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What role does AI play in modern marketing? Can you leverage AI in your marketing? How do you use AI the ‘right’ way? Wix’s Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by best-selling author and marketing influencer, Kim Garst, to discuss leveraging AI to expand your creativity and knowledge base in marketing. Kim discusses her experience using AI to fill certain skill gaps and shares her preferred chatbox for marketing purposes. Plus, learn all of the tools you need to be using to maximize your marketing efforts. Artificial intelligence meets marketing in this episode of the SERP’s Up+ Podcast! Back How marketers can best leverage AI What role does AI play in modern marketing? Can you leverage AI in your marketing? How do you use AI the ‘right’ way? Wix’s Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by best-selling author and marketing influencer, Kim Garst, to discuss leveraging AI to expand your creativity and knowledge base in marketing. Kim discusses her experience using AI to fill certain skill gaps and shares her preferred chatbox for marketing purposes. Plus, learn all of the tools you need to be using to maximize your marketing efforts. Artificial intelligence meets marketing in this episode of the SERP’s Up+ Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode SERP's Up+ 03 | October 2, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 37:10 This week’s guests Kim Garst Kim is also internationally recognized as a thought leader in the social media space. Forbes named her as one of the Top 10 Social Media Power Influencers. She has provided social and digital marketing advice to some of the world’s top brands like Microsoft, IBM, and Mastercard as well and hundreds of influential business leaders on digital and social media business strategies. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of marketing 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 digital marketing. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazingly fabulous, the very not artificial intelligence but pure genius, natural genius, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carver. Crystal Carver: I am not artificial intelligence. I do have artificial nails this week though. I got my nails done. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Crystal Carver: That was exciting. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, precisely. I haven't had that done in a while. It's been fun typing with nails like this. I had to adjust. Mordy Oberstein: I literally freak out when my nails are slightly too long. I got to cut it, because it makes me crazy typing. Crystal Carver: My sister, she goes and gets her nails done all the time. I was in the States, I was like, "I want my nails, I want my feet. I'm going to get my eyebrows done. The whole thing." Visiting my family and my sister was like, "Oh no, you just type with the tips." I was like, "Okay. All right. I'm getting used to it. It's fine." It's fun on my phone though. I feel very fancy on my phone with just using the pads with my fingers, like exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Very daintely pressing the keys. Crystal Carver: I know. I feel like, "Oh, I'm just going to- Mordy Oberstein: What happens when you write that angry email? Crystal Carver: Yeah, no, for those ones, that's when you do the voice type, that's when you do the, "Excuse me, I'd like to say just one more thing." And then you run out of time, and you're like, "And another thing. I got cut off." But I also had another thing to say. Mordy Oberstein: Like 50 WhatsApps. Crystal Carver: To be fair though, you WhatsApp me sometimes with like, "Yeah, okay." I'm like, "For serious, you couldn't type that? You couldn't type? Yeah. Okay." Mordy Oberstein: Because I’m with my kids. I have two hands on the kids, and I got to send a message somehow. I once voice messaged Barry Schwarz one time. He was like, "Never voice message me again." Fair point, Barry. Crystal Carver: I mean, we have all this technology to help us these days. There's lots of different ways to communicate, so you got to pick what works best. Mordy Oberstein: You know what works best? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can build a site that implements responsive design powered by AI, and where you can use a Wix-enriched AI model with inter IDE to generate code examples, troubleshoot your code and query product answers by using Wix Studio, a new platform built specifically for agencies. Power success for your clients with Wix Studio. Get more details over wix.com/studio. I'm pitching AI because in this episode, we're going all in on AI. This month's SERP's Up+ is all about the full AI treatment, the role of AI in modern marketing. Can you leverage AI in your marketing? If so, how do you use AI the right way? What problems and solutions does the integration of AI into marketing bring to the table? To help us wade through the murky yet highly interesting waters of AI in the marketing context, bestselling author and marketing personality, Kim Garst will be joining us in just a few moments. Bring your wrench and a few bolts and some screws as we fine tune the AI bots on this, the third episode of the SERP's Up+ podcast so that the bots can deliver the goods to your audience. I'm not good with wrenches by the way. Crystal Carver: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: I'm not good with wrenches. Crystal Carver: With wrenches, Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If I had to fine tune a bot with a wrench, I wouldn't succeed. Crystal Carver: Yeah, I don't take you as a handyman. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: No, I could be handy. I just don't like wrenches. Crystal Carver: Are you handy? Mordy Oberstein: A little bit. My stepdad was an electrician, so I used to go do... Yeah. Crystal Carver: What are the ones... Is it a ratchet where you put it on the thing, and then you move it and then it comes back? I love a ratchet. I like when it comes back, I'm like, "Oh, look at that." And then, I didn't have to move it and I didn't have to hurt my hand. I love that. Mordy Oberstein: I have a whole set, don't like them. Crystal Carver: A whole set of ratchet. Mordy Oberstein: I have a ratchet set. We can talk about ratchets all day long. Usually, we do a little bit of a whole intro about the topic we're going to discuss, but I think everyone kind of gets it, right? AI is here, it's not going away. It's here to stay, and it all depends on how you use it. From task to task, it's going to be different. But one of the areas or verticals where I feel like there's a natural case for using AI is marketing. I think there's so much content creation and so much ideation and so much research that goes into marketing that AI easily, more easily than maybe other verticals, becomes super relevant. But as I said, it's really easy to misstep, and for that reason, we need to really dive into where AI is relevant, because it does solve a lot of pain points or seemingly solve a lot of pain points for marketers, which is why we wanted to explore what does AI really mean for marketers. To do that, we have a legend with us. She's one of the most well-known marketers on this or any other earth. She's written some fantastic pieces around AI and marketing. Welcome to the show, Kim Garst. How are you? Kim Garst: I'm thrilled to be here. I was just going back to the wrench concept you mentioned a minute ago. It's all about how you work it in order to make it come out on the other side with something valuable. I just tying that back into your intro, which was fabulous, by the way. Mordy Oberstein: So you think AI is like a box of wrenches? Kim Garst: Yes, absolutely. All part of your marketing tool set. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Just to get us started, when we say AI for marketing, when we say AI, what do we mean? Kim Garst: I think, personally, that a lot of times when people own businesses, their zone of genius is around whatever their business is. If they are selling ice cream or they're selling shoes or they're an online marketer, regardless of what it is that they're selling, their passion really is around the thing that they're selling. The marketing element is usually not their zone of genius, and it is difficult for them to really get a toehold sometimes in the marketing space. The best thing, product, or service doesn't win the day. The best-marketed product or service wins the day. So, I think that AI gives us the ability to not necessarily have to be a marketing genius today. All the things that have held us back from achieving an outcome or result is now at our fingertips without us having to be a marketing pro. I think that is, for me, is really serves my passion, because that's something I've done for years, is demystify marketing for those people who aren't marketers, trying to help them grow their businesses online. That's exciting for me. But enter the problem, I think so many people are still... There's so many factors, people are fearful of it, or they're buying these 2,000 prompt banks, and I'm like, "Really?" Prompts alone are not the answer. If you've bought a bunch of prompts, that's okay, but just know that they're not really what you need. So, I think we just have to start approaching it. I mean, AI has been around even before we knew it was around, but now, we have a mechanism to use it each and every one of us with all these tools that are coming out. You just have to use it smartly and with intention and geared towards your individual business. Crystal Carver: Yeah. I think that you touch on a lot of things there about using AI to fill some of your skills gaps and things, but using them to amplify your skills. I recently went to a conference and heard Wil Reynolds talk about a marketing application where he had this great content optimization thing that he wanted to do with Python or something, but he'd never gotten around to actually getting to grips with Python really, really well. And so, he was able to say he knew the data set, he knew exactly what wanted to do, how he would measure if it would work, how he would measure the implementation, all that sort of stuff. But there was this one gap that he was really struggling with. So, he used the tool and said, "Can you help me with this Python?" The tool was like, "Yes, I can." And then, he was able to get from A to B. I think that, like you're saying, there's a lot of people who have great intelligence about whatever it is they're doing, selling ice cream, selling shoes, whatever it may be, and they want to get from A to B. Sometimes, people get stuck with the middle and Google describes it as the messy middle. I don't know if you've seen some good examples of people using AI to help them with that messy marketing middle. Kim Garst: Yeah, it really is. One of the things that I'm teaching is really about... It's a learning model. Just assuming, and I think this is one of those things that's like, "Oh, it's a big old world out there, just assuming we're the only ones in it," kind of that concept. When you approach AI with the mindset that it knows all before you ever get started with it is the wrong mindset. You need to approach it through the lens of how do I train it to know my stuff, know my voice, know my business details, know all of it. I mean, we've taken somebody who has struggled for years to define an ascension model in her business, and just by giving it the right input, we were able to build a really amazing ascension model now for her. Now, she has a path that she has struggled with for years. I have a very similar story where my brother-in-law actually has a PhD. He works at Virginia Tech. He's in a room full of PhDs, super smart people, and they're trying to figure out how to crunch some data and they're like, "Well, it's going to take two weeks to figure this out, just crunching that much information." He approaches AI. Again, going back to they knew what they wanted, they knew the output. In two minutes, they solved this problem. There's so many applications for it that I think we have to get creative in how we approach it and what we want from it, whether it's an offer, whether it's a marketing plan, whether it's really any marketing collateral can be created and with AI today. That's very fascinating and exciting for me when it comes to being an educator and trying to help people affect these transformations in their business when they've not been able to do it before. Mordy Oberstein: I was wondering, because I find when I work with AI, if I give it, like you're saying, if you're very specific, if you have a really unique and specific intent around what you're trying to do, you can usually get it to do mainly what you want it to do. I'm just wondering, I do a lot of content, I work on a lot of content side. Outside of pure content creation, I think everybody understands, yeah, you could feed a prompt, you can get some content output. I can have it maybe write a product description. I wouldn't say you should say, "Hey, write me a blog about which Air Jordans are the best Air Jordans," because when you give it less of a confine, it generally kind of is too vague and too general. But outside of that pure content generation, pure content creation, where can marketers kind of leverage AI where it does kind of work well? Kim Garst: Well, I have two core ways that I'm using it to save me an immense amount of time. Research is one. I find that the research value is different and unique to what you're going to get in the Google machine, which I think is fascinating because, again, I think... But this is my 2 cents on it, because I don't know the backend tech, how all this works. The way I think it works is its ability to synthesize massive amounts of information at a super accelerated rate is giving me better output when I'm asking for specific things from a research perspective. I have to wade through all that when I'm in the Google machine. I have to do that legwork. So, research, for sure, is a critical time saver. The other thing that has been really value-based for me is I have trained a, I call it a brand speak chat thread. I've done this both in Claude as well as ChatGPT. I find that Claude is way better with conversational engagement, and I have been able to really engage with my audience at a whole new level because it gives me the time to be able to do that, because it crafts responses that are pretty much on target when it comes to my voice and things that I would say and how I would say it and the empathy piece of engagement. So, customer service, I think, or engagement in the social space is another huge time saver for me. I think both of those are value-based that are outside of the content wheelhouse. I would just like to add to your comment there. I've been doing a lot of testing when it comes to content creation. I would never recommend that you just, at face value, accept the output from ChatGPT when it comes to content creation. My experience with it has been, it's an iteration. You have to continually ask it for better with direction and grown internal creativity. Crystal Carver: Right. I've seen it work really well. If you're like, "I need some ideas. I want to do something that has a pun about fish around this. Give me some ideas." It'll spit out something you're like, "That's not good. Oh, that is good. Oh, I could work with that." That sort of thing. The ideation element is really interesting. I also think it's interesting the way you break it down. I was looking at Rand Fishkin recently posted an article about the ways that people are using ChatGPT for their work. Similar to you, around 23% of people are using it for education, research purposes, which is interesting. Around 20% of people are using it for content. Around 13% of people are using it for marketing, like meat marketing. A lot of folks are using it for programming. I don't know if you're finding this as well in your work, but I certainly, one of the major benefits of ChatGPT in particular for me has been just cutting down the time I spend arguing with spreadsheets. I do not begrudge that time. Again, it removes some of those roadblocks from getting you from A to B and from crunching that data, things that you were talking about as well. Kim Garst: Or just creating comparison tables, for example, on a blog post. Simple things that would've taken so much time before. With the right input now, you can create these things very quickly, and it'll create the code for you to your point. All you have to do is copy and paste it into your WordPress and the way you go. It's just so many fascinating, I think, lanes. I think another thing, I know I'm deviating slightly from ChatGPT, but imagery. I am using AI for unique imagery that is brand specific and on target with what I'm trying to project. No more stock images, saving money there, but getting really specific on the message in the image that I'm trying to project. That's been really fascinating evolution too. I feel like every time I put something out now, it's more on target maybe with what I'm trying to project. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm actually surprised you don't see as many people using the image tools than you do. I know there are a lot of people who are using it. For example, in Wix, when you go to the image upload center, there's an AI generation tool and I use that now for all of my images because I don't like stock images. I do think across social media, you need to have an image. I think it's great on LinkedIn where you can't really use a gif the same kind of way as you could, say, on Twitter or X, whatever we're calling it now. It doesn't matter. But it's really good. I find with all of these kinds of tools, you have to really feed it to get it to go exactly where you want it to go. But I do think there's a tremendous branding opportunity. They're also for yourself, because you could be really consistent. Because what they'll generally do, like in the Wix one, we have different categories of image styles, fantasy, 3D, whatever it is. You can create really on-brand images all the time and be consistent all the way through. I actually experimented with this on LinkedIn for a while. I was trying with one style and people were saying, "Where'd you get those images? I keep noticing, you keep posting all those types of images," so you really could leverage those for a brand identity, as part of your brand identity. A lot of them are really, really good, and I'm fascinated why I don't see as many people using them as possible. Kim Garst: Well, my 2 cents on that, just from pouring over trying to learn all this stuff, especially with Midjourney, I think it's very difficult to match Midjourney's output from the perspective of how detailed and intricate and the resolution and everything. It's just so spot on, I think, with Midjourney. But enter the problem, the iteration of it is very difficult trying to get... If you find one you like but it's red glasses versus purple glasses, it doesn't hear you. It doesn't listen to the input that you give it, and it's so darn frustrating. From that perspective, I think it's really about the fact that it's not always understanding what you're asking from an iteration perspective. ChatGPT will listen and try to iterate based on what you tell it. So, I think the iteration issue is a problem. And trying to create images with texts and things like that, it's just not good for that. But Ideogram, I don't know if you guys have tested that out, but that is a really... It's fairly new. I think a Google exec founded that particular tool, and it's become known just in a very short window of time because it does create a text on images which allows for real customization. I can make an image that has AI brand speak on it, and it specifically says that. From that perspective, I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, I think the whole AI space is evolving, one, very rapidly. There's like, I don't know, 50 new tools a day, most of which are probably not too awesome, but how we can find the goodies, the good ones, and then leverage them to create a better outcome or time saver for us and our business. I think that's the end goal. Crystal Carver: I'm really interested in... I want to circle back to something you mentioned almost in passing, but it kind of builds on Mordy's discussion around brand, was you were talking about training AI on your brand voice. Now, you as somebody who has written prolifically, published and things, I'm sure the process might be easier for you than for somebody who's maybe written less. But I'd be really interested to know more about the process of training in AI on your particular brand voice and building that consistency. Kim Garst: I so love this question, and it's the very first thing I do when I work with someone. We just did a masterclass on this, and it's about the process that you go through to train ChatGPT, specifically ChatGPT. But honestly, you could use it for any AI learning model. You could use it on Claude or Bard or whatever. But I call it a brand speak chat thread. The goal, I start with research because so many businesses do not have any... They just randomly pick a niche that they think is their person. So, I challenge that on the front side because we traditionally, as business owners, have not had the access to the data points to be able to do research without spending a ton of money to do it. Or we do it haphazardly or most don't do it at all. So, we start with research on the niche or the area that you think, and I usually do it through the lens of... It's not about necessarily who you think your niche is, it's what problem solving piece of that. What problem are you solving? What is your transformation? Because I'm a big proponent of if you're clear on your transformation, your person is going to self-select in. You don't necessarily have to figure out who that person is. We approach it through what are you serving, what's the outcome, transformation, et cetera. And then, do the research. From there, we build a buyer persona based on real research. And then from there, we start educating it on voice, dropping in specific pieces of content that you might have created. Maybe you've done an interview where you're speaking. I'm a big proponent of natural language. When you write a blog post, it's different. The writing style is different than when you're just speaking to people. So using real speak, I call it, instances where you had real speak as well as writing style so that it learns both, within the confines of the limitations of how ChatGPT consumes content or inputs. And then, we also have a very specific strategy around stories. If you have stories, what your origin story, all the components, like the different types of stories that you might have in your business, using all of that synthesis that you've fed it, then it is able to give you really good output. We also have a piece where you give it your business details. What are you selling? What are the names of your offers? All the components so that it gets a real clear picture, not only from a realistic perspective of who your buyer is from research based, to the independent components. And then from there, you can start to really get clarity on things that you might have not had clarity on, like a message. And what's going to resonate with my buyer based on research, not guessing. It really does streamline the process and the output is just so much richer because it's based around you, your business details, and the person that you're here to serve. Crystal Carver: And then, thinking of some of the layering some of these tactics. We talked about data extraction is really, really useful, and qualitative data, the kind of qualitative data research that you need to do to get good audience research, where you're taking interviews or taking surveys or survey responses or reviews and things. You can take that information and you can put it into something like ChatGPT and say, "Where are the common themes from this set of information?" Kim Garst: That is such a great point. I have a free community and we ask three questions when they come in. One, obviously email, do you want a phone call, and the third and most important piece, "What are you struggling with the most?" Trying to get a problem set. And then, we feed those problems routinely back into ChatGPT, so that we know. We do that for every workshop every month. What's the highest outcome based on what they're telling us? What do they want? It's just no more guessing and no more going all places. It synthesizes all that information for you. It goes back to the ideation. It gives you ideas and you can go from there. It's just so many amazing outcomes if you just approach it right. Crystal Carver: Right. And then, to take that and put that into your brand voice and put it into the thing. I think we had a great webinar with Ross Hutchins who was also talking about break it into chunks. I think we talked a little bit about organizing. Before the discussion, we were discussing, "Oh, AI is great, but it's a little bit like a closet organizer. You still have to put your clothes away. You still have to know what shelf is for the shirts and where your socks go." Yeah, I think if you organize yourself in order to use these tools well, you should get some great results. Kim Garst: I tell people all the time, I feel like my value when it comes to AI is my marketing knowledge. I know I have a framework for what I want to do. So if you're not a marketer, you need to find somebody who's teaching this correctly, in my humble opinion, so that you... Again, it's not about the prompt. It's not about the prompt. I'm going to say it again. It's not about the prompt. Crystal Carver: It's not the prompt. Kim Garst: It's about how do you leverage a framework of prompts to get a specific outcome. I think that is going to be a total game changer. Once you understand there is a flow, there is a process to go through, but coming out on the other side with something amazing that you can customize and where it can be mostly customized for you already. Some people use it out of the box, because they don't know any better. But I do believe that you can do amazing things faster, smarter, and potentially better than you could do it absolutely yourself if you just follow a process to get good outcomes. Mordy Oberstein: That's always the thing people were talking about. Well, AI's going to take my job. And I’d say “how is AI going to be good for me?”. In the SEO world, SEO is going to be dead. AI will write your title tags for you, and AI will write that for you, and AI write... The reality is that it really just ups the value of you as a marketer, as an SEO. I feel yes, if you're... I hate to put it this way, a low level marketer or a low level SEO, and all you're doing is creating title tags and, yes, maybe that's an area where maybe AI could just do that for you. But if you are at a substantial marketing mind or SEO mind or whatever it is that you do, your value just went up because now you need to think a lot more. There's a lot more strategy, there's a lot more that goes into things now. If you want to use AI for this, what are the implications? What are the consequences? What are the best ways to do this? What are the worst ways to do this? How do I go about using this the right way? How do I leverage things now? What's the right strategy? Your mind is right now the commodity, which is great. Kim Garst: I've told said this to several people. I don't believe that AI is going to replace true expertise ever. To your point, if you do have an expertise, and I think everybody does, regardless of where it is on the spectrum, you may be 10 steps behind somebody else that has some expertise in the same lane, but we all have something that we know that somebody else would be willing to pay for. My challenge to you would be, how do you leverage AI to be more creative with the knowledge base that you have? It's really not about it's going to replace you. It's not. Absolutely. I do believe that that's one of... I said this a minute ago. I feel like matching what I know already to how I can integrate and be more creative, and ultimately save myself a bunch of time with AI. That's the way I've married it. I think that that's the way I would encourage everybody to look at it. It's not a way of replacing it, but if you do have an expertise, then you need to figure out how can I leverage AI in such a way that's going to be my creative partner, not the other way around. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carver: Absolutely. I think one thing I say fairly often is that AI should be used to amplify actual intelligence, not just any intelligence, but your actual intelligence. Use it to help you with your actual intelligence. In Buddhism, they have a saying write speech. So if you're using AI, don't talk about something you don't know about. I shouldn't be using AI to write podiatry blogs, because I don't know anything about podiatry. I couldn't possibly attest whether or not the information it was giving me was relevant to that or accurate or anything like that. Mordy Oberstein: What about the podiatry device you gave me last week? Crystal Carver: How's your foot doing? Mordy Oberstein: It still hurts. Kim Garst: But if you have a, let's say... I'll give you a specific example. One of our clients, when you are in a client service-based business... Let me reframe that. One of the challenges has always been to know that business model. To your point, the podiatry. We're not podiatrists. Knowing that space, knowing the voice of that brand has always been a struggle when I had a social media business, an agency. But now, we do a lot of messaging and specific to content creation in particular. One of the things that we have found has worked so well is we train... We use the same methodology that I just talked about. We train a brand speak chat for that person's business. We don't know it. We don't have any frame of reference for... I'm not a doctor. I'll give you an example. We have a doctor who has an anti-aging product, and I know nothing about that. That's not my zone of genius, but we created a whole content strategy for her specific to short form content. She's like, "How are you nailing my voice so well?" I'm like... Mordy Oberstein: I'm just so good at it. Kim Garst: Like that. Crystal Carver: She's like, "I'm the queen of anti-aging. I'm forever young. I don't know what your problem is." How do you know this stuff? Kim Garst: "How do you know this stuff? How do you know that my person has these problems?" She said, "You've identified problems I didn't even know they had." That's the way you marry your expertise. It's like you literally, you've been training on your business, but if you're in a service-based business, you can train it on your client's businesses as well. Yeah, and it makes such a big difference because the outcome, your clients are thrilled. They're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing," and super happy with the outcome. Crystal Carver: I've heard someone say from Google, and I might've seen it on an AI conferences as well, is that people are worried about AI replacing their jobs. It's like if you're a marketer, don't worry about AI replacing you. Worry about another marketer using AI replacing you. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Kim Garst: AI won't replace you. I say that too. AI's not going to replace you, but you will be replaced by somebody using it. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of all these AI tools, what are some... Because we spoke it. Note to the audience. While we were prepping for the episode before we actually recorded, we were running through some tools, some not so great tools, and it's amazing to see what's out there. We're discussing that I found a tool that helps you find God, which is fascinating that you're using a large language model to answer life's most meaningful questions, but to each their own, I guess. I hope those answers are good, probably not. But what are some good tools that you're using that you can recommend that our audience might want to check out for themselves? Kim Garst: Yeah, absolutely. I do a tools review every week in my newsletter, so I look at a lot of tools. The ones though that I use daily are ChatGPT. I still think it's the gold standard when it comes to AI tools. Will it ever be replaced? Unknown at this point. A lot of the plugin features are also super valuable, I think, within ChatGPT for research and things like that. Just knowing that, I feel like that's been more evolved. It's built on the back of OpenAI, like we were talking, Mordy, a lot of other tools are also built off the back of OpenAI. I also use Claude daily. Claude still has another paid plan, so it throttles me pretty quickly, unfortunately, which is annoying. But still, for somebody who's a light user, I think Claude would be a really great alternative. For images, Midjourney, Ideogram, it's I-D-E-O gram.ai. Love it for custom images. There's a few for... Capso is really great for meme, if you are creating memes. It's a great little tool for meme content. But I found using some plugins with ChatGPT that you can create memes with ChatGPT as well. So, there's so many ways to leverage the tools. It's just really based on the creative piece, and then what do you want as an outcome. I know a lot of people started with Jasper. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Jasper. I think ChatGPT took the thunder out from under it a little bit. But there's just so many great tools out there. Short form content, if you want to repurpose content, there's tools like Dumme, D-U-M-M-E. I love that. The reason I like Dumme over some of the other short form repurposing tools is because if we're doing an interview, like we're talking right now, and you ask a question and I answer, it keys in on the question and the answer, so that there's a frame of reference for the repurpose clip. I think that's just really smart. Those are just a few. I mean, I could keep going. Mordy Oberstein: We’ll be here all day, there's so many tools. Crystal Carver: I should shout out, Kim has a toolbox that is immense, that is full of lots of wonderful, fantastic things. I was going through it, and there's some great stuff in there. I was like, "Oh yeah, Canva. I do love Canva." That's another thing, is that a lot of things, like Wix has added lots of AI elements into our CMS. Canva's added some AI elements into the Notion, has AI built into it. I think that that's another useful thing as well. But yeah, check out that great toolbox. Kim Garst: Most all of the tools are integrating AI in some capacity, because they know. Canva just released a plugin for ChatGPT, I think just yesterday or maybe the day before. I just took a peek at it yesterday, and I think it has some application but I don't think it's where it needs to be yet. I was a little disappointed. I thought it was going to create images for me, and it's really just kind of a search engine for finding something that would a template on Canva. It was meh. Mordy Oberstein: They can't all be great. One of the things we'd like to do with the audience before we sort of wrap it up is give them some other people around social media they can learn more from around, whatever topic and marketing that it is. I'm just kind of wondering if you have AI tool recommendations, what are some actual intelligence recommendations that you might have? Kim Garst: Yeah. I love my friend Chalene Johnson, just basically because she's just so real and authentic in her social engagement, and I think we could all learn from that. Yeah, check her out definitely. She's mostly teaches Instagram, but she has a lot of business knowledge and she's very robust in that approach to how she does things. She also has a very unique strategy when it comes to being authentically sharing content or ideas or products that are affiliate-based, so that she can use that as an income stream for her. She does it so naturally that nobody really even notices because they're just personal recommendations for things that she uses. There's just a couple of things I think you could really key in from her platform. I have a friend that I just met recently. We were both speaking at the same conference. His name is Phil Phallen, P-H-A-L-L-E-N. Phil is just a sweetheart, and he has really got a heart for the entrepreneur. He's also teaching a lot of AI-related content. I think you could really key in and learn something from him. But there's just so many amazing people honestly, to tune in to today. I guess my best recommendation to you would be to find two or three amazing people and stop. Mordy Oberstein: You're right. There's been so much AI. There was a while where it was like, "Everything AI." I was like, "It's a lot." Kim Garst: Yeah, find somebody leaning into the outcome that you're trying to affect and then just hang in there. Learn from them or absorb their content or whatever. Because what I have found, and I've been in this space for a long time, is you get inundated with all the information. When I started online 30 some years ago, there was no information. You had to teach yourself anything. Now, we're inundated with so much information, it becomes overload, and you're at three o'clock in the afternoon. You've not done anything in your business because you've been paying attention to everybody else's. So, let's just keep your number down to two or three, and you can still have time for your business. Crystal Carver: That's fantastic advice. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: One final question, Kim, where can we find you? Kim Garst: Well, you can find me pretty much anywhere in the social space under my name Kim Garst. My website is kimgarst.com. I have a free community. If you're interested in learning more about AI specific to marketing, you can join us at kimgarst.com/community. I have a whole post of things that'll be value-based to you there. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Please make sure to find Kim all across the web. Her content is amazing. It's literally the reason why we asked her to come on. A bunch of great posts about AI. Check those out. We'll link them in the show notes, and really appreciate you being able to stop by and share your expertise and knowledge with us. Kim Garst: Well, thanks for having me. It's been so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: As for the next episode of SERP's Up... Well, that's it. Thanks for joining us for this SERP's Up+ podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode of SERP's Up, our regular SEO podcast. And back again next month with a SERP's Up+ for more marketing talk. Look for wherever you can see your podcast or on our SEO learning hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO and digital marketing, check out all the great content and webinars and newsletters and podcasts that we have over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and marketing. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kim Garst Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Kim Garst Consulting Claude 2 vs GPT-4 in 2023: Comparing the Top AI Models ChatGPT Claude AI Ideogram Midjourney Supermeme Dumme Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kim Garst Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Kim Garst Consulting Claude 2 vs GPT-4 in 2023: Comparing the Top AI Models ChatGPT Claude AI Ideogram Midjourney Supermeme Dumme Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of marketing 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 digital marketing. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazingly fabulous, the very not artificial intelligence but pure genius, natural genius, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carver. Crystal Carver: I am not artificial intelligence. I do have artificial nails this week though. I got my nails done. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Crystal Carver: That was exciting. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, precisely. I haven't had that done in a while. It's been fun typing with nails like this. I had to adjust. Mordy Oberstein: I literally freak out when my nails are slightly too long. I got to cut it, because it makes me crazy typing. Crystal Carver: My sister, she goes and gets her nails done all the time. I was in the States, I was like, "I want my nails, I want my feet. I'm going to get my eyebrows done. The whole thing." Visiting my family and my sister was like, "Oh no, you just type with the tips." I was like, "Okay. All right. I'm getting used to it. It's fine." It's fun on my phone though. I feel very fancy on my phone with just using the pads with my fingers, like exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Very daintely pressing the keys. Crystal Carver: I know. I feel like, "Oh, I'm just going to- Mordy Oberstein: What happens when you write that angry email? Crystal Carver: Yeah, no, for those ones, that's when you do the voice type, that's when you do the, "Excuse me, I'd like to say just one more thing." And then you run out of time, and you're like, "And another thing. I got cut off." But I also had another thing to say. Mordy Oberstein: Like 50 WhatsApps. Crystal Carver: To be fair though, you WhatsApp me sometimes with like, "Yeah, okay." I'm like, "For serious, you couldn't type that? You couldn't type? Yeah. Okay." Mordy Oberstein: Because I’m with my kids. I have two hands on the kids, and I got to send a message somehow. I once voice messaged Barry Schwarz one time. He was like, "Never voice message me again." Fair point, Barry. Crystal Carver: I mean, we have all this technology to help us these days. There's lots of different ways to communicate, so you got to pick what works best. Mordy Oberstein: You know what works best? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can build a site that implements responsive design powered by AI, and where you can use a Wix-enriched AI model with inter IDE to generate code examples, troubleshoot your code and query product answers by using Wix Studio, a new platform built specifically for agencies. Power success for your clients with Wix Studio. Get more details over wix.com/studio. I'm pitching AI because in this episode, we're going all in on AI. This month's SERP's Up+ is all about the full AI treatment, the role of AI in modern marketing. Can you leverage AI in your marketing? If so, how do you use AI the right way? What problems and solutions does the integration of AI into marketing bring to the table? To help us wade through the murky yet highly interesting waters of AI in the marketing context, bestselling author and marketing personality, Kim Garst will be joining us in just a few moments. Bring your wrench and a few bolts and some screws as we fine tune the AI bots on this, the third episode of the SERP's Up+ podcast so that the bots can deliver the goods to your audience. I'm not good with wrenches by the way. Crystal Carver: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: I'm not good with wrenches. Crystal Carver: With wrenches, Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If I had to fine tune a bot with a wrench, I wouldn't succeed. Crystal Carver: Yeah, I don't take you as a handyman. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: No, I could be handy. I just don't like wrenches. Crystal Carver: Are you handy? Mordy Oberstein: A little bit. My stepdad was an electrician, so I used to go do... Yeah. Crystal Carver: What are the ones... Is it a ratchet where you put it on the thing, and then you move it and then it comes back? I love a ratchet. I like when it comes back, I'm like, "Oh, look at that." And then, I didn't have to move it and I didn't have to hurt my hand. I love that. Mordy Oberstein: I have a whole set, don't like them. Crystal Carver: A whole set of ratchet. Mordy Oberstein: I have a ratchet set. We can talk about ratchets all day long. Usually, we do a little bit of a whole intro about the topic we're going to discuss, but I think everyone kind of gets it, right? AI is here, it's not going away. It's here to stay, and it all depends on how you use it. From task to task, it's going to be different. But one of the areas or verticals where I feel like there's a natural case for using AI is marketing. I think there's so much content creation and so much ideation and so much research that goes into marketing that AI easily, more easily than maybe other verticals, becomes super relevant. But as I said, it's really easy to misstep, and for that reason, we need to really dive into where AI is relevant, because it does solve a lot of pain points or seemingly solve a lot of pain points for marketers, which is why we wanted to explore what does AI really mean for marketers. To do that, we have a legend with us. She's one of the most well-known marketers on this or any other earth. She's written some fantastic pieces around AI and marketing. Welcome to the show, Kim Garst. How are you? Kim Garst: I'm thrilled to be here. I was just going back to the wrench concept you mentioned a minute ago. It's all about how you work it in order to make it come out on the other side with something valuable. I just tying that back into your intro, which was fabulous, by the way. Mordy Oberstein: So you think AI is like a box of wrenches? Kim Garst: Yes, absolutely. All part of your marketing tool set. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Just to get us started, when we say AI for marketing, when we say AI, what do we mean? Kim Garst: I think, personally, that a lot of times when people own businesses, their zone of genius is around whatever their business is. If they are selling ice cream or they're selling shoes or they're an online marketer, regardless of what it is that they're selling, their passion really is around the thing that they're selling. The marketing element is usually not their zone of genius, and it is difficult for them to really get a toehold sometimes in the marketing space. The best thing, product, or service doesn't win the day. The best-marketed product or service wins the day. So, I think that AI gives us the ability to not necessarily have to be a marketing genius today. All the things that have held us back from achieving an outcome or result is now at our fingertips without us having to be a marketing pro. I think that is, for me, is really serves my passion, because that's something I've done for years, is demystify marketing for those people who aren't marketers, trying to help them grow their businesses online. That's exciting for me. But enter the problem, I think so many people are still... There's so many factors, people are fearful of it, or they're buying these 2,000 prompt banks, and I'm like, "Really?" Prompts alone are not the answer. If you've bought a bunch of prompts, that's okay, but just know that they're not really what you need. So, I think we just have to start approaching it. I mean, AI has been around even before we knew it was around, but now, we have a mechanism to use it each and every one of us with all these tools that are coming out. You just have to use it smartly and with intention and geared towards your individual business. Crystal Carver: Yeah. I think that you touch on a lot of things there about using AI to fill some of your skills gaps and things, but using them to amplify your skills. I recently went to a conference and heard Wil Reynolds talk about a marketing application where he had this great content optimization thing that he wanted to do with Python or something, but he'd never gotten around to actually getting to grips with Python really, really well. And so, he was able to say he knew the data set, he knew exactly what wanted to do, how he would measure if it would work, how he would measure the implementation, all that sort of stuff. But there was this one gap that he was really struggling with. So, he used the tool and said, "Can you help me with this Python?" The tool was like, "Yes, I can." And then, he was able to get from A to B. I think that, like you're saying, there's a lot of people who have great intelligence about whatever it is they're doing, selling ice cream, selling shoes, whatever it may be, and they want to get from A to B. Sometimes, people get stuck with the middle and Google describes it as the messy middle. I don't know if you've seen some good examples of people using AI to help them with that messy marketing middle. Kim Garst: Yeah, it really is. One of the things that I'm teaching is really about... It's a learning model. Just assuming, and I think this is one of those things that's like, "Oh, it's a big old world out there, just assuming we're the only ones in it," kind of that concept. When you approach AI with the mindset that it knows all before you ever get started with it is the wrong mindset. You need to approach it through the lens of how do I train it to know my stuff, know my voice, know my business details, know all of it. I mean, we've taken somebody who has struggled for years to define an ascension model in her business, and just by giving it the right input, we were able to build a really amazing ascension model now for her. Now, she has a path that she has struggled with for years. I have a very similar story where my brother-in-law actually has a PhD. He works at Virginia Tech. He's in a room full of PhDs, super smart people, and they're trying to figure out how to crunch some data and they're like, "Well, it's going to take two weeks to figure this out, just crunching that much information." He approaches AI. Again, going back to they knew what they wanted, they knew the output. In two minutes, they solved this problem. There's so many applications for it that I think we have to get creative in how we approach it and what we want from it, whether it's an offer, whether it's a marketing plan, whether it's really any marketing collateral can be created and with AI today. That's very fascinating and exciting for me when it comes to being an educator and trying to help people affect these transformations in their business when they've not been able to do it before. Mordy Oberstein: I was wondering, because I find when I work with AI, if I give it, like you're saying, if you're very specific, if you have a really unique and specific intent around what you're trying to do, you can usually get it to do mainly what you want it to do. I'm just wondering, I do a lot of content, I work on a lot of content side. Outside of pure content creation, I think everybody understands, yeah, you could feed a prompt, you can get some content output. I can have it maybe write a product description. I wouldn't say you should say, "Hey, write me a blog about which Air Jordans are the best Air Jordans," because when you give it less of a confine, it generally kind of is too vague and too general. But outside of that pure content generation, pure content creation, where can marketers kind of leverage AI where it does kind of work well? Kim Garst: Well, I have two core ways that I'm using it to save me an immense amount of time. Research is one. I find that the research value is different and unique to what you're going to get in the Google machine, which I think is fascinating because, again, I think... But this is my 2 cents on it, because I don't know the backend tech, how all this works. The way I think it works is its ability to synthesize massive amounts of information at a super accelerated rate is giving me better output when I'm asking for specific things from a research perspective. I have to wade through all that when I'm in the Google machine. I have to do that legwork. So, research, for sure, is a critical time saver. The other thing that has been really value-based for me is I have trained a, I call it a brand speak chat thread. I've done this both in Claude as well as ChatGPT. I find that Claude is way better with conversational engagement, and I have been able to really engage with my audience at a whole new level because it gives me the time to be able to do that, because it crafts responses that are pretty much on target when it comes to my voice and things that I would say and how I would say it and the empathy piece of engagement. So, customer service, I think, or engagement in the social space is another huge time saver for me. I think both of those are value-based that are outside of the content wheelhouse. I would just like to add to your comment there. I've been doing a lot of testing when it comes to content creation. I would never recommend that you just, at face value, accept the output from ChatGPT when it comes to content creation. My experience with it has been, it's an iteration. You have to continually ask it for better with direction and grown internal creativity. Crystal Carver: Right. I've seen it work really well. If you're like, "I need some ideas. I want to do something that has a pun about fish around this. Give me some ideas." It'll spit out something you're like, "That's not good. Oh, that is good. Oh, I could work with that." That sort of thing. The ideation element is really interesting. I also think it's interesting the way you break it down. I was looking at Rand Fishkin recently posted an article about the ways that people are using ChatGPT for their work. Similar to you, around 23% of people are using it for education, research purposes, which is interesting. Around 20% of people are using it for content. Around 13% of people are using it for marketing, like meat marketing. A lot of folks are using it for programming. I don't know if you're finding this as well in your work, but I certainly, one of the major benefits of ChatGPT in particular for me has been just cutting down the time I spend arguing with spreadsheets. I do not begrudge that time. Again, it removes some of those roadblocks from getting you from A to B and from crunching that data, things that you were talking about as well. Kim Garst: Or just creating comparison tables, for example, on a blog post. Simple things that would've taken so much time before. With the right input now, you can create these things very quickly, and it'll create the code for you to your point. All you have to do is copy and paste it into your WordPress and the way you go. It's just so many fascinating, I think, lanes. I think another thing, I know I'm deviating slightly from ChatGPT, but imagery. I am using AI for unique imagery that is brand specific and on target with what I'm trying to project. No more stock images, saving money there, but getting really specific on the message in the image that I'm trying to project. That's been really fascinating evolution too. I feel like every time I put something out now, it's more on target maybe with what I'm trying to project. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm actually surprised you don't see as many people using the image tools than you do. I know there are a lot of people who are using it. For example, in Wix, when you go to the image upload center, there's an AI generation tool and I use that now for all of my images because I don't like stock images. I do think across social media, you need to have an image. I think it's great on LinkedIn where you can't really use a gif the same kind of way as you could, say, on Twitter or X, whatever we're calling it now. It doesn't matter. But it's really good. I find with all of these kinds of tools, you have to really feed it to get it to go exactly where you want it to go. But I do think there's a tremendous branding opportunity. They're also for yourself, because you could be really consistent. Because what they'll generally do, like in the Wix one, we have different categories of image styles, fantasy, 3D, whatever it is. You can create really on-brand images all the time and be consistent all the way through. I actually experimented with this on LinkedIn for a while. I was trying with one style and people were saying, "Where'd you get those images? I keep noticing, you keep posting all those types of images," so you really could leverage those for a brand identity, as part of your brand identity. A lot of them are really, really good, and I'm fascinated why I don't see as many people using them as possible. Kim Garst: Well, my 2 cents on that, just from pouring over trying to learn all this stuff, especially with Midjourney, I think it's very difficult to match Midjourney's output from the perspective of how detailed and intricate and the resolution and everything. It's just so spot on, I think, with Midjourney. But enter the problem, the iteration of it is very difficult trying to get... If you find one you like but it's red glasses versus purple glasses, it doesn't hear you. It doesn't listen to the input that you give it, and it's so darn frustrating. From that perspective, I think it's really about the fact that it's not always understanding what you're asking from an iteration perspective. ChatGPT will listen and try to iterate based on what you tell it. So, I think the iteration issue is a problem. And trying to create images with texts and things like that, it's just not good for that. But Ideogram, I don't know if you guys have tested that out, but that is a really... It's fairly new. I think a Google exec founded that particular tool, and it's become known just in a very short window of time because it does create a text on images which allows for real customization. I can make an image that has AI brand speak on it, and it specifically says that. From that perspective, I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, I think the whole AI space is evolving, one, very rapidly. There's like, I don't know, 50 new tools a day, most of which are probably not too awesome, but how we can find the goodies, the good ones, and then leverage them to create a better outcome or time saver for us and our business. I think that's the end goal. Crystal Carver: I'm really interested in... I want to circle back to something you mentioned almost in passing, but it kind of builds on Mordy's discussion around brand, was you were talking about training AI on your brand voice. Now, you as somebody who has written prolifically, published and things, I'm sure the process might be easier for you than for somebody who's maybe written less. But I'd be really interested to know more about the process of training in AI on your particular brand voice and building that consistency. Kim Garst: I so love this question, and it's the very first thing I do when I work with someone. We just did a masterclass on this, and it's about the process that you go through to train ChatGPT, specifically ChatGPT. But honestly, you could use it for any AI learning model. You could use it on Claude or Bard or whatever. But I call it a brand speak chat thread. The goal, I start with research because so many businesses do not have any... They just randomly pick a niche that they think is their person. So, I challenge that on the front side because we traditionally, as business owners, have not had the access to the data points to be able to do research without spending a ton of money to do it. Or we do it haphazardly or most don't do it at all. So, we start with research on the niche or the area that you think, and I usually do it through the lens of... It's not about necessarily who you think your niche is, it's what problem solving piece of that. What problem are you solving? What is your transformation? Because I'm a big proponent of if you're clear on your transformation, your person is going to self-select in. You don't necessarily have to figure out who that person is. We approach it through what are you serving, what's the outcome, transformation, et cetera. And then, do the research. From there, we build a buyer persona based on real research. And then from there, we start educating it on voice, dropping in specific pieces of content that you might have created. Maybe you've done an interview where you're speaking. I'm a big proponent of natural language. When you write a blog post, it's different. The writing style is different than when you're just speaking to people. So using real speak, I call it, instances where you had real speak as well as writing style so that it learns both, within the confines of the limitations of how ChatGPT consumes content or inputs. And then, we also have a very specific strategy around stories. If you have stories, what your origin story, all the components, like the different types of stories that you might have in your business, using all of that synthesis that you've fed it, then it is able to give you really good output. We also have a piece where you give it your business details. What are you selling? What are the names of your offers? All the components so that it gets a real clear picture, not only from a realistic perspective of who your buyer is from research based, to the independent components. And then from there, you can start to really get clarity on things that you might have not had clarity on, like a message. And what's going to resonate with my buyer based on research, not guessing. It really does streamline the process and the output is just so much richer because it's based around you, your business details, and the person that you're here to serve. Crystal Carver: And then, thinking of some of the layering some of these tactics. We talked about data extraction is really, really useful, and qualitative data, the kind of qualitative data research that you need to do to get good audience research, where you're taking interviews or taking surveys or survey responses or reviews and things. You can take that information and you can put it into something like ChatGPT and say, "Where are the common themes from this set of information?" Kim Garst: That is such a great point. I have a free community and we ask three questions when they come in. One, obviously email, do you want a phone call, and the third and most important piece, "What are you struggling with the most?" Trying to get a problem set. And then, we feed those problems routinely back into ChatGPT, so that we know. We do that for every workshop every month. What's the highest outcome based on what they're telling us? What do they want? It's just no more guessing and no more going all places. It synthesizes all that information for you. It goes back to the ideation. It gives you ideas and you can go from there. It's just so many amazing outcomes if you just approach it right. Crystal Carver: Right. And then, to take that and put that into your brand voice and put it into the thing. I think we had a great webinar with Ross Hutchins who was also talking about break it into chunks. I think we talked a little bit about organizing. Before the discussion, we were discussing, "Oh, AI is great, but it's a little bit like a closet organizer. You still have to put your clothes away. You still have to know what shelf is for the shirts and where your socks go." Yeah, I think if you organize yourself in order to use these tools well, you should get some great results. Kim Garst: I tell people all the time, I feel like my value when it comes to AI is my marketing knowledge. I know I have a framework for what I want to do. So if you're not a marketer, you need to find somebody who's teaching this correctly, in my humble opinion, so that you... Again, it's not about the prompt. It's not about the prompt. I'm going to say it again. It's not about the prompt. Crystal Carver: It's not the prompt. Kim Garst: It's about how do you leverage a framework of prompts to get a specific outcome. I think that is going to be a total game changer. Once you understand there is a flow, there is a process to go through, but coming out on the other side with something amazing that you can customize and where it can be mostly customized for you already. Some people use it out of the box, because they don't know any better. But I do believe that you can do amazing things faster, smarter, and potentially better than you could do it absolutely yourself if you just follow a process to get good outcomes. Mordy Oberstein: That's always the thing people were talking about. Well, AI's going to take my job. And I’d say “how is AI going to be good for me?”. In the SEO world, SEO is going to be dead. AI will write your title tags for you, and AI will write that for you, and AI write... The reality is that it really just ups the value of you as a marketer, as an SEO. I feel yes, if you're... I hate to put it this way, a low level marketer or a low level SEO, and all you're doing is creating title tags and, yes, maybe that's an area where maybe AI could just do that for you. But if you are at a substantial marketing mind or SEO mind or whatever it is that you do, your value just went up because now you need to think a lot more. There's a lot more strategy, there's a lot more that goes into things now. If you want to use AI for this, what are the implications? What are the consequences? What are the best ways to do this? What are the worst ways to do this? How do I go about using this the right way? How do I leverage things now? What's the right strategy? Your mind is right now the commodity, which is great. Kim Garst: I've told said this to several people. I don't believe that AI is going to replace true expertise ever. To your point, if you do have an expertise, and I think everybody does, regardless of where it is on the spectrum, you may be 10 steps behind somebody else that has some expertise in the same lane, but we all have something that we know that somebody else would be willing to pay for. My challenge to you would be, how do you leverage AI to be more creative with the knowledge base that you have? It's really not about it's going to replace you. It's not. Absolutely. I do believe that that's one of... I said this a minute ago. I feel like matching what I know already to how I can integrate and be more creative, and ultimately save myself a bunch of time with AI. That's the way I've married it. I think that that's the way I would encourage everybody to look at it. It's not a way of replacing it, but if you do have an expertise, then you need to figure out how can I leverage AI in such a way that's going to be my creative partner, not the other way around. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carver: Absolutely. I think one thing I say fairly often is that AI should be used to amplify actual intelligence, not just any intelligence, but your actual intelligence. Use it to help you with your actual intelligence. In Buddhism, they have a saying write speech. So if you're using AI, don't talk about something you don't know about. I shouldn't be using AI to write podiatry blogs, because I don't know anything about podiatry. I couldn't possibly attest whether or not the information it was giving me was relevant to that or accurate or anything like that. Mordy Oberstein: What about the podiatry device you gave me last week? Crystal Carver: How's your foot doing? Mordy Oberstein: It still hurts. Kim Garst: But if you have a, let's say... I'll give you a specific example. One of our clients, when you are in a client service-based business... Let me reframe that. One of the challenges has always been to know that business model. To your point, the podiatry. We're not podiatrists. Knowing that space, knowing the voice of that brand has always been a struggle when I had a social media business, an agency. But now, we do a lot of messaging and specific to content creation in particular. One of the things that we have found has worked so well is we train... We use the same methodology that I just talked about. We train a brand speak chat for that person's business. We don't know it. We don't have any frame of reference for... I'm not a doctor. I'll give you an example. We have a doctor who has an anti-aging product, and I know nothing about that. That's not my zone of genius, but we created a whole content strategy for her specific to short form content. She's like, "How are you nailing my voice so well?" I'm like... Mordy Oberstein: I'm just so good at it. Kim Garst: Like that. Crystal Carver: She's like, "I'm the queen of anti-aging. I'm forever young. I don't know what your problem is." How do you know this stuff? Kim Garst: "How do you know this stuff? How do you know that my person has these problems?" She said, "You've identified problems I didn't even know they had." That's the way you marry your expertise. It's like you literally, you've been training on your business, but if you're in a service-based business, you can train it on your client's businesses as well. Yeah, and it makes such a big difference because the outcome, your clients are thrilled. They're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing," and super happy with the outcome. Crystal Carver: I've heard someone say from Google, and I might've seen it on an AI conferences as well, is that people are worried about AI replacing their jobs. It's like if you're a marketer, don't worry about AI replacing you. Worry about another marketer using AI replacing you. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Kim Garst: AI won't replace you. I say that too. AI's not going to replace you, but you will be replaced by somebody using it. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of all these AI tools, what are some... Because we spoke it. Note to the audience. While we were prepping for the episode before we actually recorded, we were running through some tools, some not so great tools, and it's amazing to see what's out there. We're discussing that I found a tool that helps you find God, which is fascinating that you're using a large language model to answer life's most meaningful questions, but to each their own, I guess. I hope those answers are good, probably not. But what are some good tools that you're using that you can recommend that our audience might want to check out for themselves? Kim Garst: Yeah, absolutely. I do a tools review every week in my newsletter, so I look at a lot of tools. The ones though that I use daily are ChatGPT. I still think it's the gold standard when it comes to AI tools. Will it ever be replaced? Unknown at this point. A lot of the plugin features are also super valuable, I think, within ChatGPT for research and things like that. Just knowing that, I feel like that's been more evolved. It's built on the back of OpenAI, like we were talking, Mordy, a lot of other tools are also built off the back of OpenAI. I also use Claude daily. Claude still has another paid plan, so it throttles me pretty quickly, unfortunately, which is annoying. But still, for somebody who's a light user, I think Claude would be a really great alternative. For images, Midjourney, Ideogram, it's I-D-E-O gram.ai. Love it for custom images. There's a few for... Capso is really great for meme, if you are creating memes. It's a great little tool for meme content. But I found using some plugins with ChatGPT that you can create memes with ChatGPT as well. So, there's so many ways to leverage the tools. It's just really based on the creative piece, and then what do you want as an outcome. I know a lot of people started with Jasper. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Jasper. I think ChatGPT took the thunder out from under it a little bit. But there's just so many great tools out there. Short form content, if you want to repurpose content, there's tools like Dumme, D-U-M-M-E. I love that. The reason I like Dumme over some of the other short form repurposing tools is because if we're doing an interview, like we're talking right now, and you ask a question and I answer, it keys in on the question and the answer, so that there's a frame of reference for the repurpose clip. I think that's just really smart. Those are just a few. I mean, I could keep going. Mordy Oberstein: We’ll be here all day, there's so many tools. Crystal Carver: I should shout out, Kim has a toolbox that is immense, that is full of lots of wonderful, fantastic things. I was going through it, and there's some great stuff in there. I was like, "Oh yeah, Canva. I do love Canva." That's another thing, is that a lot of things, like Wix has added lots of AI elements into our CMS. Canva's added some AI elements into the Notion, has AI built into it. I think that that's another useful thing as well. But yeah, check out that great toolbox. Kim Garst: Most all of the tools are integrating AI in some capacity, because they know. Canva just released a plugin for ChatGPT, I think just yesterday or maybe the day before. I just took a peek at it yesterday, and I think it has some application but I don't think it's where it needs to be yet. I was a little disappointed. I thought it was going to create images for me, and it's really just kind of a search engine for finding something that would a template on Canva. It was meh. Mordy Oberstein: They can't all be great. One of the things we'd like to do with the audience before we sort of wrap it up is give them some other people around social media they can learn more from around, whatever topic and marketing that it is. I'm just kind of wondering if you have AI tool recommendations, what are some actual intelligence recommendations that you might have? Kim Garst: Yeah. I love my friend Chalene Johnson, just basically because she's just so real and authentic in her social engagement, and I think we could all learn from that. Yeah, check her out definitely. She's mostly teaches Instagram, but she has a lot of business knowledge and she's very robust in that approach to how she does things. She also has a very unique strategy when it comes to being authentically sharing content or ideas or products that are affiliate-based, so that she can use that as an income stream for her. She does it so naturally that nobody really even notices because they're just personal recommendations for things that she uses. There's just a couple of things I think you could really key in from her platform. I have a friend that I just met recently. We were both speaking at the same conference. His name is Phil Phallen, P-H-A-L-L-E-N. Phil is just a sweetheart, and he has really got a heart for the entrepreneur. He's also teaching a lot of AI-related content. I think you could really key in and learn something from him. But there's just so many amazing people honestly, to tune in to today. I guess my best recommendation to you would be to find two or three amazing people and stop. Mordy Oberstein: You're right. There's been so much AI. There was a while where it was like, "Everything AI." I was like, "It's a lot." Kim Garst: Yeah, find somebody leaning into the outcome that you're trying to affect and then just hang in there. Learn from them or absorb their content or whatever. Because what I have found, and I've been in this space for a long time, is you get inundated with all the information. When I started online 30 some years ago, there was no information. You had to teach yourself anything. Now, we're inundated with so much information, it becomes overload, and you're at three o'clock in the afternoon. You've not done anything in your business because you've been paying attention to everybody else's. So, let's just keep your number down to two or three, and you can still have time for your business. Crystal Carver: That's fantastic advice. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: One final question, Kim, where can we find you? Kim Garst: Well, you can find me pretty much anywhere in the social space under my name Kim Garst. My website is kimgarst.com. I have a free community. If you're interested in learning more about AI specific to marketing, you can join us at kimgarst.com/community. I have a whole post of things that'll be value-based to you there. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Please make sure to find Kim all across the web. Her content is amazing. It's literally the reason why we asked her to come on. A bunch of great posts about AI. Check those out. We'll link them in the show notes, and really appreciate you being able to stop by and share your expertise and knowledge with us. Kim Garst: Well, thanks for having me. It's been so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: As for the next episode of SERP's Up... Well, that's it. Thanks for joining us for this SERP's Up+ podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode of SERP's Up, our regular SEO podcast. And back again next month with a SERP's Up+ for more marketing talk. Look for wherever you can see your podcast or on our SEO learning hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO and digital marketing, check out all the great content and webinars and newsletters and podcasts that we have over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and marketing. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

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

Will AI overtake the SERP? Find out as we explore the SEO fallout from Google I/O 2024. Google announced the official launch of SGE at its I/O 2024 event. What does this and the other Search-related announcements mean for SEO and the SERP overall? Tune in as Wix's Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share their insights on what Google I/O 2024 means for search marketers. It's a bonus episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast covering all the SEO implications from Google I/O 2024! Back What does Google I/O 2024 mean for SEOs? Will AI overtake the SERP? Find out as we explore the SEO fallout from Google I/O 2024. Google announced the official launch of SGE at its I/O 2024 event. What does this and the other Search-related announcements mean for SEO and the SERP overall? Tune in as Wix's Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share their insights on what Google I/O 2024 means for search marketers. It's a bonus episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast covering all the SEO implications from Google I/O 2024! Previous Episode Next Episode Special episode | May 15, 2024 | 28 MIN 00:00 / 46:34 This week’s guests Google I/O Google I/O is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. The name "I/O" is taken from the number googol, with the "I" representing the "1" in googol and the "O" representing the first "0" in the number. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is 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 win insights around what's happening in SEO, and boy, if something's happening in SEO right now. I'm already overseeing the head SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is Google, Google, Google focused, our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, very enthusiastic introduction as we get into Google. Mordy Oberstein: Google. Mordy Oberstein: In case you don't know, so welcome to the bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast, where each year we go through what Google announced at Google I/O, in this case Google I/O 2024. Just to remind you, by the way, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out our brand new platform, Wix Studio, to help you manage your clients' projects and agency team members with far greater efficiency. Anyway, back to I/O. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Back to I/O. In case you didn't watch it before the keynote actually started, there was an improvisational musician who I'm told is very famous and very good. I don't know who he is. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah Mordy Oberstein: I wrote to you on WhatsApp, Crystal, he looked like Joseph and took his Technicolor Dreamcoat and was sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park and kicked out of the house and decided that during the daytime, he'll spend most of his time yelling some prophetic visions about big tech by screaming the words Google, Google, Google, all day long. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure. I think they were trying to make it fun. I did a predictions video and I thought, "Oh, maybe it'll be less fun because they're trying to focus on..." They got competitors. OpenAI did a big drop the day before, and so I thought this was going to be like, "We're very serious, boom, boom," but there was a lot of music in Google I/O, including that introduction, including it was we're in the studio, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a musical number about, am I doing the AI right, which I was very surprised to see. So, it was a lot to take in. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just a boomer anyway, so don't listen to me, Google. Anyway, where do we even start? There was a lot. It was a two-hour keynote, which was very long. Crystal Carter: Very long. Mordy Oberstein: I guess for our podcast and purposes, the good news is that they didn't talk a lot about search, so not a lot to cover. We're starting off salty. Crystal Carter: They talked about Gemini a lot, and I think that the big takeaway that I got from it was essentially that Gemini is coming to everything. It's essentially powering everything all at once, and I don't think that we will see the end of that very, very soon. I think that they're just looking to build, and build, and build on that, and I think that that's very apparent that they're all on Gemini in all parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? It made me kind of wonder, and this is maybe a hot take, I guess the show is all about hot takes to be honest with you, that they're realizing that the ecosystem where you're going to get information in the future is going to be less search and more closed AI systems like Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, that kind of thing. And at minimum, they're seeing that their revenue possibilities are greater with those AI possibilities than it is with search itself, which is interesting to hear myself even say. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that they're noticing that this is where the market is going, that a lot of people are interested in having these kind of assistants and having these kind of assistants as part of their day to day, which I mentioned that musical number there was, "Am I doing AI right?" That sort of thing. It's like normal, everyday people. I think they were trying to go for that kind of vibe that Apple always has, which is like we have very sophisticated tech that's really, really easy for you to use. And I think that they were trying to go for that, and I think that in terms of search for SEO, I think there's a lot of implications here. And you said, "I can't believe you're saying that," and there's a lot of implications here, but it did not seem particularly search was at the forefront of their minds with this. So, they wanted to showcase how useful Gemini can be, how integrated it is to their system, how powerful it is, and how many different iterations they have across all of their systems. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's I think something to keep in mind with this kind of thing that a lot of it has to do with not where they're going to earn revenue in terms of adding AI capabilities to Gmail, which they talked about in the workspace. So, I think that kind of stuff, by the way, is really cool. I think it's really useful. I think it's one of the only real cases where the AI product is really useful and it gives them a leg up over OpenAI, because Google has a whole ecosystem where they can apply their AI technology directly, so Gmail, or whatever workspace you're using, or Google Docs, whatever it is, and OpenAI doesn't have that. You're stuck in just an OpenAI universe using it independently. So that's really an interesting, I guess, advantage that Google has. Crystal Carter: But I think they had lots of different iterations, so you mentioned the Gmail one, but they also talked about lots of personal assistance sort of things as well. So, they talked about you can train it on your needs, and I think that as you're saying, so OpenAI has standalone, and I think that when they launched New Bing and their Copilot tool, that's something they really struggled with. They were like, "You can only have Copilot, you can only have New Bing if you sign up to be on the Bing ecosystem." And I think what Google's trying to do is they're trying to double down on their user relationships, so that if you have an Android phone, you are also using Gemini, you are also relying on Google Photos, so you're searching your photos, you're searching with your videos, all of us, so that their attack is part of your day-to-day, so that you're essentially relying on it, which is a big shift. I think there's a shift. I think that's a big shift. Mordy Oberstein: There's that stuff, which I think is very practical and I think very useful and I think very direct, and then I think there's the other half of it, which is let's make sure we signal to the investors, so that our stock price is healthy, that we are competing with OpenAI and our technology is just as advanced, if not more advanced than theirs is. And I think a lot of what you saw yesterday or wherever you're listening to this at Google I/O was a lot about that. So for example, a lot of the things they did with DeepMind, I felt like, "That's cool. I'm not sure how practically valuable that is yet." I felt that way, by the way, with OpenAI's demo also, "Very, very cool, but I'm not sure what's the practical implication of that, so that it actually improves my workflow right now." Crystal Carter: My main takeaway from all of it was they kept saying, "You can upload this, you can have more tokens." They said you can upload like a - Mordy Oberstein: It’s like Chucky Cheese! Crystal Carter: They were saying something like you can upload... I can't remember what the number was, but it was huge, like a 1,500 slide PowerPoint... Or not PowerPoint, Google Slide deck or something like that. I was like, "Who is making this?" Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting, because I felt what they were trying to do with that kind of stuff was differentiate themselves from OpenAI. OpenAI is for everybody, for the lay person to use on their phone and whatever, and Gemini is for developers, and engineers, and it's very complicated and professional. That was a branding differentiation they were trying to do. Crystal Carter: But I think that the thing that occurred to me though is that when we think about SEO, they were saying, "You can upload all of this and we can search all of it, and you can upload all of that and we can search all of that." And they were talking about that from their tools point of view. Google very often... Google does not silo their tools. They will overlap the tools as we see with Gemini, you see with Google Lens, as we see with Google Translate, they pull all of these things together across the ecosystem through the efficiencies and it gives users to great benefit. So, what I think we should think about as an SEO, as somebody who's working with the website is, how is Google helping users manage data via their tools and how does that affect how the users are going to access data and expect to be able to access data on a website? And I think that the shift to me that I got out of this was that users... Sorry, website managers, SEOs, marketing teams, whoever's managing the website should be thinking about their website as a data center and should be thinking about how accessible their data is, which ways their data is arranged, whether or not it's held in certain repositories, in like a PDF, or whether it's held in videos. They're talking about searching via video, which I think is a really interesting development. And I think that that opens up a lot of stuff, because that's almost certainly going to be something that's going to make YouTube videos more searchable, for instance. And I think that that's something that's interesting for people who were self-hosting on their websites. And also I think that's interesting for that data point I mean, we're going to be... I think that going forward it's going to be more updated to take advantage, and I think that'll be interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's the circle to search where we saw them, we covered that on the news on this podcast a while back when they tested it. That stuff is fascinating. It's super cool technology and it really doesn't make searching for things much easier, but I guess let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is the elephant. There's an elephant in the room and oh my God, we're talking about an elephant. No, no, we're talking about SGE. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, Google announced that they're going to be rolling out SGE outside of labs in the US and beyond. It's the end of all organic traffic ever, or not. Crystal Carter: Again, again. Mordy Oberstein: I was surprised by the way, so I was surprised that if you think about what they announced in terms of the classic SGE itself, and I know there's more capabilities which we'll get to about planning and organizing information, but the actual how many stars are in the universe and you get an SGE answer, nothing actually changed. They announced at Indutech and in DEV4, it's just the same thing. They're sufficiently rolling it out, and I think that's extremely telling about how they think about SGE, and part of me feels like they announced it, and this is a hot take, they announced it, because they had to announce that the rolling it out, because what are you going to do with the thing? You're not going to implement it, and there's a loss in having it there. You have to expand it anyway, so you could ignore it if you want to. So, let's roll it out. Again, it's good for perception, it's good for the health of the company and the perception of the company, but how impactful is the real question? Will SGE really be on the SERP? Crystal Carter: I think really interesting. So one of the things they said, they said that they're going to put it in a side panel, which I've been fascinated with. We've talked about Google copying Microsoft's homework, and the Copilot has been in the side panel on desktop for months. And basically if you go and you search up, I don't know, the best Yankee baseball player or something, then you'll get the- Mordy Oberstein: Yogi Berra. Crystal Carter: … Yogi Berra and then you'll have on the side it'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, Yogi Berra..." And it'll write that and you may or may not pay attention to it, but that's already in the side panel on thing and it's user experience of people, what people are used to, and I think it's interesting that they were planning to do that as well. So, I think we should see some parity, and I think also it might be worth thinking about people are trying to prepare for this SGE universe looking at how their rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out, how their bidding rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out. I think that's particularly important for folks who are in EU, folks who are outside of the United States where they haven't had the SGE in any form. And so, we're not here on green fields. There is something that we can look at to compare data in terms of impact, and I think that that's worth having a look at. Mordy Oberstein: And that's interesting. I was talking to Garrett Sussman on X about this where SGE has been outside of labs in the US for a while already, and I personally haven't seen anybody, "Oh, the sky is falling," yet. And that's one thing that Google didn't say. They didn't say, "Oh, people find the SGE answers useful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which everyone's got to put that PR spin on it, but they didn't say how often people are actually expanding it and interacting with it, which if the numbers were high, I would imagine they would say, "Oh, 80% of our users when SGE has been offered are engaging with..." And they didn't. So, I do speculate about how much the SGE will actually be used by users, but let's assume for a minute, Crystal, that everyone 100% of the time engages the SGE. Does that mean is the end of content as we know it? Crystal Carter: Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that they were talking about talk as much as you want, ask as long as you want, go as complex as you want in terms of your answers. So, I think the example that they showed was, "I want to find a yoga studio that's walking distance from this place in Boston, and has good entry offers," or something to the effect. And they were able to filter out this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and I think that this is the domain of the long-tail. This is something that for long-tail queries and also for understanding the element of that, what users are looking for, which combinations of information users are looking for is something that is interesting. So, I don't think it's necessarily the end of content, but I do think that we'll have to think about user expectations. Users will expect to be able to have more complex information available on the website, and I think also we will need to be able to organize that information more clearly in lots of different ways they're accessible to Google. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a little torn on this one because on the one hand it seems like, "All right, let's slow down here." On the other hand, the way that Google presented it in the video that they did, if you saw after the presentation itself, they did a whole, I don't know, a PR-ish kind of video. It very much looks like, or I took it and perceived it as they're basically saying SGE is going to replace top level information, which is, okay, let's deal with that as it is. At the same time, I feel like, yes, they did tell Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land that's going for complex queries where they can offer unique value, but if you look at the examples that people have been sharing, it's not for that. So for example, Christine Schacker shared an example with me where they're running it for... I had to deal with the kidney stone, something around that. I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting, that's not very complex." If you Google that, you'll get your typical Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health rundown of symptoms and causes and treatment and whatever. And what I take this as is Google basically saying, "Hey, you know what? You all have done that 100 times over already, 1,000 times over, we don't need that anymore. So, we're just going to show that in the SGE, because SGE actually, and I do believe this, does it better if it's accurate, because it's much more as opposed to, let's say the Mayo Clinic, they have their article, and the Cleveland clinic has their article. If you sort of combine the best of those articles, that's better. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or I think though that content's not dead is, for example, in this whole prolific they had about preventing or dealing with kidney stones, which is such a pleasant topic, they had a section on, for example, avoiding protein, because that will prevent having kidney stones for whatever reason. I'm totally botching what it wrote, because I know nothing about kidney stones. I'm not a doctor. “Damnit Jim, I'm not a doctor.” That's not how that goes, but anyway, so if I had kidney stones and I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, I can prevent this again by not eating whatever protein?" That summary's not enough. The second tier or second level or second depth content I'll call it, you still need to click, you still need to dive in. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think it means is that if a website... See, I was talking to someone, I talking to Mark Preston about this today actually, when we think about writing a content cluster, so we'll be like, "How to prevent kidney stones," and we'll talk about medicine on one page and we'll talk about diet on another page. We think it's very prolific, but when you think about it, it's still very top level. A real in-depth topic cluster would be a content cluster about protein, eating it, and the prevention of kidney stones. Like for example, one topic would be, what proteins do or don't? Another page would be, for example, I'm off the cuff here, how do you now substitute your diet to get the protein you do need without eating protein to prevent kidney stones? There's a whole topic cluster about just that one slice of preventing kidney stones, which no one's doing, because that's way too in-depth kind of thing, but I feel like if you want to be the URL that shows up in the section of the SGE, that talks about preventing kidney stones with a protein-less diet, whatever it is, then you need to write that content cluster and be known as that entity that talks about what? Not kidney stones, not diet and kidney stones, preventing kidney stones with a less protein diet. So, I think content's alive, but I think it's a very different model than we currently look at it. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to shift the way that people think about content. And I've been here with content projects as well, where sometimes you're writing the content that is the primer, that is the, "What are kidney stones? What are the things..." You're writing that primer content, but you might not necessarily even expect that to rank particularly. You need to have that as part of your ecosystem, you need to have that in order to have content cluster salience, you need to have that in order to make sure that you can link to yourself instead link to someone else. And for people who are already on your website to understand that you know what that topic is and that sort of thing, you might not necessarily exactly trend. And I think that that will change the way people think about things. I think also where we are able to pull out those unique pieces of content from users that we are speaking with, that I think is a real content opportunity. So, where we know there is a deep cut question that only we can answer, that's really important. So, I think that the tools that we use for keyword research are going to be really important as well, because Google knows which ones have the giant volume. And I've started using Bing a lot recently, and I use Copilot when I get stuck, but if I've been searching on Google, "How do I answer this question?" Searching on Bing, "How do I answer this question?" If I find that in between the two of them, I can't find anything, then it goes to one of the LLMs, I'll go to Bing Copilot, I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll go to something else because I'm like, "Clearly, I'm not getting what I need. Maybe you can point me in the right direction with either the right terminology or the right ideas, or maybe you can verify this confusing information that I have." So I think that those, to use a phrase that Google uses very often, those needle and a haystack things, sometimes Google can point you in the right direction or sometimes an LLM can point you in the right direction of what you should be searching for, so that you can do a better search, so that's useful. I think also in terms of content opportunities in this sort of SGE everywhere world, I think that the new is your friend, because like you said, some of that well-worn territory of what is a key of kidney stone or what is a search engine or the kinds of things that they clearly have in the militrap. They've got it in the militrap, they know what it is. That sort of content, I think that that's right for Picket in terms of SGE. But new content and new information leads to insights on new things that are happening are going to be going to be a good place for websites to think that it may even be the reverse of journalism that websites are going to need to employ journalists for their sector, for their vertical. Mordy Oberstein: It's definitely a constriction of content, but it's not the elimination of content. So, I feel like content's been out of control. It's been in need of a correction for a long time, and this might be that. Is it going too far? I do have a feeling that Google might be going a little bit too far and the ecosystem, it won't be healthy enough and creating enough content, but that's a different question for a different time. Crystal Carter: I also want to talk about what they didn't talk about. So, they didn't talk about Reddit at all, which is very surprised about. Mordy Oberstein: They know that the Reddit thing is only a crutch. It's only there because they need to have the first-hand knowledge. No one really wants the Reddit there. They just have nothing else. Crystal Carter: I wasn’t surprised, but there wasn't a whole lot in terms of e-coms. Normally they're all in e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, shoppity, shop, shop, shop. Mordy Oberstein: Because Amazon's not the competitor anymore. OpenAI is the competitor. Crystal Carter: That's why they said AI over and over. It's super cut of them saying AI often though. Mordy Oberstein: Google, Google. The whole thing is interesting. I think the most interesting thing is the thematic trends throughout the whole thing, that being one of them, or the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh, SGE is going to be the end of content, blah, blah, blah," but look at the other thing. Google announced. And by the way, I just want to say predicted this in our talk with Danny Goodwin on a previous episode about Gemini, I said Google's going to take the custom answer formatting that Gemini produces and bringing that to the SERP. And lo and behold, Google said, "We're taking an AI approach to the SERP, the layout and presentation of the SERP results themselves, here you go. And that to me... So on the one hand you have, "Oh, SGE is going to answer everything," but if that's the case, then why is Google also investing in having the SERP being formatted by AI to make it easier for you to explore the topic? Because they know that people don't just want the answer. There still is an exploration element, so they're going to invest in both. Big thing for me. Crystal Carter: Also, Google needs to be able to send people's websites in order for their revenue. Their ad revenue is a strong tool for them, so they need to be able to make sure that that ecosystem doesn't fall apart. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. One last thing we didn't cover, which we need to cover, and that's the trip planning and the menu planning, all the organizational stuff, which is interesting. Now, Google... We covered this also on the Snappy news before, but Google has been testing the trip planner for a while. So you type in, "Plan my trip to Philadelphia," and it says, "Don't go there." I'm just kidding. It plans out you're five days in Philly for you. And then if you want to create a low-carb daily menu plan for me that focuses on chicken and whatever, whatever, it'll create a menu plan for you. Again, "Oh, it's the end of these websites. It's the end of all the websites." I don't know. I got feelings about this. I'll give you my example. I put this on X earlier today. So, three years ago I got diagnosed. Is it a diagnosis? I don't know, with a fatty liver. I ate too much during COVID, I drank too much during COVID, and I watched too much Netflix during COVID. The Netflix part had less to do with the fatty liver part, and I completely changed my diet. I didn't go to Google. I didn't even think about going to Google and asking it, "Can you please plan a menu so I don't leave my children fatherless?" I went to a nutritionist and then when I had specific questions about what that nutritionist said, I started Googling, "Does this food..." She said, "Here's the criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Does this food meet that criteria?" And I did Google that, so I feel like a casual trip or a casual diet plan you might search for. I went to a conference, I got an extra day in Philly, what should I do today? If I'm spilling 10 grand to take my family to LA or to San Francisco or to Philly for that matter, I am not saying, "All right, plan my trip for me and see you later. I'll just do whatever the AI says." Crystal Carter: So, I think it's really interesting that they chose the trip thing again as well, because they talked about the trip or planning a trip for when they were talking about MUM, when they were like, "Oh, we're multi-modal with MUM." They talked about the trip when they were talking about the Google when they originally announced Gemini and AI and stuff. So, they've talked about planning a trip for a few times, and one of the times that they talked about planning a trip, they got things wrong. So, I think it's interesting that they went back to this as a trope and as a use case, because planning a trip is really complex, as you say. So, it's interesting to use it as an example. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, parenthetically, they announced this whole multi-step search result reason, multi-step reasoning, which you mentioned before. I kind of feel like old, not new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I remember when they were like, "MUM is going to be the new thing," and MUM is now kind of in Gemini kind of. Mordy Oberstein: That's what MUM did. MUM did the multiple reasoning, parsing … Crystal Carter: But with AI. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's different, I forgot. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: With AI. Crystal Carter: I'm sure that MUM didn't have any AI to begin with. I'm sure that there wasn't. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's just machine learning, an inferior version of AI. Crystal Carter: Of course,. I think the next few months will be interesting. I think the international rollout of Gemini and all of the different elements that are associated with it will be really interesting, and I think it felt a little inconclusive overall. Overall, it felt a little bit work in progress rather than, "Here's the thing and here's exactly what we're doing." It felt a little bit work in progress and I was fascinated that there weren't as many hot takes as there normally are from Google I/O. Mordy Oberstein: No, I knew that. Crystal Carter: It kind feels a little work in progress, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting, all right. I guess we'll wait and see, and also the sky is not falling. Crystal Carter: No, not yet, but I do think if people want to do anything, then if you were to take any next steps out of this, I'd probably say shore up your knowledge panel. Mordy Oberstein: It's always a good idea anyway. Crystal Carter: True. Mordy Oberstein: I would say add a layer of topical depth to your website if you don't have it. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's good, so these are top tips. Mordy Oberstein: Two takeaways. All right, we did good. We have two takeaways for you. Two is better than one Crystal Carter: AI. Mordy Oberstein: Ai, Google. That'll do it for I/O, I guess. I/O you one for joining me today and spending your time with recording this, Crystal. I owe you one. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, thanks. Joining us on this special bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? You literally don't have to worry. We're back tomorrow with a new episode about SEO and accessibility. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on Wix is SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rate rating on Spotify, please. So until next time, which is tomorrow, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Barry Schwartz Garrett Sussman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Barry Schwartz Garrett Sussman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is 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 win insights around what's happening in SEO, and boy, if something's happening in SEO right now. I'm already overseeing the head SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is Google, Google, Google focused, our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, very enthusiastic introduction as we get into Google. Mordy Oberstein: Google. Mordy Oberstein: In case you don't know, so welcome to the bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast, where each year we go through what Google announced at Google I/O, in this case Google I/O 2024. Just to remind you, by the way, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out our brand new platform, Wix Studio, to help you manage your clients' projects and agency team members with far greater efficiency. Anyway, back to I/O. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Back to I/O. In case you didn't watch it before the keynote actually started, there was an improvisational musician who I'm told is very famous and very good. I don't know who he is. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah Mordy Oberstein: I wrote to you on WhatsApp, Crystal, he looked like Joseph and took his Technicolor Dreamcoat and was sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park and kicked out of the house and decided that during the daytime, he'll spend most of his time yelling some prophetic visions about big tech by screaming the words Google, Google, Google, all day long. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure. I think they were trying to make it fun. I did a predictions video and I thought, "Oh, maybe it'll be less fun because they're trying to focus on..." They got competitors. OpenAI did a big drop the day before, and so I thought this was going to be like, "We're very serious, boom, boom," but there was a lot of music in Google I/O, including that introduction, including it was we're in the studio, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a musical number about, am I doing the AI right, which I was very surprised to see. So, it was a lot to take in. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just a boomer anyway, so don't listen to me, Google. Anyway, where do we even start? There was a lot. It was a two-hour keynote, which was very long. Crystal Carter: Very long. Mordy Oberstein: I guess for our podcast and purposes, the good news is that they didn't talk a lot about search, so not a lot to cover. We're starting off salty. Crystal Carter: They talked about Gemini a lot, and I think that the big takeaway that I got from it was essentially that Gemini is coming to everything. It's essentially powering everything all at once, and I don't think that we will see the end of that very, very soon. I think that they're just looking to build, and build, and build on that, and I think that that's very apparent that they're all on Gemini in all parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? It made me kind of wonder, and this is maybe a hot take, I guess the show is all about hot takes to be honest with you, that they're realizing that the ecosystem where you're going to get information in the future is going to be less search and more closed AI systems like Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, that kind of thing. And at minimum, they're seeing that their revenue possibilities are greater with those AI possibilities than it is with search itself, which is interesting to hear myself even say. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that they're noticing that this is where the market is going, that a lot of people are interested in having these kind of assistants and having these kind of assistants as part of their day to day, which I mentioned that musical number there was, "Am I doing AI right?" That sort of thing. It's like normal, everyday people. I think they were trying to go for that kind of vibe that Apple always has, which is like we have very sophisticated tech that's really, really easy for you to use. And I think that they were trying to go for that, and I think that in terms of search for SEO, I think there's a lot of implications here. And you said, "I can't believe you're saying that," and there's a lot of implications here, but it did not seem particularly search was at the forefront of their minds with this. So, they wanted to showcase how useful Gemini can be, how integrated it is to their system, how powerful it is, and how many different iterations they have across all of their systems. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's I think something to keep in mind with this kind of thing that a lot of it has to do with not where they're going to earn revenue in terms of adding AI capabilities to Gmail, which they talked about in the workspace. So, I think that kind of stuff, by the way, is really cool. I think it's really useful. I think it's one of the only real cases where the AI product is really useful and it gives them a leg up over OpenAI, because Google has a whole ecosystem where they can apply their AI technology directly, so Gmail, or whatever workspace you're using, or Google Docs, whatever it is, and OpenAI doesn't have that. You're stuck in just an OpenAI universe using it independently. So that's really an interesting, I guess, advantage that Google has. Crystal Carter: But I think they had lots of different iterations, so you mentioned the Gmail one, but they also talked about lots of personal assistance sort of things as well. So, they talked about you can train it on your needs, and I think that as you're saying, so OpenAI has standalone, and I think that when they launched New Bing and their Copilot tool, that's something they really struggled with. They were like, "You can only have Copilot, you can only have New Bing if you sign up to be on the Bing ecosystem." And I think what Google's trying to do is they're trying to double down on their user relationships, so that if you have an Android phone, you are also using Gemini, you are also relying on Google Photos, so you're searching your photos, you're searching with your videos, all of us, so that their attack is part of your day-to-day, so that you're essentially relying on it, which is a big shift. I think there's a shift. I think that's a big shift. Mordy Oberstein: There's that stuff, which I think is very practical and I think very useful and I think very direct, and then I think there's the other half of it, which is let's make sure we signal to the investors, so that our stock price is healthy, that we are competing with OpenAI and our technology is just as advanced, if not more advanced than theirs is. And I think a lot of what you saw yesterday or wherever you're listening to this at Google I/O was a lot about that. So for example, a lot of the things they did with DeepMind, I felt like, "That's cool. I'm not sure how practically valuable that is yet." I felt that way, by the way, with OpenAI's demo also, "Very, very cool, but I'm not sure what's the practical implication of that, so that it actually improves my workflow right now." Crystal Carter: My main takeaway from all of it was they kept saying, "You can upload this, you can have more tokens." They said you can upload like a - Mordy Oberstein: It’s like Chucky Cheese! Crystal Carter: They were saying something like you can upload... I can't remember what the number was, but it was huge, like a 1,500 slide PowerPoint... Or not PowerPoint, Google Slide deck or something like that. I was like, "Who is making this?" Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting, because I felt what they were trying to do with that kind of stuff was differentiate themselves from OpenAI. OpenAI is for everybody, for the lay person to use on their phone and whatever, and Gemini is for developers, and engineers, and it's very complicated and professional. That was a branding differentiation they were trying to do. Crystal Carter: But I think that the thing that occurred to me though is that when we think about SEO, they were saying, "You can upload all of this and we can search all of it, and you can upload all of that and we can search all of that." And they were talking about that from their tools point of view. Google very often... Google does not silo their tools. They will overlap the tools as we see with Gemini, you see with Google Lens, as we see with Google Translate, they pull all of these things together across the ecosystem through the efficiencies and it gives users to great benefit. So, what I think we should think about as an SEO, as somebody who's working with the website is, how is Google helping users manage data via their tools and how does that affect how the users are going to access data and expect to be able to access data on a website? And I think that the shift to me that I got out of this was that users... Sorry, website managers, SEOs, marketing teams, whoever's managing the website should be thinking about their website as a data center and should be thinking about how accessible their data is, which ways their data is arranged, whether or not it's held in certain repositories, in like a PDF, or whether it's held in videos. They're talking about searching via video, which I think is a really interesting development. And I think that that opens up a lot of stuff, because that's almost certainly going to be something that's going to make YouTube videos more searchable, for instance. And I think that that's something that's interesting for people who were self-hosting on their websites. And also I think that's interesting for that data point I mean, we're going to be... I think that going forward it's going to be more updated to take advantage, and I think that'll be interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's the circle to search where we saw them, we covered that on the news on this podcast a while back when they tested it. That stuff is fascinating. It's super cool technology and it really doesn't make searching for things much easier, but I guess let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is the elephant. There's an elephant in the room and oh my God, we're talking about an elephant. No, no, we're talking about SGE. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, Google announced that they're going to be rolling out SGE outside of labs in the US and beyond. It's the end of all organic traffic ever, or not. Crystal Carter: Again, again. Mordy Oberstein: I was surprised by the way, so I was surprised that if you think about what they announced in terms of the classic SGE itself, and I know there's more capabilities which we'll get to about planning and organizing information, but the actual how many stars are in the universe and you get an SGE answer, nothing actually changed. They announced at Indutech and in DEV4, it's just the same thing. They're sufficiently rolling it out, and I think that's extremely telling about how they think about SGE, and part of me feels like they announced it, and this is a hot take, they announced it, because they had to announce that the rolling it out, because what are you going to do with the thing? You're not going to implement it, and there's a loss in having it there. You have to expand it anyway, so you could ignore it if you want to. So, let's roll it out. Again, it's good for perception, it's good for the health of the company and the perception of the company, but how impactful is the real question? Will SGE really be on the SERP? Crystal Carter: I think really interesting. So one of the things they said, they said that they're going to put it in a side panel, which I've been fascinated with. We've talked about Google copying Microsoft's homework, and the Copilot has been in the side panel on desktop for months. And basically if you go and you search up, I don't know, the best Yankee baseball player or something, then you'll get the- Mordy Oberstein: Yogi Berra. Crystal Carter: … Yogi Berra and then you'll have on the side it'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, Yogi Berra..." And it'll write that and you may or may not pay attention to it, but that's already in the side panel on thing and it's user experience of people, what people are used to, and I think it's interesting that they were planning to do that as well. So, I think we should see some parity, and I think also it might be worth thinking about people are trying to prepare for this SGE universe looking at how their rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out, how their bidding rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out. I think that's particularly important for folks who are in EU, folks who are outside of the United States where they haven't had the SGE in any form. And so, we're not here on green fields. There is something that we can look at to compare data in terms of impact, and I think that that's worth having a look at. Mordy Oberstein: And that's interesting. I was talking to Garrett Sussman on X about this where SGE has been outside of labs in the US for a while already, and I personally haven't seen anybody, "Oh, the sky is falling," yet. And that's one thing that Google didn't say. They didn't say, "Oh, people find the SGE answers useful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which everyone's got to put that PR spin on it, but they didn't say how often people are actually expanding it and interacting with it, which if the numbers were high, I would imagine they would say, "Oh, 80% of our users when SGE has been offered are engaging with..." And they didn't. So, I do speculate about how much the SGE will actually be used by users, but let's assume for a minute, Crystal, that everyone 100% of the time engages the SGE. Does that mean is the end of content as we know it? Crystal Carter: Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that they were talking about talk as much as you want, ask as long as you want, go as complex as you want in terms of your answers. So, I think the example that they showed was, "I want to find a yoga studio that's walking distance from this place in Boston, and has good entry offers," or something to the effect. And they were able to filter out this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and I think that this is the domain of the long-tail. This is something that for long-tail queries and also for understanding the element of that, what users are looking for, which combinations of information users are looking for is something that is interesting. So, I don't think it's necessarily the end of content, but I do think that we'll have to think about user expectations. Users will expect to be able to have more complex information available on the website, and I think also we will need to be able to organize that information more clearly in lots of different ways they're accessible to Google. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a little torn on this one because on the one hand it seems like, "All right, let's slow down here." On the other hand, the way that Google presented it in the video that they did, if you saw after the presentation itself, they did a whole, I don't know, a PR-ish kind of video. It very much looks like, or I took it and perceived it as they're basically saying SGE is going to replace top level information, which is, okay, let's deal with that as it is. At the same time, I feel like, yes, they did tell Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land that's going for complex queries where they can offer unique value, but if you look at the examples that people have been sharing, it's not for that. So for example, Christine Schacker shared an example with me where they're running it for... I had to deal with the kidney stone, something around that. I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting, that's not very complex." If you Google that, you'll get your typical Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health rundown of symptoms and causes and treatment and whatever. And what I take this as is Google basically saying, "Hey, you know what? You all have done that 100 times over already, 1,000 times over, we don't need that anymore. So, we're just going to show that in the SGE, because SGE actually, and I do believe this, does it better if it's accurate, because it's much more as opposed to, let's say the Mayo Clinic, they have their article, and the Cleveland clinic has their article. If you sort of combine the best of those articles, that's better. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or I think though that content's not dead is, for example, in this whole prolific they had about preventing or dealing with kidney stones, which is such a pleasant topic, they had a section on, for example, avoiding protein, because that will prevent having kidney stones for whatever reason. I'm totally botching what it wrote, because I know nothing about kidney stones. I'm not a doctor. “Damnit Jim, I'm not a doctor.” That's not how that goes, but anyway, so if I had kidney stones and I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, I can prevent this again by not eating whatever protein?" That summary's not enough. The second tier or second level or second depth content I'll call it, you still need to click, you still need to dive in. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think it means is that if a website... See, I was talking to someone, I talking to Mark Preston about this today actually, when we think about writing a content cluster, so we'll be like, "How to prevent kidney stones," and we'll talk about medicine on one page and we'll talk about diet on another page. We think it's very prolific, but when you think about it, it's still very top level. A real in-depth topic cluster would be a content cluster about protein, eating it, and the prevention of kidney stones. Like for example, one topic would be, what proteins do or don't? Another page would be, for example, I'm off the cuff here, how do you now substitute your diet to get the protein you do need without eating protein to prevent kidney stones? There's a whole topic cluster about just that one slice of preventing kidney stones, which no one's doing, because that's way too in-depth kind of thing, but I feel like if you want to be the URL that shows up in the section of the SGE, that talks about preventing kidney stones with a protein-less diet, whatever it is, then you need to write that content cluster and be known as that entity that talks about what? Not kidney stones, not diet and kidney stones, preventing kidney stones with a less protein diet. So, I think content's alive, but I think it's a very different model than we currently look at it. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to shift the way that people think about content. And I've been here with content projects as well, where sometimes you're writing the content that is the primer, that is the, "What are kidney stones? What are the things..." You're writing that primer content, but you might not necessarily even expect that to rank particularly. You need to have that as part of your ecosystem, you need to have that in order to have content cluster salience, you need to have that in order to make sure that you can link to yourself instead link to someone else. And for people who are already on your website to understand that you know what that topic is and that sort of thing, you might not necessarily exactly trend. And I think that that will change the way people think about things. I think also where we are able to pull out those unique pieces of content from users that we are speaking with, that I think is a real content opportunity. So, where we know there is a deep cut question that only we can answer, that's really important. So, I think that the tools that we use for keyword research are going to be really important as well, because Google knows which ones have the giant volume. And I've started using Bing a lot recently, and I use Copilot when I get stuck, but if I've been searching on Google, "How do I answer this question?" Searching on Bing, "How do I answer this question?" If I find that in between the two of them, I can't find anything, then it goes to one of the LLMs, I'll go to Bing Copilot, I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll go to something else because I'm like, "Clearly, I'm not getting what I need. Maybe you can point me in the right direction with either the right terminology or the right ideas, or maybe you can verify this confusing information that I have." So I think that those, to use a phrase that Google uses very often, those needle and a haystack things, sometimes Google can point you in the right direction or sometimes an LLM can point you in the right direction of what you should be searching for, so that you can do a better search, so that's useful. I think also in terms of content opportunities in this sort of SGE everywhere world, I think that the new is your friend, because like you said, some of that well-worn territory of what is a key of kidney stone or what is a search engine or the kinds of things that they clearly have in the militrap. They've got it in the militrap, they know what it is. That sort of content, I think that that's right for Picket in terms of SGE. But new content and new information leads to insights on new things that are happening are going to be going to be a good place for websites to think that it may even be the reverse of journalism that websites are going to need to employ journalists for their sector, for their vertical. Mordy Oberstein: It's definitely a constriction of content, but it's not the elimination of content. So, I feel like content's been out of control. It's been in need of a correction for a long time, and this might be that. Is it going too far? I do have a feeling that Google might be going a little bit too far and the ecosystem, it won't be healthy enough and creating enough content, but that's a different question for a different time. Crystal Carter: I also want to talk about what they didn't talk about. So, they didn't talk about Reddit at all, which is very surprised about. Mordy Oberstein: They know that the Reddit thing is only a crutch. It's only there because they need to have the first-hand knowledge. No one really wants the Reddit there. They just have nothing else. Crystal Carter: I wasn’t surprised, but there wasn't a whole lot in terms of e-coms. Normally they're all in e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, shoppity, shop, shop, shop. Mordy Oberstein: Because Amazon's not the competitor anymore. OpenAI is the competitor. Crystal Carter: That's why they said AI over and over. It's super cut of them saying AI often though. Mordy Oberstein: Google, Google. The whole thing is interesting. I think the most interesting thing is the thematic trends throughout the whole thing, that being one of them, or the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh, SGE is going to be the end of content, blah, blah, blah," but look at the other thing. Google announced. And by the way, I just want to say predicted this in our talk with Danny Goodwin on a previous episode about Gemini, I said Google's going to take the custom answer formatting that Gemini produces and bringing that to the SERP. And lo and behold, Google said, "We're taking an AI approach to the SERP, the layout and presentation of the SERP results themselves, here you go. And that to me... So on the one hand you have, "Oh, SGE is going to answer everything," but if that's the case, then why is Google also investing in having the SERP being formatted by AI to make it easier for you to explore the topic? Because they know that people don't just want the answer. There still is an exploration element, so they're going to invest in both. Big thing for me. Crystal Carter: Also, Google needs to be able to send people's websites in order for their revenue. Their ad revenue is a strong tool for them, so they need to be able to make sure that that ecosystem doesn't fall apart. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. One last thing we didn't cover, which we need to cover, and that's the trip planning and the menu planning, all the organizational stuff, which is interesting. Now, Google... We covered this also on the Snappy news before, but Google has been testing the trip planner for a while. So you type in, "Plan my trip to Philadelphia," and it says, "Don't go there." I'm just kidding. It plans out you're five days in Philly for you. And then if you want to create a low-carb daily menu plan for me that focuses on chicken and whatever, whatever, it'll create a menu plan for you. Again, "Oh, it's the end of these websites. It's the end of all the websites." I don't know. I got feelings about this. I'll give you my example. I put this on X earlier today. So, three years ago I got diagnosed. Is it a diagnosis? I don't know, with a fatty liver. I ate too much during COVID, I drank too much during COVID, and I watched too much Netflix during COVID. The Netflix part had less to do with the fatty liver part, and I completely changed my diet. I didn't go to Google. I didn't even think about going to Google and asking it, "Can you please plan a menu so I don't leave my children fatherless?" I went to a nutritionist and then when I had specific questions about what that nutritionist said, I started Googling, "Does this food..." She said, "Here's the criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Does this food meet that criteria?" And I did Google that, so I feel like a casual trip or a casual diet plan you might search for. I went to a conference, I got an extra day in Philly, what should I do today? If I'm spilling 10 grand to take my family to LA or to San Francisco or to Philly for that matter, I am not saying, "All right, plan my trip for me and see you later. I'll just do whatever the AI says." Crystal Carter: So, I think it's really interesting that they chose the trip thing again as well, because they talked about the trip or planning a trip for when they were talking about MUM, when they were like, "Oh, we're multi-modal with MUM." They talked about the trip when they were talking about the Google when they originally announced Gemini and AI and stuff. So, they've talked about planning a trip for a few times, and one of the times that they talked about planning a trip, they got things wrong. So, I think it's interesting that they went back to this as a trope and as a use case, because planning a trip is really complex, as you say. So, it's interesting to use it as an example. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, parenthetically, they announced this whole multi-step search result reason, multi-step reasoning, which you mentioned before. I kind of feel like old, not new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I remember when they were like, "MUM is going to be the new thing," and MUM is now kind of in Gemini kind of. Mordy Oberstein: That's what MUM did. MUM did the multiple reasoning, parsing … Crystal Carter: But with AI. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's different, I forgot. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: With AI. Crystal Carter: I'm sure that MUM didn't have any AI to begin with. I'm sure that there wasn't. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's just machine learning, an inferior version of AI. Crystal Carter: Of course,. I think the next few months will be interesting. I think the international rollout of Gemini and all of the different elements that are associated with it will be really interesting, and I think it felt a little inconclusive overall. Overall, it felt a little bit work in progress rather than, "Here's the thing and here's exactly what we're doing." It felt a little bit work in progress and I was fascinated that there weren't as many hot takes as there normally are from Google I/O. Mordy Oberstein: No, I knew that. Crystal Carter: It kind feels a little work in progress, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting, all right. I guess we'll wait and see, and also the sky is not falling. Crystal Carter: No, not yet, but I do think if people want to do anything, then if you were to take any next steps out of this, I'd probably say shore up your knowledge panel. Mordy Oberstein: It's always a good idea anyway. Crystal Carter: True. Mordy Oberstein: I would say add a layer of topical depth to your website if you don't have it. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's good, so these are top tips. Mordy Oberstein: Two takeaways. All right, we did good. We have two takeaways for you. Two is better than one Crystal Carter: AI. Mordy Oberstein: Ai, Google. That'll do it for I/O, I guess. I/O you one for joining me today and spending your time with recording this, Crystal. I owe you one. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, thanks. Joining us on this special bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? You literally don't have to worry. We're back tomorrow with a new episode about SEO and accessibility. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on Wix is SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rate rating on Spotify, please. So until next time, which is tomorrow, peace, love, and SEO. 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What's the SEO verdict: subdomains or subfolders? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein take up this age-old question as they dive into the SEO nuances between using subdomains versus subfolders. Migrating subdomain content into a subfolder? How can you make the transition smooth as silk? Tech SEO expert Nikki Halliwell joins the conversation to help you make the move as seamless as possible. Plus, a deep look into indented results on the SERP and the surprising clue they leave about subfolders and subdomains for SEO. It’s subdomain versus subfolder and all of the subsequent SEO conversation that follows on this episode of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Subdomains or subfolders? Which is best for SEO? What's the SEO verdict: subdomains or subfolders? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein take up this age-old question as they dive into the SEO nuances between using subdomains versus subfolders. Migrating subdomain content into a subfolder? How can you make the transition smooth as silk? Tech SEO expert Nikki Halliwell joins the conversation to help you make the move as seamless as possible. Plus, a deep look into indented results on the SERP and the surprising clue they leave about subfolders and subdomains for SEO. It’s subdomain versus subfolder and all of the subsequent SEO conversation that follows on this episode of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 43 | June 21, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:42 This week’s guests Nikki Halliwell Based in Manchester, UK, Nikki Halliwell is a freelance Technical SEO Consultant and Technical SEO Specialist for Journey Further. She has worked at several agencies and in-house and has worked across the health, hospitality and fashion industries and more. Nikki enjoys working with eCommerce websites and ensuring that websites are easy to find, load quickly and work efficiently. 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 insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy O, overseeing the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fabulous, the unequivocable, the always right, there's nothing I could say more about Crystal Carter, our own Head of SEO communications. I haven't done that kind of intro in a while, and it felt it was long overdue. Crystal Carter: I would tell you right now that I am not always right. Mordy Oberstein: Crystals is always right. Crystal Carter: I'm never always right. In fact, I was wrong. My husband got me a Fitbit for Christmas, and at first I was like, "Uh, how could you? What are you trying to say? What do you mean by this?" I was wrong about that. I love my Fitbit thing now. It's good. And I count my little steps and I do my little thing, and it's cool. So, I was wrong about that. And sometimes it's okay to admit when you got things incorrect, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Those are the small little things. But the big things, Crystal's always right. Crystal Carter: It's fine if you want to go with that, I'll take that to every meeting. So, next time you say it, I say to quote... Mordy Oberstein: Okay, you know what, let's do that. It will make meetings shorter, I think. Crystal Carter: It will. Mordy Oberstein: Which is the goal. This SERPs' 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 where you can easily decide whether to structure your site with subfolders or subdomains, including from multilingual sites, as today, the battle wages on, subdomains or subfolders, which is better for SEO. Just ask John Mueller on Twitter, and tell him we sent you. I am just kidding, do not do that. He has literally asked 1,000 times over about this. But yes, today we're stepping on that landmine that is a debate about subdomains versus subfolders . I feel it is the debate that's captured the hearts and souls of a generation of SEOs, which is better? Because just like Highlander, there can be only one. Or can there, I don't know. We're going right after the jugular with this one as we ask, is there really still a debate? When are subfolders or subdomains a good idea, when are they a bad idea? And just what exactly can Google grasp and what can't it grasp when it comes to how you structure your website? Also, joining us, tech SEOs extraordinaire, Nikki Halliwell will join us to discuss the considerations of a migration for subdomain content to a subfolder, plus, we look at a little format on the SERP or a little SERP feature on the SERP, obviously, the SERP feature on the SERP, that's redundant, but anyway, that sheds a bit of light into this whole subdomain versus subfolder discussion, and survey what the feature tends to prefer. And of course, with your snappiest SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So, Up Periscope as episode number 43 of the SERP's UP Podcast submerges you in an SEO question of all SEO questions. It's subdomain versus subfolder, and all of the subsequent conversation that follows on episode 43. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad that we're getting into this subject. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I didn't even think of that. That's so obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Crystal Carter: Well, I just had to submit that into the conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I was just going to... You beat me. You stole my thought. I was going to submit you were right again. Crystal Carter: All right. So, I'm excited to be talking about this. It comes up every now and then where people say, "What's better for SEO, a subdomain or a subfolder?" Before we get into it, in particular, let's just get everybody up to speed. So, a subdomain is essentially a part of your top-level domain. So, top-level domain might be example.com, for instance. A subdomain might be blog.example.com. It might also be something like de.example.com. For instance, if it was a language one, it might also be support.example.com. These, essentially, are treated as separate entities from each other. So, it's not exactly treated as the same entity as your top-level domain, it's treated as a separate entity. And the way I like to think about the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder, which is when you have, essentially, the folder at the end of it, for instance, in the example.com example, you'd have example.com/blog, or as a subfolder or subdirectory, they are interchangeable terms, if you were going to have it as a subdomain, you would have it as blog.example.com. Now, the difference between the two is, essentially, the same difference between a shed and an extension, because if you have a house and you want more space and you want to create more space for something that you've got going on, then you might think of building an extension onto your house, in which case the extension would be on the same property, but would use the same electricity, the same plumbing, and all of that sort of stuff. However, if you were to build a shed, in this case a subdomain, then, essentially, you would need to run electricity to this different place. It might have a different circuit breaker. If you were going to put plumbing in, you might have to build a whole nother set of plumbing, et cetera, et cetera. It's all still on the same property, so it's all still understood as being part of the same ecosystem, however, they are two different entities. So, that's essentially the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder. Where we get into conversations with SEOs about whether or not subfolders and subdomains are better or worse for an SEO is something that is a bit of a point of debate. Now, I asked the SEO high-of-mind whether or not subdomains or subfolders were better for SEO, and on Twitter I got 439 votes, and 83% of SEOs said that subfolders were better than subdomains. And I got some very interesting replies on that. Now, the thing I find interesting about it was, it depends, really. I definitely think that subdomains have a place. And I think we'll get into a bit of some of the ways that people can use them, but subdomains can often be used for things like helpdesks, job boards, they can also be used for international SEO, they can be used for lots of other things like that. I've seen them used for corporate, like CSR things and things like that. And essentially, to my mind, the time when you would use a subdomain is, essentially, where you have a bulk of content that maybe potentially needs a completely different set of infrastructure from your existing top-level domain and maybe would add better customer value if it was in that particular thing. A lot of times the subdomain things, for instance, Yukto uses a Wix subdomain for their customer support section, and it's got a specially dedicated framework for answering questions and doing customer service and raising tickets and things like that, which is different from their main website. HubSpot, for instance, use their blog on a subdomain, which is very different from their main domain, which is dedicated entirely to their product. And their blog, @blog.hubspot.com, does very well in terms of SEO, but it has a completely different setup from their main domain. So, I definitely think that there is a place. However, lots of SEOs will report to you that they've seen some great results from moving blogs onto the main-level domain. And this is because it's really the top-level domain, and this is because it makes it easier to get more value out of links, it makes it more easy for users to find it. You're also able to benefit from a lot of the search equity and a lot of the keyword understanding that Google has about the main domain in order to get great results on Search. So, I think it depends on what the user needs, but there are some great benefits to both. Mordy Oberstein: So, this whole debate falls under one of these weird SEO conversations because Google, for the longest time, has been like, "Whatever the heck you want." Yes, there are real differences, like setting it up in Search console on a subdomain is far, perhaps, depends, far more annoying because you have to add different properties for each subdomain and then you can't track them, and that's a problem. It might be better for you. It all depends. But it might be a little more annoying. And that's a personal choice, fine. But Google's general thing is, "Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's all good." They do, however, or have, however, said that sometimes Google does really separate the two out, and that's where I think the sweet spot is. I remember doing a webinar one time, it was actually with the SEJ, and someone had made a subfolder. I'm like, "Yeah. Well, Google said you can whatever you want." And they send you the stuff after, I was building the T here a bit, but after some of the webinars, they sent you the comments that people leave. As one commented, "This guy knows nothing about SEO." So, people have really strong opinions about this. Crystal Carter: Really strong opinions. Mordy Oberstein: So, before I say what I'm about to say, I want everyone to take a drink, whether it be an alcoholic drink or just some water, clear your throat, let's relax for a minute. This is my opinion. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: This is not the SEO gospel. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think Google is not lying. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy, I know. I think it really does all depend. For example, I'll give you, again, a case. It's not an actual case. I'm not sure if they actually do this or not, but just imagine they did. CNN does use subdomains, for example. So, like travel.cnn, or entertainment.cnn, or, I don't know, news.cnn. I don't think that's an actual subdomain, news.cnn. That wouldn't make any sense. I think Google understands that all of that is CNN reporting about different types of news; travel news, entertainment news, news-news in my case, which makes no sense. And I think they understand that should be looked at as one identity, one entity. To quote Eli Schwartz, he one time said in a talk I heard him give, Google has a self-driving car, he used to live in the Bay Area, and the car was able to determine whether or not a squirrel or a human being jumped out in front of it. If they can do that, they can understand that travel.cnn and entertainment.cnn is all reporting about different types of news, as opposed to, and I don't know if they do this, and I should have looked at it beforehand, Honda. Honda has the cars, it has vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, motorcycles. They also have Honda robotics- Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: ... which is totally separate. So, I don't know how they structure it, but imagine they had robots.honda versus cars.honda. I might look at those two things, like, "No, not connected." They're very different. Crystal Carter: So, in the discussion, Joelle Irvine from Moz, she was saying exactly what you're talking about. She says, "I use subdomains when the goals and audience are different. So, that's what you're talking about with your robotics and your cars. If the main goals of the site are brand awareness, engagement conversion for your business, then having jobs on a subdomain makes sense, for instance, and you can track and optimize them separately. If audience and goals are the same, then subfolders are better for SEO, and that makes sense entirely. For instance, another one was Kindr Grindr, Grindr, the dating app, has a whole thing that talks about their CSR and how they do the corporate responsibility. They don't need to have that on their dating app thing that doesn't affect them things. It's useful- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... information for people to have. If somebody wants to see your sustainability report, that's great for your team or whatever, but it can sometimes confuse your overall brand entity in that, if you have it on your main domain, if it's not specifically relevant to the general intent of your general website. So, that's something that's interesting there. Then, I think, also, here's something that was interesting. So, Alex Hartford was saying that, "I generally prefer subdomains only when it's poor content setup." A support product with a bad tech SEO or content-wise, for example, which I think is interesting because I think that's another point. Sometimes, with subdomain content, it's content that's not intended to rank anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Agreed. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's content that is intended to serve a purpose, to provide value for your customers who know you and who know what you're doing, and things like that, but it's not necessarily intended to rank. So, a lot of people will have a lot of larger businesses. Enterprise businesses might have their corporate information online, they might have all their latest stock prices and things like that, and that's not necessarily going to rank. They don't need it to be competitive, they need it to be visible so that they're transparent and all of that sort of information. They need to have a link to it. It doesn't really matter if it ranks or not. So, it's important to remember that it provides business value. I was actually involved in a project where we had a client who wanted to move a large chunk of their main content onto a subdomain, and I was initially very hesitant. And I followed the SEO gospel, and they said, "No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do it. Oh, no, gosh, no, no, no." And what I found was that the client was like, "This subdomain product, the product that's going to be using the subdomain, has immense business value for us." It was one of those bells and whistles, fully integrated, so the back end was integrated with the front end. And it was a situation where it was providing them a lot of business value, and so they decided that even if there was an SEO risk, they were willing to take it in order to benefit from the overall business value. So, bearing that in mind and trying to keep my clients happy, we tried to mitigate the risk as much as possible. One of the things that was important was making sure that the tech spec between the subdomain and the main domain, or the top-level domain, were as close to each other as possible. So, when we initially got this subdomain product, the security level was much lower, and there was a lot of lag in the speed, and I was like, "This is terrible. If we're linking between the two, this is gonna be a terrible user experience, and it's not going to work." So, I campaigned and literally got the people, who built the product, to upgrade their security across the whole product so that they could fix it. And in the end, because we did the linking correctly and because we did lots of stuff, we actually saw a general benefit- Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: ... for the users, for the business, for everyone. So, I think that there's ways that you can do it. But one of the other things that someone mentioned was, they were having a discussion about subdomains and subfolders, and the client wanted to go forward with it. So, it's Ashley Thornhill . She was saying, "There are things we have to get done first and they want to jump into this new product," because I think that's another thing that people sometimes do with subdomain is they'll use it to patch up so that- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ...everything here. And I think that that brings to mind one of the other issues is that, with a subdomain, you do need to maintain it. It is like the garden shed or your external garage, somebody needs to maintain it. And if somebody comes to you and they say, "We wanna split the site into a top-level domain and a subdomain," well, essentially, from an SEO point of view, that's two websites to manage because they're two different CMSs or two different setups or two different routing situations, all of that sort of stuff. So- Mordy Oberstein: That's a huge consideration, by the way. Just the practical considerations are the fact that you now have two distinct properties to deal with is a major thing to consider, and long-term, how the client is going to evolve as a business, and then what's going to happen in a year from now that you have these two distinct properties that they're going to need to handle and they're really going to want to have to deal with that in a year. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And this comes into international SEO as well. So, Lydia Infante , in her article about international SEO, she talks about that subdomains are sometimes the solution for international SEO. It's quite a common use for subdomains. We do it with Wix.com as well. And one of the things about that is that they have to evolve, be maintained. Each version of the site has to be maintained uniquely to make sure that it's working there as well, so it's something to think about that you've definitely got the chops to support your subdomain situation. Mordy Oberstein: I want to jump back to something you were saying before about links. I think it's a great thing we need to talk about. I've been involved in discussions with whether or not to go with a subfolder or a subdomain. The case was, it was a new product, the product was tangentially related to the core product that this company offered. And the question was, "What do you do with this thing?" Because from a brand point of view, it definitely helps to have it on a subdomain, but the product was going to be kept separate for different audiences, and they weren't going to interlink between the two. So, you run the risk of Google not realizing, because it wasn't like, "Okay, here's our core product, here's like a very, very close variant of the core product subdomain. Okay, Google will be able to get that." Different, but the same. Same, but different. You run the risk of Google not really understanding that the product on the subdomain is actually related to the core product on the main domain, and you're not going to have a lot of linking opportunities between the two because it's for different audiences, so now what? Then, you really run the risk of Google not realizing that this is all one story, because you're not linking. Crystal Carter: Right. The links are incredibly important. The links are incredibly important and should absolutely be factored into any decisions you make about how you're going to proceed with this subdomain or subfolder or whatever. So, when you see it work well, they're linking back and forth to each other and supporting each other where relevant. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Precisely, precisely. That's your shed. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Going back. Crystal Carter: These are the things. So, I think it's really important, and I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Do you use a special outdoor cable or any cable? What happens when it rains? Crystal Carter: Well, exactly. You've got to shore that all up. And these are very- Mordy Oberstein: One of those orange cables. Crystal Carter: Yeah, with the little mat that you can walk over. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's how you want to handle your subdomain. Crystal Carter: So, links are really important. And I think, also, indented results... Are we going to- Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get... That's my spoiler. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my spoiler. Hey SEOs, I have some proof for you that Google does understand the relationship between domain and the various subdomains, because they do it right on the SERP. I'm not revealing that. You have to keep listening. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. I have one more thing that I wanted to share from the discussion we had on Twitter, which was Freddie Chat. And there's lots of people who have great examples of this, who shared that he actually saw a really big bump moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, of an increase of 20% from moving one of his brands into a subfolder, in an international SEO perspective, which I think is interesting. So, this is something that I find interesting considering that Google can sometimes find it a bit of a challenge with regards to international SEO. So, it's interesting to see that they've seen that increase, and that I think if they've done that well, then that's a really good example of somebody who managed that migration well, because essentially, if you're moving from a subfolder to a subdomain or moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, that's essentially a migration, and should be managed well. So, if you are seeing a bump or you're a client who has seen the fruits of some SEO labor, then thank your SEO for helping you with that and making sure that that was managed well. So, yeah, there's some great things there. I will link to the discussion because there was a really great, fantastic thread, which I cannot give into all the details of it, but it's fantastic, from @darth_na as well where he gets into all of the details of the nuances of subfolders, subdomains, et cetera, and particularly, one of the- Mordy Oberstein: I've already tweeted to take him to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he loves a thread. One of the ones that was particularly prescient, I thought, was, he mentioned, if you have risky content, including Adal or low value or high similarity or uncertain quality, et cetera, he said these are best for putting them on a subdomain. I think that's really interesting of using it as a risk-management thing, particularly if you have a brand that has a particular unique positioning or has a very curated positioning, for instance. So, you see this a lot with celebrities and things where they'll have their main website that's like, "Oh, yeah, look at me, I'm this person and I'm so great," and it's just lots of beauty shots, et cetera, et cetera, and then they'll have a subdomain that's their shop that's like, "And here's my merch." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: …all my lifestyle things buy this T-shirt, that sort of thing. So, I think that that's interesting as well. Also, if the merch thing fails or doesn't work, then you can just- Mordy Oberstein: Get rid with it. Crystal Carter: ... stop with the subdomain, and then it doesn't mess up the rest of your website. Mordy Oberstein: JLo, who's on Wix, does that, I believe. Crystal Carter: JLo does do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just in case you're looking to get more on international SEO, we did a whole interview with Aleyda Solis about this. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. It's Crystal's thread of all the high-of-mind talking about subdomain and subfolders in the show notes. But now we're going to circle back to what you mentioned before, which is migrating or moving subdomain content over to a subfolder. And we're going to ask Nikki Halliwell what's her top consideration for migrating subdomain content to a subfolder. Take it away, Nikki. Nikki Halliwell: This is an interesting one for me because I've done several pieces of work around migrating from subdomains to subfolders, and also, investigations into the benefits of both of those. And overwhelmingly, in my experience, I definitely do prefer a subfolder. I'm going to start this off and share, first of all, that subdomains definitely do have their place. I'm not saying you should never use them whatsoever, but I do think that you need to have a special case for using them. And that can be things like if there's a completely separate brand from the rest of the site, you're using an entirely different language, and there's not a particular reason why you can use a subfolder for that. I know that some CMSs limit the use of subfolders for international content. Also, if it's a help section, in cases like that, I think it's okay to use a subdomain, but certainly, for anything like a blog or newer areas of the website, in most cases I will always advocate for using a subfolder. And one of the most interesting projects that I worked on around this was for a very large international medical equipment website, and they had done an international migration as part of a redesign of their website, and all of their international sub photos got moved onto subdomains, and there was a tank in performance. And we did lots of investigations into this to see what had happened and everything else. And long story short, we were able to rule out everything else. And the only thing that remained was that the content was now on a subdomain. So, it was as if Google was seeing them as separate sites. Even though Google will tell you that they don't consider them as separate, it does tend to be the case, certainly in my experience. Then, I led the migration to move this content back onto the previous subfolders that it sat on. So, instead of UK.domain, we now had domain/UK, and so on, for all of the different international variations that we had. And the results were instant. They went straight back up to 23,000 impressions, I think, was what we saw at the time, on average each day. And some were patterns with clicks and the average positions as well. In terms of top considerations when you are migrating to a subfolder, do your investigations, make sure that you know that it is the right decision. Other things is just making sure that everyone is aware of what you're doing and why you are doing it. That includes everyone from internal stakeholders as well as the dev teams. Are they still able to sit on the same CMS as well? Sometimes, depending on what platform you have or how the website is built, if it's a custom CMS, they might need a bit more involvement from some of the dev teams. And other things to think about during a migration such as this involves things like just making sure that you are very carefully planning all of your redirects. I'd suggest getting multiple people to check over your final redirects when you've done it just so that there is that extra layer of validation so you can mitigate the risk of any additional drops as much as possible. Think about how you're redirecting. Obviously, you want to implement them in the right place, but also make sure that you're using 301 redirects and that they're all remaining on https. Again, that depends on how they're implemented. Then, one of the final points that I want to say to make sure that you consider when you are migrating from a subdomain to a subfolder is to take the time to update all of the internal links . These are now all going to be incorrect because obviously, before, they were pointing to the subdomain, so you now need to update them to point to the new version. But that also means that you need to update things like your canonicals. You might be able to get a plugin to help you do this, but also things like HREFLANG, those will also need updating across the site as well. And that can be quite a large amount of work, but if you don't do it, you can see yourself falling into a lot of issues, and you might not see the uptick in performance that perhaps you expected if you don't take the time to update your internal links like that. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Nikki. I love the point, by the way, about have to go check the redirects, multiple people check the redirects. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, it's really important. And updating internal links is also such an important thing to do. I think a lot of people forget that step because it can be very tedious, upload, updating all of your internal links, but it is absolutely crucial, because even if you've got redirects, what happens is that all of the redirects are happening on your server and it's dragging down your server as people are moving between all of those different spaces. So, if you can update your internal links to go to the direct link that they're supposed to be, that's really important. But I think that the general takeaway from Nikki's fantastic advice is that all of these things should be done carefully and with care, and you should be making sure that anything you're implementing is technically sound. When she was talking about moving from the subfolder to the subdomain and seeing that they drop, I think one of the things that's interesting there is that, essentially, because they are treated as unique entities, the subdomain in the top-level domain, is, essentially you're starting from scratch. So, in terms of your back link profile in terms of what Google knows about that entity, if time is of the essence, if you don't have time to build the brand equity for that specific subdomain, then it might be best to keep it in a subfolder set up because it allows you to build on some of the equity of the overall domain if you're on a subfolder, which is, I think, again, one of the reasons why people tend to try to do it if they can. And I think that it's interesting that she was able to discern that that was the best thing to do in that situation because it takes a lot of data points to make that decision. Decisions like that shouldn't be made lightly because they require a lot of time and energy to implement. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of subdomains and subfolders and which one is better, which one is worse and what would you do, and all what we just said and all what Nikki just said, I have the proof- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: ... sort of, maybe. I want to get into that. Yeah, and I want to get into also just, what this feature, that is my proof, does and shows about things in general. Anyway. This time we're going to take a look at a little SERP feature. I don't know what to call it. A feature, maybe it's a layout, I don't know, a format, I don't know. We'll call it a feature, because in the SEO tools they label it separately. We're taking a look at indented results for a very special Top of the SERP to show you how Google can or can't relate to subdomains and subfolders. So, let's take it away with indented results from the Top of the SERP. So, I think you pointed this out to me. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You pointed it out to me, but I think I made the connection. I don't know, maybe I'm taking too much credit for myself. You were right, you're right. Indented results Google will show. Let's say you search for the latest news, and you'll have, for example, "The economic times of India." They will show with their domain, and they'll show with maybe their sports news. They're not a sports site, they're an economic site. Their financial news and stock news, market news, and they'll all be different organic results, or they're all from the same site, but to show that they're on their own, that they're connected to the initial site's ranking or organic result, they get indented, like an outlier. They get a bit indented, and they're indented results. Now, guess what? Sometimes there are subfolders that are part of the indented results, and this is what you pointed out, sometimes they're subdomains, which to me says, guess what, Google knows this domain and that and that subdomain and that subfolder and that other subdomain, it's all the same thing, because it shows it as all part of one organic result. Crystal Carter: This is what I've observed on a number of different occasions. This is something that I've experienced as a user. For instance, one of the classic ones is trying to figure out what the luggage allowance is on an airline, or something like that. If you look up "Ryanair suitcase allowance", for instance, then the top result will be from help.ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another result in the terms and conditions from ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another one from helpcenter.ryanair.com, and they're all talking about that baggage allowance. But Google knows that they're all talking about the same thing for the same brand, and they're all serving the same intent. And essentially, one of the things that I think Google likes about a subdomain, particularly like a KB subdomain, is that it is a very clear intent. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Crystal Carter: So, with the baggage and suitcase allowance query, for instance, they know that if I'm looking at suitcase allowance, I want to know what is the suitcase allowance. I don't want to have a discussion about the value of suitcases and what is a suitcase. No, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Google loves documentation, loves documentation. Crystal Carter: They absolutely do. And what's really important for Abs, and particular for documentation and things like that, is that you're linking back and forth and in between some of the documentation information and also into maybe more conversational, maybe more informational information as well. But Google does this all the time. They are constantly pulling this through. Mordy Oberstein: I want to get into some of the trends around what Google's doing with the indented results. I don't want this to be just like, "I told you. See, Google does understand the connection." But one of the trends that I have seen, and same as you, is that Google loves to do this with knowledge-based content. And oftentimes that knowledge-based content that sits at a subdomain. For example, if you search for a Wix SEO, the first thing you get, the main non-indented result is our SEO gate where we go through all the features that we have for SEO, blah, blah, blah. Then, the first indented result is actually the SEO learning hub. Then, there's a second result on a subdomain... I'm sorry, it's a subfolder rather, I apologize. Then, there's one about an article from the blog about SEO, and that's also an indented result. And the third indented result is support.wix.com subdomain. But it's very often knowledge-based content. Google loves throwing that in the indented results. Crystal Carter: So, to my mind, there's an SEO value for this in that it's taking up a lot of real estate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah- Crystal Carter: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: ... so big, huge, lot of real estate. Crystal Carter: Huge. I think it might be a bit of an overlooked SEO opportunity that a lot of people will ignore the subdomains. They'll ignore the support documentation, they'll ignore the help center, they'll ignore the jobs board, they'll ignore that sort of thing, for instance. But I'm sorry, if you're showing up for four search results across four domains under your brand- Mordy Oberstein: It's almost the entire above-the-fold. Spoiler alert, I'm spoiling some data that I got from nozzle.io, the average number of organic results that appear above the fold on the SERP is three and a half. And we're talking, there's four right here. Crystal Carter: Right. That's a lot, that's a lot. Also, sometimes you get subdomains that'll have the indented results, and then you'll have your top-level domain underneath that- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... for some of those things. So, I think that if it's managed correctly, you can get a lot of good real estate, you can get a lot of good opportunities from those particular things. And again, it has to do with interlinking between the two, that has to do with having good clear connections between the two. For instance, you can declare, in your schema markup, that support documentation is run by this organization, @organization, et cetera, and you can link back to the main domain, you can have your footer that declares who you are, you can have your subdomains, et cetera, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. And the indented results... Semrush recently added in the feature where you can see what's an indented result and where they're spreading out, and they're updated their tools- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... so that you can see the SERP features reflected more clearly in the SERP write-up at the bottom. And I think it's really interesting because you can see the impact of it, and sometimes, with those indented results, which ones on top can affect what your click-through rate is. But I think that what's really important to think about this is, and you're a big advocate of this, but it's how your subdomains, how your domain domains, how the indented results all reflect your brand. What I see when I see a brand that has a robust knowledge base, has a solid blog, has good product pages, et cetera, et cetera, is I see a brand that has a commitment to delivering good content and is looking to provide good value for their customers, and I think if you can reflect that at all stages, you're onto a winner or whatever you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: One other place I really see that is with news content. If you're in the new space, there's a huge amount of opportunity for indented results. Why I was using the "economic times of India", because that was the result I was literally looking at on the SERP. It shows up all the time from news content. And just to your point about the branding, it shows you that I as a website, as a brand, as a company, handle this topic really well in a really organized way also. For example, one of the cases I was looking at, I think it was Yahoo, I think it was Yahoo. So, it was a query about financial news, and one of the indented results was something like finance.yahoo.com, and another one below it was money.yahoo.com, meaning, they've taken the topic of economics and finances, and they've parsed it out into multiple categories. And if you see that show up, I thought, initially, that's a bit repetitive, but when you dive into the content, it makes sense. It's taking it from a very different angle. They cover it from multiple perspectives for multiple users. And by the way, it does really reflect, in my mind, that you've taken your content, thought about the different intents and the different users and created content in an organized way to deal with both of those audiences or all of those audiences or all of those intents at the same time, which is why it really works well in the news. Just, by the way, back to our subdomain subfolder thing, the SERP for Europe and US News, you get US News and World Report. The first result is a subfolder for Europe news, so usnews.com/topics/locations, whatever it is, and then, one of the other results is travel.usnews.com. So, subdomain, subfolder, all in the same result. But if you're in the news space, and I find there are spaces, so know your space that don't have data, it's very anecdotal, but I find there are spaces that are more predisposed towards intended results than other spaces. So, make sure you know your space. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, it's really important, because I think the other thing is that you get into... Because you also have to think about this in terms of duplicate content. So, you have to think about this in terms of, if you've covered it on your KB, and your knowledge-based articles or your support documentation, or whatever you want to call it, is showing at the top of the indented results pack, for instance, and you're covering it on a blog, then you need to make sure that you're not duplicating that content as well. So, I think you also need to think about, when you're doing your audits to make sure that you're looking at whatever keyword and whatever positioning you're going to be doing when you're creating your content, you also need to think about that content as well so that you're taking into account all of the things that are associated with your brand that are showing on the SERP. So, pay attention to your indented results. If you see the indented results, that's your brand showing with your brand, so you need to just double check that you're showing with the things that are appropriate, and also that what's on those pages that Google is showing in that collection. So, do check those things out. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of checking things out, what you should always make sure to check out is the SEO news each and every week so that you are up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. This is why we cover the SEO news every week so you are up-to-date with what's happening in the industry. So, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up, I have some perspective for you, Google Perspectives. As announced at Google I/O , the Perspectives filter is here. Well, if you're in the US. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google finally launches the Perspective Search Filter. Well, Barry, clearly impatient, it finally launches. I/O wasn't that long ago. But I'm glad that Barry got his wish, Perspectives is here. The idea of Perspectives is, well, to give you wider perspective on the topic that's reflected in your search query. Currently, there's a lot of social media results in there. I think this is very early on. It's going to evolve. For example, if you search for the Beatles, the band, you get some YouTube videos about different songs and some content around who the lead singer is. It's not very perspectivy yet. In this case, I think you would have things like perspectives if the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the first real rock band, or which Beatle is the best. Clearly, it's George. But those kinds of things that really give you an extra layer of perspective on the topic. But again, it's very new. Okay. Google held a live search central event in Tokyo, and friend of the show, Kenichi Suzuki was sharing some great tweets from his attendance of the event. For example, Kenichi tweeted that per Google's Gary Ish, Illyes Ish, whatever, "Machine learning-based ranking algorithms and signals are trained on content by humans for humans. They understand and promote natural content better," which, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant point that Gary's pointing out through Kenichi here, that if Google's using machine learning to train itself on what to show via the algorithm, then what is training itself on is going to be a very important part of that. So, if Google's looking at saying, "Hey, great content is X," and in the data dataset it's focusing on content with, say, firsthand experience, then the output of that is going to be rewarding of firsthand experience. Anyway. We'll link to the tweets in the show notes, so check them out for sure. And last, but not least, Glen Gabe shared a fantastic case study showing that a site indeed thrived despite its abandoning of disavowing practices. Google has long said they ignore spammy links that are pointing to your sites, so you don't need to disavow them. Many SEOs have been skeptical about Google's transparency here for some reason that is well beyond me. I take Google out their word about this. It makes absolutely total sense. Anyway. Well, Glenn took a look at a site that was very involved in disavowing links very energetically. They were hit by an update. Glen worked with the site to improve the site, but said, "Hey, you don't need to do that disavowing stuff." And they stopped doing the disavowing stuff because it's not worth anybody's time. And lo and behold, as the case study shows, the site did return towards its former glory all without the disavowing of links. So, a great article. We'll link to it in the show notes, check it out. Glen, I hope us featuring your wonderful article is some consolation for the terrible way the Yankees have been playing. It's been depressing if you're a Yankees fan, like myself and Glen. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. How does it feel to be updated? It's always a good feeling to be updated. Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. Mordy Oberstein: I feel updated. Crystal Carter: I feel sublime. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's what the SEO-ners do for you. That's the effect it has. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Barry has an effect on people. Speaking of people, as I just plow through segways like it's butter. Crystal Carter: That was silky smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Silky smooth. I took like a machete to warm butter, that's how smooth it was. Speaking of people, here's this week's follower of the week, and this week's follower of the week is none other than Jess Joyce over on Twitter @JessJoyce . We'll link to her profile in the show notes, but if you want to spell it out, which I will do painfully. It's @J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E, Jess Joyce on Twitter. She's full of knowledge, a little fun, a little snarkiness sometimes I will always appreciate, and that's what makes her an absolutely great follow. Crystal Carter: Jess Joyce, yes, she's fantastically dedicated to technical SEO, and she just loves getting into the details of it. It's fantastic the way- Mordy Oberstein: And jokes. Crystal Carter: ... she unpacks that. Yeah. And she's got a great sense of humor as well. So, she's a fantastic follower, and she shares some really good examples of her work and how she approaches what she does, and it's really incredible. So, yeah, she's a great person to follow, and yeah, cannot recommend enough. Mordy Oberstein: So, follow her. Crystal Carter: Already. Mordy Oberstein: Over on Twitter @JessJoyse, which brings us to the end of the episode. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: How about that? Crystal Carter: Have we... Oh, no, don't scratch. Delete. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: I was going to make a sub joke, but I didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a subliminal message in there that you wanted me to take away from that or... Crystal Carter: I think we have reached our conclusion- Mordy Oberstein: We wouldn't want to subjugate you to anymore. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Crystal Carter: It was superb. No, that's not one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. Crystal Carter: That's not sub. Mordy Oberstein: That's- Crystal Carter: It certainly wasn't subpar. Mordy Oberstein: It's an upside down B, so I guess it counts. Crystal Carter: A cute B. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, that's it for us this week's SEO. 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 we dive into, "How to grow from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency." Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning About at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nikki Halliwell Jess Joyce Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter What Are The Benefits Of Subdirectories vs. Subdomains? Tech SEO Tips Newsletter Journey Further News: Google Finally Launches The Perspectives Search Filter Updates from Search Central Live Tokyo Disavowing The Disavow Tool [Case Study] Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nikki Halliwell Jess Joyce Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter What Are The Benefits Of Subdirectories vs. Subdomains? Tech SEO Tips Newsletter Journey Further News: Google Finally Launches The Perspectives Search Filter Updates from Search Central Live Tokyo Disavowing The Disavow Tool [Case Study] 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 insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy O, overseeing the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fabulous, the unequivocable, the always right, there's nothing I could say more about Crystal Carter, our own Head of SEO communications. I haven't done that kind of intro in a while, and it felt it was long overdue. Crystal Carter: I would tell you right now that I am not always right. Mordy Oberstein: Crystals is always right. Crystal Carter: I'm never always right. In fact, I was wrong. My husband got me a Fitbit for Christmas, and at first I was like, "Uh, how could you? What are you trying to say? What do you mean by this?" I was wrong about that. I love my Fitbit thing now. It's good. And I count my little steps and I do my little thing, and it's cool. So, I was wrong about that. And sometimes it's okay to admit when you got things incorrect, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Those are the small little things. But the big things, Crystal's always right. Crystal Carter: It's fine if you want to go with that, I'll take that to every meeting. So, next time you say it, I say to quote... Mordy Oberstein: Okay, you know what, let's do that. It will make meetings shorter, I think. Crystal Carter: It will. Mordy Oberstein: Which is the goal. This SERPs' 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 where you can easily decide whether to structure your site with subfolders or subdomains, including from multilingual sites, as today, the battle wages on, subdomains or subfolders, which is better for SEO. Just ask John Mueller on Twitter, and tell him we sent you. I am just kidding, do not do that. He has literally asked 1,000 times over about this. But yes, today we're stepping on that landmine that is a debate about subdomains versus subfolders . I feel it is the debate that's captured the hearts and souls of a generation of SEOs, which is better? Because just like Highlander, there can be only one. Or can there, I don't know. We're going right after the jugular with this one as we ask, is there really still a debate? When are subfolders or subdomains a good idea, when are they a bad idea? And just what exactly can Google grasp and what can't it grasp when it comes to how you structure your website? Also, joining us, tech SEOs extraordinaire, Nikki Halliwell will join us to discuss the considerations of a migration for subdomain content to a subfolder, plus, we look at a little format on the SERP or a little SERP feature on the SERP, obviously, the SERP feature on the SERP, that's redundant, but anyway, that sheds a bit of light into this whole subdomain versus subfolder discussion, and survey what the feature tends to prefer. And of course, with your snappiest SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So, Up Periscope as episode number 43 of the SERP's UP Podcast submerges you in an SEO question of all SEO questions. It's subdomain versus subfolder, and all of the subsequent conversation that follows on episode 43. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad that we're getting into this subject. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I didn't even think of that. That's so obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Crystal Carter: Well, I just had to submit that into the conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I was just going to... You beat me. You stole my thought. I was going to submit you were right again. Crystal Carter: All right. So, I'm excited to be talking about this. It comes up every now and then where people say, "What's better for SEO, a subdomain or a subfolder?" Before we get into it, in particular, let's just get everybody up to speed. So, a subdomain is essentially a part of your top-level domain. So, top-level domain might be example.com, for instance. A subdomain might be blog.example.com. It might also be something like de.example.com. For instance, if it was a language one, it might also be support.example.com. These, essentially, are treated as separate entities from each other. So, it's not exactly treated as the same entity as your top-level domain, it's treated as a separate entity. And the way I like to think about the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder, which is when you have, essentially, the folder at the end of it, for instance, in the example.com example, you'd have example.com/blog, or as a subfolder or subdirectory, they are interchangeable terms, if you were going to have it as a subdomain, you would have it as blog.example.com. Now, the difference between the two is, essentially, the same difference between a shed and an extension, because if you have a house and you want more space and you want to create more space for something that you've got going on, then you might think of building an extension onto your house, in which case the extension would be on the same property, but would use the same electricity, the same plumbing, and all of that sort of stuff. However, if you were to build a shed, in this case a subdomain, then, essentially, you would need to run electricity to this different place. It might have a different circuit breaker. If you were going to put plumbing in, you might have to build a whole nother set of plumbing, et cetera, et cetera. It's all still on the same property, so it's all still understood as being part of the same ecosystem, however, they are two different entities. So, that's essentially the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder. Where we get into conversations with SEOs about whether or not subfolders and subdomains are better or worse for an SEO is something that is a bit of a point of debate. Now, I asked the SEO high-of-mind whether or not subdomains or subfolders were better for SEO, and on Twitter I got 439 votes, and 83% of SEOs said that subfolders were better than subdomains. And I got some very interesting replies on that. Now, the thing I find interesting about it was, it depends, really. I definitely think that subdomains have a place. And I think we'll get into a bit of some of the ways that people can use them, but subdomains can often be used for things like helpdesks, job boards, they can also be used for international SEO, they can be used for lots of other things like that. I've seen them used for corporate, like CSR things and things like that. And essentially, to my mind, the time when you would use a subdomain is, essentially, where you have a bulk of content that maybe potentially needs a completely different set of infrastructure from your existing top-level domain and maybe would add better customer value if it was in that particular thing. A lot of times the subdomain things, for instance, Yukto uses a Wix subdomain for their customer support section, and it's got a specially dedicated framework for answering questions and doing customer service and raising tickets and things like that, which is different from their main website. HubSpot, for instance, use their blog on a subdomain, which is very different from their main domain, which is dedicated entirely to their product. And their blog, @blog.hubspot.com, does very well in terms of SEO, but it has a completely different setup from their main domain. So, I definitely think that there is a place. However, lots of SEOs will report to you that they've seen some great results from moving blogs onto the main-level domain. And this is because it's really the top-level domain, and this is because it makes it easier to get more value out of links, it makes it more easy for users to find it. You're also able to benefit from a lot of the search equity and a lot of the keyword understanding that Google has about the main domain in order to get great results on Search. So, I think it depends on what the user needs, but there are some great benefits to both. Mordy Oberstein: So, this whole debate falls under one of these weird SEO conversations because Google, for the longest time, has been like, "Whatever the heck you want." Yes, there are real differences, like setting it up in Search console on a subdomain is far, perhaps, depends, far more annoying because you have to add different properties for each subdomain and then you can't track them, and that's a problem. It might be better for you. It all depends. But it might be a little more annoying. And that's a personal choice, fine. But Google's general thing is, "Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's all good." They do, however, or have, however, said that sometimes Google does really separate the two out, and that's where I think the sweet spot is. I remember doing a webinar one time, it was actually with the SEJ, and someone had made a subfolder. I'm like, "Yeah. Well, Google said you can whatever you want." And they send you the stuff after, I was building the T here a bit, but after some of the webinars, they sent you the comments that people leave. As one commented, "This guy knows nothing about SEO." So, people have really strong opinions about this. Crystal Carter: Really strong opinions. Mordy Oberstein: So, before I say what I'm about to say, I want everyone to take a drink, whether it be an alcoholic drink or just some water, clear your throat, let's relax for a minute. This is my opinion. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: This is not the SEO gospel. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think Google is not lying. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy, I know. I think it really does all depend. For example, I'll give you, again, a case. It's not an actual case. I'm not sure if they actually do this or not, but just imagine they did. CNN does use subdomains, for example. So, like travel.cnn, or entertainment.cnn, or, I don't know, news.cnn. I don't think that's an actual subdomain, news.cnn. That wouldn't make any sense. I think Google understands that all of that is CNN reporting about different types of news; travel news, entertainment news, news-news in my case, which makes no sense. And I think they understand that should be looked at as one identity, one entity. To quote Eli Schwartz, he one time said in a talk I heard him give, Google has a self-driving car, he used to live in the Bay Area, and the car was able to determine whether or not a squirrel or a human being jumped out in front of it. If they can do that, they can understand that travel.cnn and entertainment.cnn is all reporting about different types of news, as opposed to, and I don't know if they do this, and I should have looked at it beforehand, Honda. Honda has the cars, it has vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, motorcycles. They also have Honda robotics- Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: ... which is totally separate. So, I don't know how they structure it, but imagine they had robots.honda versus cars.honda. I might look at those two things, like, "No, not connected." They're very different. Crystal Carter: So, in the discussion, Joelle Irvine from Moz, she was saying exactly what you're talking about. She says, "I use subdomains when the goals and audience are different. So, that's what you're talking about with your robotics and your cars. If the main goals of the site are brand awareness, engagement conversion for your business, then having jobs on a subdomain makes sense, for instance, and you can track and optimize them separately. If audience and goals are the same, then subfolders are better for SEO, and that makes sense entirely. For instance, another one was Kindr Grindr, Grindr, the dating app, has a whole thing that talks about their CSR and how they do the corporate responsibility. They don't need to have that on their dating app thing that doesn't affect them things. It's useful- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... information for people to have. If somebody wants to see your sustainability report, that's great for your team or whatever, but it can sometimes confuse your overall brand entity in that, if you have it on your main domain, if it's not specifically relevant to the general intent of your general website. So, that's something that's interesting there. Then, I think, also, here's something that was interesting. So, Alex Hartford was saying that, "I generally prefer subdomains only when it's poor content setup." A support product with a bad tech SEO or content-wise, for example, which I think is interesting because I think that's another point. Sometimes, with subdomain content, it's content that's not intended to rank anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Agreed. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's content that is intended to serve a purpose, to provide value for your customers who know you and who know what you're doing, and things like that, but it's not necessarily intended to rank. So, a lot of people will have a lot of larger businesses. Enterprise businesses might have their corporate information online, they might have all their latest stock prices and things like that, and that's not necessarily going to rank. They don't need it to be competitive, they need it to be visible so that they're transparent and all of that sort of information. They need to have a link to it. It doesn't really matter if it ranks or not. So, it's important to remember that it provides business value. I was actually involved in a project where we had a client who wanted to move a large chunk of their main content onto a subdomain, and I was initially very hesitant. And I followed the SEO gospel, and they said, "No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do it. Oh, no, gosh, no, no, no." And what I found was that the client was like, "This subdomain product, the product that's going to be using the subdomain, has immense business value for us." It was one of those bells and whistles, fully integrated, so the back end was integrated with the front end. And it was a situation where it was providing them a lot of business value, and so they decided that even if there was an SEO risk, they were willing to take it in order to benefit from the overall business value. So, bearing that in mind and trying to keep my clients happy, we tried to mitigate the risk as much as possible. One of the things that was important was making sure that the tech spec between the subdomain and the main domain, or the top-level domain, were as close to each other as possible. So, when we initially got this subdomain product, the security level was much lower, and there was a lot of lag in the speed, and I was like, "This is terrible. If we're linking between the two, this is gonna be a terrible user experience, and it's not going to work." So, I campaigned and literally got the people, who built the product, to upgrade their security across the whole product so that they could fix it. And in the end, because we did the linking correctly and because we did lots of stuff, we actually saw a general benefit- Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: ... for the users, for the business, for everyone. So, I think that there's ways that you can do it. But one of the other things that someone mentioned was, they were having a discussion about subdomains and subfolders, and the client wanted to go forward with it. So, it's Ashley Thornhill . She was saying, "There are things we have to get done first and they want to jump into this new product," because I think that's another thing that people sometimes do with subdomain is they'll use it to patch up so that- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ...everything here. And I think that that brings to mind one of the other issues is that, with a subdomain, you do need to maintain it. It is like the garden shed or your external garage, somebody needs to maintain it. And if somebody comes to you and they say, "We wanna split the site into a top-level domain and a subdomain," well, essentially, from an SEO point of view, that's two websites to manage because they're two different CMSs or two different setups or two different routing situations, all of that sort of stuff. So- Mordy Oberstein: That's a huge consideration, by the way. Just the practical considerations are the fact that you now have two distinct properties to deal with is a major thing to consider, and long-term, how the client is going to evolve as a business, and then what's going to happen in a year from now that you have these two distinct properties that they're going to need to handle and they're really going to want to have to deal with that in a year. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And this comes into international SEO as well. So, Lydia Infante , in her article about international SEO, she talks about that subdomains are sometimes the solution for international SEO. It's quite a common use for subdomains. We do it with Wix.com as well. And one of the things about that is that they have to evolve, be maintained. Each version of the site has to be maintained uniquely to make sure that it's working there as well, so it's something to think about that you've definitely got the chops to support your subdomain situation. Mordy Oberstein: I want to jump back to something you were saying before about links. I think it's a great thing we need to talk about. I've been involved in discussions with whether or not to go with a subfolder or a subdomain. The case was, it was a new product, the product was tangentially related to the core product that this company offered. And the question was, "What do you do with this thing?" Because from a brand point of view, it definitely helps to have it on a subdomain, but the product was going to be kept separate for different audiences, and they weren't going to interlink between the two. So, you run the risk of Google not realizing, because it wasn't like, "Okay, here's our core product, here's like a very, very close variant of the core product subdomain. Okay, Google will be able to get that." Different, but the same. Same, but different. You run the risk of Google not really understanding that the product on the subdomain is actually related to the core product on the main domain, and you're not going to have a lot of linking opportunities between the two because it's for different audiences, so now what? Then, you really run the risk of Google not realizing that this is all one story, because you're not linking. Crystal Carter: Right. The links are incredibly important. The links are incredibly important and should absolutely be factored into any decisions you make about how you're going to proceed with this subdomain or subfolder or whatever. So, when you see it work well, they're linking back and forth to each other and supporting each other where relevant. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Precisely, precisely. That's your shed. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Going back. Crystal Carter: These are the things. So, I think it's really important, and I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Do you use a special outdoor cable or any cable? What happens when it rains? Crystal Carter: Well, exactly. You've got to shore that all up. And these are very- Mordy Oberstein: One of those orange cables. Crystal Carter: Yeah, with the little mat that you can walk over. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's how you want to handle your subdomain. Crystal Carter: So, links are really important. And I think, also, indented results... Are we going to- Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get... That's my spoiler. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my spoiler. Hey SEOs, I have some proof for you that Google does understand the relationship between domain and the various subdomains, because they do it right on the SERP. I'm not revealing that. You have to keep listening. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. I have one more thing that I wanted to share from the discussion we had on Twitter, which was Freddie Chat. And there's lots of people who have great examples of this, who shared that he actually saw a really big bump moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, of an increase of 20% from moving one of his brands into a subfolder, in an international SEO perspective, which I think is interesting. So, this is something that I find interesting considering that Google can sometimes find it a bit of a challenge with regards to international SEO. So, it's interesting to see that they've seen that increase, and that I think if they've done that well, then that's a really good example of somebody who managed that migration well, because essentially, if you're moving from a subfolder to a subdomain or moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, that's essentially a migration, and should be managed well. So, if you are seeing a bump or you're a client who has seen the fruits of some SEO labor, then thank your SEO for helping you with that and making sure that that was managed well. So, yeah, there's some great things there. I will link to the discussion because there was a really great, fantastic thread, which I cannot give into all the details of it, but it's fantastic, from @darth_na as well where he gets into all of the details of the nuances of subfolders, subdomains, et cetera, and particularly, one of the- Mordy Oberstein: I've already tweeted to take him to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he loves a thread. One of the ones that was particularly prescient, I thought, was, he mentioned, if you have risky content, including Adal or low value or high similarity or uncertain quality, et cetera, he said these are best for putting them on a subdomain. I think that's really interesting of using it as a risk-management thing, particularly if you have a brand that has a particular unique positioning or has a very curated positioning, for instance. So, you see this a lot with celebrities and things where they'll have their main website that's like, "Oh, yeah, look at me, I'm this person and I'm so great," and it's just lots of beauty shots, et cetera, et cetera, and then they'll have a subdomain that's their shop that's like, "And here's my merch." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: …all my lifestyle things buy this T-shirt, that sort of thing. So, I think that that's interesting as well. Also, if the merch thing fails or doesn't work, then you can just- Mordy Oberstein: Get rid with it. Crystal Carter: ... stop with the subdomain, and then it doesn't mess up the rest of your website. Mordy Oberstein: JLo, who's on Wix, does that, I believe. Crystal Carter: JLo does do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just in case you're looking to get more on international SEO, we did a whole interview with Aleyda Solis about this. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. It's Crystal's thread of all the high-of-mind talking about subdomain and subfolders in the show notes. But now we're going to circle back to what you mentioned before, which is migrating or moving subdomain content over to a subfolder. And we're going to ask Nikki Halliwell what's her top consideration for migrating subdomain content to a subfolder. Take it away, Nikki. Nikki Halliwell: This is an interesting one for me because I've done several pieces of work around migrating from subdomains to subfolders, and also, investigations into the benefits of both of those. And overwhelmingly, in my experience, I definitely do prefer a subfolder. I'm going to start this off and share, first of all, that subdomains definitely do have their place. I'm not saying you should never use them whatsoever, but I do think that you need to have a special case for using them. And that can be things like if there's a completely separate brand from the rest of the site, you're using an entirely different language, and there's not a particular reason why you can use a subfolder for that. I know that some CMSs limit the use of subfolders for international content. Also, if it's a help section, in cases like that, I think it's okay to use a subdomain, but certainly, for anything like a blog or newer areas of the website, in most cases I will always advocate for using a subfolder. And one of the most interesting projects that I worked on around this was for a very large international medical equipment website, and they had done an international migration as part of a redesign of their website, and all of their international sub photos got moved onto subdomains, and there was a tank in performance. And we did lots of investigations into this to see what had happened and everything else. And long story short, we were able to rule out everything else. And the only thing that remained was that the content was now on a subdomain. So, it was as if Google was seeing them as separate sites. Even though Google will tell you that they don't consider them as separate, it does tend to be the case, certainly in my experience. Then, I led the migration to move this content back onto the previous subfolders that it sat on. So, instead of UK.domain, we now had domain/UK, and so on, for all of the different international variations that we had. And the results were instant. They went straight back up to 23,000 impressions, I think, was what we saw at the time, on average each day. And some were patterns with clicks and the average positions as well. In terms of top considerations when you are migrating to a subfolder, do your investigations, make sure that you know that it is the right decision. Other things is just making sure that everyone is aware of what you're doing and why you are doing it. That includes everyone from internal stakeholders as well as the dev teams. Are they still able to sit on the same CMS as well? Sometimes, depending on what platform you have or how the website is built, if it's a custom CMS, they might need a bit more involvement from some of the dev teams. And other things to think about during a migration such as this involves things like just making sure that you are very carefully planning all of your redirects. I'd suggest getting multiple people to check over your final redirects when you've done it just so that there is that extra layer of validation so you can mitigate the risk of any additional drops as much as possible. Think about how you're redirecting. Obviously, you want to implement them in the right place, but also make sure that you're using 301 redirects and that they're all remaining on https. Again, that depends on how they're implemented. Then, one of the final points that I want to say to make sure that you consider when you are migrating from a subdomain to a subfolder is to take the time to update all of the internal links . These are now all going to be incorrect because obviously, before, they were pointing to the subdomain, so you now need to update them to point to the new version. But that also means that you need to update things like your canonicals. You might be able to get a plugin to help you do this, but also things like HREFLANG, those will also need updating across the site as well. And that can be quite a large amount of work, but if you don't do it, you can see yourself falling into a lot of issues, and you might not see the uptick in performance that perhaps you expected if you don't take the time to update your internal links like that. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Nikki. I love the point, by the way, about have to go check the redirects, multiple people check the redirects. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, it's really important. And updating internal links is also such an important thing to do. I think a lot of people forget that step because it can be very tedious, upload, updating all of your internal links, but it is absolutely crucial, because even if you've got redirects, what happens is that all of the redirects are happening on your server and it's dragging down your server as people are moving between all of those different spaces. So, if you can update your internal links to go to the direct link that they're supposed to be, that's really important. But I think that the general takeaway from Nikki's fantastic advice is that all of these things should be done carefully and with care, and you should be making sure that anything you're implementing is technically sound. When she was talking about moving from the subfolder to the subdomain and seeing that they drop, I think one of the things that's interesting there is that, essentially, because they are treated as unique entities, the subdomain in the top-level domain, is, essentially you're starting from scratch. So, in terms of your back link profile in terms of what Google knows about that entity, if time is of the essence, if you don't have time to build the brand equity for that specific subdomain, then it might be best to keep it in a subfolder set up because it allows you to build on some of the equity of the overall domain if you're on a subfolder, which is, I think, again, one of the reasons why people tend to try to do it if they can. And I think that it's interesting that she was able to discern that that was the best thing to do in that situation because it takes a lot of data points to make that decision. Decisions like that shouldn't be made lightly because they require a lot of time and energy to implement. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of subdomains and subfolders and which one is better, which one is worse and what would you do, and all what we just said and all what Nikki just said, I have the proof- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: ... sort of, maybe. I want to get into that. Yeah, and I want to get into also just, what this feature, that is my proof, does and shows about things in general. Anyway. This time we're going to take a look at a little SERP feature. I don't know what to call it. A feature, maybe it's a layout, I don't know, a format, I don't know. We'll call it a feature, because in the SEO tools they label it separately. We're taking a look at indented results for a very special Top of the SERP to show you how Google can or can't relate to subdomains and subfolders. So, let's take it away with indented results from the Top of the SERP. So, I think you pointed this out to me. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You pointed it out to me, but I think I made the connection. I don't know, maybe I'm taking too much credit for myself. You were right, you're right. Indented results Google will show. Let's say you search for the latest news, and you'll have, for example, "The economic times of India." They will show with their domain, and they'll show with maybe their sports news. They're not a sports site, they're an economic site. Their financial news and stock news, market news, and they'll all be different organic results, or they're all from the same site, but to show that they're on their own, that they're connected to the initial site's ranking or organic result, they get indented, like an outlier. They get a bit indented, and they're indented results. Now, guess what? Sometimes there are subfolders that are part of the indented results, and this is what you pointed out, sometimes they're subdomains, which to me says, guess what, Google knows this domain and that and that subdomain and that subfolder and that other subdomain, it's all the same thing, because it shows it as all part of one organic result. Crystal Carter: This is what I've observed on a number of different occasions. This is something that I've experienced as a user. For instance, one of the classic ones is trying to figure out what the luggage allowance is on an airline, or something like that. If you look up "Ryanair suitcase allowance", for instance, then the top result will be from help.ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another result in the terms and conditions from ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another one from helpcenter.ryanair.com, and they're all talking about that baggage allowance. But Google knows that they're all talking about the same thing for the same brand, and they're all serving the same intent. And essentially, one of the things that I think Google likes about a subdomain, particularly like a KB subdomain, is that it is a very clear intent. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Crystal Carter: So, with the baggage and suitcase allowance query, for instance, they know that if I'm looking at suitcase allowance, I want to know what is the suitcase allowance. I don't want to have a discussion about the value of suitcases and what is a suitcase. No, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Google loves documentation, loves documentation. Crystal Carter: They absolutely do. And what's really important for Abs, and particular for documentation and things like that, is that you're linking back and forth and in between some of the documentation information and also into maybe more conversational, maybe more informational information as well. But Google does this all the time. They are constantly pulling this through. Mordy Oberstein: I want to get into some of the trends around what Google's doing with the indented results. I don't want this to be just like, "I told you. See, Google does understand the connection." But one of the trends that I have seen, and same as you, is that Google loves to do this with knowledge-based content. And oftentimes that knowledge-based content that sits at a subdomain. For example, if you search for a Wix SEO, the first thing you get, the main non-indented result is our SEO gate where we go through all the features that we have for SEO, blah, blah, blah. Then, the first indented result is actually the SEO learning hub. Then, there's a second result on a subdomain... I'm sorry, it's a subfolder rather, I apologize. Then, there's one about an article from the blog about SEO, and that's also an indented result. And the third indented result is support.wix.com subdomain. But it's very often knowledge-based content. Google loves throwing that in the indented results. Crystal Carter: So, to my mind, there's an SEO value for this in that it's taking up a lot of real estate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah- Crystal Carter: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: ... so big, huge, lot of real estate. Crystal Carter: Huge. I think it might be a bit of an overlooked SEO opportunity that a lot of people will ignore the subdomains. They'll ignore the support documentation, they'll ignore the help center, they'll ignore the jobs board, they'll ignore that sort of thing, for instance. But I'm sorry, if you're showing up for four search results across four domains under your brand- Mordy Oberstein: It's almost the entire above-the-fold. Spoiler alert, I'm spoiling some data that I got from nozzle.io, the average number of organic results that appear above the fold on the SERP is three and a half. And we're talking, there's four right here. Crystal Carter: Right. That's a lot, that's a lot. Also, sometimes you get subdomains that'll have the indented results, and then you'll have your top-level domain underneath that- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... for some of those things. So, I think that if it's managed correctly, you can get a lot of good real estate, you can get a lot of good opportunities from those particular things. And again, it has to do with interlinking between the two, that has to do with having good clear connections between the two. For instance, you can declare, in your schema markup, that support documentation is run by this organization, @organization, et cetera, and you can link back to the main domain, you can have your footer that declares who you are, you can have your subdomains, et cetera, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. And the indented results... Semrush recently added in the feature where you can see what's an indented result and where they're spreading out, and they're updated their tools- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... so that you can see the SERP features reflected more clearly in the SERP write-up at the bottom. And I think it's really interesting because you can see the impact of it, and sometimes, with those indented results, which ones on top can affect what your click-through rate is. But I think that what's really important to think about this is, and you're a big advocate of this, but it's how your subdomains, how your domain domains, how the indented results all reflect your brand. What I see when I see a brand that has a robust knowledge base, has a solid blog, has good product pages, et cetera, et cetera, is I see a brand that has a commitment to delivering good content and is looking to provide good value for their customers, and I think if you can reflect that at all stages, you're onto a winner or whatever you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: One other place I really see that is with news content. If you're in the new space, there's a huge amount of opportunity for indented results. Why I was using the "economic times of India", because that was the result I was literally looking at on the SERP. It shows up all the time from news content. And just to your point about the branding, it shows you that I as a website, as a brand, as a company, handle this topic really well in a really organized way also. For example, one of the cases I was looking at, I think it was Yahoo, I think it was Yahoo. So, it was a query about financial news, and one of the indented results was something like finance.yahoo.com, and another one below it was money.yahoo.com, meaning, they've taken the topic of economics and finances, and they've parsed it out into multiple categories. And if you see that show up, I thought, initially, that's a bit repetitive, but when you dive into the content, it makes sense. It's taking it from a very different angle. They cover it from multiple perspectives for multiple users. And by the way, it does really reflect, in my mind, that you've taken your content, thought about the different intents and the different users and created content in an organized way to deal with both of those audiences or all of those audiences or all of those intents at the same time, which is why it really works well in the news. Just, by the way, back to our subdomain subfolder thing, the SERP for Europe and US News, you get US News and World Report. The first result is a subfolder for Europe news, so usnews.com/topics/locations, whatever it is, and then, one of the other results is travel.usnews.com. So, subdomain, subfolder, all in the same result. But if you're in the news space, and I find there are spaces, so know your space that don't have data, it's very anecdotal, but I find there are spaces that are more predisposed towards intended results than other spaces. So, make sure you know your space. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, it's really important, because I think the other thing is that you get into... Because you also have to think about this in terms of duplicate content. So, you have to think about this in terms of, if you've covered it on your KB, and your knowledge-based articles or your support documentation, or whatever you want to call it, is showing at the top of the indented results pack, for instance, and you're covering it on a blog, then you need to make sure that you're not duplicating that content as well. So, I think you also need to think about, when you're doing your audits to make sure that you're looking at whatever keyword and whatever positioning you're going to be doing when you're creating your content, you also need to think about that content as well so that you're taking into account all of the things that are associated with your brand that are showing on the SERP. So, pay attention to your indented results. If you see the indented results, that's your brand showing with your brand, so you need to just double check that you're showing with the things that are appropriate, and also that what's on those pages that Google is showing in that collection. So, do check those things out. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of checking things out, what you should always make sure to check out is the SEO news each and every week so that you are up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. This is why we cover the SEO news every week so you are up-to-date with what's happening in the industry. So, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up, I have some perspective for you, Google Perspectives. As announced at Google I/O , the Perspectives filter is here. Well, if you're in the US. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google finally launches the Perspective Search Filter. Well, Barry, clearly impatient, it finally launches. I/O wasn't that long ago. But I'm glad that Barry got his wish, Perspectives is here. The idea of Perspectives is, well, to give you wider perspective on the topic that's reflected in your search query. Currently, there's a lot of social media results in there. I think this is very early on. It's going to evolve. For example, if you search for the Beatles, the band, you get some YouTube videos about different songs and some content around who the lead singer is. It's not very perspectivy yet. In this case, I think you would have things like perspectives if the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the first real rock band, or which Beatle is the best. Clearly, it's George. But those kinds of things that really give you an extra layer of perspective on the topic. But again, it's very new. Okay. Google held a live search central event in Tokyo, and friend of the show, Kenichi Suzuki was sharing some great tweets from his attendance of the event. For example, Kenichi tweeted that per Google's Gary Ish, Illyes Ish, whatever, "Machine learning-based ranking algorithms and signals are trained on content by humans for humans. They understand and promote natural content better," which, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant point that Gary's pointing out through Kenichi here, that if Google's using machine learning to train itself on what to show via the algorithm, then what is training itself on is going to be a very important part of that. So, if Google's looking at saying, "Hey, great content is X," and in the data dataset it's focusing on content with, say, firsthand experience, then the output of that is going to be rewarding of firsthand experience. Anyway. We'll link to the tweets in the show notes, so check them out for sure. And last, but not least, Glen Gabe shared a fantastic case study showing that a site indeed thrived despite its abandoning of disavowing practices. Google has long said they ignore spammy links that are pointing to your sites, so you don't need to disavow them. Many SEOs have been skeptical about Google's transparency here for some reason that is well beyond me. I take Google out their word about this. It makes absolutely total sense. Anyway. Well, Glenn took a look at a site that was very involved in disavowing links very energetically. They were hit by an update. Glen worked with the site to improve the site, but said, "Hey, you don't need to do that disavowing stuff." And they stopped doing the disavowing stuff because it's not worth anybody's time. And lo and behold, as the case study shows, the site did return towards its former glory all without the disavowing of links. So, a great article. We'll link to it in the show notes, check it out. Glen, I hope us featuring your wonderful article is some consolation for the terrible way the Yankees have been playing. It's been depressing if you're a Yankees fan, like myself and Glen. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. How does it feel to be updated? It's always a good feeling to be updated. Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. Mordy Oberstein: I feel updated. Crystal Carter: I feel sublime. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's what the SEO-ners do for you. That's the effect it has. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Barry has an effect on people. Speaking of people, as I just plow through segways like it's butter. Crystal Carter: That was silky smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Silky smooth. I took like a machete to warm butter, that's how smooth it was. Speaking of people, here's this week's follower of the week, and this week's follower of the week is none other than Jess Joyce over on Twitter @JessJoyce . We'll link to her profile in the show notes, but if you want to spell it out, which I will do painfully. It's @J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E, Jess Joyce on Twitter. She's full of knowledge, a little fun, a little snarkiness sometimes I will always appreciate, and that's what makes her an absolutely great follow. Crystal Carter: Jess Joyce, yes, she's fantastically dedicated to technical SEO, and she just loves getting into the details of it. It's fantastic the way- Mordy Oberstein: And jokes. Crystal Carter: ... she unpacks that. Yeah. And she's got a great sense of humor as well. So, she's a fantastic follower, and she shares some really good examples of her work and how she approaches what she does, and it's really incredible. So, yeah, she's a great person to follow, and yeah, cannot recommend enough. Mordy Oberstein: So, follow her. Crystal Carter: Already. Mordy Oberstein: Over on Twitter @JessJoyse, which brings us to the end of the episode. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: How about that? Crystal Carter: Have we... Oh, no, don't scratch. Delete. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: I was going to make a sub joke, but I didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a subliminal message in there that you wanted me to take away from that or... Crystal Carter: I think we have reached our conclusion- Mordy Oberstein: We wouldn't want to subjugate you to anymore. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Crystal Carter: It was superb. No, that's not one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. Crystal Carter: That's not sub. Mordy Oberstein: That's- Crystal Carter: It certainly wasn't subpar. Mordy Oberstein: It's an upside down B, so I guess it counts. Crystal Carter: A cute B. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, that's it for us this week's SEO. 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 we dive into, "How to grow from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency." Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning About at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review 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

Gemma Fontané is an SEO consultant, co-founder, and director of Orvit Digital, where she leads digital strategies for B2B and eCommerce clients. She is also a teacher, industry speaker and author, as well as a co-founder of two international Christmas eCommerce stores. Gemma Fontané Co-founder and Director at Orvit Digital Gemma Fontané is an SEO consultant, co-founder, and director of Orvit Digital , where she leads digital strategies for B2B and eCommerce clients. She is also a teacher, industry speaker and author, as well as a co-founder of two international Christmas eCommerce stores. Articles & Resources 16 Sept 2024 How to optimize your Etsy shop for Google 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

Nick LeRoy is a freelance SEO consultant, podcaster and newsletter author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in SEO strategy, technical SEO, editorial strategy, and website migrations. Nick is the author of the SEOForLunch newsletter and owner of SEOjobs.com. Nick LeRoy Freelance SEO Consultant, Nick LeRoy Consulting Nick LeRoy is a freelance SEO consultant, podcaster and newsletter author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in SEO strategy, technical SEO, editorial strategy, and website migrations. Nick is the author of the SEOForLunch newsletter and owner of SEOjobs.com . Resources Nick LeRoy SEO client retention checklist A roadmap for developing long-lasting partnerships with your SEO clients. 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

Ever wondered why Googlebot loves your blog's cat photos but totally dismisses your high-value product pages? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Roxana Stingu, Head of Search and SEO at Alamy, to dig into crawl patterns, bot behaviors, and crawl budgets. Learn how to make your pages better for bots, update old content to be relevant again, and minimize server costs by managing bot activity. Discover how specialized bot logs can offer insights into everything from quality issues to market trends and detect patterns of malicious bots you may want to block. (Best Shatner Impression) “The robots are interacting with our site, but how?” Don’t miss out as we navigate the world of search engine bots on the SERP's Up Podcast! Back Making bot log SEO data easy (easier?) Ever wondered why Googlebot loves your blog's cat photos but totally dismisses your high-value product pages? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Roxana Stingu, Head of Search and SEO at Alamy, to dig into crawl patterns, bot behaviors, and crawl budgets. Learn how to make your pages better for bots, update old content to be relevant again, and minimize server costs by managing bot activity. Discover how specialized bot logs can offer insights into everything from quality issues to market trends and detect patterns of malicious bots you may want to block. (Best Shatner Impression) “The robots are interacting with our site, but how?” Don’t miss out as we navigate the world of search engine bots on the SERP's Up Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 102 | September 18, 2024 | 39 MIN 00:00 / 38:40 This week’s guests Roxana Stingu Roxana has a strong background in technical SEO, including enterprise SEO, image search, and ecommerce site search. As the Head of Search & SEO at Alamy, her diverse skill set is dedicated to making it easier for users to discover products across various platforms, ensuring they can find exactly what they need with ease. 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 pushing on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by she who has all of the information you need in a highly visual and pointed way, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. I am the Crystal Carter who does things. Mordy Oberstein: With visuals also. Crystal Carter: Sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: At the same time. Crystal Carter: And then also sometimes a- Mordy Oberstein: What are we even talking about? Crystal Carter: ... because today we're talking about robots. Mordy Oberstein: We always talk about robots. It's an SEO podcast. Crystal Carter: I'm going to stop them from crawling over here. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do that. Crystal Carter: I'm going to make them crawl over there. I'm going to watch where they go. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, which comes out each and every month. It's called Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can get your Botlogs in a highly visual, seamless way right inside of Wix and Wix Studio, more on that later. Well, not more on that topic, more on those reports later, as this week we're diving into Botlogs. Check every call and log every hit. No, we're not talking baseball, but Botlogs. How and why Botlog reporting factors into SEO, how to use Botlog analysis to drive SEO success, and how to make all that, much easier than I'm making it sound. To help us navigate our way through this perhaps uncharted part of your SEO universe, Roxana Stingu, the Head of Search and SEO at Alamy will be here in just a bit. We'll also explore a highly visual Botlog tool that simplifies the entire Botlog SEO process for you. What tool could that be? I kind of mentioned already before. Oh, no. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So Captain's Log, Supplemental, the robots are interacting with our site, but how? Unknown. Our only chance of returning from this quadrant of SEO is an unknown entity who refers to themselves as, "The Botlog." Though they hardly resemble a log at all, we're hoping it can help us branch out from our usual SEO analysis on this, the 102nd episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting the Shatner. I'm not going to lie. That was unexpected. Mordy Oberstein: In a good way or a bad way? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Crystal Carter: Well, because you started and I was like, "Oh, this is amusing." And then it just kept going. I was like, "Wow, he's really-" Mordy Oberstein: I actually researched. I read through various captain's logs to see like, hey, what does he talk about in there? Yeah, I really did my homework on that. I went full nerd. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's what we're here for. That's what this is about. Mordy Oberstein: That's what makes this podcast special and better than all the other podcasts. Crystal Carter: You're at home. It's fine. It's cool. Mordy Oberstein: We do our thing here. We do our thing. Anyway. Anyway. Botlogs. The mere term sounds like it's frightening and/or confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Crystal Carter: It doesn't have to. That's one of the reasons why we've got Roxana talking about it. Because when I've heard Roxana speak a few times at a few different events, I've known Roxana for a few years now by Women in Tech SEO and she's wonderful and fantastic, which we'll find out very shortly. But Roxana is really great at taking really complex stuff and making it not sound impossible, which I think is super important because I think that everything is accessible. So I am so happy to be talking to Roxana about this today. Mordy Oberstein: With that, welcome to SERP's Up Roxana Stingu. How are you? Roxana Stingu: I'm good, thank you. No, sorry, I can't do that- Mordy Oberstein: We should do the whole episode like that, right? Everyone will love it. Roxana Stingu: We could try, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of people listening to this if I do that. Mordy Oberstein: You have two options, either we talk like Botlogs or bots or like William Shatner for the entire episode. Your choice. Roxana Stingu: I can't do either, but I can talk about Botlogs- Mordy Oberstein: And William Shatner? Roxana Stingu: A little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. Well, just the Botlog then. Roxana Stingu: Hello, everybody. Official hello. Crystal Carter: So Roxana, just for folks who are new to meeting you, can you just give them a little bit of your background, from where you're coming at this topic from? Roxana Stingu: Yeah, sure. Quick intro. I'm Head of Search and SEO for Alamy, where search is not paid search, but actually website search. So I get to work with my own search engine, which is great. And Alamy is a massive website. We have about 400 million product, and I'm mentioning this because the bigger the website, the more you care about log files and want to have a look at what bots are doing on that website. And we're going to talk about why that's important, but this is pretty much why I am so interested in this topic and why I like it so much. And even if you're not working on a 400 million product website, don't worry, there's still a lot of information in those files for you to get and be able to use that insight to further improve your website's presence in bigger search engines like Google. Crystal Carter: And that's super important. And for folks who don't know, bots are like little computer kind of things that they come to your website and they look around and stuff. So we have Googlebot, which crawls your website and sends information back to Google. There's Bingbot that also sends things. There's an AdSense one. Pinterest has one called PinBot. Then there's other stuff, like tools, like Ahrefs for instance also has their own bot that crawls around and does all this sort of thing. For a website that's your size, are there particular bots where you're like, "No, get away from me. Back up"? Roxana Stingu: Yes. Crystal Carter: Are there? Roxana Stingu: Absolutely. So when a website is this big, every request that comes from a bot is costly. And that's mostly because pages are dynamic, so every time a request comes in from a bot or a person, it doesn't matter. We need to recreate the pages from the server and then the server uses a database and that database incurs costs because we're getting that information from there. So pretty much every time anybody's requesting a page, we pay for it and it adds up. And the more bots you have crawling, the more it adds up. So then what I do is I tend to look at who's crawling me the most and what value am I getting out of that. So for instance, Google is crawling like crazy and I get value from that. I get organic traffic and that traffic then converts for me, so I'm getting revenue out of it. So I'm happy with Google crawling. Same for Bing and Yandex and Baidu and other search engines in countries where I want to have visibility with this website, but we live in an AI era and everybody is now crawling for information to put in their large language models and train whatever they want to train. So that is a problem because I'm paying for their training in this case. They have to request my content, so I'm incurring a cost, but I'm not seeing a benefit out of it because it's their model that they're monetizing or whatever they're doing. So for me at this point, looking at crawls from AI related bots, that's kind of the biggest area. And the problem is some of them will have descriptive names and you'll recognize them as being various companies that I'm not going to name and shame, but some of them use third party bots that don't resemble the name of the company using them. They're like bots for hire. And I think those are the ones you want to have a lookout for and block because you're really getting nothing out of it. You don't even know who's hired them. Crystal Carter: Right. That's really interesting. So people who are new to the concept of robots and crawling and all of that sort of stuff, you were talking about how it costs your server, it costs server time. So essentially they're calling the page when they're crawling the page, and so that's triggering server response. You're talking about much, much bigger sites, but even on smaller sites, I've seen it where somebody sent a bot to there and it's a junk bot, it's a spam bot or whatever that's coming through and it's causing tons and tons of traffic to the site that's messing up your analytics; It's causing server issues and things like that. So yeah, it is really important to pay attention to who they are, where they are, even from a smaller site. But also when thinking about these AI considerations and all of that sort of stuff. I guess I don't want to get into spilling all of the company details or whatever, but have you ever had to take immediate action to block people who are behaving in ways they shouldn't? Roxana Stingu: Yeah. It's part of security practices. You always do it. You look at malicious kind of requests, that's what we call them, so there's patterns to them. And you notice there's a big wave of requests and then it goes down and it's periodical and you can kind of see that pattern, and you know it's unnatural. To quote from my favorite movie, "It's unnatural, mate." Sorry, that accent, see, I can't do that. But you kind of notice these and you think, why are they crawling me? Is this a reputable bot? Because you have IPs of Googlebot and other bots and you can verify it's them and it's not somebody else. Or other times you get what's called DDoS or a denial of service attack. So that's when somebody starts sending so many hits to your website, your hosting can't deal with that. So then everything kind of freezes in your server is just refusing to connect to anything, so then your website's down even for your users. And this is not about large websites, it's about the bandwidth that your hosting will allow in terms of connection. So it's been in the past that I worked to small blogs that had low bandwidth hosting and I would create a fake DDoS with just the crawler because I was crawling too fast. So sending too many requests to it per second that the hosting just couldn't handle it. And I think small business websites, personal blogs, things like that will not go for a very expensive hosting package because there's no reason to. But they could be the victims of these DDoS because it's really easy to create them if your hosting doesn't allow a lot of hits to come through. Mordy Oberstein: Another reason why using Wix is great, because we'll take care of all that for you and your server won't get overloaded because we optimize the server network for you. Roxana Stingu: Exactly. One less thing to worry about. Mordy Oberstein: Two less things to worry about among other things. But thinking about small businesses, one of the other ways that I think you can think about using your botlux is understanding Google's behavior. Where are they crawling on your website? Which pages are they crawling on your website? And is there a problem? For example, I had a situation one time where there was a massive redirect done on the site and there was a glitch somewhere and you could see Google ignoring the redirect and going to the old page and not the new page. So you can take a look at your Botlogs and say, "Wait a second. I thought that was all good. Everything looks like it's fine, but there might be an underlying problem here because Google's ignoring it and they're going to the old page." Roxana Stingu: Yeah, that's absolutely one of the reasons why you should even go through these files. They're just like, you can export them as text files. It's just lines upon lines upon lines of who requested, like the referrer. Who requested what, the page on your site, and then information like the IP of the person or the service or the crawler requesting it. And other information that might be useful or not to you, like the browser, for instance, and the HTTP status code that come back, did that service get the page? 200? Okay, did it get a server error, a 5xx? What's going on? But the reason to go through all that information, because it's going to be a lot, is exactly as you said, to identify points where things are not working. I mentioned small businesses before and they tend to have a calendar for reservations on their website. And those tend to create infinite spaces because for every single combination of day, month, time, whatever, and especially in the future because the calendar goes forever, you create a page or you create a parameter that creates a new URL and Google and other bots can just get stuck in that and they literally just go in an infinite space and can't come out. So you are getting all these hits as if Google is identifying all these millions of new pages on your website when your site might just have 10 pages. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that people often don't understand the connection between that and your marketing activity or your other activity. So if Google's finding that, then that might be stopping Google from indexing the rest of your content, that might be stopping Google from completing their crawl, and that might mean that pages that you're expecting to be indexed aren't being indexed. And let's say those pages are the things that you're trying to sell. Maybe those things, the pages that aren't being indexed are the core of your business. Roxana Stingu: Exactly. You are making an update with the new offer, but Google's too busy in that infinite space. Instead of going and indexing the information about your new offer and showing your new maybe title or description that can convert that click. Mordy Oberstein: And also if quality is a domain level metric, right? So let's say with a helpful content system, which is now part of the core algorithm, they're looking at helpfulness across the entire domain. If they're not seeing your entire website and they're only seeing X, Y, and Z pages, that entire score is built up on X, Y, and Z pages and not the entire corpus of content on your entire website, which is not what you want. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure people heard about crawl budget before, and I think looking into log files, you can kind of see where that budget is being allocated. So for people who haven't worked with this term before, imagine you have a finite sum of money like all of us have when we get our payment at the beginning of the month or end of the month, and then you can allocate that money towards different things. You can put more money in food or more money in fun, but then you can pay rent. Google does something similar where they can put more crawl towards certain types of pages or other types of pages and it kind of has to find a balance in your website. And if we put too much money towards fun, that's great for us, but we're not really getting the value because then we starve. It's the same with Google. If it puts too much crawl towards pages where there's just errors, the pages don't load, they're really slow, their quality overall is low, it will stop putting money there because there's no value. So it will either shift the budget elsewhere or understand that maybe it needs to spend less with your website because it's not that good. So again, crawl log files can help you with this because if you segment your page types, so if it's a bigger website, you might do it by template, let's say. So you have category pages, you have product pages, you might have some, I don't know, blog pages, whatever you have, you segment by that. And then you look at how many hits am I getting from whatever search engine you're analyzing in these pages. And has that behavior kind of changed in time? Am I seeing a reduction that kind of matches maybe a core updates? All of a sudden I'm thinking, well, Google doesn't find it as quality as it did before. Maybe I need to up my game on these pages. Do something, right? And that's the thing. Quality will get stricter and stricter with every update because the internet just gets bigger and bigger, so Google needs to keep it clean. So if you notice this reduced crawling behavior in your pages, even though your number of pages is the same or higher, maybe kind of focus on this. Maybe that template needs a boost somehow, so try to understand what a quality boost would be in that case. Mordy Oberstein: Great point. Crystal Carter: I think also the other thing, you talk about how often people are crawling. Is that something that you look for in a Botlog, like how often Google's coming to the site? How often Bing is coming to the site? How often Yandex is coming to the site, for instance? Roxana Stingu: So that matters as well because if your content is interesting or of interest, which is different from being interesting to you, then you will notice that bots will come and crawl more frequently because they want to make sure they have the latest version of it because it's of interest. If you run a news website, you'll get so many crawls, it'll be insane because news is all about freshness. So then this is why Google recommends you have a news sitemap if you have a news website because then crawl patterns will change because it's more time-sensitive. But regarding this crawl frequency, have a look at pages that get a lot of crawls and very frequent ones. And then think, are these pages actually driving a lot of traffic or are they being crawled a lot but driving no traffic? Because then why is there an interest in getting updated information from pages that drive no traffic, right? So that might be a reason for you to look at those pages and try to understand, is this something I want to show to my users? And if yes, why isn't Google showing it to users, so no traffic? Or is this something like one of those spaces we talked about where just parameters which are duplicates of other pages or subsets that maybe I should just block and not crawl anymore because users don't need to see this, why am I allowing bots to see it? And then we use robots.txt and you block that. Crystal Carter: If you're seeing that it's crawling then and Google's kind of interested in it, if it is a page that's maybe an older blog or something like that, maybe that's a candidate for updating, for instance. Maybe we can update this and maybe can look at the... To make it so that it's indexable because they're already interested in it. They know where it is. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, exactly. If you're 2020 guide is still getting a lot of crawls, then it might mean that the topic of the guide is of interest, but information is outdated. So exactly as you said, go update that. Make it a 2024 guide and you might attract even more traffic then. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, even look at which part of the website Google tends to be crawling more often. You have products and you have a blog and you're fundamentally trying to use the blog to get people to the product pages because that what your website is actually earning money on. But if Google's crawling your blog way more frequently or not crawling your product-oriented content a lot at all, maybe you have a problem there. Maybe you need to interlink better. Whatever it may be, you need to understand that Google's seeing you as a blog website, not as a commerce website. Roxana Stingu: And here's where we get it wrong. We use crawlers and we always start the crawl from the homepage. And even though we use a Googlebot user agent or whatever, we think that's how search engines will crawl us, but that's just the one crawler that we're using. By using log files, it can actually see how search engines crawl because they don't always start from the homepage. They can start from a random page and then the priority they give the URLs they found and how they crawl might be different from the priority a crawler gives. So then it's really not the same thing and it should be comparing the two. And if you're kind of seeing the same stuff, great, then you don't need to do that comparison all the time. But if you compare crawl coming from a tool with where the main hits go to from your log files and you see major discrepancies, then you have to kind of consider weight. Why is it so different for bots than it is for my crawler? Why are bots not crawling these other links or URLs? Maybe they're too hidden in the page, maybe I already have so many links they give up. It gives you ideas of how to analyze a page and figure out what's not working. Crystal Carter: And I think in terms of comparison, one thing that I've looked at and Google's like, "Yeah, we're mobile first. Mobile, mobile, mobile." But then I see properties and it says that it's the desktop crawler, like in Google Search Console, it says the desktop crawler, whatever and things. And I'm like, "Y'all, really?" And then when I go into my Botlogs, I can see that the mobile crawler is not crawling me very often. The desktop crawler is crawling me more. Are you comparing the different bots to optimize accordingly in your day to day? Roxana Stingu: I have good news for you. Google is killing off the desktop crawler this month. It's going away. It's out. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's it. Roxana Stingu: So you're not going to see it anymore. Well, at least not- Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to miss. It's sad. Used to hanging out. We used to have a beer once in a while. All right, well, I guess that- Roxana Stingu: I know. It used to be fun, but good news is you're getting a crawl reduction because it's going away, because it's like duplicate crawl. You are getting crawled by the desktop and the smartphone one, and now the desktop one is going away. But I'm assuming it's going to be small percentages for people because Google has been mobile first, so crawling more like that. But there's other Google bots and not just Google, but other user agents from search engines that you need to keep an eye on. So for instance, you can see major spikes from Adsbot even though you don't serve ads, and that can take up a lot of bandwidth. And it's a good idea to keep an eye on that and just kind of monitor it, especially if it's not useful to you and you have an Adsbot robots.txt specific where you can say, "Right, I'm allowing you to do this, but not that." Or you just use your robots.txt where you say, "Right, Adsbot, I don't want this. Go away." So there's options there depending on if you have ads or not. Another thing that's interesting is that Google will crawl images with a different bot, and that's a bit slower than your regular HTML bot. So if you have an image heavy website and not seeing those crawls come in, give it a few weeks. But after that you should definitely be seeing that. And again, analyze the patterns there. If Google's not really crawling your images or doesn't really care about your images, maybe you should assess what your images are, because they might not be that useful. Crystal Carter: I think also one thing that's really interesting is, Mordy has the SEO Brand Podcast web page, I have a couple of other. I've got a little space site that I have, and I have my personal site or whatever. Neither of those have podcasts on them. I've looked at the Botlogs for Mordy's podcast site. He has a completely different set of bots that come to his website. He's got a completely different crew of robots that orbit his site- Roxana Stingu: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Those are my homies. Roxana Stingu: Your homies, yeah. But it's the same as with the Adbots. Once in a while Google will send all these different bots to discover, have you added a podcast in the meantime? Have you added more images? Have you added advertising? So you will see these hits once in a while and you should probably let that happen unless they go wild when you don't have podcasts, but you're getting half of your crawls from a podcast bot. You don't want that. So it's good to understand all the different bots and what they do and let them be if it's low values, because that's how search engines discover the web and changes to the web. But if they start being problematic and you don't have that type of content, just block them. Crystal Carter: And that's something you can do in your robots.txt? Roxana Stingu: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: And we have content on that, on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which can help you learn all of that stuff. Roxana, This has been such a fantastic discussion. I've absolutely loved geeking out with you on this. Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: I, as well. Roxana Stingu: Always. Always for geeking out. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry for going all nerd on you earlier with the William Shatter thing. My bad. Roxana Stingu: It's acceptable. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Roxana Stingu: I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so you're more of a card person, I get it. I understand. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, I am. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, all good. All good there. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you so much for making it so today, and I think- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where do people follow you? Roxana Stingu: I'm on X. I almost called it Twitter. I'm on X. It's just roxanastingu, one word. And same thing on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Roxana Stingu: Thank you very much for having me. This has been fun. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Roxana Stingu: Bye, everybody. Mordy Oberstein: So you might be thinking like, I love Botlogs at this point. They're great, they're fantastic. You might also be thinking, Botlogs? That sounds complicated. How do I set those up? How do I do those? So good news for both you who love Botlogs and you who think Botlogs? That sounds complicated. How do I do that? Because we have our own Botlog reporting for you as we go tool time. So for those lucky folks who are using Wix, you have built in Botlog reports as visuals and they're awesome. Crystal Carter: And you don't have to ask a dev for them. Mordy Oberstein: No. Or connect this or connect that. You don't have to do anything. You just have to click on Analytics, go to SEO and click on Botlog Reports. Crystal Carter: Right. Go to the search bar, type in bot traffic over time, and you'll be able to find whatever you need. It really is genuinely fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Can I say a salty point? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. For those like, "Oh, I like work because I get to control the server." Outside of locking yourselves out, leaving that aside for a minute, to me it's always opportunity costs. It's not either good or bad, it's whatever you need. This is the opportunity cost of not having control over the server and us having control over the server. Because we have control over the server, we automatically create Botlog reports for you because it's our server. Crystal Carter: And we have eyes on lots of different bots and can identify them. So I'm looking at the one from my private website, which to be honest, doesn't get tons and tons of traffic and just sort of does what it does. And on it, I can see the bot for Baidu in the Botlog Reports. Basically if you go to the Wix Botlog Report, and if you want to find out more about this, we have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub by one Mr. George Nguyen, link in show notes, who gets into lots of some of the details there. But the kind of bots that I'll see on my private website are going to be different from the bots that I'll see on say the Wix's SEO Learning Hub. I think we mentioned this in one of the other parts of this podcast as well, they're very different from the bots that Mordy gets on his podcast website, for instance. So my personal website doesn't have a podcast, so I don't get podcast bots on my website, but Mordy's gets tons. Tons of podcast bots. Bots I didn't even know existed. And I think that one of the things that's really interesting about this is that it can help you figure out, like Yandex is a bot that shows up on my site; HubSpot is one that shows up on my site; I've got Google Web Snippet, I've got Facebook, I've got Common Crawler, I've got Baidu. So for instance, if I'm seeing that the Baidu bot, a spider is showing up on my website a lot, guess what? That means that Baidu wants to know who I am. Guess what? That might tell me that maybe I should be investing more in markets where Baidu is a bigger player, because that's telling me that users there are interested in it because Baidu's interested in it. Same with Yandex. Mordy Oberstein: AKA China. Crystal Carter: Right? Same with Yandex and same with some other things as well. DuckDuckGo is another one as well. Someone was asking me about DuckDuckGo a while back and I'm like, "It can be really useful for people who don't want to leave a paper trail when they're online, and this can be really important-" Mordy Oberstein: If your market is criminals, DuckDuckGo might be for you. Crystal Carter: The CBD market, for instance, I think can be a bit more complex. So for instance, I think that Google has different rules around how CBD products are ranked on Google than they are on say, DuckDuckGo for instance. I don't think you're really able to do ads if you're a CBD product, and even if they are fully legal. So for instance, folks like that might see more traffic from DuckDuckGo. And again, that might give you an idea of, oh, actually, maybe we should invest some more time in that. And it's incredibly useful and making them so accessible, as we do in our Botlogs Report, is fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's all that. I mean, all the SEO tools are in there. So you can see like, hey, I'm paying for SEMrush and you're asking to audit my website. How come I'm not seeing any SEMrush on my website? Maybe they're not really auditing. They are. SEMrush will audit you. I'm not saying anything bad. Just an example. The visuals are built in, so you don't have to do any fancy footwork in order to take what's in a chart and to turn into a visual that A, you can share with the client that you could use yourself. And by the way, it's an easy way to check status codes on your website. Like, oh snap, what are people looking for that's pulling up a 404? What are the bots getting this pulling up a 404? Because you can filter by status code. Which pages are they seeing, a reader? Or, and I mentioned this earlier in the show, you could see if the search engines or whatever bot you were looking at are crawling the wrong pages. It's as simple as going to one of the reports and looking at the bar graph that shows which pages whatever bot you selected is crawling. Crystal Carter: Right, and you can also see that by the day. So let's say there was an issue on Tuesday or something and you want to see which pages were affected by that issue that you had on the Tuesday or something. You can go and filter by the one day that it happened and you can see whether or not you saw reduction before or after of that particular crawl rate, or whether or not you've seen bots crawling you less since then, that sort of thing. So you can see it by the date and filtered out by the different response codes and all of that sort of stuff. And the response codes get into details. It's not just 200, it's like 200, 304, 503, 504. It gets into the detail. Mordy Oberstein: So we're trying to say is check out the Botlog Reports in your Wix channel analytics. It's really great information for you. It's really easy. It's really streamlined. So if you are someone who listened to this podcast like, "There's this whole bot thing, but it's also terrifying," don't just go right in. Crystal Carter: Can I also say it's also downloadable as a CSV or for Excel or as an image. So if you, for instance, wanted to demonstrate that, guess what, we did mobile optimization on your site and now we're seeing lot more crawls from Google's mobile bot, you can take a little snapshot from the Botlog, the bot traffic over time report. You can put that in your report, you can get your gold star, maybe get yourself a raise. We- Mordy Oberstein: It is great for reporting. Crystal Carter: We out here helping y'all in these economic times. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Hey, you got to report in order to get the buy-in. You know what else is great at reporting? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is great at reporting. Crystal Carter: How did I not know that that was coming? Mordy Oberstein: It's only been 102 episodes, Crystal. I mean, come on. But who's counting? We are. We're counting. We're counting on Barry to cover this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. I will try to keep it snappier than usual because last week I got a complaint from Barry Schwartz that I droned on and on and on and on and on trying to cover his story that went on and on and on and on and on about Danny Sullivan's take on algorithm updates, the interview that Barry did. So I will try to keep it snappier this week. Barry, I'm so sorry. Anyway, from Barry Schwartz, both articles from Barry, they're both from seoroundtable.com. First up, Google search ranking volatility still heated a week after core-update. Barry wrote that on September 11th. I'm looking at the SEMRush Sensor on September 15th, and it's still high. It was high before the update, it was high during the update and it's been crazy high after the update. Is it all one update? No, but it's bonkers. Barry asked me, actually if this is like an Ask SEMRush... This is the longest period of high or very high volatility they've recorded. I should have known the answer because I actually researched that a while ago and the answer's no, we're not there yet. We need 15 more days of high volatility to break the record. I think that was back in 2022, 2021. I don't remember. I could look at my email. I forgot exactly when it was, but I think it had to do with the product review update, something like that, and there was this crazy volatility forever. So it's not the longest period of rank volatility, high rank volatility we've seen, but it's up there. I would say more, but I'll keep it snappy, Barry. Okay, also from Barry, report half Google AI overviews. You're missing an of. Report half of Google AI overviews links overlap with top search results. This study came from Rich Sanger, a great guy, great SEO, follow him on social media. He partnered up with the Authoritas and they looked at, hey, how often are the organic results, the links there, the URLs there matching what Google is showing the URLs in the AI overviews? Been a bunch of studies on this. They all have different data. What does that mean? I think it means the tools have a hard time tracking this stuff. Take that and, I don't know, do with it what you will. What Rich and Authoritas showed was 46% of the URLs in the AI overviews match up with the top organic results on page one. They actually did something interesting I thought that was cool. They went and clicked through to the related search features, like people also ask, people also search for, related search at the bottom of the page, and they click through and then recalculated to see if any of the URLs on that second SERP also match the AI overview URLs. And the number jumps up to around 64%. I could say more, but I don't. I do want to, but I can't because I don't want to set Barry by going on and on and on covering his stories. Barry, I'm so sorry. To the audience, also sorry, but really I'm just messing. And that's really all I have to say. We'll link to the articles in the show notes. Have a look at them, click through to look at the actual study that Rich did. It's pretty interesting. And I hope I kept it snappier. Snappy News, over and out. I just call Barry all reliable, all dependable. What's it called? That's like a geyser, isn't it? Like all reliable? Crystal Carter: Old Faithful. Mordy Oberstein: Old Faithful. There we go, Barry, aka all faithful. Crystal Carter: There we go. Is he the same age as you? Mordy Oberstein: Is he? Barry? No, Barry's older than me. Crystal Carter: Is he? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll check his Wikipedia page out, see what it says. Does it have his birthday on it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: Don't ask me how I know that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, good. Barry is old, not new. I was going to say like a geyser, he is blowing out a lot of hot air, but that wouldn't be nice. Crystal Carter: No, and to be fair, it's steam, really- Mordy Oberstein: Steam, right. Barry is not an angry person, so he doesn't blow off a lot of steam like a geyser would. There we go. That's good. That's better. There we go. All right, thanks Barry. Moving on from people to people, our follow of the week this week is the one, the only from Lumar, Anne Berlin. Crystal Carter: Anne Berlin is fantastic. She's such a wealth of technical knowledge. She's really active in the women in tech SEO community as well. I did a webinar for Lumar with her a little while back, and it was really, really engaging. So we were talking about technical SEO audits and how you can get into those and why they're really valuable. And she's somebody who's able to understand that really, really well. And I think that in terms of Botlogs, bot traffic, etc, etc, when you're doing your technical SEO audit, it should absolutely be a part of it. And when you're using a tool like the Wix SEO bot traffic over time report or even Lumar's tool, which gets into more detail, you'll learn different things. And one of the things we talked about during that session was how you need to adjust your settings. Lumar has some great detail that you can go into and to how you adjust the settings for your crawl when you're doing your audit to find out which things the bots are looking at, which things people are looking at, which things you should be prioritizing. So shout out to Anne, shout out to the whole Lumar team for some great insights there. Mordy Oberstein: We got their app in the Wix App Market as well. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. Crystal Carter: Did the podcast compute? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Yeah, it computed. Crystal Carter: That's good. So we don't need to control, alt, delete the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm kind of hoping we're moving to a world where bots become more like cyborgs because I don't know, cyborgs are more interesting. You never know what they're going to do. They're kind of unpredictable. Crystal Carter: I saw a TikTok of two ChatGPT-4 or something like the app or something, they were chatting to each other. They were like, "Hi, how can I help you?" And they were like, "Oh no, this is interesting. Oh, that's an interesting thing. I would like to know more about the latest top or what you're interested in." And then someone was like, "Oh yes, I'm interested in quantum computing." And then they had a long conversation about quantum computing. Their opening gamut wasn't like, "Oh, the weather..." Wasn't like, "Oh, let's talk about..." Because obviously robots aren't affected by the weather. But yeah, they jumped straight into quantum computing. It was like, "Oh my gosh, yes, quantum computing-" Mordy Oberstein: Course. Crystal Carter: "... Amazing. My favorite." Mordy Oberstein: And then they got into drinking urine and eating glue right afterwards. But did you see, by the way, I know this is off topic a little bit, and old news by the time this episode comes out, there's a social media platform where you create an avatar, like an AI avatar of yourself, and it talks to other AI avatars of other people? Crystal Carter: Twitter? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, no. That's where you talk to real people who you wish were AI avatars. This is- Crystal Carter: I mean, if we're talking about bots, we got to talk about Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: No, this is like AI talking to AI, but it's social media, which I understand the point of social media is I interact with other people, but now I'm having my avatar interact on my behalf with other avatars. I think it's called Butterfly or something. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure I'm just an old person and I don't get it, but I don't get it. Crystal Carter: It sounds to me a little bit like a Tamagotchi. Mordy Oberstein: That's what. Exactly what it sounds like. Crystal Carter: You put your Tamagotchi in the Tamagotchi land and then they put their Tamagotchi in the Tamagotchi land, and then you just come back and see what happened- Mordy Oberstein: Mine would just die every time. Crystal Carter: Do you know what actually? And maybe I should, if anyone makes this, I should get the rights for the IP because they definitely brought it from me, but that would be a really interesting way to do a dating app, to upgrade a dating app. It's basically you give your avatar loads of personality points that are your personality points, they give their avatar loads of personality points that are their personality parts. You put them in a meta universe and then whoever your little bot happens to find or gravitate towards or whatever, that's your match. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. AI should create dating bots because nothing will go wrong there. The divorce rate will not jump up. It'll be just fine. On that happy marital note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, back next week with the new episode as we dive into the gaps between those who optimize and those who search. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts 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 that we have 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: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Roxana Stingu Anne Berlin Rich Sanger Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Bot Log Reports Alamy News: Google Search Ranking Volatility Still Heated A Week After Core Update Report: Half Google AI Overviews Links Overlap With Top Search Results Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Roxana Stingu Anne Berlin Rich Sanger Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Bot Log Reports Alamy News: Google Search Ranking Volatility Still Heated A Week After Core Update Report: Half Google AI Overviews Links Overlap With Top Search Results 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 pushing on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by she who has all of the information you need in a highly visual and pointed way, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. I am the Crystal Carter who does things. Mordy Oberstein: With visuals also. Crystal Carter: Sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: At the same time. Crystal Carter: And then also sometimes a- Mordy Oberstein: What are we even talking about? Crystal Carter: ... because today we're talking about robots. Mordy Oberstein: We always talk about robots. It's an SEO podcast. Crystal Carter: I'm going to stop them from crawling over here. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do that. Crystal Carter: I'm going to make them crawl over there. I'm going to watch where they go. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, which comes out each and every month. It's called Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can get your Botlogs in a highly visual, seamless way right inside of Wix and Wix Studio, more on that later. Well, not more on that topic, more on those reports later, as this week we're diving into Botlogs. Check every call and log every hit. No, we're not talking baseball, but Botlogs. How and why Botlog reporting factors into SEO, how to use Botlog analysis to drive SEO success, and how to make all that, much easier than I'm making it sound. To help us navigate our way through this perhaps uncharted part of your SEO universe, Roxana Stingu, the Head of Search and SEO at Alamy will be here in just a bit. We'll also explore a highly visual Botlog tool that simplifies the entire Botlog SEO process for you. What tool could that be? I kind of mentioned already before. Oh, no. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So Captain's Log, Supplemental, the robots are interacting with our site, but how? Unknown. Our only chance of returning from this quadrant of SEO is an unknown entity who refers to themselves as, "The Botlog." Though they hardly resemble a log at all, we're hoping it can help us branch out from our usual SEO analysis on this, the 102nd episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting the Shatner. I'm not going to lie. That was unexpected. Mordy Oberstein: In a good way or a bad way? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Crystal Carter: Well, because you started and I was like, "Oh, this is amusing." And then it just kept going. I was like, "Wow, he's really-" Mordy Oberstein: I actually researched. I read through various captain's logs to see like, hey, what does he talk about in there? Yeah, I really did my homework on that. I went full nerd. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's what we're here for. That's what this is about. Mordy Oberstein: That's what makes this podcast special and better than all the other podcasts. Crystal Carter: You're at home. It's fine. It's cool. Mordy Oberstein: We do our thing here. We do our thing. Anyway. Anyway. Botlogs. The mere term sounds like it's frightening and/or confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Crystal Carter: It doesn't have to. That's one of the reasons why we've got Roxana talking about it. Because when I've heard Roxana speak a few times at a few different events, I've known Roxana for a few years now by Women in Tech SEO and she's wonderful and fantastic, which we'll find out very shortly. But Roxana is really great at taking really complex stuff and making it not sound impossible, which I think is super important because I think that everything is accessible. So I am so happy to be talking to Roxana about this today. Mordy Oberstein: With that, welcome to SERP's Up Roxana Stingu. How are you? Roxana Stingu: I'm good, thank you. No, sorry, I can't do that- Mordy Oberstein: We should do the whole episode like that, right? Everyone will love it. Roxana Stingu: We could try, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of people listening to this if I do that. Mordy Oberstein: You have two options, either we talk like Botlogs or bots or like William Shatner for the entire episode. Your choice. Roxana Stingu: I can't do either, but I can talk about Botlogs- Mordy Oberstein: And William Shatner? Roxana Stingu: A little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. Well, just the Botlog then. Roxana Stingu: Hello, everybody. Official hello. Crystal Carter: So Roxana, just for folks who are new to meeting you, can you just give them a little bit of your background, from where you're coming at this topic from? Roxana Stingu: Yeah, sure. Quick intro. I'm Head of Search and SEO for Alamy, where search is not paid search, but actually website search. So I get to work with my own search engine, which is great. And Alamy is a massive website. We have about 400 million product, and I'm mentioning this because the bigger the website, the more you care about log files and want to have a look at what bots are doing on that website. And we're going to talk about why that's important, but this is pretty much why I am so interested in this topic and why I like it so much. And even if you're not working on a 400 million product website, don't worry, there's still a lot of information in those files for you to get and be able to use that insight to further improve your website's presence in bigger search engines like Google. Crystal Carter: And that's super important. And for folks who don't know, bots are like little computer kind of things that they come to your website and they look around and stuff. So we have Googlebot, which crawls your website and sends information back to Google. There's Bingbot that also sends things. There's an AdSense one. Pinterest has one called PinBot. Then there's other stuff, like tools, like Ahrefs for instance also has their own bot that crawls around and does all this sort of thing. For a website that's your size, are there particular bots where you're like, "No, get away from me. Back up"? Roxana Stingu: Yes. Crystal Carter: Are there? Roxana Stingu: Absolutely. So when a website is this big, every request that comes from a bot is costly. And that's mostly because pages are dynamic, so every time a request comes in from a bot or a person, it doesn't matter. We need to recreate the pages from the server and then the server uses a database and that database incurs costs because we're getting that information from there. So pretty much every time anybody's requesting a page, we pay for it and it adds up. And the more bots you have crawling, the more it adds up. So then what I do is I tend to look at who's crawling me the most and what value am I getting out of that. So for instance, Google is crawling like crazy and I get value from that. I get organic traffic and that traffic then converts for me, so I'm getting revenue out of it. So I'm happy with Google crawling. Same for Bing and Yandex and Baidu and other search engines in countries where I want to have visibility with this website, but we live in an AI era and everybody is now crawling for information to put in their large language models and train whatever they want to train. So that is a problem because I'm paying for their training in this case. They have to request my content, so I'm incurring a cost, but I'm not seeing a benefit out of it because it's their model that they're monetizing or whatever they're doing. So for me at this point, looking at crawls from AI related bots, that's kind of the biggest area. And the problem is some of them will have descriptive names and you'll recognize them as being various companies that I'm not going to name and shame, but some of them use third party bots that don't resemble the name of the company using them. They're like bots for hire. And I think those are the ones you want to have a lookout for and block because you're really getting nothing out of it. You don't even know who's hired them. Crystal Carter: Right. That's really interesting. So people who are new to the concept of robots and crawling and all of that sort of stuff, you were talking about how it costs your server, it costs server time. So essentially they're calling the page when they're crawling the page, and so that's triggering server response. You're talking about much, much bigger sites, but even on smaller sites, I've seen it where somebody sent a bot to there and it's a junk bot, it's a spam bot or whatever that's coming through and it's causing tons and tons of traffic to the site that's messing up your analytics; It's causing server issues and things like that. So yeah, it is really important to pay attention to who they are, where they are, even from a smaller site. But also when thinking about these AI considerations and all of that sort of stuff. I guess I don't want to get into spilling all of the company details or whatever, but have you ever had to take immediate action to block people who are behaving in ways they shouldn't? Roxana Stingu: Yeah. It's part of security practices. You always do it. You look at malicious kind of requests, that's what we call them, so there's patterns to them. And you notice there's a big wave of requests and then it goes down and it's periodical and you can kind of see that pattern, and you know it's unnatural. To quote from my favorite movie, "It's unnatural, mate." Sorry, that accent, see, I can't do that. But you kind of notice these and you think, why are they crawling me? Is this a reputable bot? Because you have IPs of Googlebot and other bots and you can verify it's them and it's not somebody else. Or other times you get what's called DDoS or a denial of service attack. So that's when somebody starts sending so many hits to your website, your hosting can't deal with that. So then everything kind of freezes in your server is just refusing to connect to anything, so then your website's down even for your users. And this is not about large websites, it's about the bandwidth that your hosting will allow in terms of connection. So it's been in the past that I worked to small blogs that had low bandwidth hosting and I would create a fake DDoS with just the crawler because I was crawling too fast. So sending too many requests to it per second that the hosting just couldn't handle it. And I think small business websites, personal blogs, things like that will not go for a very expensive hosting package because there's no reason to. But they could be the victims of these DDoS because it's really easy to create them if your hosting doesn't allow a lot of hits to come through. Mordy Oberstein: Another reason why using Wix is great, because we'll take care of all that for you and your server won't get overloaded because we optimize the server network for you. Roxana Stingu: Exactly. One less thing to worry about. Mordy Oberstein: Two less things to worry about among other things. But thinking about small businesses, one of the other ways that I think you can think about using your botlux is understanding Google's behavior. Where are they crawling on your website? Which pages are they crawling on your website? And is there a problem? For example, I had a situation one time where there was a massive redirect done on the site and there was a glitch somewhere and you could see Google ignoring the redirect and going to the old page and not the new page. So you can take a look at your Botlogs and say, "Wait a second. I thought that was all good. Everything looks like it's fine, but there might be an underlying problem here because Google's ignoring it and they're going to the old page." Roxana Stingu: Yeah, that's absolutely one of the reasons why you should even go through these files. They're just like, you can export them as text files. It's just lines upon lines upon lines of who requested, like the referrer. Who requested what, the page on your site, and then information like the IP of the person or the service or the crawler requesting it. And other information that might be useful or not to you, like the browser, for instance, and the HTTP status code that come back, did that service get the page? 200? Okay, did it get a server error, a 5xx? What's going on? But the reason to go through all that information, because it's going to be a lot, is exactly as you said, to identify points where things are not working. I mentioned small businesses before and they tend to have a calendar for reservations on their website. And those tend to create infinite spaces because for every single combination of day, month, time, whatever, and especially in the future because the calendar goes forever, you create a page or you create a parameter that creates a new URL and Google and other bots can just get stuck in that and they literally just go in an infinite space and can't come out. So you are getting all these hits as if Google is identifying all these millions of new pages on your website when your site might just have 10 pages. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that people often don't understand the connection between that and your marketing activity or your other activity. So if Google's finding that, then that might be stopping Google from indexing the rest of your content, that might be stopping Google from completing their crawl, and that might mean that pages that you're expecting to be indexed aren't being indexed. And let's say those pages are the things that you're trying to sell. Maybe those things, the pages that aren't being indexed are the core of your business. Roxana Stingu: Exactly. You are making an update with the new offer, but Google's too busy in that infinite space. Instead of going and indexing the information about your new offer and showing your new maybe title or description that can convert that click. Mordy Oberstein: And also if quality is a domain level metric, right? So let's say with a helpful content system, which is now part of the core algorithm, they're looking at helpfulness across the entire domain. If they're not seeing your entire website and they're only seeing X, Y, and Z pages, that entire score is built up on X, Y, and Z pages and not the entire corpus of content on your entire website, which is not what you want. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure people heard about crawl budget before, and I think looking into log files, you can kind of see where that budget is being allocated. So for people who haven't worked with this term before, imagine you have a finite sum of money like all of us have when we get our payment at the beginning of the month or end of the month, and then you can allocate that money towards different things. You can put more money in food or more money in fun, but then you can pay rent. Google does something similar where they can put more crawl towards certain types of pages or other types of pages and it kind of has to find a balance in your website. And if we put too much money towards fun, that's great for us, but we're not really getting the value because then we starve. It's the same with Google. If it puts too much crawl towards pages where there's just errors, the pages don't load, they're really slow, their quality overall is low, it will stop putting money there because there's no value. So it will either shift the budget elsewhere or understand that maybe it needs to spend less with your website because it's not that good. So again, crawl log files can help you with this because if you segment your page types, so if it's a bigger website, you might do it by template, let's say. So you have category pages, you have product pages, you might have some, I don't know, blog pages, whatever you have, you segment by that. And then you look at how many hits am I getting from whatever search engine you're analyzing in these pages. And has that behavior kind of changed in time? Am I seeing a reduction that kind of matches maybe a core updates? All of a sudden I'm thinking, well, Google doesn't find it as quality as it did before. Maybe I need to up my game on these pages. Do something, right? And that's the thing. Quality will get stricter and stricter with every update because the internet just gets bigger and bigger, so Google needs to keep it clean. So if you notice this reduced crawling behavior in your pages, even though your number of pages is the same or higher, maybe kind of focus on this. Maybe that template needs a boost somehow, so try to understand what a quality boost would be in that case. Mordy Oberstein: Great point. Crystal Carter: I think also the other thing, you talk about how often people are crawling. Is that something that you look for in a Botlog, like how often Google's coming to the site? How often Bing is coming to the site? How often Yandex is coming to the site, for instance? Roxana Stingu: So that matters as well because if your content is interesting or of interest, which is different from being interesting to you, then you will notice that bots will come and crawl more frequently because they want to make sure they have the latest version of it because it's of interest. If you run a news website, you'll get so many crawls, it'll be insane because news is all about freshness. So then this is why Google recommends you have a news sitemap if you have a news website because then crawl patterns will change because it's more time-sensitive. But regarding this crawl frequency, have a look at pages that get a lot of crawls and very frequent ones. And then think, are these pages actually driving a lot of traffic or are they being crawled a lot but driving no traffic? Because then why is there an interest in getting updated information from pages that drive no traffic, right? So that might be a reason for you to look at those pages and try to understand, is this something I want to show to my users? And if yes, why isn't Google showing it to users, so no traffic? Or is this something like one of those spaces we talked about where just parameters which are duplicates of other pages or subsets that maybe I should just block and not crawl anymore because users don't need to see this, why am I allowing bots to see it? And then we use robots.txt and you block that. Crystal Carter: If you're seeing that it's crawling then and Google's kind of interested in it, if it is a page that's maybe an older blog or something like that, maybe that's a candidate for updating, for instance. Maybe we can update this and maybe can look at the... To make it so that it's indexable because they're already interested in it. They know where it is. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, exactly. If you're 2020 guide is still getting a lot of crawls, then it might mean that the topic of the guide is of interest, but information is outdated. So exactly as you said, go update that. Make it a 2024 guide and you might attract even more traffic then. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, even look at which part of the website Google tends to be crawling more often. You have products and you have a blog and you're fundamentally trying to use the blog to get people to the product pages because that what your website is actually earning money on. But if Google's crawling your blog way more frequently or not crawling your product-oriented content a lot at all, maybe you have a problem there. Maybe you need to interlink better. Whatever it may be, you need to understand that Google's seeing you as a blog website, not as a commerce website. Roxana Stingu: And here's where we get it wrong. We use crawlers and we always start the crawl from the homepage. And even though we use a Googlebot user agent or whatever, we think that's how search engines will crawl us, but that's just the one crawler that we're using. By using log files, it can actually see how search engines crawl because they don't always start from the homepage. They can start from a random page and then the priority they give the URLs they found and how they crawl might be different from the priority a crawler gives. So then it's really not the same thing and it should be comparing the two. And if you're kind of seeing the same stuff, great, then you don't need to do that comparison all the time. But if you compare crawl coming from a tool with where the main hits go to from your log files and you see major discrepancies, then you have to kind of consider weight. Why is it so different for bots than it is for my crawler? Why are bots not crawling these other links or URLs? Maybe they're too hidden in the page, maybe I already have so many links they give up. It gives you ideas of how to analyze a page and figure out what's not working. Crystal Carter: And I think in terms of comparison, one thing that I've looked at and Google's like, "Yeah, we're mobile first. Mobile, mobile, mobile." But then I see properties and it says that it's the desktop crawler, like in Google Search Console, it says the desktop crawler, whatever and things. And I'm like, "Y'all, really?" And then when I go into my Botlogs, I can see that the mobile crawler is not crawling me very often. The desktop crawler is crawling me more. Are you comparing the different bots to optimize accordingly in your day to day? Roxana Stingu: I have good news for you. Google is killing off the desktop crawler this month. It's going away. It's out. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's it. Roxana Stingu: So you're not going to see it anymore. Well, at least not- Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to miss. It's sad. Used to hanging out. We used to have a beer once in a while. All right, well, I guess that- Roxana Stingu: I know. It used to be fun, but good news is you're getting a crawl reduction because it's going away, because it's like duplicate crawl. You are getting crawled by the desktop and the smartphone one, and now the desktop one is going away. But I'm assuming it's going to be small percentages for people because Google has been mobile first, so crawling more like that. But there's other Google bots and not just Google, but other user agents from search engines that you need to keep an eye on. So for instance, you can see major spikes from Adsbot even though you don't serve ads, and that can take up a lot of bandwidth. And it's a good idea to keep an eye on that and just kind of monitor it, especially if it's not useful to you and you have an Adsbot robots.txt specific where you can say, "Right, I'm allowing you to do this, but not that." Or you just use your robots.txt where you say, "Right, Adsbot, I don't want this. Go away." So there's options there depending on if you have ads or not. Another thing that's interesting is that Google will crawl images with a different bot, and that's a bit slower than your regular HTML bot. So if you have an image heavy website and not seeing those crawls come in, give it a few weeks. But after that you should definitely be seeing that. And again, analyze the patterns there. If Google's not really crawling your images or doesn't really care about your images, maybe you should assess what your images are, because they might not be that useful. Crystal Carter: I think also one thing that's really interesting is, Mordy has the SEO Brand Podcast web page, I have a couple of other. I've got a little space site that I have, and I have my personal site or whatever. Neither of those have podcasts on them. I've looked at the Botlogs for Mordy's podcast site. He has a completely different set of bots that come to his website. He's got a completely different crew of robots that orbit his site- Roxana Stingu: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Those are my homies. Roxana Stingu: Your homies, yeah. But it's the same as with the Adbots. Once in a while Google will send all these different bots to discover, have you added a podcast in the meantime? Have you added more images? Have you added advertising? So you will see these hits once in a while and you should probably let that happen unless they go wild when you don't have podcasts, but you're getting half of your crawls from a podcast bot. You don't want that. So it's good to understand all the different bots and what they do and let them be if it's low values, because that's how search engines discover the web and changes to the web. But if they start being problematic and you don't have that type of content, just block them. Crystal Carter: And that's something you can do in your robots.txt? Roxana Stingu: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: And we have content on that, on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which can help you learn all of that stuff. Roxana, This has been such a fantastic discussion. I've absolutely loved geeking out with you on this. Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: I, as well. Roxana Stingu: Always. Always for geeking out. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry for going all nerd on you earlier with the William Shatter thing. My bad. Roxana Stingu: It's acceptable. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Roxana Stingu: I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so you're more of a card person, I get it. I understand. Roxana Stingu: Yeah, I am. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, all good. All good there. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you so much for making it so today, and I think- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where do people follow you? Roxana Stingu: I'm on X. I almost called it Twitter. I'm on X. It's just roxanastingu, one word. And same thing on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Roxana Stingu: Thank you very much for having me. This has been fun. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Roxana Stingu: Bye, everybody. Mordy Oberstein: So you might be thinking like, I love Botlogs at this point. They're great, they're fantastic. You might also be thinking, Botlogs? That sounds complicated. How do I set those up? How do I do those? So good news for both you who love Botlogs and you who think Botlogs? That sounds complicated. How do I do that? Because we have our own Botlog reporting for you as we go tool time. So for those lucky folks who are using Wix, you have built in Botlog reports as visuals and they're awesome. Crystal Carter: And you don't have to ask a dev for them. Mordy Oberstein: No. Or connect this or connect that. You don't have to do anything. You just have to click on Analytics, go to SEO and click on Botlog Reports. Crystal Carter: Right. Go to the search bar, type in bot traffic over time, and you'll be able to find whatever you need. It really is genuinely fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Can I say a salty point? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. For those like, "Oh, I like work because I get to control the server." Outside of locking yourselves out, leaving that aside for a minute, to me it's always opportunity costs. It's not either good or bad, it's whatever you need. This is the opportunity cost of not having control over the server and us having control over the server. Because we have control over the server, we automatically create Botlog reports for you because it's our server. Crystal Carter: And we have eyes on lots of different bots and can identify them. So I'm looking at the one from my private website, which to be honest, doesn't get tons and tons of traffic and just sort of does what it does. And on it, I can see the bot for Baidu in the Botlog Reports. Basically if you go to the Wix Botlog Report, and if you want to find out more about this, we have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub by one Mr. George Nguyen, link in show notes, who gets into lots of some of the details there. But the kind of bots that I'll see on my private website are going to be different from the bots that I'll see on say the Wix's SEO Learning Hub. I think we mentioned this in one of the other parts of this podcast as well, they're very different from the bots that Mordy gets on his podcast website, for instance. So my personal website doesn't have a podcast, so I don't get podcast bots on my website, but Mordy's gets tons. Tons of podcast bots. Bots I didn't even know existed. And I think that one of the things that's really interesting about this is that it can help you figure out, like Yandex is a bot that shows up on my site; HubSpot is one that shows up on my site; I've got Google Web Snippet, I've got Facebook, I've got Common Crawler, I've got Baidu. So for instance, if I'm seeing that the Baidu bot, a spider is showing up on my website a lot, guess what? That means that Baidu wants to know who I am. Guess what? That might tell me that maybe I should be investing more in markets where Baidu is a bigger player, because that's telling me that users there are interested in it because Baidu's interested in it. Same with Yandex. Mordy Oberstein: AKA China. Crystal Carter: Right? Same with Yandex and same with some other things as well. DuckDuckGo is another one as well. Someone was asking me about DuckDuckGo a while back and I'm like, "It can be really useful for people who don't want to leave a paper trail when they're online, and this can be really important-" Mordy Oberstein: If your market is criminals, DuckDuckGo might be for you. Crystal Carter: The CBD market, for instance, I think can be a bit more complex. So for instance, I think that Google has different rules around how CBD products are ranked on Google than they are on say, DuckDuckGo for instance. I don't think you're really able to do ads if you're a CBD product, and even if they are fully legal. So for instance, folks like that might see more traffic from DuckDuckGo. And again, that might give you an idea of, oh, actually, maybe we should invest some more time in that. And it's incredibly useful and making them so accessible, as we do in our Botlogs Report, is fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's all that. I mean, all the SEO tools are in there. So you can see like, hey, I'm paying for SEMrush and you're asking to audit my website. How come I'm not seeing any SEMrush on my website? Maybe they're not really auditing. They are. SEMrush will audit you. I'm not saying anything bad. Just an example. The visuals are built in, so you don't have to do any fancy footwork in order to take what's in a chart and to turn into a visual that A, you can share with the client that you could use yourself. And by the way, it's an easy way to check status codes on your website. Like, oh snap, what are people looking for that's pulling up a 404? What are the bots getting this pulling up a 404? Because you can filter by status code. Which pages are they seeing, a reader? Or, and I mentioned this earlier in the show, you could see if the search engines or whatever bot you were looking at are crawling the wrong pages. It's as simple as going to one of the reports and looking at the bar graph that shows which pages whatever bot you selected is crawling. Crystal Carter: Right, and you can also see that by the day. So let's say there was an issue on Tuesday or something and you want to see which pages were affected by that issue that you had on the Tuesday or something. You can go and filter by the one day that it happened and you can see whether or not you saw reduction before or after of that particular crawl rate, or whether or not you've seen bots crawling you less since then, that sort of thing. So you can see it by the date and filtered out by the different response codes and all of that sort of stuff. And the response codes get into details. It's not just 200, it's like 200, 304, 503, 504. It gets into the detail. Mordy Oberstein: So we're trying to say is check out the Botlog Reports in your Wix channel analytics. It's really great information for you. It's really easy. It's really streamlined. So if you are someone who listened to this podcast like, "There's this whole bot thing, but it's also terrifying," don't just go right in. Crystal Carter: Can I also say it's also downloadable as a CSV or for Excel or as an image. So if you, for instance, wanted to demonstrate that, guess what, we did mobile optimization on your site and now we're seeing lot more crawls from Google's mobile bot, you can take a little snapshot from the Botlog, the bot traffic over time report. You can put that in your report, you can get your gold star, maybe get yourself a raise. We- Mordy Oberstein: It is great for reporting. Crystal Carter: We out here helping y'all in these economic times. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Hey, you got to report in order to get the buy-in. You know what else is great at reporting? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is great at reporting. Crystal Carter: How did I not know that that was coming? Mordy Oberstein: It's only been 102 episodes, Crystal. I mean, come on. But who's counting? We are. We're counting. We're counting on Barry to cover this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. I will try to keep it snappier than usual because last week I got a complaint from Barry Schwartz that I droned on and on and on and on and on trying to cover his story that went on and on and on and on and on about Danny Sullivan's take on algorithm updates, the interview that Barry did. So I will try to keep it snappier this week. Barry, I'm so sorry. Anyway, from Barry Schwartz, both articles from Barry, they're both from seoroundtable.com. First up, Google search ranking volatility still heated a week after core-update. Barry wrote that on September 11th. I'm looking at the SEMRush Sensor on September 15th, and it's still high. It was high before the update, it was high during the update and it's been crazy high after the update. Is it all one update? No, but it's bonkers. Barry asked me, actually if this is like an Ask SEMRush... This is the longest period of high or very high volatility they've recorded. I should have known the answer because I actually researched that a while ago and the answer's no, we're not there yet. We need 15 more days of high volatility to break the record. I think that was back in 2022, 2021. I don't remember. I could look at my email. I forgot exactly when it was, but I think it had to do with the product review update, something like that, and there was this crazy volatility forever. So it's not the longest period of rank volatility, high rank volatility we've seen, but it's up there. I would say more, but I'll keep it snappy, Barry. Okay, also from Barry, report half Google AI overviews. You're missing an of. Report half of Google AI overviews links overlap with top search results. This study came from Rich Sanger, a great guy, great SEO, follow him on social media. He partnered up with the Authoritas and they looked at, hey, how often are the organic results, the links there, the URLs there matching what Google is showing the URLs in the AI overviews? Been a bunch of studies on this. They all have different data. What does that mean? I think it means the tools have a hard time tracking this stuff. Take that and, I don't know, do with it what you will. What Rich and Authoritas showed was 46% of the URLs in the AI overviews match up with the top organic results on page one. They actually did something interesting I thought that was cool. They went and clicked through to the related search features, like people also ask, people also search for, related search at the bottom of the page, and they click through and then recalculated to see if any of the URLs on that second SERP also match the AI overview URLs. And the number jumps up to around 64%. I could say more, but I don't. I do want to, but I can't because I don't want to set Barry by going on and on and on covering his stories. Barry, I'm so sorry. To the audience, also sorry, but really I'm just messing. And that's really all I have to say. We'll link to the articles in the show notes. Have a look at them, click through to look at the actual study that Rich did. It's pretty interesting. And I hope I kept it snappier. Snappy News, over and out. I just call Barry all reliable, all dependable. What's it called? That's like a geyser, isn't it? Like all reliable? Crystal Carter: Old Faithful. Mordy Oberstein: Old Faithful. There we go, Barry, aka all faithful. Crystal Carter: There we go. Is he the same age as you? Mordy Oberstein: Is he? Barry? No, Barry's older than me. Crystal Carter: Is he? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll check his Wikipedia page out, see what it says. Does it have his birthday on it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: Don't ask me how I know that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, good. Barry is old, not new. I was going to say like a geyser, he is blowing out a lot of hot air, but that wouldn't be nice. Crystal Carter: No, and to be fair, it's steam, really- Mordy Oberstein: Steam, right. Barry is not an angry person, so he doesn't blow off a lot of steam like a geyser would. There we go. That's good. That's better. There we go. All right, thanks Barry. Moving on from people to people, our follow of the week this week is the one, the only from Lumar, Anne Berlin. Crystal Carter: Anne Berlin is fantastic. She's such a wealth of technical knowledge. She's really active in the women in tech SEO community as well. I did a webinar for Lumar with her a little while back, and it was really, really engaging. So we were talking about technical SEO audits and how you can get into those and why they're really valuable. And she's somebody who's able to understand that really, really well. And I think that in terms of Botlogs, bot traffic, etc, etc, when you're doing your technical SEO audit, it should absolutely be a part of it. And when you're using a tool like the Wix SEO bot traffic over time report or even Lumar's tool, which gets into more detail, you'll learn different things. And one of the things we talked about during that session was how you need to adjust your settings. Lumar has some great detail that you can go into and to how you adjust the settings for your crawl when you're doing your audit to find out which things the bots are looking at, which things people are looking at, which things you should be prioritizing. So shout out to Anne, shout out to the whole Lumar team for some great insights there. Mordy Oberstein: We got their app in the Wix App Market as well. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. Crystal Carter: Did the podcast compute? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Yeah, it computed. Crystal Carter: That's good. So we don't need to control, alt, delete the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm kind of hoping we're moving to a world where bots become more like cyborgs because I don't know, cyborgs are more interesting. You never know what they're going to do. They're kind of unpredictable. Crystal Carter: I saw a TikTok of two ChatGPT-4 or something like the app or something, they were chatting to each other. They were like, "Hi, how can I help you?" And they were like, "Oh no, this is interesting. Oh, that's an interesting thing. I would like to know more about the latest top or what you're interested in." And then someone was like, "Oh yes, I'm interested in quantum computing." And then they had a long conversation about quantum computing. Their opening gamut wasn't like, "Oh, the weather..." Wasn't like, "Oh, let's talk about..." Because obviously robots aren't affected by the weather. But yeah, they jumped straight into quantum computing. It was like, "Oh my gosh, yes, quantum computing-" Mordy Oberstein: Course. Crystal Carter: "... Amazing. My favorite." Mordy Oberstein: And then they got into drinking urine and eating glue right afterwards. But did you see, by the way, I know this is off topic a little bit, and old news by the time this episode comes out, there's a social media platform where you create an avatar, like an AI avatar of yourself, and it talks to other AI avatars of other people? Crystal Carter: Twitter? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, no. That's where you talk to real people who you wish were AI avatars. This is- Crystal Carter: I mean, if we're talking about bots, we got to talk about Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: No, this is like AI talking to AI, but it's social media, which I understand the point of social media is I interact with other people, but now I'm having my avatar interact on my behalf with other avatars. I think it's called Butterfly or something. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure I'm just an old person and I don't get it, but I don't get it. Crystal Carter: It sounds to me a little bit like a Tamagotchi. Mordy Oberstein: That's what. Exactly what it sounds like. Crystal Carter: You put your Tamagotchi in the Tamagotchi land and then they put their Tamagotchi in the Tamagotchi land, and then you just come back and see what happened- Mordy Oberstein: Mine would just die every time. Crystal Carter: Do you know what actually? And maybe I should, if anyone makes this, I should get the rights for the IP because they definitely brought it from me, but that would be a really interesting way to do a dating app, to upgrade a dating app. It's basically you give your avatar loads of personality points that are your personality points, they give their avatar loads of personality points that are their personality parts. You put them in a meta universe and then whoever your little bot happens to find or gravitate towards or whatever, that's your match. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. AI should create dating bots because nothing will go wrong there. The divorce rate will not jump up. It'll be just fine. On that happy marital note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, back next week with the new episode as we dive into the gaps between those who optimize and those who search. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts 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 that we have 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

Can gated content behind a paywall rank? Is there anything you need to be doing to make sure it does? Fear not, because gated content can certainly rank on the SERP. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein explore strategies for ensuring rankings for gated content. They connect with Amalia Fowler, Principal Strategist at Good AF Consulting, to discuss how to ensure gated content is relevant and properly reflects the buyers’ journey (it’s one thing to rank - it’s another thing to convert). Join us as we explore how to do SEO for gated content on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back SEO for gates, paywalls and exclusive content Can gated content behind a paywall rank? Is there anything you need to be doing to make sure it does? Fear not, because gated content can certainly rank on the SERP. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein explore strategies for ensuring rankings for gated content. They connect with Amalia Fowler, Principal Strategist at Good AF Consulting, to discuss how to ensure gated content is relevant and properly reflects the buyers’ journey (it’s one thing to rank - it’s another thing to convert). Join us as we explore how to do SEO for gated content on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 32 | April 5, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:35 This week’s guests Amalia Fowler Amalia is an experienced digital marketing strategist who has previously been dubbed a “PPC Wizard” by someone on Twitter. Her passions include ridding the world of terrible marketing and helping small businesses understand the world of digital marketing. Amalia excels at building great marketing teams, explaining tough marketing concepts and brewing really strong coffee. When she isn’t teaching marketing at college or optimizing PPC accounts, you can find her paddleboarding in the mountain rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest. 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 fabric, the incredible, fantastic... Is she behind a paywall? Is she not behind a paywall? Can you exit a... We don't know, we'll find out. The head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, I'm Crystal Carter. And yes you do. If you pay me five pounds, I'll chat to you, I promise, like $5, rubles, rand, what other currency is acceptable. Mordy Oberstein: That's not a random joke, by the way. Dear audience, you will see why that joke makes sense in a few minutes because otherwise it is completely random. Makes absolutely no sense why I would say that. Crystal Carter: Right. Completely random. But that is why we're here today. We're here to talk about... What are we going to talk about Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Not yet. Crystal Carter: Not yet. It's it exclusive? Mordy Oberstein: You have to first send in your email address and then- Crystal Carter: Oh wait, do we have to like and subscribe? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. There's so many hints of what we're talking about today already. But before we get to that, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where we've added two new reports to our Google Search Console analytics around search console performance over time and search console, average position reporting. Check out both of those reports in addition to the two other reports we already have for you within your Wix analytics, which has absolutely nothing to do with the concept that we're talking about today. Usually, I try to tie them in. But the writing of the outline for this podcast episode came out along with the release of the two reports. So I felt like, let's go with it. Crystal Carter: It's important for all SEO and actually a lot of standard SEO, it also applies to exclusive VIP gated behind a membership subscriber space as well. So there are lots of SEO overlap that you need to pay attention to. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you know what? No, I got to pivot. I got to pivot. Crystal Carter: You got to pivot. Mordy Oberstein: These reports will come mightily in hand if, say you were to track organics performance for, I don't know, gated content. Crystal Carter: For gated content, for content that is behind maybe a login- Mordy Oberstein: Or some other paywall Crystal Carter: Or some sort of lead gen form. That sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. You can track your performance with these analytical reports because today, guess what we're talking about, SEO for content that's behind some sort of gate paywall or other sort of exclusivity that you're trying to use to possibly generate more leads for yourself. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: To be honest, that's why you're collecting those emails. That's not for the fun of it. Crystal Carter: This is it. This is it. And sometimes it's a question of being able to deliver somebody something that maybe is a big file. And so sometimes there's just a way of doing it that way. Mordy Oberstein: Right. There's legitimate reasons other than the lead gen to collect the emails. But now that you have the email. Crystal Carter: I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Right? Now that we're here. We're talking all about SEO and gated content, when to get your content, how to handle the SEO considerations around gated content, and even how ChatGPT and AI writers plays into the gated content equation. Because no podcast episode is safe when we're talking about AI these days. Crystal Carter: Nope. No, the bots are here. Mordy Oberstein: Plus, we'll explore what some gated pages that our ranking well are doing so you can take away some lessons for your own pages. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness out there on social media. So enter your name, company, and email address as episode number 32 of the SERP's Up podcast is now downloading. You don't really need to enter your email address or name or anything. Crystal Carter: No, you don't. Although, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can do that. And then whenever we drop the latest, most exclusive podcast, you can get it. It's not that exclusive at all. We're literally on all of the podcast networks that we're not exclusive. But as soon as it drops, you'll get an email in your inbox, which is a great service that we're happy to provide. Mordy Oberstein: So we're not using it for lead gen, we're using it because legitimately, we need to know where to email the newsletter too. Crystal Carter: So we're going to be talking today about gates, paywalls and exclusive content. And one of the things that I did as soon as I started looking at this topic was to go to the news people, the people who are managing news websites because they have been in this space for longer than anyone. Because one of the things that folks who are looking at news websites will say that is that they had to deal with a big shift because there was one point where the news was essentially where you got a lot of information. And then, with the advent of the internet, lots of people were getting information from lots of places. And so news folks had to find another way to manage their things and to make sure that they can pay their reporters and bills and all that sort of stuff. So there's some fantastic people who are working in the news SEO space. Shout out to Barry Adams. Shout out to Shelby Blackley. Shout out to Jessie Willms over at WTF SEO. Basically, when I was looking at this topic, I find it really fascinating and there's a few things that we can think about. So there's paywalls, and paywalls are not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things that they talk about in WTF SEO is that the New York Times, for instance, was getting a lot of good activity out of their paywall. So they're generating millions of pounds every year based on their paywall because they make very, very good content, for instance. So they're able to charge a little bit of money for that. And so they're not necessarily a bad thing. You do need to manage them correctly. Google has a specific documentation about how you can make sure that you have structured data that supports your paywall content. So for instance, you need to say to Google in declaring your structured data whether or not it's accessible for free. So there's a property within structured data it says is accessible for free. And if it is not, then you say false. And that's something that you should consider when you're thinking about paywalls. And what kind of paywalls are there? Well, there's hard paywalls, which is essentially where you have to subscribe and pay for everything and callers can't access it and other people can't access it unless they either pay you or subscribe or join or whichever. There's soft paywalls where you essentially gate part of your content for a few articles for a month. So the Washington Post for instance, does this where you go onto their website and they're like, "You've got three free articles. There's your one. Thank you very much." Then the next time they're like, "You've got two left," that sort of thing. So that's a soft paywall. And then there's combination paywall where you have a few paywalls that are free, a few pieces of content that are free and some that are gated. This often happens during big events. So for instance, The Financial Times generally gates a lot of their content. But during peak COVID, they had a lot of COVID data and that was freely accessible. This is a really good opportunity to get people to understand your brand and see the robustness of your reporting. So The Financial Times, their COVID reporting was really, really good. And so that made me think, well, maybe it is worth paying for that sort of thing. I didn't, but I could. The thing that's important to think about is if you were trying to rank hard paywalls, all right, no. If you have an audience that is engaged and an audience that is your subscriber list and an audience that you are giving exclusive, exclusive content, then cool, go through the hard paywall. But if you're expecting to rank, then Google's not calling your site and other folks aren't being able to see it. One of the other challenges that a lot of people have discussed, this is something that Barry Adams and WTF SEO talked about and a few other folks talk about, is one of the things that's a challenge for paywall content is pogo sticking. So people will go to say, The New York Times, or they'll go to a website that has a paywall and they'll go, "I'm interested in this." And then they go, "Oh, I have to pay for it?" And then they go back to the SERP. So that's something that you have to think about. And then the other thing you have to think about is that you might get fewer backlinks . And I looked at this. So thinking about news, again, I compared The New York Times to The Guardian, for instance. The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, they just say, "Please, would you contribute? Would you mind, so kindly?" And for instance, The New York Times has all a lot more organic traffic overall, and they have a lot more keywords overall. But The Guardian has 1.6 billion backlinks and the New York Times has, according to Semrush, has 967 million backlinks. And so that a thing to consider as well. Mordy Oberstein: Also, qualify your traffic data. Just because they're there, doesn't mean... They might have just came and left. Crystal Carter: Also, I think that you'll want to think about the value of that traffic. So if you have subscribed to traffic, then that value is potentially going to be more. So this is something to think about. So then we have gated content, general gated content. And this is something that folks who are big into their content marketing will use very strategically in order to add real deep value to their users and to engage their audience. And it's nice to think of this as part of your funnel. So I know that Semrush has some of their webinars where you have to log in, you give them their email address, they give you the webinar link, you give them one thing. And sometimes this is also a way to sort of satisfy content that's on school domains. So for instance, if you have your webinars hosted on a webinar platform and you have your website on your main platform, then it might be that you gate it so that you can direct them to the landing page. That's the appropriate page in a way that you're able to track. Also, it's a way for you to build in your funnel so that somebody maybe gets one, you get their email and you're able to send them resources and then you're able to add more value on top of that. Gated content is great for things like white papers, for research, for eBooks, for media, webinars and things like that. And for those ones, you're going to want to optimize your landing page for instance. And yeah, it's a really interesting topic. A lot of people have written about it and it's something that I think is really fascinating. Mordy Oberstein: It's really interesting because you have so many things going. On the news side, the news side's a little bit different than your typical gated content because it's gated, let's say The New York Times, but Google needs to be able to crawl it and then index it. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Its own thing. Crystal Carter: Barry Adams wrote a great article recently called Best Practices for Paywalls and SEOs, and he talks a lot about that. So essentially, the bot needs to have free access in order to be able to call it and see the content appropriately. And there's lots of other things that news sites do. They have like RSS set up so that they're able to submit their content to Google in a certain way so that Google can read it that way as well. And there's lots of other things that they do there. But if you really want to get into the details, I cannot recommend enough Barry's article, Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO. There's also the article, WTF SEO, they have two articles on new SEO paywall strategies. They have a part one and a part two where they go into it as well and they talk about lots of different strategies. It's really fascinating and it's something that we might see a little bit more of. I think you hinted at this a little bit, but I think it's something that people might want to be considering when we're thinking about a space where the nature of content is changing because of the AI space. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's just dive into that I guess at this point, because that's a point you illuminated to me about. I thought it was a great point that AI writers, whatever you want, the ChatGPTs of the world are built on scraping content and then spitting that out. And if you don't want to lend your voice to that, if everybody else is doing it and I don't do it, am I then left out of the equation or do I say, "Do I not be part of this," and just differentiate myself? That is a very top level brand content strategy, SEO everything kind of question. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And there's no simple answer to that, but one of the things you might want to consider is, you know what? Let's not let them crawl this. Crystal Carter: So a lot of the chatGPT for instance, is using Common Crawl as one of their data sources, for instance. And I had a look in web archive and you look at web archive and you see the common crawls that they've done, it doubled between 2020 and 2021. And chatGPT, their data has taken extensively up till 2021. So there has been an influx in data coming from then. And what we're seeing with some of the AI image generators, for instance, they're scraping Getty Images and we can tell because when they generate images, it still has the Getty Image watermark on it. So a company like Getty Images for instance, might think, well, we might potentially want to block that crawler. But then when we have AI search, if you think about new Bing, if you think about Google's proposed Bard situation, then it might be that you're less visible on those search engines. So I think that your brand point is really important because if you think about someone like The New York Times, they have an established name, they have an established brand and they can say, "Hey, subscribe to us, you're going to get really good stuff. It's going to be really good." And a lot of people from doing this with Patreon and YouTube and stuff because they're like, this takes me a lot of time and effort to create. If you want it, pay me a fiver a month and I'll give you really great content and you'll enjoy it. And lots of people make a living out of that, and lots of people make great content out of that. So I think it's something lots of people should be considering of lots of different business styles. Mordy Oberstein: The New York Times is literally a great example. I was at Semrush's Global Marketing Day and one of the people I was on a panel with, she was actually presenting, was from the New York Times. And she was going through their strategy around they want to show the value how complicated and hard it is to get good news and get good reporting. What you have to do as a reporter to be accurate, to be novel, to get this information and that because it's so hard, that's not something that should be free necessarily, you should pay for. And that's a very much a brand decision for them. And that's something where I think your SEO value may contradict the brand if you're now not going to show up when Bing does an AI chat, now you're not going to be cited by Bing like, okay, because as a brand, don't care. Crystal Carter: It's a very interesting business proposition because, and I think that this is why a lot of folks are saying that a combination paywall or a combination of gated and free stuff works really well. So if you think its social media, there's something that people talk about. They talk about a thirst trap, which is essentially where you have a celebrity or something and they generally post things about, "Hey, look at me, I'm on set" or whatever. And then every now and then they post an amazing picture where they're just looking very sultry or they're giving it blue steel or whatever. And people call it a thirst trap. Essentially, what you'll need to do is have a few things that are maybe a pillar post or maybe a high traffic thing or something that gets a lot of attention on search. And then maybe be more selective about the kinds of content that you keep back for your team. And I think this is something that we see with newsletters. Newsletters is something that's changing as well. There's people who are like, you can pay to be on my newsletter. And people pay to get a high quality newsletter. And I think that in a space where we're going to see a high volume of content coming from ChatGPT, because literally I could create something without even typing. I could talk into my phone and say, "Make me an article about something," and then it could spit something out. And I think in a space where we're seeing a lot of volume, quality is going to be equality based on brand recognition, based on entity, based on trust, is going to be a big difference. And I think that people will be interested in potentially paying for that, potentially being in a community where that's available. And in order to manage that, we'll have to think more strategically about it. And I think that people who are building up their mailing lists are going to be more resilient to that. People who are building up their communities are going to be more resilient to that going forward. Mordy Oberstein: And I think, by the way, leaving the gated side of it alone for just one second, in an AI era, one of the things that's going to be important is being recognized as someone with differentiated content. Meaning if there's a mass influx of generic-ish kind of content out there, you as a brand being known when your site shows up on the SERP and there's three other sites with you above the fold, you might think, well, I'm not ranking number one, I'm not ranking number two, I'm number three or four. But in a world where that brand differentiation is going to be a thing, people might skip over one or two because they know that's whatever, but you are known for your great content and then click. It's going to become, if I can make a prediction, that service association two brands as having great content is going to become a thing going forward. And I want to hit back to something you mentioned before about having different forms of content is at times putting out the blog post or the articles and then at time is doing a gated piece. One thing that I think works really well, and I think you'll see companies, Semrush does this lot, where they'll do a state of search. Remember I wrote a state of search for them 2022. And what we did was we put out a few sections that we thought were really interesting and that was free. And it was a regular blog post. It wasn't thin, it was a good couple of pages. Or if you wanted to really dive into the whole thing, then you go behind the paywall. So you got the best of both worlds. You got the organic whatever out of it, juice for lack of a better word, but you also got that ability to show up behind a paywall to get the leads, which is the other part of it. Crystal Carter: Right. And this is something that you see a lot of people do with extract. So I used to do a lot of work with the food industry, so you'd have somebody who'd written them an amazing book. I know that Mordy is apparently the chef du jour on the General Tso's chicken. And so let's say he's got his book on how to make these amazing meals, what you would do is you'd have one recipe that you feature in one magazine and you say, "This is an extract from this book." And it's that sort of thing. This is a great recipe. And it's just in the same way that you have singles that you released from your album and then you have the whole album. You want to make sure that... I say as if I released an album. I'm like, yeah, last week. Mordy Oberstein: You have the good songs and the crap songs. Crystal Carter: I didn't say it. Mordy Oberstein: No, but sometimes as you won the whole album, you want to feel the album. I really like to feel the album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I always like to feel the album. Crystal Carter: What's that Marvin Gaye song, the album, what's going on? It's actually pretty much a whole album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's themed albums like The Who's Quadrophenia is a whole theme of an album. Crystal Carter: It's a whole album. If you listen to one at a time, you don't get the same experiences if you listen to the whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, this is true. I'm being facetious. Crystal Carter: Music podcast later. One thing that I think people should be considering now in the AI era is thinking about whether or not you have the kind of content that people would be willing to pay for. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: If you needed to, is your content good enough Where if you were like, "I'm charging for this now," and people would be like, "Yeah, okay." Mordy Oberstein: That's a great sniff test. That's a great sniff test. Crystal Carter: Yeah, would you pay for this? It's like, yeah, I would, this is really good. I would like. And I've seen people who've had things that they, or communities or something they have and they're like, "I'm putting buy me a coffee thing on that." And I'm like, yeah, I will buy you a coffee because I value this so much that I want to make sure that you're able to continue making this content for me because I really, really value it. I think it's really good. Mordy Oberstein: We might end up turning the engine on its head a little bit from going from volume to focus audience, but it's a whole different conversation for a different time. One thing I do want to bring up really quickly is that gated content or areas that are segmented off without having immediate access apply more often than you think. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So there's a lot of pages, forums, for example are like this, membership. So you may not realize, we're talking about gated content. I don't have any gated content, I don't have any blog posts or eBooks or whatever. But there could be many pages on your website that if you started thinking about, wait a second, they actually are gated. I didn't even realize it. Crystal Carter: Right. Wix has a tool that allows you, if somebody wants to comment on your blog, you can make it- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's what I was thinking. Crystal Carter: ... That they're a member. And this has benefits for a couple of reasons. So this means that you'll have less spam. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say keep the riffraff out. Crystal Carter: Right. So it means you'll have less spam in your comments because spam in your comments can bring down the quality of your content. For instance, it also means that you are able to engage your mailing list, for instance. So it means that if you open up your comments and that people have to subscribe or whatever in order to comment, then that means you're going to be on a mailing list just from people being able to comment. I've seen content which has very little SEO optimization on the actual page itself, but is ranking for hundreds of keywords because it has a very engaged comment section, like a recipe site in particular that I know, because it's like, "Best recipe ever," in the comments, like seven times. And that's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: Don't go to your recipe now and start leaving comments for yourself. Please don't do that. Crystal Carter: SEOs are going to SEO, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, just had to say that. Now since you're talking about using gated content to get email addresses to get leads, we thought it may make sense to offer you some tips about how to do that most effectively. And to do that, we brought Amalia Fowler over and she's going to talk to us now about how to get max value, even max leads out of gated content. Amalia Fowler: Gated content. It's one of those things people think is really easy to do, but so many things can go wrong. And this is especially true if you're not paying attention to the little things that matter. And a lot of what matters actually happens before the user even accesses the content itself. One of the first ways to get maximum value out of gated content is to make sure that you not only know who you're speaking to, but also where they are in their user journey. What content is going to appeal to them? What pain point are you helping them overcome? What motivation are you tapping into and how does everything you are putting together speak to that, but also fit into the larger user journey? Once you know who you're speaking to, you've got to make sure that your value proposition is clear. If I cannot immediately understand what I am going to receive for giving you my information, then you're not going to get me to fill out a form. I need some incentive. This is because filling out a form is an information exchange. One sentence that I've heard, and I don't know who said it originally, is that information is the currency of the internet. And I find this to be so true. I know, the average user knows, that a business is going to get value from my information, from my name or from my email. So the value that they're offering in return has to be proportional. The more a business wants from someone, the more they have to give in return. This is especially true if you're going to ask for a phone number and if you've made that a mandatory field and you don't want to fake number in there, you have got to make the gated content worth the person's while of giving you that level of information. After all of that, finally, the content itself needs to be super high quality and deliver on your promise. If it's not high quality, why is it gated? It should be relevant, clear, actionable, unique, and much like the content we write on blogs or on webpages, it also needs to solve a problem, that initial problem that you've understood from understanding your audience. The risks are higher with gated content than with content that users access for free because they've given you their information and the law of reciprocity dictates that they get something of value in return. So if somebody doesn't feel like they've received value from the content or submitting their information was a waste of time, then you've probably lost them at a point in the journey where you really want to be nurturing them. To get maximum value from your gated content, you've got to make sure that you know who you're speaking to, your value proposition is clear, that your form asks for proportional information and that the content is actionable, unique and relevant to the user. This is how you get somebody going, "Oh man, that was really worth it," as opposed to going, "Oh crap, now I need to change my phone number." Mordy Oberstein: That last line is gold. Amalia Fowler: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Gold. When you're putting something behind a gate and people are entering their personal information, i.e. their email address and their name, you feel vulnerable as a person. And now you're in a very precarious spot as a brand because the goal is not to get the email address. I think people think, got my email, I have succeeded. The goal is to use that email address effectively. So now you have the email address. Now you're going to email them all about your product and your newsletter or whatever you're going to email them about and they see your brand, like those SOBs, those are the people I gave them my... How do I get out? I don't want nothing to do with them, which is not what you want, not what you want. Crystal Carter: It's not what you want, it's not what you want. And she's like, you got to change your phone number. This is the thing. If I gave my email address, I don't want to give it to somebody who I trust. It's about trust. If you're gating the content and you're telling me that this content is gated, it needs to be good. Like she says like, oh my gosh, if it's not good, why is it gated? Facts, big facts. And I think that nobody wants to get onto an email list for a bunch of junk. However, if you get onto someone's mailing list and they're sending you good stuff, good quality things like, "Hey, we think this will help you. Hey, we think this is good. Hey, you asked for this ebook. We also have this other thing that you might be interested in," or "Because you signed up for this webinar, we also have this other thing you might be interested in." That's great. Like you said, it's not about getting the email address, it's about having the opportunity to build a relationship. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, thank you. Crystal Carter: And what she was saying was that it's high risk because if you don't deliver, then yeah, you can burn that bridge and that's awful. You don't want to do that. So you want to make sure that yeah, it's good quality when you gate something and it's good quality when you're creating it. I remember working with somebody who was a client and they were really into, look, get this brochure downloaded. The brochure was six pages and had very little stuff and they were like, "How come no one's downloading the brochure?" I was like, "It's not a good brochure." And also, they wanted a phone number for it. And I think that's something to remember as well. Be careful with the data that you're asking for. There's no reason for them to ask for a phone number for you to download a PDF. None. And yet, they were trying to do this. And I was like, "Guys, no, don't do that. Ask for what you need." I've had it before where people are like, "What's your first name and what was your dog's name?" Mordy Oberstein: You don't need any of that. Why do you need to know any of that? It's super annoying. Super annoying. And also, be careful. They read it. It's an amazing asset you created and they love you now, and they gave you the email address and they're glad, and then they get 400 emails from you the next day. It's a relationship, everything is all part of the funnel. You can't be good at one spot, you need to be good at all of the spots. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's like if somebody opens the gate to your house and you welcome them in, you don't want to. . , you welcome them. Mordy Oberstein: They were a great dinner guest for the first course. Once the dessert came out, they were destroying everything, throwing plates and all sorts of whatnot. So thank you, Amalia. Look for Amalia out in there on Twitter @AmaliaEFowler. That's A-M-A-L-I-A-E-F-O-W-L-E-R. We'll link to that in the show notes. And big shout out to RicketyRoo, where she's a senior PPC manager. So good folks over there, the RicketyRoo agency, Blake, Amanda, a lot of good folks over there. All right. Now, there are plenty of sites or plenty of pages rather, that have some great gated content that rank well. But we thought, well, even more great reason to go have a look at what's ranking that is behind the gate and look why is that ranking, even though it's behind a gate or what's happening there and what's not happening there, and what could we learn for ourselves and our own gated content. So welcome to the gated version From the Top of the SERP. Just kidding, again, it's not actually gated. Crystal Carter: No. You don't have to give us your email in order to read this part of.. Read? Listen to this part of- Mordy Oberstein: Listen. Or you could read it, I guess. We have a transcript on the- Crystal Carter: There's a transcript because we like to add value for our users. Mordy Oberstein: See? And that's not behind a gate either. Only the newsletter is behind the gate. But again, how are we going to email it to you- Crystal Carter: If we don't have your email? Mordy Oberstein: We don't have your email address. We're not prophets. Crystal Carter: We like to do combinations. We have the complete guide Wix SEO, as written by one Mordy Oberstein. And if you go to that website, you can have it as a webpage, or you can enter your email and we'll email it to you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And you can download it and do that thing that you do with whatever you download. So there's a bunch of keywords we were looking at, that bring up gated content. For example, I was looking at state of marketing reports. So marketing reports about the state of marketing. And the second result is from HubSpot, and it's gated. And interesting by the way, the result after that is Semrush. They have a state of content marketing 2023. And that used to be behind a gate. And that's an interesting strategy by the way. For the first, let's say month or so, I don't remember the exact time, they had it behind a gate or they had a very limited version that was not gated. And then they had the full version that was gated. And then eventually, after that... which makes so much sense because after a while, it's not about the leads at that point, it's about the ranking. So switch it up. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: And now the whole thing is there and you can download it if you want to. But you don't have to, you can read the whole thing. So that's one cool strategy. And the HubSpot page is you just have to download the thing. It's a data marketing report. It's a little outdated, Google, some 2022. But okay, leave that aside. What they do is they have a little paragraph about the content and then they have download the free report. What I would say with them is they're known for this kind of thing and a lot of that topical authority and links back into them ranking for this particular keyword. Crystal Carter: They're trusted for what they're known for. So people know, hey, if I give them my email address, they're not going to spam me with a bunch of stuff or any of the things that they do send me are probably going to be relevant to the thing that I'm interested in and it's not a big deal. I know where they are. I can find the information again, et cetera, et cetera. So these are a prime example of... And then also these, again, Amalia talked about the funnel. These are teams that have a marketing funnel that includes the data content as part of the funnel, or they're using it strategically to support that funnel. Because sometimes it might be that if you have something that's maybe a high ticket item that maybe you're not going to get a lot of people who are buying that 7,000 pound or $7,000 thing all the time, but you might get people who want to know about it, for instance. So if you had a luxury car or something that had a special kind of engine, you might have somebody who wants to know more about those kinds of engines, like a USP. And it might be that you can have a gated piece of content or the state of electric vehicles, for instance, that sort of thing. And that will give you potential leads. And you might not even expect to see a big return on it straight away, but it's about building trust in the long term. So it's interesting to see that ready for that and building their relationships. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, one of the things that they have, by the way, you start to fill out your name and whatever, that they have a little percentage completed icon so that you're not like, "Oh my God, how much more information do I have to give to get this." But again, there's a lot of things you can do. You can still rank and be behind a gate. It is possible. I know you were looking for a bunch of keywords also. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So one of the ones I found, we talked a lot about the New York Times. One of the things I found, and this goes back to what you were saying about how sometimes you think about gated content, but not everything we think of gated content is a hard gate or whatever. So cooking.nytimes.com is a recipe website. They have one piece of content called old fashioned beef stew, and it ranks for 400 number one keywords according to Semrush, for instance. So they rank for beef stew. According to Semrush, they're getting 27,000 bit's traffic every month from that. They rank for beef stew recipe, for instance. And if you go into their website, then if they have the article, but if you want to continue reading the article, you have to log in. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's another great strategy. Crystal Carter: Right. So the thing that's interesting about this is that this is also dealing with some of the changes that we're seeing around the way the web is. The web is becoming a lot less anonymous. And so if you log in, then the website will be able to track the analytics because when you log in, you're also agreeing to certain analytic conditions, like cookies, et cetera, et cetera. And we're moving away from being able to just put cookies on everything, track whatever we like, any honest person. We're moving away from that. And so having content, any sort of, you have to log in first space allows a brand to get permission from that person in order to track the activity on the website, which sometimes is people being cheeky. Sometimes it's people being like, "I'm going to follow you around so that can sell you this lawnmower 25 times," even though you already bought the lawnmower. Oh my gosh, sometimes it's those people. But sometimes it's also just a case of making sure that you're able to make content that the people that are coming to your website are actually... So if you're seeing that lots of people are going to that beach, maybe you should make more about that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's a great point by the web itself is becoming a little bit more less anonymous for a variety of reasons. I think users want that. I think obviously, the websites want it because the state of analytics is just, the whole reason there's a GA4 is because of this. And again, you need to make sure that when you're doing this sort of thing where you're having a login that you let Google know this is how the content is accessed. So you have structured data, is accessible for free kind of thing. You need to let them know what this content is so that they know how to handle the content and they can make sure they can actually crawl and read the content. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you do that well, as this piece of content is doing, like I said, they're ranking for hundreds of keywords, best recipe for beef stew. So they're not suffering by managing their content. Mordy Oberstein: That is the moral of this story. You do not need to suffer just because you have decided to put your content behind some kind of gate. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: If you're taking anything away from this segment, you can absolutely do this. Crystal Carter: You can absolutely do this. Mordy Oberstein: There are many ways. Crystal Carter: There are many ways, and there's people who can support you. As I said, the space with news publishers, they're doing amazing stuff in this space, a great place to start. And you can experiment really, really easily. So for instance, like I said, Wix has a membership space which will allow you to gate some things and gate other things, allow you to put a price tag on some things. And it can also do it with certain tools as well. So it might be that you have, for instance, there's certain courses as well that you can add a paywall to, and you can use certain tools to help you do that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: A course is another great case of you're going to have gated content, but you want to rank, like I have a free course on this, or you want to make sure that you rank for that. And again, I think with gated content kind of behind a paywall, you can get creative with how you go about doing this, what you show, when you show it, how you change it, what you're asking for. You can get really, really creative with all this stuff. Crystal Carter: One of the things that news publishers do a lot, particularly if you have a hard paywall, or not necessarily a hard paywall, but maybe a free paywall or something like that, is it makes the headline that much more important. You need to lure people in. Mordy Oberstein: Don't go too crazy. Crystal Carter: Don't go too crazy, but you need to make sure that you're making it seem enticing. The telegraph always trends on Twitter for different things and then like, that's interesting. And then I click it and they're like, "You have to pay to be on the telegraph." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh." So your content distribution strategy should also help you to build your brand in order to increase the possibility that people are more likely to pay for whatever it is you're offering. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of news publishers who are not behind a paywall, most of the SEO news publishers are not behind a paywall. In fact, if you were to put it behind a paywall, that would probably be a very bad idea because all of the great news publishers are not behind a paywall. So think about what your competitors are doing when you're putting your content behind a paywall. Because if you're going to get the same thing and you don't have to enter an email address, I'm just going to do that. So here's this week's snappiest of SEO news from all the SEO news sites that are not behind a paywall. Okay, now it's time to panic. Just kidding, just kidding. The March, 2023 core update is now complete for are some of the data that the folks over at Semrush had me review, the update was far more impactful than the previous core update back in September, 2022. I'll link to Barry Schwartz's full write up over at Search Engine Land in the show notes. Now, here's a fascinating one. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land again, Google Maps can attack fake phone numbers and photos and remove them. So when the evildoers of the web known as spammers throw their phone number onto a user contributed photo, Google said they can tell and remove it. The question of is this enough to fight spam, which Barry raises in his article is always a loaded one when it comes to local. Just the other day, Jason Brown showed how spammers are using ChatGPT to create fake reviews. Bet you didn't see that coming. I can't even. Speaking of the great AI in the sky, Bard's team is getting beefed up. Per reports, Google is pulling folks from the Google Assistant division to work on Bard. I always think it's fascinating who Google pulls over for different projects. Not that I know the entire roster over at Google, by heart. I'm into Google, but they're not the Yankees. But it's more interesting to see what types of folks Google is moving over from what team. So for example, the VP of Google's e-com efforts got pulled into the Bard team, right? Fascinating. Some kind of e-com element coming to Bard, possibly. Who knows? Anyway, you can see the full writeup from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal in the show notes. And finally, also from the great Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Bing Chat, they feature ads shaking up the ad free experience. Oh no, right? No, wrong. Good thing. What? It means Bing is focusing on having clicks from its AI experience. You can't run ads and then not have people click. No one will run an ad with you. So ads means focus on clicks, as crazy and ironic as that sounds. It's really healthy for the web, my experience or my opinion rather, and completely ironic again when you think about it, Bing by the way, is I think very publisher focused with its AI experience. Matt reports that they're thinking about a hover experience from the AI chat for the sighted links showing more links from that website. I really do think Bing looks at the AI chat experience as an accent to, not replacement of websites. And I think Bing will be one of the forces out there to force other search engines to think the same way. And with that, that is the Snappiest of SEO news. Wasn't it great to get that SEO content that wasn't behind a paywall? What an inappropriate time to have a paywall. Crystal Carter: That would be inappropriate. Mordy Oberstein: It would be really inappropriate. Crystal Carter: Inappropriate. Although, there are definitely some people who have unique insights. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. So for example, you can super follow Barry Schwartz on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And Marie Haynes has two versions of her newsletter, for instance. So she has one that gives you the top level and then they have another one that adds a lot more detail and a lot more nuance and a lot more information. And that sets up premium pay list. Mordy Oberstein: So yes, there is SEO news out there that is behind a gate that is worth paying for. I don't personally super follow Barry, but if I were to, I probably would be very satisfied just knowing Barry. So I recommend super following Barry. Hear that Barry? Super follow. Send Barry your sheckles. Crystal Carter: So you're going to super follow Barry? Mordy Oberstein: What I'm doing now is I want to see if Barry's really listening this far into the episode. Crystal Carter: Okay. We'll see if he's listening because yeah, Barry is an absolute legend. Mordy Oberstein: Barry's an international treasure. Crystal Carter: Indeed. He's coming to London. Mordy Oberstein: He's coming to London. I was shocked. Crystal Carter: I know. He's coming to London. Mordy Oberstein: If you don't know who we're talking about, Barry Schwartz, who almost all the SEO news articles that we do on this show come from Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: All the SEO news comes from Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: He's written something like 30,000, 40,000 SEO news articles. So it's incredible. Anyway, so as time ebbs away on us this week, Crystal, who should we be following for more SEO awesomeness? Crystal Carter: I'm going to throw an international follow in for this week. So this is a follow from someone called, please forgive me if I've mispronounced your name, but Antoine Eripret. It's a French name, so it might be Eripret. Who wrote a really great thread on gated content and SEO. I think he's originally French speaking, but it says that he lives in Spain. And he wrote a really great thread all about gated content and SEO and about interstitials and all of these sort of technical things. And he talks in this thread a lot about the sort of accessible for free things that you need to do and a lot about some of the other elements that you can add in to see. So he gets into some of the technical details of paywall content. And he generally shares great content. He's an SEO for something called Liligo, and he shares some great content. He's got a good follower base of folks and he is really interested and curious about SEO topics. So yeah, follow him. Although I believe he's French speaking, he publishes lots of things in English as well. So yeah, just a shout out to an international SEO person. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So if you're looking to follow, @antoineripret over on Twitter, link to it in the show notes and that'll do it for us this week. Crystal Carter: That's it. Did you get your email address? Did you send me your email address? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. But please don't spam me, I will unsubscribe. If only you could unsubscribe from people emailing you. Crystal Carter: Sad about right now to spam your email address or to spam your email with lots of random things. I can't decide what I should spam your email about. Maybe about spam. Maybe I should just send you literal pictures of spam over and over again. Mordy Oberstein: That doesn't sound kosher to me. 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 what you need to know if you want to go enterprise SEO. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review over at iTunes, and or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Amalia Fowler Barry Adams Shelby Blackley Jessie Willms Antoine Eripret Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Polemic Digital WTFSEO Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO Guide to Wix SEO The Searchlight Newsletter News : How the March 2023 Google core update compared to previous core updates Google Maps can detect fake phone numbers in photos and remove them Google Restructures Company To Prioritize Bard AI Chatbot Bing Chat To Feature Ads, Shaking Up The Ad-Free Experience Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Amalia Fowler Barry Adams Shelby Blackley Jessie Willms Antoine Eripret Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Polemic Digital WTFSEO Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO Guide to Wix SEO The Searchlight Newsletter News : How the March 2023 Google core update compared to previous core updates Google Maps can detect fake phone numbers in photos and remove them Google Restructures Company To Prioritize Bard AI Chatbot Bing Chat To Feature Ads, Shaking Up The Ad-Free Experience 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 fabric, the incredible, fantastic... Is she behind a paywall? Is she not behind a paywall? Can you exit a... We don't know, we'll find out. The head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, I'm Crystal Carter. And yes you do. If you pay me five pounds, I'll chat to you, I promise, like $5, rubles, rand, what other currency is acceptable. Mordy Oberstein: That's not a random joke, by the way. Dear audience, you will see why that joke makes sense in a few minutes because otherwise it is completely random. Makes absolutely no sense why I would say that. Crystal Carter: Right. Completely random. But that is why we're here today. We're here to talk about... What are we going to talk about Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Not yet. Crystal Carter: Not yet. It's it exclusive? Mordy Oberstein: You have to first send in your email address and then- Crystal Carter: Oh wait, do we have to like and subscribe? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. There's so many hints of what we're talking about today already. But before we get to that, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where we've added two new reports to our Google Search Console analytics around search console performance over time and search console, average position reporting. Check out both of those reports in addition to the two other reports we already have for you within your Wix analytics, which has absolutely nothing to do with the concept that we're talking about today. Usually, I try to tie them in. But the writing of the outline for this podcast episode came out along with the release of the two reports. So I felt like, let's go with it. Crystal Carter: It's important for all SEO and actually a lot of standard SEO, it also applies to exclusive VIP gated behind a membership subscriber space as well. So there are lots of SEO overlap that you need to pay attention to. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you know what? No, I got to pivot. I got to pivot. Crystal Carter: You got to pivot. Mordy Oberstein: These reports will come mightily in hand if, say you were to track organics performance for, I don't know, gated content. Crystal Carter: For gated content, for content that is behind maybe a login- Mordy Oberstein: Or some other paywall Crystal Carter: Or some sort of lead gen form. That sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. You can track your performance with these analytical reports because today, guess what we're talking about, SEO for content that's behind some sort of gate paywall or other sort of exclusivity that you're trying to use to possibly generate more leads for yourself. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: To be honest, that's why you're collecting those emails. That's not for the fun of it. Crystal Carter: This is it. This is it. And sometimes it's a question of being able to deliver somebody something that maybe is a big file. And so sometimes there's just a way of doing it that way. Mordy Oberstein: Right. There's legitimate reasons other than the lead gen to collect the emails. But now that you have the email. Crystal Carter: I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Right? Now that we're here. We're talking all about SEO and gated content, when to get your content, how to handle the SEO considerations around gated content, and even how ChatGPT and AI writers plays into the gated content equation. Because no podcast episode is safe when we're talking about AI these days. Crystal Carter: Nope. No, the bots are here. Mordy Oberstein: Plus, we'll explore what some gated pages that our ranking well are doing so you can take away some lessons for your own pages. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness out there on social media. So enter your name, company, and email address as episode number 32 of the SERP's Up podcast is now downloading. You don't really need to enter your email address or name or anything. Crystal Carter: No, you don't. Although, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can do that. And then whenever we drop the latest, most exclusive podcast, you can get it. It's not that exclusive at all. We're literally on all of the podcast networks that we're not exclusive. But as soon as it drops, you'll get an email in your inbox, which is a great service that we're happy to provide. Mordy Oberstein: So we're not using it for lead gen, we're using it because legitimately, we need to know where to email the newsletter too. Crystal Carter: So we're going to be talking today about gates, paywalls and exclusive content. And one of the things that I did as soon as I started looking at this topic was to go to the news people, the people who are managing news websites because they have been in this space for longer than anyone. Because one of the things that folks who are looking at news websites will say that is that they had to deal with a big shift because there was one point where the news was essentially where you got a lot of information. And then, with the advent of the internet, lots of people were getting information from lots of places. And so news folks had to find another way to manage their things and to make sure that they can pay their reporters and bills and all that sort of stuff. So there's some fantastic people who are working in the news SEO space. Shout out to Barry Adams. Shout out to Shelby Blackley. Shout out to Jessie Willms over at WTF SEO. Basically, when I was looking at this topic, I find it really fascinating and there's a few things that we can think about. So there's paywalls, and paywalls are not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things that they talk about in WTF SEO is that the New York Times, for instance, was getting a lot of good activity out of their paywall. So they're generating millions of pounds every year based on their paywall because they make very, very good content, for instance. So they're able to charge a little bit of money for that. And so they're not necessarily a bad thing. You do need to manage them correctly. Google has a specific documentation about how you can make sure that you have structured data that supports your paywall content. So for instance, you need to say to Google in declaring your structured data whether or not it's accessible for free. So there's a property within structured data it says is accessible for free. And if it is not, then you say false. And that's something that you should consider when you're thinking about paywalls. And what kind of paywalls are there? Well, there's hard paywalls, which is essentially where you have to subscribe and pay for everything and callers can't access it and other people can't access it unless they either pay you or subscribe or join or whichever. There's soft paywalls where you essentially gate part of your content for a few articles for a month. So the Washington Post for instance, does this where you go onto their website and they're like, "You've got three free articles. There's your one. Thank you very much." Then the next time they're like, "You've got two left," that sort of thing. So that's a soft paywall. And then there's combination paywall where you have a few paywalls that are free, a few pieces of content that are free and some that are gated. This often happens during big events. So for instance, The Financial Times generally gates a lot of their content. But during peak COVID, they had a lot of COVID data and that was freely accessible. This is a really good opportunity to get people to understand your brand and see the robustness of your reporting. So The Financial Times, their COVID reporting was really, really good. And so that made me think, well, maybe it is worth paying for that sort of thing. I didn't, but I could. The thing that's important to think about is if you were trying to rank hard paywalls, all right, no. If you have an audience that is engaged and an audience that is your subscriber list and an audience that you are giving exclusive, exclusive content, then cool, go through the hard paywall. But if you're expecting to rank, then Google's not calling your site and other folks aren't being able to see it. One of the other challenges that a lot of people have discussed, this is something that Barry Adams and WTF SEO talked about and a few other folks talk about, is one of the things that's a challenge for paywall content is pogo sticking. So people will go to say, The New York Times, or they'll go to a website that has a paywall and they'll go, "I'm interested in this." And then they go, "Oh, I have to pay for it?" And then they go back to the SERP. So that's something that you have to think about. And then the other thing you have to think about is that you might get fewer backlinks . And I looked at this. So thinking about news, again, I compared The New York Times to The Guardian, for instance. The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, they just say, "Please, would you contribute? Would you mind, so kindly?" And for instance, The New York Times has all a lot more organic traffic overall, and they have a lot more keywords overall. But The Guardian has 1.6 billion backlinks and the New York Times has, according to Semrush, has 967 million backlinks. And so that a thing to consider as well. Mordy Oberstein: Also, qualify your traffic data. Just because they're there, doesn't mean... They might have just came and left. Crystal Carter: Also, I think that you'll want to think about the value of that traffic. So if you have subscribed to traffic, then that value is potentially going to be more. So this is something to think about. So then we have gated content, general gated content. And this is something that folks who are big into their content marketing will use very strategically in order to add real deep value to their users and to engage their audience. And it's nice to think of this as part of your funnel. So I know that Semrush has some of their webinars where you have to log in, you give them their email address, they give you the webinar link, you give them one thing. And sometimes this is also a way to sort of satisfy content that's on school domains. So for instance, if you have your webinars hosted on a webinar platform and you have your website on your main platform, then it might be that you gate it so that you can direct them to the landing page. That's the appropriate page in a way that you're able to track. Also, it's a way for you to build in your funnel so that somebody maybe gets one, you get their email and you're able to send them resources and then you're able to add more value on top of that. Gated content is great for things like white papers, for research, for eBooks, for media, webinars and things like that. And for those ones, you're going to want to optimize your landing page for instance. And yeah, it's a really interesting topic. A lot of people have written about it and it's something that I think is really fascinating. Mordy Oberstein: It's really interesting because you have so many things going. On the news side, the news side's a little bit different than your typical gated content because it's gated, let's say The New York Times, but Google needs to be able to crawl it and then index it. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Its own thing. Crystal Carter: Barry Adams wrote a great article recently called Best Practices for Paywalls and SEOs, and he talks a lot about that. So essentially, the bot needs to have free access in order to be able to call it and see the content appropriately. And there's lots of other things that news sites do. They have like RSS set up so that they're able to submit their content to Google in a certain way so that Google can read it that way as well. And there's lots of other things that they do there. But if you really want to get into the details, I cannot recommend enough Barry's article, Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO. There's also the article, WTF SEO, they have two articles on new SEO paywall strategies. They have a part one and a part two where they go into it as well and they talk about lots of different strategies. It's really fascinating and it's something that we might see a little bit more of. I think you hinted at this a little bit, but I think it's something that people might want to be considering when we're thinking about a space where the nature of content is changing because of the AI space. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's just dive into that I guess at this point, because that's a point you illuminated to me about. I thought it was a great point that AI writers, whatever you want, the ChatGPTs of the world are built on scraping content and then spitting that out. And if you don't want to lend your voice to that, if everybody else is doing it and I don't do it, am I then left out of the equation or do I say, "Do I not be part of this," and just differentiate myself? That is a very top level brand content strategy, SEO everything kind of question. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And there's no simple answer to that, but one of the things you might want to consider is, you know what? Let's not let them crawl this. Crystal Carter: So a lot of the chatGPT for instance, is using Common Crawl as one of their data sources, for instance. And I had a look in web archive and you look at web archive and you see the common crawls that they've done, it doubled between 2020 and 2021. And chatGPT, their data has taken extensively up till 2021. So there has been an influx in data coming from then. And what we're seeing with some of the AI image generators, for instance, they're scraping Getty Images and we can tell because when they generate images, it still has the Getty Image watermark on it. So a company like Getty Images for instance, might think, well, we might potentially want to block that crawler. But then when we have AI search, if you think about new Bing, if you think about Google's proposed Bard situation, then it might be that you're less visible on those search engines. So I think that your brand point is really important because if you think about someone like The New York Times, they have an established name, they have an established brand and they can say, "Hey, subscribe to us, you're going to get really good stuff. It's going to be really good." And a lot of people from doing this with Patreon and YouTube and stuff because they're like, this takes me a lot of time and effort to create. If you want it, pay me a fiver a month and I'll give you really great content and you'll enjoy it. And lots of people make a living out of that, and lots of people make great content out of that. So I think it's something lots of people should be considering of lots of different business styles. Mordy Oberstein: The New York Times is literally a great example. I was at Semrush's Global Marketing Day and one of the people I was on a panel with, she was actually presenting, was from the New York Times. And she was going through their strategy around they want to show the value how complicated and hard it is to get good news and get good reporting. What you have to do as a reporter to be accurate, to be novel, to get this information and that because it's so hard, that's not something that should be free necessarily, you should pay for. And that's a very much a brand decision for them. And that's something where I think your SEO value may contradict the brand if you're now not going to show up when Bing does an AI chat, now you're not going to be cited by Bing like, okay, because as a brand, don't care. Crystal Carter: It's a very interesting business proposition because, and I think that this is why a lot of folks are saying that a combination paywall or a combination of gated and free stuff works really well. So if you think its social media, there's something that people talk about. They talk about a thirst trap, which is essentially where you have a celebrity or something and they generally post things about, "Hey, look at me, I'm on set" or whatever. And then every now and then they post an amazing picture where they're just looking very sultry or they're giving it blue steel or whatever. And people call it a thirst trap. Essentially, what you'll need to do is have a few things that are maybe a pillar post or maybe a high traffic thing or something that gets a lot of attention on search. And then maybe be more selective about the kinds of content that you keep back for your team. And I think this is something that we see with newsletters. Newsletters is something that's changing as well. There's people who are like, you can pay to be on my newsletter. And people pay to get a high quality newsletter. And I think that in a space where we're going to see a high volume of content coming from ChatGPT, because literally I could create something without even typing. I could talk into my phone and say, "Make me an article about something," and then it could spit something out. And I think in a space where we're seeing a lot of volume, quality is going to be equality based on brand recognition, based on entity, based on trust, is going to be a big difference. And I think that people will be interested in potentially paying for that, potentially being in a community where that's available. And in order to manage that, we'll have to think more strategically about it. And I think that people who are building up their mailing lists are going to be more resilient to that. People who are building up their communities are going to be more resilient to that going forward. Mordy Oberstein: And I think, by the way, leaving the gated side of it alone for just one second, in an AI era, one of the things that's going to be important is being recognized as someone with differentiated content. Meaning if there's a mass influx of generic-ish kind of content out there, you as a brand being known when your site shows up on the SERP and there's three other sites with you above the fold, you might think, well, I'm not ranking number one, I'm not ranking number two, I'm number three or four. But in a world where that brand differentiation is going to be a thing, people might skip over one or two because they know that's whatever, but you are known for your great content and then click. It's going to become, if I can make a prediction, that service association two brands as having great content is going to become a thing going forward. And I want to hit back to something you mentioned before about having different forms of content is at times putting out the blog post or the articles and then at time is doing a gated piece. One thing that I think works really well, and I think you'll see companies, Semrush does this lot, where they'll do a state of search. Remember I wrote a state of search for them 2022. And what we did was we put out a few sections that we thought were really interesting and that was free. And it was a regular blog post. It wasn't thin, it was a good couple of pages. Or if you wanted to really dive into the whole thing, then you go behind the paywall. So you got the best of both worlds. You got the organic whatever out of it, juice for lack of a better word, but you also got that ability to show up behind a paywall to get the leads, which is the other part of it. Crystal Carter: Right. And this is something that you see a lot of people do with extract. So I used to do a lot of work with the food industry, so you'd have somebody who'd written them an amazing book. I know that Mordy is apparently the chef du jour on the General Tso's chicken. And so let's say he's got his book on how to make these amazing meals, what you would do is you'd have one recipe that you feature in one magazine and you say, "This is an extract from this book." And it's that sort of thing. This is a great recipe. And it's just in the same way that you have singles that you released from your album and then you have the whole album. You want to make sure that... I say as if I released an album. I'm like, yeah, last week. Mordy Oberstein: You have the good songs and the crap songs. Crystal Carter: I didn't say it. Mordy Oberstein: No, but sometimes as you won the whole album, you want to feel the album. I really like to feel the album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I always like to feel the album. Crystal Carter: What's that Marvin Gaye song, the album, what's going on? It's actually pretty much a whole album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's themed albums like The Who's Quadrophenia is a whole theme of an album. Crystal Carter: It's a whole album. If you listen to one at a time, you don't get the same experiences if you listen to the whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, this is true. I'm being facetious. Crystal Carter: Music podcast later. One thing that I think people should be considering now in the AI era is thinking about whether or not you have the kind of content that people would be willing to pay for. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: If you needed to, is your content good enough Where if you were like, "I'm charging for this now," and people would be like, "Yeah, okay." Mordy Oberstein: That's a great sniff test. That's a great sniff test. Crystal Carter: Yeah, would you pay for this? It's like, yeah, I would, this is really good. I would like. And I've seen people who've had things that they, or communities or something they have and they're like, "I'm putting buy me a coffee thing on that." And I'm like, yeah, I will buy you a coffee because I value this so much that I want to make sure that you're able to continue making this content for me because I really, really value it. I think it's really good. Mordy Oberstein: We might end up turning the engine on its head a little bit from going from volume to focus audience, but it's a whole different conversation for a different time. One thing I do want to bring up really quickly is that gated content or areas that are segmented off without having immediate access apply more often than you think. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So there's a lot of pages, forums, for example are like this, membership. So you may not realize, we're talking about gated content. I don't have any gated content, I don't have any blog posts or eBooks or whatever. But there could be many pages on your website that if you started thinking about, wait a second, they actually are gated. I didn't even realize it. Crystal Carter: Right. Wix has a tool that allows you, if somebody wants to comment on your blog, you can make it- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's what I was thinking. Crystal Carter: ... That they're a member. And this has benefits for a couple of reasons. So this means that you'll have less spam. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say keep the riffraff out. Crystal Carter: Right. So it means you'll have less spam in your comments because spam in your comments can bring down the quality of your content. For instance, it also means that you are able to engage your mailing list, for instance. So it means that if you open up your comments and that people have to subscribe or whatever in order to comment, then that means you're going to be on a mailing list just from people being able to comment. I've seen content which has very little SEO optimization on the actual page itself, but is ranking for hundreds of keywords because it has a very engaged comment section, like a recipe site in particular that I know, because it's like, "Best recipe ever," in the comments, like seven times. And that's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: Don't go to your recipe now and start leaving comments for yourself. Please don't do that. Crystal Carter: SEOs are going to SEO, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, just had to say that. Now since you're talking about using gated content to get email addresses to get leads, we thought it may make sense to offer you some tips about how to do that most effectively. And to do that, we brought Amalia Fowler over and she's going to talk to us now about how to get max value, even max leads out of gated content. Amalia Fowler: Gated content. It's one of those things people think is really easy to do, but so many things can go wrong. And this is especially true if you're not paying attention to the little things that matter. And a lot of what matters actually happens before the user even accesses the content itself. One of the first ways to get maximum value out of gated content is to make sure that you not only know who you're speaking to, but also where they are in their user journey. What content is going to appeal to them? What pain point are you helping them overcome? What motivation are you tapping into and how does everything you are putting together speak to that, but also fit into the larger user journey? Once you know who you're speaking to, you've got to make sure that your value proposition is clear. If I cannot immediately understand what I am going to receive for giving you my information, then you're not going to get me to fill out a form. I need some incentive. This is because filling out a form is an information exchange. One sentence that I've heard, and I don't know who said it originally, is that information is the currency of the internet. And I find this to be so true. I know, the average user knows, that a business is going to get value from my information, from my name or from my email. So the value that they're offering in return has to be proportional. The more a business wants from someone, the more they have to give in return. This is especially true if you're going to ask for a phone number and if you've made that a mandatory field and you don't want to fake number in there, you have got to make the gated content worth the person's while of giving you that level of information. After all of that, finally, the content itself needs to be super high quality and deliver on your promise. If it's not high quality, why is it gated? It should be relevant, clear, actionable, unique, and much like the content we write on blogs or on webpages, it also needs to solve a problem, that initial problem that you've understood from understanding your audience. The risks are higher with gated content than with content that users access for free because they've given you their information and the law of reciprocity dictates that they get something of value in return. So if somebody doesn't feel like they've received value from the content or submitting their information was a waste of time, then you've probably lost them at a point in the journey where you really want to be nurturing them. To get maximum value from your gated content, you've got to make sure that you know who you're speaking to, your value proposition is clear, that your form asks for proportional information and that the content is actionable, unique and relevant to the user. This is how you get somebody going, "Oh man, that was really worth it," as opposed to going, "Oh crap, now I need to change my phone number." Mordy Oberstein: That last line is gold. Amalia Fowler: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Gold. When you're putting something behind a gate and people are entering their personal information, i.e. their email address and their name, you feel vulnerable as a person. And now you're in a very precarious spot as a brand because the goal is not to get the email address. I think people think, got my email, I have succeeded. The goal is to use that email address effectively. So now you have the email address. Now you're going to email them all about your product and your newsletter or whatever you're going to email them about and they see your brand, like those SOBs, those are the people I gave them my... How do I get out? I don't want nothing to do with them, which is not what you want, not what you want. Crystal Carter: It's not what you want, it's not what you want. And she's like, you got to change your phone number. This is the thing. If I gave my email address, I don't want to give it to somebody who I trust. It's about trust. If you're gating the content and you're telling me that this content is gated, it needs to be good. Like she says like, oh my gosh, if it's not good, why is it gated? Facts, big facts. And I think that nobody wants to get onto an email list for a bunch of junk. However, if you get onto someone's mailing list and they're sending you good stuff, good quality things like, "Hey, we think this will help you. Hey, we think this is good. Hey, you asked for this ebook. We also have this other thing that you might be interested in," or "Because you signed up for this webinar, we also have this other thing you might be interested in." That's great. Like you said, it's not about getting the email address, it's about having the opportunity to build a relationship. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, thank you. Crystal Carter: And what she was saying was that it's high risk because if you don't deliver, then yeah, you can burn that bridge and that's awful. You don't want to do that. So you want to make sure that yeah, it's good quality when you gate something and it's good quality when you're creating it. I remember working with somebody who was a client and they were really into, look, get this brochure downloaded. The brochure was six pages and had very little stuff and they were like, "How come no one's downloading the brochure?" I was like, "It's not a good brochure." And also, they wanted a phone number for it. And I think that's something to remember as well. Be careful with the data that you're asking for. There's no reason for them to ask for a phone number for you to download a PDF. None. And yet, they were trying to do this. And I was like, "Guys, no, don't do that. Ask for what you need." I've had it before where people are like, "What's your first name and what was your dog's name?" Mordy Oberstein: You don't need any of that. Why do you need to know any of that? It's super annoying. Super annoying. And also, be careful. They read it. It's an amazing asset you created and they love you now, and they gave you the email address and they're glad, and then they get 400 emails from you the next day. It's a relationship, everything is all part of the funnel. You can't be good at one spot, you need to be good at all of the spots. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's like if somebody opens the gate to your house and you welcome them in, you don't want to. . , you welcome them. Mordy Oberstein: They were a great dinner guest for the first course. Once the dessert came out, they were destroying everything, throwing plates and all sorts of whatnot. So thank you, Amalia. Look for Amalia out in there on Twitter @AmaliaEFowler. That's A-M-A-L-I-A-E-F-O-W-L-E-R. We'll link to that in the show notes. And big shout out to RicketyRoo, where she's a senior PPC manager. So good folks over there, the RicketyRoo agency, Blake, Amanda, a lot of good folks over there. All right. Now, there are plenty of sites or plenty of pages rather, that have some great gated content that rank well. But we thought, well, even more great reason to go have a look at what's ranking that is behind the gate and look why is that ranking, even though it's behind a gate or what's happening there and what's not happening there, and what could we learn for ourselves and our own gated content. So welcome to the gated version From the Top of the SERP. Just kidding, again, it's not actually gated. Crystal Carter: No. You don't have to give us your email in order to read this part of.. Read? Listen to this part of- Mordy Oberstein: Listen. Or you could read it, I guess. We have a transcript on the- Crystal Carter: There's a transcript because we like to add value for our users. Mordy Oberstein: See? And that's not behind a gate either. Only the newsletter is behind the gate. But again, how are we going to email it to you- Crystal Carter: If we don't have your email? Mordy Oberstein: We don't have your email address. We're not prophets. Crystal Carter: We like to do combinations. We have the complete guide Wix SEO, as written by one Mordy Oberstein. And if you go to that website, you can have it as a webpage, or you can enter your email and we'll email it to you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And you can download it and do that thing that you do with whatever you download. So there's a bunch of keywords we were looking at, that bring up gated content. For example, I was looking at state of marketing reports. So marketing reports about the state of marketing. And the second result is from HubSpot, and it's gated. And interesting by the way, the result after that is Semrush. They have a state of content marketing 2023. And that used to be behind a gate. And that's an interesting strategy by the way. For the first, let's say month or so, I don't remember the exact time, they had it behind a gate or they had a very limited version that was not gated. And then they had the full version that was gated. And then eventually, after that... which makes so much sense because after a while, it's not about the leads at that point, it's about the ranking. So switch it up. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: And now the whole thing is there and you can download it if you want to. But you don't have to, you can read the whole thing. So that's one cool strategy. And the HubSpot page is you just have to download the thing. It's a data marketing report. It's a little outdated, Google, some 2022. But okay, leave that aside. What they do is they have a little paragraph about the content and then they have download the free report. What I would say with them is they're known for this kind of thing and a lot of that topical authority and links back into them ranking for this particular keyword. Crystal Carter: They're trusted for what they're known for. So people know, hey, if I give them my email address, they're not going to spam me with a bunch of stuff or any of the things that they do send me are probably going to be relevant to the thing that I'm interested in and it's not a big deal. I know where they are. I can find the information again, et cetera, et cetera. So these are a prime example of... And then also these, again, Amalia talked about the funnel. These are teams that have a marketing funnel that includes the data content as part of the funnel, or they're using it strategically to support that funnel. Because sometimes it might be that if you have something that's maybe a high ticket item that maybe you're not going to get a lot of people who are buying that 7,000 pound or $7,000 thing all the time, but you might get people who want to know about it, for instance. So if you had a luxury car or something that had a special kind of engine, you might have somebody who wants to know more about those kinds of engines, like a USP. And it might be that you can have a gated piece of content or the state of electric vehicles, for instance, that sort of thing. And that will give you potential leads. And you might not even expect to see a big return on it straight away, but it's about building trust in the long term. So it's interesting to see that ready for that and building their relationships. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, one of the things that they have, by the way, you start to fill out your name and whatever, that they have a little percentage completed icon so that you're not like, "Oh my God, how much more information do I have to give to get this." But again, there's a lot of things you can do. You can still rank and be behind a gate. It is possible. I know you were looking for a bunch of keywords also. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So one of the ones I found, we talked a lot about the New York Times. One of the things I found, and this goes back to what you were saying about how sometimes you think about gated content, but not everything we think of gated content is a hard gate or whatever. So cooking.nytimes.com is a recipe website. They have one piece of content called old fashioned beef stew, and it ranks for 400 number one keywords according to Semrush, for instance. So they rank for beef stew. According to Semrush, they're getting 27,000 bit's traffic every month from that. They rank for beef stew recipe, for instance. And if you go into their website, then if they have the article, but if you want to continue reading the article, you have to log in. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's another great strategy. Crystal Carter: Right. So the thing that's interesting about this is that this is also dealing with some of the changes that we're seeing around the way the web is. The web is becoming a lot less anonymous. And so if you log in, then the website will be able to track the analytics because when you log in, you're also agreeing to certain analytic conditions, like cookies, et cetera, et cetera. And we're moving away from being able to just put cookies on everything, track whatever we like, any honest person. We're moving away from that. And so having content, any sort of, you have to log in first space allows a brand to get permission from that person in order to track the activity on the website, which sometimes is people being cheeky. Sometimes it's people being like, "I'm going to follow you around so that can sell you this lawnmower 25 times," even though you already bought the lawnmower. Oh my gosh, sometimes it's those people. But sometimes it's also just a case of making sure that you're able to make content that the people that are coming to your website are actually... So if you're seeing that lots of people are going to that beach, maybe you should make more about that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's a great point by the web itself is becoming a little bit more less anonymous for a variety of reasons. I think users want that. I think obviously, the websites want it because the state of analytics is just, the whole reason there's a GA4 is because of this. And again, you need to make sure that when you're doing this sort of thing where you're having a login that you let Google know this is how the content is accessed. So you have structured data, is accessible for free kind of thing. You need to let them know what this content is so that they know how to handle the content and they can make sure they can actually crawl and read the content. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you do that well, as this piece of content is doing, like I said, they're ranking for hundreds of keywords, best recipe for beef stew. So they're not suffering by managing their content. Mordy Oberstein: That is the moral of this story. You do not need to suffer just because you have decided to put your content behind some kind of gate. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: If you're taking anything away from this segment, you can absolutely do this. Crystal Carter: You can absolutely do this. Mordy Oberstein: There are many ways. Crystal Carter: There are many ways, and there's people who can support you. As I said, the space with news publishers, they're doing amazing stuff in this space, a great place to start. And you can experiment really, really easily. So for instance, like I said, Wix has a membership space which will allow you to gate some things and gate other things, allow you to put a price tag on some things. And it can also do it with certain tools as well. So it might be that you have, for instance, there's certain courses as well that you can add a paywall to, and you can use certain tools to help you do that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: A course is another great case of you're going to have gated content, but you want to rank, like I have a free course on this, or you want to make sure that you rank for that. And again, I think with gated content kind of behind a paywall, you can get creative with how you go about doing this, what you show, when you show it, how you change it, what you're asking for. You can get really, really creative with all this stuff. Crystal Carter: One of the things that news publishers do a lot, particularly if you have a hard paywall, or not necessarily a hard paywall, but maybe a free paywall or something like that, is it makes the headline that much more important. You need to lure people in. Mordy Oberstein: Don't go too crazy. Crystal Carter: Don't go too crazy, but you need to make sure that you're making it seem enticing. The telegraph always trends on Twitter for different things and then like, that's interesting. And then I click it and they're like, "You have to pay to be on the telegraph." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh." So your content distribution strategy should also help you to build your brand in order to increase the possibility that people are more likely to pay for whatever it is you're offering. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of news publishers who are not behind a paywall, most of the SEO news publishers are not behind a paywall. In fact, if you were to put it behind a paywall, that would probably be a very bad idea because all of the great news publishers are not behind a paywall. So think about what your competitors are doing when you're putting your content behind a paywall. Because if you're going to get the same thing and you don't have to enter an email address, I'm just going to do that. So here's this week's snappiest of SEO news from all the SEO news sites that are not behind a paywall. Okay, now it's time to panic. Just kidding, just kidding. The March, 2023 core update is now complete for are some of the data that the folks over at Semrush had me review, the update was far more impactful than the previous core update back in September, 2022. I'll link to Barry Schwartz's full write up over at Search Engine Land in the show notes. Now, here's a fascinating one. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land again, Google Maps can attack fake phone numbers and photos and remove them. So when the evildoers of the web known as spammers throw their phone number onto a user contributed photo, Google said they can tell and remove it. The question of is this enough to fight spam, which Barry raises in his article is always a loaded one when it comes to local. Just the other day, Jason Brown showed how spammers are using ChatGPT to create fake reviews. Bet you didn't see that coming. I can't even. Speaking of the great AI in the sky, Bard's team is getting beefed up. Per reports, Google is pulling folks from the Google Assistant division to work on Bard. I always think it's fascinating who Google pulls over for different projects. Not that I know the entire roster over at Google, by heart. I'm into Google, but they're not the Yankees. But it's more interesting to see what types of folks Google is moving over from what team. So for example, the VP of Google's e-com efforts got pulled into the Bard team, right? Fascinating. Some kind of e-com element coming to Bard, possibly. Who knows? Anyway, you can see the full writeup from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal in the show notes. And finally, also from the great Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Bing Chat, they feature ads shaking up the ad free experience. Oh no, right? No, wrong. Good thing. What? It means Bing is focusing on having clicks from its AI experience. You can't run ads and then not have people click. No one will run an ad with you. So ads means focus on clicks, as crazy and ironic as that sounds. It's really healthy for the web, my experience or my opinion rather, and completely ironic again when you think about it, Bing by the way, is I think very publisher focused with its AI experience. Matt reports that they're thinking about a hover experience from the AI chat for the sighted links showing more links from that website. I really do think Bing looks at the AI chat experience as an accent to, not replacement of websites. And I think Bing will be one of the forces out there to force other search engines to think the same way. And with that, that is the Snappiest of SEO news. Wasn't it great to get that SEO content that wasn't behind a paywall? What an inappropriate time to have a paywall. Crystal Carter: That would be inappropriate. Mordy Oberstein: It would be really inappropriate. Crystal Carter: Inappropriate. Although, there are definitely some people who have unique insights. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. So for example, you can super follow Barry Schwartz on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And Marie Haynes has two versions of her newsletter, for instance. So she has one that gives you the top level and then they have another one that adds a lot more detail and a lot more nuance and a lot more information. And that sets up premium pay list. Mordy Oberstein: So yes, there is SEO news out there that is behind a gate that is worth paying for. I don't personally super follow Barry, but if I were to, I probably would be very satisfied just knowing Barry. So I recommend super following Barry. Hear that Barry? Super follow. Send Barry your sheckles. Crystal Carter: So you're going to super follow Barry? Mordy Oberstein: What I'm doing now is I want to see if Barry's really listening this far into the episode. Crystal Carter: Okay. We'll see if he's listening because yeah, Barry is an absolute legend. Mordy Oberstein: Barry's an international treasure. Crystal Carter: Indeed. He's coming to London. Mordy Oberstein: He's coming to London. I was shocked. Crystal Carter: I know. He's coming to London. Mordy Oberstein: If you don't know who we're talking about, Barry Schwartz, who almost all the SEO news articles that we do on this show come from Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: All the SEO news comes from Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: He's written something like 30,000, 40,000 SEO news articles. So it's incredible. Anyway, so as time ebbs away on us this week, Crystal, who should we be following for more SEO awesomeness? Crystal Carter: I'm going to throw an international follow in for this week. So this is a follow from someone called, please forgive me if I've mispronounced your name, but Antoine Eripret. It's a French name, so it might be Eripret. Who wrote a really great thread on gated content and SEO. I think he's originally French speaking, but it says that he lives in Spain. And he wrote a really great thread all about gated content and SEO and about interstitials and all of these sort of technical things. And he talks in this thread a lot about the sort of accessible for free things that you need to do and a lot about some of the other elements that you can add in to see. So he gets into some of the technical details of paywall content. And he generally shares great content. He's an SEO for something called Liligo, and he shares some great content. He's got a good follower base of folks and he is really interested and curious about SEO topics. So yeah, follow him. Although I believe he's French speaking, he publishes lots of things in English as well. So yeah, just a shout out to an international SEO person. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So if you're looking to follow, @antoineripret over on Twitter, link to it in the show notes and that'll do it for us this week. Crystal Carter: That's it. Did you get your email address? Did you send me your email address? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. But please don't spam me, I will unsubscribe. If only you could unsubscribe from people emailing you. Crystal Carter: Sad about right now to spam your email address or to spam your email with lots of random things. I can't decide what I should spam your email about. Maybe about spam. Maybe I should just send you literal pictures of spam over and over again. Mordy Oberstein: That doesn't sound kosher to me. 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 what you need to know if you want to go enterprise SEO. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review over at iTunes, and 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

Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix, where he's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before joining Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Yossi Fest Technical SEO Specialist at Wix Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix, where he's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before joining Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Articles & Resources 19 Sept 2025 Your guide to crawl budget optimization 29 Oct 2024 How to optimize for INP Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Can you learn SEO from a course? Are SEO courses worth the hype? We put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test with Wix Studio SEO course instructors Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Celeste Gonzalez, and Judith Lewis. Tune is as our guests explain how SEO courses offer flexibility, shareable insights, learning structure, the ability to learn at your own pace, and offer practical guidance without being dry and encyclopedic. So spit out that gum. Sit up straight and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this, the 105th episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Why learn SEO from a course? Can you learn SEO from a course? Are SEO courses worth the hype? We put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test with Wix Studio SEO course instructors Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Celeste Gonzalez, and Judith Lewis. Tune is as our guests explain how SEO courses offer flexibility, shareable insights, learning structure, the ability to learn at your own pace, and offer practical guidance without being dry and encyclopedic. So spit out that gum. Sit up straight and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this, the 105th episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 105 | October 9, 2024 | 45:14 00:00 / 45:13 This week’s guests Celeste Gonzalez Celeste Gonzalez leads RooLabs, RicketyRoo's SEO testing division, where she drives innovative strategies and engages with the SEO community. She is passionate about pushing SEO boundaries and sharing insights on both successes and challenges in the industry. Judith Lewis Judith is a renowned international speaker and digital media consultant, specializing in digital technologies to help businesses innovate and optimize. With over 25 years of experience, she runs her own consultancy delivering actionable business insight for M2B, B2B, and B2C companies. Andrew Optimisey Andrew Cock-Starkey is an SEO consultant who prides himself on delivering the right kind of traffic to client sites. With decades of experience in digital marketing, he turns the complex side of SEO into plain English, but can still talk technical with the devs. Aleyda Solis Aleyda Solis is an SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, speaker, and author. She shares the latest news and resources in SEO in the #SEOFOMO newsletter with +25K subscribers and Digital Marketing in #MarketingFOMO, SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called LearningSEO.io. Awarded as the European Search Personality of the Year in 2018 and included as one of the 10 Most Influential SEO Experts of 2022 by List Wire from USA Today, she's also co-founder of Remoters.net, a remote work hub, featuring a free remote job board, tools, guides, and more to empower remote work. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm been joined by she who educates the masses with all sorts of profound SEO knowledge and insights, Head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. I am here, and yes, we're going to do a podcast, you said about educating. I was asked... there was a time when they were giving teacher discounts at a place where I went, and they were like, "Are you a teacher?" I was like, "I do teaching sometimes, but technically no. But many people have learned, I think..." I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: As a former actual teacher, let me tell you how teachers look. Because I would get the free Dunkin' Donuts thing on Teacher's Day. Let me tell you- Crystal Carter: Yo, that's a dub. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Let me tell you how a teacher'd look at it. "Oh, it's totally worth it now dealing with your children," because they got a free coffee. Crystal Carter: The coffee at Dunkin' is pretty good, so that's a win. I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: I'll take the W. Mordy Oberstein: When I go back home, I bring back bags full of ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Very nice. Very nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's my life. Crystal Carter: Good choice. Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' coffee packed in a suitcase. I'm always worried, by the way, they'll think I'm some sort of drug trafficker because that's how you hide drugs, in coffee, because it kills the smell of the marijuana and whatever. Crystal Carter: Okay, so you have more exciting friends than I do because I did not know that fact. Mordy Oberstein: A customs person told me this when he saw the coffee in the thing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the cartel. No, it's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get an entire course of SEO awesomeness. How much does it cost? Nothing. What does it cover? Everything. Who's in it? Aleyda Solis, Andrew Cock-Starkey, Jill Quick, Judith Lewis, and so many others. Where can you find it? Over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub. Link in the show note, which brings us to what we're covering today: what to look for in an SEO course. Of course, is there such thing as the best SEO course? Signs an SEO course may or may not be for you and what goes into creating a good course. To help the idea of learning SEO from a course take its course, we welcome Wix Studio course instructors, Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. I apologize for a little bit of a keyword stuffing there. Plus we put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test as more Wix Studio course instructors share their insights as Judith Lewis and Celeste Gonzalez grab the mic. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So spit out that gum, sit up straight, and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this the 105th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. That was a lot. Crystal Carter: There was definitely some teachable moments in there. Mordy Oberstein: If you want moments, write shorter intros. With that, please welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. Aleyda Solis: Hello. Hello everybody. Mordy, oh, my god. And Crystal, I had to restrict myself to not say anything. Oh, what we have already learned already. Andrew Optimisey: Aloha, Mordy. Aloha, Crystal. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hi, Andrew. Crystal Carter: Hello. Mahalo. Thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: How festive of you to steer into our vibe. Aleyda Solis: By the way, it's one thing, right? That's so very American of you, listening about the Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Last time that I went actually to the US in July, I bought one, the already cold prepare one that they sell at the supermarket that is so very American. So yeah, I had to try one frappuccino-like just to taste it. It was so good, but it was also 240 calories or something that high. Got so many calories in a single drink. It's yummy but yes, highly, highly... I think that you can get fat just drinking that. It's crazy. Mordy Oberstein: It's ridiculous. Pro-tip, when you go to Dunkin' Donuts, do not think about calories. Andrew Optimisey: If you're thinking about calories in Dunkin', you're in the wrong place, right? Mordy Oberstein: You're in the wrong place. I got to have the water. Crystal Carter: A hilarious SEO fact before we get into things, if you look up dunkin.com, which I did, it doesn't actually go to Dunkin' Donuts or they rebranded to Dunkin'. It goes to some random consultancy and then they have this holding screen that says, "If you're looking for Dunkin' Donuts, you have to go back to the internet because this isn't Dunkin' Donuts." And then after 15 seconds, it loads to this other website. And as an SEO, I was like, "Dude, you're sitting on a gold mine. Just cash the check. Just cash the check." Andrew Optimisey: Sell the domain. Crystal Carter: But somehow he's holding on. I don't know, Mr. Dunkin, really, really... Dunkin' Logistics really, really wants to keep that domain. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' Logistics. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There we go. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's get into it. Y'all are part of our Wix Studio SEO course and which... people are taking an SEO course. You sat down and you wrote up scripts for the course. What are you hoping, what were you hoping, what are you hoping that people will get out of an SEO course? Aleyda Solis: My expectation was to facilitate the learning process about technical SEO, because this is a topic that I cover in my course, and to make it very actionable in a way that it was very easy to grasp the importance of technical SEO, especially something that can quickly become very complex if you don't come from the web development world. So it is very clear, the why, why it is important, why you need to learn it, what are the key concepts to understand even if you are not going to specialize on becoming a technical SEO, and what makes or breaks a website technical configuration to focus on what's actually key or most impactful? So in the course, that was my expectation, to be... not necessarily make it the most comprehensive course ever. I think I can be a little bit... it's okay to be proud to say that I tried to really cover everything, what actually matters, but that was not necessarily as much of a point of there are so many resources and so much out there where they can learn already from that is also comprehensive, but let's make it meaningful. Let's make it easy to go through, make it a journey, and that it can be helpful for people who are just starting, people who are not already SEOs, as well as those who are SEOs and want to focus more on the technical side of things. So I believe that that is what makes a little bit of a difference between a course or other formats like a guide, a comprehensive guide, or a book even to make it easier to explain and give those details that you cannot necessarily as easily share in the text format. Mordy Oberstein: Before I let Angie reply, just a plug. If you're looking for a guide to SEO, check out the guide that Aleyda has at learnseo.io. Okay Andrew, take it away. Andrew Optimisey: So there was a couple of things for me that I really wanted to aim at, and one of the reasons it was great to work with Wix on this is because... so Wix is used by loads of different people. You get people who are building their own websites themselves who have never done any web dev before. They're running their own little shop like a bakery or whatever, and they have not a clue where to start with SEO. And then you've got big agencies who maybe know a little bit about SEO, enough to make them dangerous, but maybe they need a little bit of guidance on that kind of stuff. So that's where I thought working with Wix with this kind of stuff would be really good, and so I wanted to demystify it a little bit because everybody hears this thing about SEO and, "Oh, it's so complex and it's so tricky and I don't know where to start and how do I do these things? And it changes so fast," and that kind of stuff around... because you said about us writing scripts and we spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. As soon as you write stuff down in SEO, it's out date, right? Because it changes quickly and the minute you note it down, then there'll be some update or something will change or there'll be a new platform, a new system and stuff. So one of the things I wanted to do with the stuff that I was writing was teach people a sort of direction to travel, a way of thinking about things like... so if I'm going to show you this particular way to do keyword research and stuff, it's not that this way is the only way. It's that these are some of the things that you might want to think about and how you do this, how you think about customers and how you think about matching your content to intent and all those kinds of things where this is a good direction of travel. I always use the Wayne Gretzky thing all the time in SEO. It's don't go to where SEO is. Skate to where the puck is going. That's how you get really good as Wayne Gretzky as the ice hockey player. You go to where SEO is going. If you know where Google is heading and the directions that SEO generally is trying to go in, if you go in that direction too, you're going to be okay. Mordy Oberstein: That was, by the way, one of the things that we were making the course... and by the way, we didn't write the scripts. The people in our course, they wrote their own scripts. Obviously, we had a course instructor go through and they would tighten it up, whatever it is, but this is coming from... it's the latest focus on technical SEO. It's your focus on keyword research, but that was one of the things that we were thinking about when we made the course. How do we create a course in a way where if something changes, it's not out of data in an instant? Which is very tricky and very complicated. Sorry Crys, I feel like I cut you off. Crystal Carter: No, no. I think that the other thing that we were thinking about when... we were so grateful that you both agreed to do the course and we were so grateful that all the other folks on the course got involved with the course and everyone that has been working with us on this has a common goal, which is basically what you were talking about Aleyda and what you were talking about Andrew, which is demystifying this stuff. There are some people... we've talked about reputational things on this podcast before, but sometimes within the SEO industry people are like, "Oh, it's so complicated." They make it so that you couldn't possibly... people speak in really big words and they speak really convoluted or they speak in jargon or that sort of thing. And everyone, we were so grateful again, that was involved with this, has a focus of, "No, we can speak in plain English, we can speak in plain language, and we can speak in a way that you can understand it. If you stick with this, you'll understand it. It's a question of whether or not you want to learn and that will make it accessible to you." Aleyda Solis: And I think that a big role here, at least it was when I decided to go ahead with the course, and then that I could thankfully also validate through the whole process, was the production quality that you had. I was amazed from the beginning. When we were creating the strips with the examples, the feedback that I got from you it's true that yeah, I did it, but I got amazing feedback to make it super easy to go through first and then secondly, once that we were recording, I remember in London I was mind blown by the whole production around it. So I am delighted to see the outcome now that is going to be launched, because I believe that although there are so many courses out there, there are only so very few that have this not only quality. The content and insights also make it easy for people to understand independently of the complexity and additionally, the production value is so, so high. It's going to be beautiful and can't wait to watch it, too. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Big hearts to you as well. Andrew Optimisey: I think a quick note for all the other people in the Wix Studio team that worked on this kind of stuff, there was a whole bunch of your colleagues that came into town on this. Like Aleyda said, there was times when I'd been writing sections of my course and I'd get a note back saying, "This is great. How can we show it? We need something so it's not just a talking head lecturing you about SEO and here's what you should and shouldn't do. How can we demonstrate this? What does this look like?" And it was like, "Well, I can't really do... it doesn't really work with this." "Okay, well let's think of another example that's similar, that tells the same story, makes the same point, but we can demonstrate it with data. We can demonstrate it with..." If you watch my section of the course, I use a lot of silly rambling analogies and synonyms and silly stuff like stories and things to try and bring that kind of stuff to life. But that, working with the Wix team and your colleagues really help bring that kind of stuff out and make it more of a story so it's more engaging. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you read my mind. I literally wrote a note to myself while Aleyda was talking, "Oh, I need to shout out Natalie Hamouie for being the organizing force behind the entire course. Natalie, you're amazing. Both of you bring up a really good point and it's one of the things that I want to talk about in deciding whether or not to take an SEO course or not take an SEO course, or how do you know if an SEO course is a good course or not. Aleyda, you hinted at it before. When we made the course, we didn't want to make the best SEO course because there is no such thing as the best SEO course. It's a course that I think is good for you for where you're at and what you need right now for your learning journey kind of thing. In fact, to break the fourth wall, when we were making the landing page for the course, we decided, "Well, should we include the word best?" From a pure SEO point of view if you look at what Google's showing, there's a tendency for Google to rank pages that include the word best. Super old school SEO. We said, "No, we're not going to do that because, A, old school SEO and B, It's not on brand for what we want the course to be." I don't think, and maybe you'll disagree with me, that it really is a way to produce the best SEO course. There's only a way to produce something that you think is able to reach a targeted audience at that particular moment. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, one hundred percent, because even if I think that we tried with this course to make it as evergreen as possible... and I remember when we were recording, one of the core metrics was about to be updated and we already talk about it as something from the past, but eventually, something else will be updated that will unfortunately and hopefully not that soon, but at some point it will, so it won't be fresh anymore. So to make it the perfect course at every single point in time, it should be completely updated and potentially even discussing or tackling things that just happened. So I believe that potentially to have the best experience, not the best course, the best learning experience, you should take a course but also complement it with podcasts like this one where you discuss the latest in SEO, the trends, the updates, the news, what is happening, and what matters right now. And what I believe is critical to make the course a great learning experience is to tie it with the SEO day to day, to make it impactful and actionable. Because I believe that what it really let's say challenged me at the beginning of my SEO learning journey was that for me when learning, guides out there, it was very non-tangible and very hard to think of scenarios or circumstances where I will, for example, want to add a nofollow on links or willingly noindex pages at the time and things like that. So providing the scenarios, examples that are usual, common, that people will run into when doing audits or analyzing or assessing opportunities, and also given the very realistic and reasonable idea that it's too idealistic and potentially not reasonable to think that a website will be perfectly optimized ever, but to give a sense of this is the actual goal, this is how you should align everything, and you don't work in a silo too because it's not only about being technical optimized and this ties to revenue and this ties to major bigger goals that are not only SEO-related and stuff like that. I think that that makes all the difference. And many years ago I wrote an SEO fundamentals book in Spanish. And through the years I have gotten people who have told me, Spanish speakers telling me, "This is the book that made the difference when I learned it, not because it discusses new things, but the angle that you took was different, was actionable, and makes sense. All these concepts actually now made sense." So I believe that this is what makes a course or the learning journey through a course better in general and more impactful and actually helpful in your learning journey. Crystal Carter: I think that that's such an important point because there are a lot of people selling very expensive courses with terrible motivations right now. So I think the motivations that you're talking about are so important, to help people actually know how to do it and learn the fundamentals and learn tying it to value of the business and not to, "You can do SEO and you'll make $1 million tomorrow." There's so many people, particularly on TikTok, there's a lot of people selling this digital marketing course and, "I will make da da da da da, and just DM me and I'll tell you all of the secrets and da da da." And then you see there's 17 videos that are all the same thing of all these people saying this stuff. And I'm sorry, if you are somebody who's listening to this and you've seen one of those courses, I'm sorry, but it's a pyramid scheme. That's what's going on there. So they're not going to teach you how to do digital marketing properly. That's something else. Beware the motivations of the folks that are trying to sell you something. And our motivations are to help people learn SEO. That's our motivations. Andrew Optimisey: One of the things that I liked about, again, working with Natalie and the rest of the Wix team, was there was this effort to make the lessons stand alone. Although there is... again, they've made a lot of efforts to then join things up when it's been like, "If you learned a little bit about this, you might want to learn more about it in a later section or in Judith's section," those kind of things. But because they broke the courses up so I don't just rattle on about keywords for hours and hours, there's discrete chunks where it's like, "Here's some basic stuff and here's some middle of the road stuff, and then if you want to go even further with it, here's this bit too." And again, that was something the Wix team were really keen to push me on it. "How do you go even further?" "So this is the one-on-one stuff, this is..." But what if you're like, "This is all really basic," and you skip that because you're already fairly experienced in SEO, but you just want more? "Where do I go next?" So that's one of the things I quite liked about it and then you can cherry pick if you are completely new to SEO and you just want some fundamentals. So again, we talked about the baker that runs the shop. They've got a ten-page website. Technical SEO is probably not going to move the needle for them unless they're doing some absolutely fundamentally awful things, if they have noindex'd their website. So you're going to need some of the technical stuff. So you need enough to make you not completely invisible to Google, but if you're getting onto canonical tags and really complex technical stuff, that's probably not going to make the difference for a ten-page website. What might make the difference is some really good content or building your basic link structures, all those kinds of things. So that's the kind of thing we should build. "Right, you need two stories from this section, two from this section, and two from this, and that's enough for now. Then you can get going and then when you want more, there's more too. So you can come back for those things too." When you get to your 8 million page website because you scaled it up and you are now dominating the world, you're going to need the heck out of the technical section because if you've got that size site, there's no way you're getting anywhere without a solid technical structure. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's about that was when we were thinking about the structure of the course, they were like, "Oh, we need something for beginners or something for advanced." And the thing about it, in SEO, sometimes you're a beginner and advanced at the same time. When GA4 comes out, everyone's a beginner at GA4. They're just having to start again with this new piece of technology. We have AI stuff and there's people who are very, very advanced with one type of SEO skill, but maybe you're getting started with AI or maybe they're good at one part of creating content with AI and then they're not so great at this other part of AI. So it is important that you can jump across to different sections and it is important that you can jump to all of those. But I think certainly one of the things with learningseo.io, which is a great resource as well from Aleyda Solis, has a map of even if you jump around, you can see the gaps. So you can see like, "Oh, well I learned this part, but apparently I didn't learn these two parts that lead up to that." Similarly, our courses is that way as well. So you can see the whole and also you can also take it off and go, "All right, I know that. I know that. Okay, I don't know that. I will watch that one." Or you can take the whole thing all together. You have the option. Mordy Oberstein: It's very purposeful because way, way, way back when this was first a concept, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because when I started learning SEO, I started learning SEO and I think one of the first things I saw was... I don't know if they still have it or not. The periodic table that Search Engine Land had, that was one of the first things that I saw. And as I started diving into SEO more and more and more, I felt like, "I don't feel like I see the full picture. I feel like I see a little bit here, I see a little bit there, and I don't even know what I'm missing, but I feel like I'm missing something. There's a gap." So I wanted to do a course because when you do something like a course, you can at least walk away feeling like there's obviously going to be more to learn, but there shouldn't be these wide gaps anymore that I feel like, "I don't know where I'm supposed to go next," or, "What did I miss that I shouldn't have missed?" And to zoom out, it kind of goes back to what Crystal was saying before and what Aleyda and Andrew, you're both saying, it goes back to motivations. When you're looking at an SEO course, I'll give you a pointer. Whether you're taking our course or somebody else's course or whatever even that's not about SEO, look who's behind the course. Who are they and what are they about? Because that'll dictate everything about the course. That'll dictate whether or not... I gave Andrew a hard time about his assessment saying, "Drew, let's make it a little bit harder, a little more nuanced, and blah, blah blah." By the way, if you think you had it bad, I was giving Itamar Blauer the hardest time because he was doing a section on third-party SEO tools and it can be very straightforward. "No, let's give actual cases and examples and let's try to give scenarios so this way, you can take what he was talking about and apply it somewhere else." So you should talk to Itamar, Andrew, because I was giving him... putting through the ringer of trying to... no, but because of what Aleyda was saying before, you want to try to have it scenario-based whenever you can. You want to try to make it as practical and real-world whenever you can, because when you walk away learning SEO from a blog post or from whatever it might be, a webinar, that's one of those gaps. And the reason why I felt we did a good job with this was because the people behind the course, whether it's us on the Wix side or whether it's y'all as the instructors are people who at one point or another struggled with learning SEO and it was meaningful to do something for somebody who is currently struggling to learn SEO. Aleyda Solis: Just to also potentially close the circle regarding motivations, because I think that is also very, very important. When someone takes a course, you need to invest a little bit of more time, I have to say, and attention than what takes to go through a guide for example, or skim reading an e-book, something like that. But you actually need to put a lot of more focus, and many times also not a trivial investment for many people. And motivation is key here of what you want out of that. For many, it will be, "Okay to start understanding what is this about, complement my already existing experience, or because I feel that I need to take my skills on these topics to the next level, there are certain areas or configurations or elements that I don't know yet how they tie in or how I can connect them to what I do in the day to day." So these are fantastic. Also, I have to say something, right? It was a few years back when I was giving this pro bono course about technical SEO, and I asked a little bit about the feedback regarding the motivations of the people learning very honestly, and I think it's good, right? It's okay. It's understandable. Some of them say, "I want to start with technical SEO and focus more on technical SEO rather than content in all the areas, because I have heard that because it is more complex, it pays better, and I see the salary ranges out there and they are higher." And I was like, "Look, this is legit. This is completely reasonable." Just make sure that it's not only about the pay, because realistically it's true that many of these more specialized roles, depending a little bit on the type of specialization can end up paying more, but it pays more because these are on companies that have bigger SEO departments and hire very specialized people. These very specialized people have already had a very big journey and a lot of experience not only that area, but understand well the overall process, the fundamental... and how that area actually has an impact that makes money and drives revenue and achieves goals at... very likely at an enterprise level. So this ties in on how important it is to understand that you don't work on a silo, so even if you want to only focus on technical SEO or link building or content or whatever, it is fundamental that you have... how important is your specific or particular area within the SEO context and the context of the business that you're working in, because that is what actually makes a difference at the end of the day. Not necessarily how complex it is, only because... and you understanding the concepts and nailing the concepts and knowing how to code in case you do technical SEO, but actually moving the needle and changing what actually matters to drive the impact that these bigger companies are willing to pay big bucks for. And this is it, right? Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing that also comes with that is, of course, if you're working to get a job in the industry, having a course, doing a course can be super useful. And if you're trying to get a job or you're planning to increase your skillset so that you can get a pay raise or so you can get whatever, that's totally valid because we live in the world and then people got to pay the bills. I totally get that. But what's also important is that if that's only your motivation, very often you might get bored or tired of SEO fairly quickly. You have to be a little bit curious as well because it can be very complex and you have to be the person that goes, "But why? No, but why? No, but really, but why?" over and over and over again until you figure out what it is. And I think one of the only ways that you can do that alongside a course is to be building, be testing, be looking at things in real life. So throughout the course, we have examples of how you can implement things on Wix Studio, how you can implement things across your Wix website, et cetera, et cetera. These are ways that you can get started with trying out content. So if you don't have your own website, it's fairly straightforward to get set up on Wix to building a website. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of the technical things are built in to help you get going with that, and it means that you can test and you can iterate. If you don't have your own website, then I highly recommend while you're doing this course, getting involved with a website so you can say to the people who... your football team or your neighbor or something you volunteer with, "Can I help you with your website?" And chances are they'll go, "Yeah," because nine times out of 10 they're not doing anything with it. And you can have a look in their Google Search Console, you can set them up on GA4. You can have a look at whether their links are working. You can crawl their site map, you can use some of those tools, but it really helps to understand the concepts if you're able to see them in real time, particularly with technical SEO and also with content. When you're looking at how people respond to content and how Google ranks content, you can't see that without seeing that in the wild. And it's a live ecosystem, so you have to be involved with it. And I highly, highly, highly recommend doing SEO in parallel with the course. Andrew Optimisey: And one of the things I liked about it was... so when you work with people who are part of a digital marketing role rather than an SEO specialist, is that they have to wear lots of hats. And much as they would love to know all of SEO, I very much doubt anybody... there'll be some people that will sit there and just smash through the whole course in one go. They'll have a lot of free time, but it's like you can kind of cherry-pick a little bit. So there's going to be times when there's a project coming up where we have the budget and we have the developer time, and we have the resource to go after content, so this is the thing we're going to focus on, this particular topic area, and my boss has said, "Right, we've previously worked on dog food. Now we're doing cat food content." "We need content right now. How do we do the..." and so you can then go and if you've not done content, if you're more of a technically minded SEO and you haven't really done content stuff before, or maybe you are one of these T-shaped digital marketers who's good at lots of things but only super deep on one or two things, you can choose a bit of the course that best suits the project you're going to work on. And then maybe later down the line, there'll be more budget and it'll be, "Okay, well actually we found that there's all these issues going on in Search Console and technically our website's falling over and it's really slow, and what do we do with these kinds of things?" "Okay, I don't really know enough about... so I'm going to go and I'm going to watch this section of the course and I'm going to learn about these things that I need to scale up a little bit more on." So then you can make better use of your time. So when you do get that project that comes up and works in that particular area, you can make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you should need to cover in that section so that project really works. And so that works for, say, digital marketing teams, those mom and pop shops we talked about, but then also those people that are working in those bigger companies that maybe it helps to then have that sympathy and empathy with the people that you are working with. If you're a super great technical SEO and you've got these content people banging on you all the time about, "Can we get this done? Can we do this?" And you're like, "Oh." If you can watch that bit of the course, then maybe you can understand a bit more about where they're coming from and then you can have a bit more of a useful conversation rather than just banging heads all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You took our course and you transcended it from being learning about SEO to making the world a more harmonious and better place. There's no better place than- Andrew Optimisey: We can all be friends. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, other than saying thank you both so much for being a part of the course, thank you to Mike Stepney, to Itamar Blauer, to Jill Quick, to James Clark, to Judith Lewis, to Celeste Gonzalez, to everyone who helped on the back end of the course, and Debbie Chu obviously as well. Thank you so much for being a part of the course and thank you, Aleyda and Andrew, for not only being a part of the course, but being a part of our little podcast. Andrew Optimisey: Thanks. Aleyda Solis: Always a great time. Mordy Oberstein: All right, thanks again so much, Aleyda and Andrew, A, for sitting down with us here in this podcast and for of course being a part of our course. So we spent the entire episode until now talking about... or working with the assumption that taking an SEO course is a good idea and it represents a good way to learn SEO provided it's the right fit for you, if the course is the right fit for you. But is that actually the case? Let's challenge some assumptions about our new SEO course with a special edition of It's New. Mordy Oberstein: It's New, being the course is new, by the way. The SEO learning from a course is not new, but our course is new. Crystal Carter: It is new. We spent a lot of time on it and it's new, fresh out the box. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Because for me, it doesn't feel new because I've been working on this thing for months. It's old. Crystal Carter: I think that's because anything good takes a little while to cook. You got to let it cook. Mordy Oberstein: Really? My great popcorn is delicious. Takes, I don't know, a minute and a half. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, somebody prepped it beforehand. They put all that delicious buttery stuff in the bag. I don't know what's in that stuff, but it's delicious. I can't even cope. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically butter-flavored cancer. Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I literally... I've pulled it off before. Mordy Oberstein: Did you ever- Crystal Carter: And just eat the butter. Mordy Oberstein: You scraped... you take the popcorn and like a lunatic, scraping the inside of the bag like a scratch and sniff? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: No regrets. Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about again? Courses. Crystal Carter: Courses, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So why is this a special edition of It's New? It's because we asked Celeste Gonzalez and Judith Lewis, who are another two of our course instructors, about why learning SEO from a course is a good idea. You might say that's biased. We say that's good marketing, but you can listen to what they had to say and make your own decision. Here's Celeste on why taking an SEO course is a good way to learn SEO. Celeste Gonzalez: Learning SEO through a course provides you with a structured foundation that hits all essential topics. A course offers expert guidance from knowledgeable professionals, so you'll get real insights and practical tips that you may not encounter until you can get hands-on experience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Celeste. Yeah, that's a great point. But that last thing she mentioned is a really, really good point because the hands-on experience is where you fundamentally... you have to have hands-on experience. There's no way around that. However, if you don't have it, getting a course is good a foundation for when you do have it. But more importantly, I think is, while you are... let's say you're building your own website on Wix or Wix studio and you're doing that hands-on work to learn SEO. You do need reference points to go back to. It's like, "All right, I have it all in my head. Now I just have to implement it." If it were that easy, you wouldn't need a course, but you need to go back like, "Okay, now I ran into a situation. What does Celeste say in the course about that? Okay, fine. Now I'll do this." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think also sometimes when you do a course, particularly with SEO, you can layer your learning and you can layer your implementation. So maybe when you first go over the course, you're thinking about on-page SEO, and you're like, "Cool, I can do title tags," and you do title tags and then you learn more about the keyword research and stuff and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can add this to the title tags." Or you go back to the same piece of content after you learn more about technical SEO and maybe you're like, "Oh, I can add this technical element to this page as well." And there's basically... things will be fresher to you when you listen or when you go back to them again and they will appeal to you in different ways, so it's good to be able to go at your own pace. It's like listening to jazz. If you listen to jazz, sometimes you listen to the piano player, sometimes you listen to the saxophone player, and sometimes when you do that, it feels like a brand new song. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well first of all, it's like when I listen to my kids. Sometimes I listen to the one and I tune out the other one. But also, glad you said your point about what you just said because here's Judith Lewis about why you should take an SEO course, and I'll think you find great minds think alike. Judith Lewis: So I was asked, what are some of the advantages of learning SEO from a course? I used to teach courses in person and in the pre-pandemic days, and it was really difficult, I think, for some of the students to keep up, especially with the advanced elements of the course. When you're learning SEO from a course online though, you can pause, rewind, and listen to that section again. It's really hard to pause me, rewind me, and listen to that section again in a classroom, so one of the best advantages of learning SEO from a course online is that you get to pause, rewind, and listen again. And I might be biased, but I feel like my section of the course is one you're going to want to listen to over and over again, and it's my hope that you'll refer back to it time and time again. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, well first off, thank you Judith, and see? Great minds do think alike. That's just exactly what Crystal said. And by the way, Crystal did not know that Juidth said that. That's the first time Crystal heard the recording. Crystal Carter: This is true, but in my earlier discussion with Aleyda, I also said this: it's worth following along and going through some of the steps, going through some of the implementation if you can, while you're doing the course, and that's really great for rewinding and stuff. We also say this about some of the webinars is that, sometimes people say, "Oh, I'm not sure I understand the concept." I'm like, "Watch the whole thing." And this is one of the ways I learned personally. "Watch the whole thing, get the full scope of how it's all going to roll out, and then if there's the particular concept that you're not sure about, go back to that." But sometimes having a full idea of the full picture can help you to understand what one particular element might be, so it's great to be able to go at your own pace. I love online learning for that. It's really, really, really great value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like this... for an example, you can go and dive into one thing, come back out. You don't have to go in chronology... I learn like that. I don't like going in chronological order sometimes. I pop in here, pop out, pop in somewhere else. So courses are great for that, for the reasons that you're saying. You know who's basically an SEO course in his own right? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: seoroundtable.com is basically one giant, unorganized SEO course. Crystal Carter: It is really like a time capsule. He really just keeps all of the things that happen on Google is on there, so if you want to know when this feature came out, you will find it on Search Engine Roundtable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: If you want to know when Google announced this thing... whenever I have to do research on historical things of, "This came out here, this came out then, that happened then," if you want to see the evolution of a feature, that's where you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I like the old design of seoroundtable.com because it felt literally like a time capsule. And with that, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This one comes at you from Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land: Google rolls out new AI organized search results, AI overview links. So there's a bunch of changes here. Some of these were announced previously at some of Google's events like first of the AI organized search results. Google announced they were going to do this... I think it was back at Google IO? I've seen a similar format when they were talking about releasing... or when they released Google Gemini itself, but basically we've seen this in local space before, by the way. So new, but not new-new. The example here, by the way, is from a recipe query. So you could get the SERP organized according to, let's say, different topics. I think the example they have is around cooking cherries, if I'm not mistaken? Or cherry tomatoes or sauce recipes or whatever it is. I think it was... right, vegetarian appetizer ideas. There we go. And you can see a carousel of top recipes. You could explore by ingredient, so they have cheese or crackers or avocado. You can explore by the ingredient that way. Then they lay out the SERP with maybe guides to cooking the best vegetarian appetizer. They're basically breaking down the SERP according to the various subtopics, the various intents. I like it. I think it all makes it very much more usable as a user trying to find something, trying to explore something, and I think this is a great case of AI being implemented the right way. I think you're going to see this expand all over the place. There're going to be Solace already in local. We're seeing it now with the recipe query. I like it. I think it's great. I think it aligns with Google, which I mentioned originally showed with Gemini in their demo, or its demo back then. Okay. Google also said the new way of linking and citations in AI overviews that we talked back in August. Barry says that that format's going live across the board, so that seems great. Also, here's an interesting one. Google's saying, "Yeah, going to get some ads in the AI overviews." In fact, if you head over to Search Engine Journal, Brookes Osmundson says, "Google officially launches ads in AI overviews." You can see, by the way, in the example that they have there, how it'll actually look. It looks pretty interesting. Basically you have a query for whatever, like... I don't know, how do you get a grass stain out? You have your AI overview summary, and in this case, at the bottom of the AI overview is a little sponsor label with that typical product carousel sponsor products. So that's what it looks like in this particular case, so that's really interesting. Should make folks like Greg Finn pretty happy. I suspect Google also announced updates to its Lens features and how you can search with Lens and shopping with Lens. So for example, yeah, you could have always taken a snapshot with the Lens of a product and said, "Hey, find me more examples of that product." But now Google's saying you can also do the same thing, but now get more context about the product along with it when you search for it. So that's great, a bunch of additions on the AI front. Super cool, super awesome. Links to the show notes. That's this week's Snappy News. Thank you again, Barry, for all the great news you provide. By the way, I'm going to break a fourth wall here. We record the news afterwards. After this, and I always thank Barry anyway because I know I'm going to inevitably use an article from Barry. Also thinking to anyone else I might have quoted in this week's episode. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Right. Thank you for the news and for being newsworthy. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: Did I tell you? Behind the scenes, when we did the hundredth episode, we had Barry on for the news and I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing going on this week." I'm like, "Barry, I don't know what to cover. There's nothing happening." It was Labor Day week, we lost a day. Barry was like, "No, I got you. Big news is coming." I'm like, "You know, you asked for SEO news and the great Barry in the sky makes it rain." Crystal Carter: He does. Mordy Oberstein: And it turns out there's a day the core update finished rolling out, so we covered that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Barry makes it rain SEO news. Crystal Carter: Every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our podcast with the Follow of the Week. I'm cheating a little bit this week. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a lot of buttered popcorn from the microwave. I'm cheating. Crystal Carter: Are you not just going to shout out yourself? I think it's like that Snoop Dogg song where he's like- Mordy Oberstein: That would be so narcissistic. Crystal Carter: Snoop Dogg got that award and he was like, "Last of all, I'd like to thank... first of all, I'd like to thank me and myself for all the hard work that I did, for all the sleepless nights and for everything." And I was like, "You know what?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." You do need... Obviously, thank other people as well, but you do need to thank yourself as well a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: All right. All right, so we'll do it like this then, okay? We're going to recommend you follow all of the course instructors, so Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Judith Lewis, James Clark, Jill Quick, Itamar Blauer, Mike Stephanie, Debbie Chu, Celeste Gonzales, Crystal Carter... Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And if you want, you can follow me at your own risk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's right. Literally, we were so honored and one of the things that's great about working with this team is that we get to do cool stuff like this, and it's such an honor to be able to be like, "Hey, do y'all want to do our course?" And all of these fine SEOs said yes, which is amazing and I'm so honored because literally they're some of the best folks. Mordy Oberstein: And we didn't have to threaten anybody. That's such a Mordy comment to make. 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 in the new episode as we dive into AI overviews and the data behind them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and whatnot over at the Wix Studio 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 Aleyda Solis Andrew Optimisey Judith Lewis Celeste Gonzalez Itamar Blauer Jill Quick James Clark Mike Stepney Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Orainti Optimisey News Google rolls out new AI-organized search results, AI Overview links Google Officially Launches Ads In AI Overviews Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Aleyda Solis Andrew Optimisey Judith Lewis Celeste Gonzalez Itamar Blauer Jill Quick James Clark Mike Stepney Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Orainti Optimisey News Google rolls out new AI-organized search results, AI Overview links Google Officially Launches Ads In AI Overviews Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm been joined by she who educates the masses with all sorts of profound SEO knowledge and insights, Head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. I am here, and yes, we're going to do a podcast, you said about educating. I was asked... there was a time when they were giving teacher discounts at a place where I went, and they were like, "Are you a teacher?" I was like, "I do teaching sometimes, but technically no. But many people have learned, I think..." I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: As a former actual teacher, let me tell you how teachers look. Because I would get the free Dunkin' Donuts thing on Teacher's Day. Let me tell you- Crystal Carter: Yo, that's a dub. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Let me tell you how a teacher'd look at it. "Oh, it's totally worth it now dealing with your children," because they got a free coffee. Crystal Carter: The coffee at Dunkin' is pretty good, so that's a win. I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: I'll take the W. Mordy Oberstein: When I go back home, I bring back bags full of ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Very nice. Very nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's my life. Crystal Carter: Good choice. Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' coffee packed in a suitcase. I'm always worried, by the way, they'll think I'm some sort of drug trafficker because that's how you hide drugs, in coffee, because it kills the smell of the marijuana and whatever. Crystal Carter: Okay, so you have more exciting friends than I do because I did not know that fact. Mordy Oberstein: A customs person told me this when he saw the coffee in the thing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the cartel. No, it's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get an entire course of SEO awesomeness. How much does it cost? Nothing. What does it cover? Everything. Who's in it? Aleyda Solis, Andrew Cock-Starkey, Jill Quick, Judith Lewis, and so many others. Where can you find it? Over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub. Link in the show note, which brings us to what we're covering today: what to look for in an SEO course. Of course, is there such thing as the best SEO course? Signs an SEO course may or may not be for you and what goes into creating a good course. To help the idea of learning SEO from a course take its course, we welcome Wix Studio course instructors, Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. I apologize for a little bit of a keyword stuffing there. Plus we put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test as more Wix Studio course instructors share their insights as Judith Lewis and Celeste Gonzalez grab the mic. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So spit out that gum, sit up straight, and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this the 105th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. That was a lot. Crystal Carter: There was definitely some teachable moments in there. Mordy Oberstein: If you want moments, write shorter intros. With that, please welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. Aleyda Solis: Hello. Hello everybody. Mordy, oh, my god. And Crystal, I had to restrict myself to not say anything. Oh, what we have already learned already. Andrew Optimisey: Aloha, Mordy. Aloha, Crystal. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hi, Andrew. Crystal Carter: Hello. Mahalo. Thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: How festive of you to steer into our vibe. Aleyda Solis: By the way, it's one thing, right? That's so very American of you, listening about the Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Last time that I went actually to the US in July, I bought one, the already cold prepare one that they sell at the supermarket that is so very American. So yeah, I had to try one frappuccino-like just to taste it. It was so good, but it was also 240 calories or something that high. Got so many calories in a single drink. It's yummy but yes, highly, highly... I think that you can get fat just drinking that. It's crazy. Mordy Oberstein: It's ridiculous. Pro-tip, when you go to Dunkin' Donuts, do not think about calories. Andrew Optimisey: If you're thinking about calories in Dunkin', you're in the wrong place, right? Mordy Oberstein: You're in the wrong place. I got to have the water. Crystal Carter: A hilarious SEO fact before we get into things, if you look up dunkin.com, which I did, it doesn't actually go to Dunkin' Donuts or they rebranded to Dunkin'. It goes to some random consultancy and then they have this holding screen that says, "If you're looking for Dunkin' Donuts, you have to go back to the internet because this isn't Dunkin' Donuts." And then after 15 seconds, it loads to this other website. And as an SEO, I was like, "Dude, you're sitting on a gold mine. Just cash the check. Just cash the check." Andrew Optimisey: Sell the domain. Crystal Carter: But somehow he's holding on. I don't know, Mr. Dunkin, really, really... Dunkin' Logistics really, really wants to keep that domain. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' Logistics. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There we go. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's get into it. Y'all are part of our Wix Studio SEO course and which... people are taking an SEO course. You sat down and you wrote up scripts for the course. What are you hoping, what were you hoping, what are you hoping that people will get out of an SEO course? Aleyda Solis: My expectation was to facilitate the learning process about technical SEO, because this is a topic that I cover in my course, and to make it very actionable in a way that it was very easy to grasp the importance of technical SEO, especially something that can quickly become very complex if you don't come from the web development world. So it is very clear, the why, why it is important, why you need to learn it, what are the key concepts to understand even if you are not going to specialize on becoming a technical SEO, and what makes or breaks a website technical configuration to focus on what's actually key or most impactful? So in the course, that was my expectation, to be... not necessarily make it the most comprehensive course ever. I think I can be a little bit... it's okay to be proud to say that I tried to really cover everything, what actually matters, but that was not necessarily as much of a point of there are so many resources and so much out there where they can learn already from that is also comprehensive, but let's make it meaningful. Let's make it easy to go through, make it a journey, and that it can be helpful for people who are just starting, people who are not already SEOs, as well as those who are SEOs and want to focus more on the technical side of things. So I believe that that is what makes a little bit of a difference between a course or other formats like a guide, a comprehensive guide, or a book even to make it easier to explain and give those details that you cannot necessarily as easily share in the text format. Mordy Oberstein: Before I let Angie reply, just a plug. If you're looking for a guide to SEO, check out the guide that Aleyda has at learnseo.io. Okay Andrew, take it away. Andrew Optimisey: So there was a couple of things for me that I really wanted to aim at, and one of the reasons it was great to work with Wix on this is because... so Wix is used by loads of different people. You get people who are building their own websites themselves who have never done any web dev before. They're running their own little shop like a bakery or whatever, and they have not a clue where to start with SEO. And then you've got big agencies who maybe know a little bit about SEO, enough to make them dangerous, but maybe they need a little bit of guidance on that kind of stuff. So that's where I thought working with Wix with this kind of stuff would be really good, and so I wanted to demystify it a little bit because everybody hears this thing about SEO and, "Oh, it's so complex and it's so tricky and I don't know where to start and how do I do these things? And it changes so fast," and that kind of stuff around... because you said about us writing scripts and we spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. As soon as you write stuff down in SEO, it's out date, right? Because it changes quickly and the minute you note it down, then there'll be some update or something will change or there'll be a new platform, a new system and stuff. So one of the things I wanted to do with the stuff that I was writing was teach people a sort of direction to travel, a way of thinking about things like... so if I'm going to show you this particular way to do keyword research and stuff, it's not that this way is the only way. It's that these are some of the things that you might want to think about and how you do this, how you think about customers and how you think about matching your content to intent and all those kinds of things where this is a good direction of travel. I always use the Wayne Gretzky thing all the time in SEO. It's don't go to where SEO is. Skate to where the puck is going. That's how you get really good as Wayne Gretzky as the ice hockey player. You go to where SEO is going. If you know where Google is heading and the directions that SEO generally is trying to go in, if you go in that direction too, you're going to be okay. Mordy Oberstein: That was, by the way, one of the things that we were making the course... and by the way, we didn't write the scripts. The people in our course, they wrote their own scripts. Obviously, we had a course instructor go through and they would tighten it up, whatever it is, but this is coming from... it's the latest focus on technical SEO. It's your focus on keyword research, but that was one of the things that we were thinking about when we made the course. How do we create a course in a way where if something changes, it's not out of data in an instant? Which is very tricky and very complicated. Sorry Crys, I feel like I cut you off. Crystal Carter: No, no. I think that the other thing that we were thinking about when... we were so grateful that you both agreed to do the course and we were so grateful that all the other folks on the course got involved with the course and everyone that has been working with us on this has a common goal, which is basically what you were talking about Aleyda and what you were talking about Andrew, which is demystifying this stuff. There are some people... we've talked about reputational things on this podcast before, but sometimes within the SEO industry people are like, "Oh, it's so complicated." They make it so that you couldn't possibly... people speak in really big words and they speak really convoluted or they speak in jargon or that sort of thing. And everyone, we were so grateful again, that was involved with this, has a focus of, "No, we can speak in plain English, we can speak in plain language, and we can speak in a way that you can understand it. If you stick with this, you'll understand it. It's a question of whether or not you want to learn and that will make it accessible to you." Aleyda Solis: And I think that a big role here, at least it was when I decided to go ahead with the course, and then that I could thankfully also validate through the whole process, was the production quality that you had. I was amazed from the beginning. When we were creating the strips with the examples, the feedback that I got from you it's true that yeah, I did it, but I got amazing feedback to make it super easy to go through first and then secondly, once that we were recording, I remember in London I was mind blown by the whole production around it. So I am delighted to see the outcome now that is going to be launched, because I believe that although there are so many courses out there, there are only so very few that have this not only quality. The content and insights also make it easy for people to understand independently of the complexity and additionally, the production value is so, so high. It's going to be beautiful and can't wait to watch it, too. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Big hearts to you as well. Andrew Optimisey: I think a quick note for all the other people in the Wix Studio team that worked on this kind of stuff, there was a whole bunch of your colleagues that came into town on this. Like Aleyda said, there was times when I'd been writing sections of my course and I'd get a note back saying, "This is great. How can we show it? We need something so it's not just a talking head lecturing you about SEO and here's what you should and shouldn't do. How can we demonstrate this? What does this look like?" And it was like, "Well, I can't really do... it doesn't really work with this." "Okay, well let's think of another example that's similar, that tells the same story, makes the same point, but we can demonstrate it with data. We can demonstrate it with..." If you watch my section of the course, I use a lot of silly rambling analogies and synonyms and silly stuff like stories and things to try and bring that kind of stuff to life. But that, working with the Wix team and your colleagues really help bring that kind of stuff out and make it more of a story so it's more engaging. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you read my mind. I literally wrote a note to myself while Aleyda was talking, "Oh, I need to shout out Natalie Hamouie for being the organizing force behind the entire course. Natalie, you're amazing. Both of you bring up a really good point and it's one of the things that I want to talk about in deciding whether or not to take an SEO course or not take an SEO course, or how do you know if an SEO course is a good course or not. Aleyda, you hinted at it before. When we made the course, we didn't want to make the best SEO course because there is no such thing as the best SEO course. It's a course that I think is good for you for where you're at and what you need right now for your learning journey kind of thing. In fact, to break the fourth wall, when we were making the landing page for the course, we decided, "Well, should we include the word best?" From a pure SEO point of view if you look at what Google's showing, there's a tendency for Google to rank pages that include the word best. Super old school SEO. We said, "No, we're not going to do that because, A, old school SEO and B, It's not on brand for what we want the course to be." I don't think, and maybe you'll disagree with me, that it really is a way to produce the best SEO course. There's only a way to produce something that you think is able to reach a targeted audience at that particular moment. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, one hundred percent, because even if I think that we tried with this course to make it as evergreen as possible... and I remember when we were recording, one of the core metrics was about to be updated and we already talk about it as something from the past, but eventually, something else will be updated that will unfortunately and hopefully not that soon, but at some point it will, so it won't be fresh anymore. So to make it the perfect course at every single point in time, it should be completely updated and potentially even discussing or tackling things that just happened. So I believe that potentially to have the best experience, not the best course, the best learning experience, you should take a course but also complement it with podcasts like this one where you discuss the latest in SEO, the trends, the updates, the news, what is happening, and what matters right now. And what I believe is critical to make the course a great learning experience is to tie it with the SEO day to day, to make it impactful and actionable. Because I believe that what it really let's say challenged me at the beginning of my SEO learning journey was that for me when learning, guides out there, it was very non-tangible and very hard to think of scenarios or circumstances where I will, for example, want to add a nofollow on links or willingly noindex pages at the time and things like that. So providing the scenarios, examples that are usual, common, that people will run into when doing audits or analyzing or assessing opportunities, and also given the very realistic and reasonable idea that it's too idealistic and potentially not reasonable to think that a website will be perfectly optimized ever, but to give a sense of this is the actual goal, this is how you should align everything, and you don't work in a silo too because it's not only about being technical optimized and this ties to revenue and this ties to major bigger goals that are not only SEO-related and stuff like that. I think that that makes all the difference. And many years ago I wrote an SEO fundamentals book in Spanish. And through the years I have gotten people who have told me, Spanish speakers telling me, "This is the book that made the difference when I learned it, not because it discusses new things, but the angle that you took was different, was actionable, and makes sense. All these concepts actually now made sense." So I believe that this is what makes a course or the learning journey through a course better in general and more impactful and actually helpful in your learning journey. Crystal Carter: I think that that's such an important point because there are a lot of people selling very expensive courses with terrible motivations right now. So I think the motivations that you're talking about are so important, to help people actually know how to do it and learn the fundamentals and learn tying it to value of the business and not to, "You can do SEO and you'll make $1 million tomorrow." There's so many people, particularly on TikTok, there's a lot of people selling this digital marketing course and, "I will make da da da da da, and just DM me and I'll tell you all of the secrets and da da da." And then you see there's 17 videos that are all the same thing of all these people saying this stuff. And I'm sorry, if you are somebody who's listening to this and you've seen one of those courses, I'm sorry, but it's a pyramid scheme. That's what's going on there. So they're not going to teach you how to do digital marketing properly. That's something else. Beware the motivations of the folks that are trying to sell you something. And our motivations are to help people learn SEO. That's our motivations. Andrew Optimisey: One of the things that I liked about, again, working with Natalie and the rest of the Wix team, was there was this effort to make the lessons stand alone. Although there is... again, they've made a lot of efforts to then join things up when it's been like, "If you learned a little bit about this, you might want to learn more about it in a later section or in Judith's section," those kind of things. But because they broke the courses up so I don't just rattle on about keywords for hours and hours, there's discrete chunks where it's like, "Here's some basic stuff and here's some middle of the road stuff, and then if you want to go even further with it, here's this bit too." And again, that was something the Wix team were really keen to push me on it. "How do you go even further?" "So this is the one-on-one stuff, this is..." But what if you're like, "This is all really basic," and you skip that because you're already fairly experienced in SEO, but you just want more? "Where do I go next?" So that's one of the things I quite liked about it and then you can cherry pick if you are completely new to SEO and you just want some fundamentals. So again, we talked about the baker that runs the shop. They've got a ten-page website. Technical SEO is probably not going to move the needle for them unless they're doing some absolutely fundamentally awful things, if they have noindex'd their website. So you're going to need some of the technical stuff. So you need enough to make you not completely invisible to Google, but if you're getting onto canonical tags and really complex technical stuff, that's probably not going to make the difference for a ten-page website. What might make the difference is some really good content or building your basic link structures, all those kinds of things. So that's the kind of thing we should build. "Right, you need two stories from this section, two from this section, and two from this, and that's enough for now. Then you can get going and then when you want more, there's more too. So you can come back for those things too." When you get to your 8 million page website because you scaled it up and you are now dominating the world, you're going to need the heck out of the technical section because if you've got that size site, there's no way you're getting anywhere without a solid technical structure. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's about that was when we were thinking about the structure of the course, they were like, "Oh, we need something for beginners or something for advanced." And the thing about it, in SEO, sometimes you're a beginner and advanced at the same time. When GA4 comes out, everyone's a beginner at GA4. They're just having to start again with this new piece of technology. We have AI stuff and there's people who are very, very advanced with one type of SEO skill, but maybe you're getting started with AI or maybe they're good at one part of creating content with AI and then they're not so great at this other part of AI. So it is important that you can jump across to different sections and it is important that you can jump to all of those. But I think certainly one of the things with learningseo.io, which is a great resource as well from Aleyda Solis, has a map of even if you jump around, you can see the gaps. So you can see like, "Oh, well I learned this part, but apparently I didn't learn these two parts that lead up to that." Similarly, our courses is that way as well. So you can see the whole and also you can also take it off and go, "All right, I know that. I know that. Okay, I don't know that. I will watch that one." Or you can take the whole thing all together. You have the option. Mordy Oberstein: It's very purposeful because way, way, way back when this was first a concept, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because when I started learning SEO, I started learning SEO and I think one of the first things I saw was... I don't know if they still have it or not. The periodic table that Search Engine Land had, that was one of the first things that I saw. And as I started diving into SEO more and more and more, I felt like, "I don't feel like I see the full picture. I feel like I see a little bit here, I see a little bit there, and I don't even know what I'm missing, but I feel like I'm missing something. There's a gap." So I wanted to do a course because when you do something like a course, you can at least walk away feeling like there's obviously going to be more to learn, but there shouldn't be these wide gaps anymore that I feel like, "I don't know where I'm supposed to go next," or, "What did I miss that I shouldn't have missed?" And to zoom out, it kind of goes back to what Crystal was saying before and what Aleyda and Andrew, you're both saying, it goes back to motivations. When you're looking at an SEO course, I'll give you a pointer. Whether you're taking our course or somebody else's course or whatever even that's not about SEO, look who's behind the course. Who are they and what are they about? Because that'll dictate everything about the course. That'll dictate whether or not... I gave Andrew a hard time about his assessment saying, "Drew, let's make it a little bit harder, a little more nuanced, and blah, blah blah." By the way, if you think you had it bad, I was giving Itamar Blauer the hardest time because he was doing a section on third-party SEO tools and it can be very straightforward. "No, let's give actual cases and examples and let's try to give scenarios so this way, you can take what he was talking about and apply it somewhere else." So you should talk to Itamar, Andrew, because I was giving him... putting through the ringer of trying to... no, but because of what Aleyda was saying before, you want to try to have it scenario-based whenever you can. You want to try to make it as practical and real-world whenever you can, because when you walk away learning SEO from a blog post or from whatever it might be, a webinar, that's one of those gaps. And the reason why I felt we did a good job with this was because the people behind the course, whether it's us on the Wix side or whether it's y'all as the instructors are people who at one point or another struggled with learning SEO and it was meaningful to do something for somebody who is currently struggling to learn SEO. Aleyda Solis: Just to also potentially close the circle regarding motivations, because I think that is also very, very important. When someone takes a course, you need to invest a little bit of more time, I have to say, and attention than what takes to go through a guide for example, or skim reading an e-book, something like that. But you actually need to put a lot of more focus, and many times also not a trivial investment for many people. And motivation is key here of what you want out of that. For many, it will be, "Okay to start understanding what is this about, complement my already existing experience, or because I feel that I need to take my skills on these topics to the next level, there are certain areas or configurations or elements that I don't know yet how they tie in or how I can connect them to what I do in the day to day." So these are fantastic. Also, I have to say something, right? It was a few years back when I was giving this pro bono course about technical SEO, and I asked a little bit about the feedback regarding the motivations of the people learning very honestly, and I think it's good, right? It's okay. It's understandable. Some of them say, "I want to start with technical SEO and focus more on technical SEO rather than content in all the areas, because I have heard that because it is more complex, it pays better, and I see the salary ranges out there and they are higher." And I was like, "Look, this is legit. This is completely reasonable." Just make sure that it's not only about the pay, because realistically it's true that many of these more specialized roles, depending a little bit on the type of specialization can end up paying more, but it pays more because these are on companies that have bigger SEO departments and hire very specialized people. These very specialized people have already had a very big journey and a lot of experience not only that area, but understand well the overall process, the fundamental... and how that area actually has an impact that makes money and drives revenue and achieves goals at... very likely at an enterprise level. So this ties in on how important it is to understand that you don't work on a silo, so even if you want to only focus on technical SEO or link building or content or whatever, it is fundamental that you have... how important is your specific or particular area within the SEO context and the context of the business that you're working in, because that is what actually makes a difference at the end of the day. Not necessarily how complex it is, only because... and you understanding the concepts and nailing the concepts and knowing how to code in case you do technical SEO, but actually moving the needle and changing what actually matters to drive the impact that these bigger companies are willing to pay big bucks for. And this is it, right? Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing that also comes with that is, of course, if you're working to get a job in the industry, having a course, doing a course can be super useful. And if you're trying to get a job or you're planning to increase your skillset so that you can get a pay raise or so you can get whatever, that's totally valid because we live in the world and then people got to pay the bills. I totally get that. But what's also important is that if that's only your motivation, very often you might get bored or tired of SEO fairly quickly. You have to be a little bit curious as well because it can be very complex and you have to be the person that goes, "But why? No, but why? No, but really, but why?" over and over and over again until you figure out what it is. And I think one of the only ways that you can do that alongside a course is to be building, be testing, be looking at things in real life. So throughout the course, we have examples of how you can implement things on Wix Studio, how you can implement things across your Wix website, et cetera, et cetera. These are ways that you can get started with trying out content. So if you don't have your own website, it's fairly straightforward to get set up on Wix to building a website. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of the technical things are built in to help you get going with that, and it means that you can test and you can iterate. If you don't have your own website, then I highly recommend while you're doing this course, getting involved with a website so you can say to the people who... your football team or your neighbor or something you volunteer with, "Can I help you with your website?" And chances are they'll go, "Yeah," because nine times out of 10 they're not doing anything with it. And you can have a look in their Google Search Console, you can set them up on GA4. You can have a look at whether their links are working. You can crawl their site map, you can use some of those tools, but it really helps to understand the concepts if you're able to see them in real time, particularly with technical SEO and also with content. When you're looking at how people respond to content and how Google ranks content, you can't see that without seeing that in the wild. And it's a live ecosystem, so you have to be involved with it. And I highly, highly, highly recommend doing SEO in parallel with the course. Andrew Optimisey: And one of the things I liked about it was... so when you work with people who are part of a digital marketing role rather than an SEO specialist, is that they have to wear lots of hats. And much as they would love to know all of SEO, I very much doubt anybody... there'll be some people that will sit there and just smash through the whole course in one go. They'll have a lot of free time, but it's like you can kind of cherry-pick a little bit. So there's going to be times when there's a project coming up where we have the budget and we have the developer time, and we have the resource to go after content, so this is the thing we're going to focus on, this particular topic area, and my boss has said, "Right, we've previously worked on dog food. Now we're doing cat food content." "We need content right now. How do we do the..." and so you can then go and if you've not done content, if you're more of a technically minded SEO and you haven't really done content stuff before, or maybe you are one of these T-shaped digital marketers who's good at lots of things but only super deep on one or two things, you can choose a bit of the course that best suits the project you're going to work on. And then maybe later down the line, there'll be more budget and it'll be, "Okay, well actually we found that there's all these issues going on in Search Console and technically our website's falling over and it's really slow, and what do we do with these kinds of things?" "Okay, I don't really know enough about... so I'm going to go and I'm going to watch this section of the course and I'm going to learn about these things that I need to scale up a little bit more on." So then you can make better use of your time. So when you do get that project that comes up and works in that particular area, you can make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you should need to cover in that section so that project really works. And so that works for, say, digital marketing teams, those mom and pop shops we talked about, but then also those people that are working in those bigger companies that maybe it helps to then have that sympathy and empathy with the people that you are working with. If you're a super great technical SEO and you've got these content people banging on you all the time about, "Can we get this done? Can we do this?" And you're like, "Oh." If you can watch that bit of the course, then maybe you can understand a bit more about where they're coming from and then you can have a bit more of a useful conversation rather than just banging heads all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You took our course and you transcended it from being learning about SEO to making the world a more harmonious and better place. There's no better place than- Andrew Optimisey: We can all be friends. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, other than saying thank you both so much for being a part of the course, thank you to Mike Stepney, to Itamar Blauer, to Jill Quick, to James Clark, to Judith Lewis, to Celeste Gonzalez, to everyone who helped on the back end of the course, and Debbie Chu obviously as well. Thank you so much for being a part of the course and thank you, Aleyda and Andrew, for not only being a part of the course, but being a part of our little podcast. Andrew Optimisey: Thanks. Aleyda Solis: Always a great time. Mordy Oberstein: All right, thanks again so much, Aleyda and Andrew, A, for sitting down with us here in this podcast and for of course being a part of our course. So we spent the entire episode until now talking about... or working with the assumption that taking an SEO course is a good idea and it represents a good way to learn SEO provided it's the right fit for you, if the course is the right fit for you. But is that actually the case? Let's challenge some assumptions about our new SEO course with a special edition of It's New. Mordy Oberstein: It's New, being the course is new, by the way. The SEO learning from a course is not new, but our course is new. Crystal Carter: It is new. We spent a lot of time on it and it's new, fresh out the box. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Because for me, it doesn't feel new because I've been working on this thing for months. It's old. Crystal Carter: I think that's because anything good takes a little while to cook. You got to let it cook. Mordy Oberstein: Really? My great popcorn is delicious. Takes, I don't know, a minute and a half. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, somebody prepped it beforehand. They put all that delicious buttery stuff in the bag. I don't know what's in that stuff, but it's delicious. I can't even cope. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically butter-flavored cancer. Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I literally... I've pulled it off before. Mordy Oberstein: Did you ever- Crystal Carter: And just eat the butter. Mordy Oberstein: You scraped... you take the popcorn and like a lunatic, scraping the inside of the bag like a scratch and sniff? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: No regrets. Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about again? Courses. Crystal Carter: Courses, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So why is this a special edition of It's New? It's because we asked Celeste Gonzalez and Judith Lewis, who are another two of our course instructors, about why learning SEO from a course is a good idea. You might say that's biased. We say that's good marketing, but you can listen to what they had to say and make your own decision. Here's Celeste on why taking an SEO course is a good way to learn SEO. Celeste Gonzalez: Learning SEO through a course provides you with a structured foundation that hits all essential topics. A course offers expert guidance from knowledgeable professionals, so you'll get real insights and practical tips that you may not encounter until you can get hands-on experience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Celeste. Yeah, that's a great point. But that last thing she mentioned is a really, really good point because the hands-on experience is where you fundamentally... you have to have hands-on experience. There's no way around that. However, if you don't have it, getting a course is good a foundation for when you do have it. But more importantly, I think is, while you are... let's say you're building your own website on Wix or Wix studio and you're doing that hands-on work to learn SEO. You do need reference points to go back to. It's like, "All right, I have it all in my head. Now I just have to implement it." If it were that easy, you wouldn't need a course, but you need to go back like, "Okay, now I ran into a situation. What does Celeste say in the course about that? Okay, fine. Now I'll do this." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think also sometimes when you do a course, particularly with SEO, you can layer your learning and you can layer your implementation. So maybe when you first go over the course, you're thinking about on-page SEO, and you're like, "Cool, I can do title tags," and you do title tags and then you learn more about the keyword research and stuff and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can add this to the title tags." Or you go back to the same piece of content after you learn more about technical SEO and maybe you're like, "Oh, I can add this technical element to this page as well." And there's basically... things will be fresher to you when you listen or when you go back to them again and they will appeal to you in different ways, so it's good to be able to go at your own pace. It's like listening to jazz. If you listen to jazz, sometimes you listen to the piano player, sometimes you listen to the saxophone player, and sometimes when you do that, it feels like a brand new song. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well first of all, it's like when I listen to my kids. Sometimes I listen to the one and I tune out the other one. But also, glad you said your point about what you just said because here's Judith Lewis about why you should take an SEO course, and I'll think you find great minds think alike. Judith Lewis: So I was asked, what are some of the advantages of learning SEO from a course? I used to teach courses in person and in the pre-pandemic days, and it was really difficult, I think, for some of the students to keep up, especially with the advanced elements of the course. When you're learning SEO from a course online though, you can pause, rewind, and listen to that section again. It's really hard to pause me, rewind me, and listen to that section again in a classroom, so one of the best advantages of learning SEO from a course online is that you get to pause, rewind, and listen again. And I might be biased, but I feel like my section of the course is one you're going to want to listen to over and over again, and it's my hope that you'll refer back to it time and time again. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, well first off, thank you Judith, and see? Great minds do think alike. That's just exactly what Crystal said. And by the way, Crystal did not know that Juidth said that. That's the first time Crystal heard the recording. Crystal Carter: This is true, but in my earlier discussion with Aleyda, I also said this: it's worth following along and going through some of the steps, going through some of the implementation if you can, while you're doing the course, and that's really great for rewinding and stuff. We also say this about some of the webinars is that, sometimes people say, "Oh, I'm not sure I understand the concept." I'm like, "Watch the whole thing." And this is one of the ways I learned personally. "Watch the whole thing, get the full scope of how it's all going to roll out, and then if there's the particular concept that you're not sure about, go back to that." But sometimes having a full idea of the full picture can help you to understand what one particular element might be, so it's great to be able to go at your own pace. I love online learning for that. It's really, really, really great value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like this... for an example, you can go and dive into one thing, come back out. You don't have to go in chronology... I learn like that. I don't like going in chronological order sometimes. I pop in here, pop out, pop in somewhere else. So courses are great for that, for the reasons that you're saying. You know who's basically an SEO course in his own right? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: seoroundtable.com is basically one giant, unorganized SEO course. Crystal Carter: It is really like a time capsule. He really just keeps all of the things that happen on Google is on there, so if you want to know when this feature came out, you will find it on Search Engine Roundtable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: If you want to know when Google announced this thing... whenever I have to do research on historical things of, "This came out here, this came out then, that happened then," if you want to see the evolution of a feature, that's where you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I like the old design of seoroundtable.com because it felt literally like a time capsule. And with that, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This one comes at you from Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land: Google rolls out new AI organized search results, AI overview links. So there's a bunch of changes here. Some of these were announced previously at some of Google's events like first of the AI organized search results. Google announced they were going to do this... I think it was back at Google IO? I've seen a similar format when they were talking about releasing... or when they released Google Gemini itself, but basically we've seen this in local space before, by the way. So new, but not new-new. The example here, by the way, is from a recipe query. So you could get the SERP organized according to, let's say, different topics. I think the example they have is around cooking cherries, if I'm not mistaken? Or cherry tomatoes or sauce recipes or whatever it is. I think it was... right, vegetarian appetizer ideas. There we go. And you can see a carousel of top recipes. You could explore by ingredient, so they have cheese or crackers or avocado. You can explore by the ingredient that way. Then they lay out the SERP with maybe guides to cooking the best vegetarian appetizer. They're basically breaking down the SERP according to the various subtopics, the various intents. I like it. I think it all makes it very much more usable as a user trying to find something, trying to explore something, and I think this is a great case of AI being implemented the right way. I think you're going to see this expand all over the place. There're going to be Solace already in local. We're seeing it now with the recipe query. I like it. I think it's great. I think it aligns with Google, which I mentioned originally showed with Gemini in their demo, or its demo back then. Okay. Google also said the new way of linking and citations in AI overviews that we talked back in August. Barry says that that format's going live across the board, so that seems great. Also, here's an interesting one. Google's saying, "Yeah, going to get some ads in the AI overviews." In fact, if you head over to Search Engine Journal, Brookes Osmundson says, "Google officially launches ads in AI overviews." You can see, by the way, in the example that they have there, how it'll actually look. It looks pretty interesting. Basically you have a query for whatever, like... I don't know, how do you get a grass stain out? You have your AI overview summary, and in this case, at the bottom of the AI overview is a little sponsor label with that typical product carousel sponsor products. So that's what it looks like in this particular case, so that's really interesting. Should make folks like Greg Finn pretty happy. I suspect Google also announced updates to its Lens features and how you can search with Lens and shopping with Lens. So for example, yeah, you could have always taken a snapshot with the Lens of a product and said, "Hey, find me more examples of that product." But now Google's saying you can also do the same thing, but now get more context about the product along with it when you search for it. So that's great, a bunch of additions on the AI front. Super cool, super awesome. Links to the show notes. That's this week's Snappy News. Thank you again, Barry, for all the great news you provide. By the way, I'm going to break a fourth wall here. We record the news afterwards. After this, and I always thank Barry anyway because I know I'm going to inevitably use an article from Barry. Also thinking to anyone else I might have quoted in this week's episode. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Right. Thank you for the news and for being newsworthy. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: Did I tell you? Behind the scenes, when we did the hundredth episode, we had Barry on for the news and I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing going on this week." I'm like, "Barry, I don't know what to cover. There's nothing happening." It was Labor Day week, we lost a day. Barry was like, "No, I got you. Big news is coming." I'm like, "You know, you asked for SEO news and the great Barry in the sky makes it rain." Crystal Carter: He does. Mordy Oberstein: And it turns out there's a day the core update finished rolling out, so we covered that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Barry makes it rain SEO news. Crystal Carter: Every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our podcast with the Follow of the Week. I'm cheating a little bit this week. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a lot of buttered popcorn from the microwave. I'm cheating. Crystal Carter: Are you not just going to shout out yourself? I think it's like that Snoop Dogg song where he's like- Mordy Oberstein: That would be so narcissistic. Crystal Carter: Snoop Dogg got that award and he was like, "Last of all, I'd like to thank... first of all, I'd like to thank me and myself for all the hard work that I did, for all the sleepless nights and for everything." And I was like, "You know what?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." You do need... Obviously, thank other people as well, but you do need to thank yourself as well a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: All right. All right, so we'll do it like this then, okay? We're going to recommend you follow all of the course instructors, so Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Judith Lewis, James Clark, Jill Quick, Itamar Blauer, Mike Stephanie, Debbie Chu, Celeste Gonzales, Crystal Carter... Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And if you want, you can follow me at your own risk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's right. Literally, we were so honored and one of the things that's great about working with this team is that we get to do cool stuff like this, and it's such an honor to be able to be like, "Hey, do y'all want to do our course?" And all of these fine SEOs said yes, which is amazing and I'm so honored because literally they're some of the best folks. Mordy Oberstein: And we didn't have to threaten anybody. That's such a Mordy comment to make. 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 in the new episode as we dive into AI overviews and the data behind them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and whatnot over at the Wix Studio 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

What is good content and how quickly does its definition change? Why is rank more volatile than it was before? How will SGE ultimately play itself out on the SERP? Get ready to experience the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast live from BrightonSEO in San Diego, as we uncover the most critical unsolved SEO mysteries. We evaluate the role of content trends in SEO with George Nguyen, the state of rank volatility with Cindy Krum, how to communicate with clients in a more complex environment with Greg Gifford, and take up the future of SGE on the SERP with the great Mike King. We’re doing it live this week as we “dance”’ our way into solving SEO mysteries right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! *Mordy’s rank dancing gif available soon* Back Unsolved SEO Mysteries What is good content and how quickly does its definition change? Why is rank more volatile than it was before? How will SGE ultimately play itself out on the SERP? Get ready to experience the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast live from BrightonSEO in San Diego, as we uncover the most critical unsolved SEO mysteries. We evaluate the role of content trends in SEO with George Nguyen, the state of rank volatility with Cindy Krum, how to communicate with clients in a more complex environment with Greg Gifford, and take up the future of SGE on the SERP with the great Mike King. We’re doing it live this week as we “dance”’ our way into solving SEO mysteries right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! *Mordy’s rank dancing gif available soon* Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 63 | November 22, 2023 | 78 MIN 00:00 / 1:18:09 This week’s guests Mike King An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Cindy Krum Cindy Krum is the Founder & CEO of MobileMoxie (previously Rank-Mobile). She has been bringing fresh and creative ideas about SEO & ASO to consulting clients and digital marketing stages around the world since 2005. She regularly speaks at national and international trade events, and launched MobileMoxie in 2008 to address mobile-specific marketing needs within the traditional digital marketing specialty. Cindy’s leadership helped MobileMoxie launch the first mobile-focused SEO toolset, to help SEO's see what actual mobile search results & pages look like from anywhere and to provide insights about the impact of Mobile-First Indexing on search results; Now, free versions of these great tools are also available to all digital marketers as two easy to use Chrome Extensions. Greg Gifford Greg Gifford is the Chief Operating Officer at SearchLab, a boutique marketing agency specializing in Local SEO and PPC. He’s one of the most in-demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world, with dynamic movie-themed presentations packed full of actionable tactics and information. He's got over 20 years of online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in Local SEO has helped countless businesses gain more visibility in local searches. Greg graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on this episode of the SERP's Up podcast everybody, we have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here and I’m joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the unequivocally, unparalleled greatest person on the planet. Too far. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There are definitely better people than myself. Mordy Oberstein: Just because my wife is listening. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Also, I've met better people than me. It's fine, I do my best. I think we all do our best. I think we can sum it up as Crystal Carter, doing her best. I'm fine with that. Mordy Oberstein: I can think of some people who do not do their best. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: That's going to those people. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I think maybe they're doing their best and maybe they still need to grow. There we go. I aim for some positives there. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. Yeah. We're still going to put a positive spin on things. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. That's a lot of slashes. But we can also take the mystery out of writing a good title tag and meta description with Wix's brand new AI meta-tag creator. Run the tag creation process with more efficiency using the new AI tag creator tool. Okay, fine, doesn't really solve any mystery of writing at all. Crystal Carter: Not particularly, but we're getting some great feedback on it. I had somebody on the Wix blog was like, "There are several things I love about Wix blog. I'll list them here for you. The SEO optimization tool just keeps getting better with AI. The editor is easy to use and yet powerful." Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Wow. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: That's quite-. Two likes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's like my washing machine. My washing machine broke and I got a new one and I said to my husband, "You hear that?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Exactly. Exactly." Mordy Oberstein: The same thing. I just got a new washing machine two weeks ago, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: By the time it's done, when it's on the spin cycle, you're like, "What'd you say? What was that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the old one looks like it went through something real serious. Crystal Carter: Shoes. Shoes is the worst. Mordy Oberstein: My kids' laundry. Okay, so the AI tag creator tool we have on Wix doesn't solve any mysteries, but you know what does solve some mysteries? Our session from Brighton SEO, in San Diego, we talked about unsolved SEO mysteries. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see, I do see that. The pivot. It was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just for clarification, we didn't actually solve anything at the session either. We just added more nuance and clarification and contextualization to some troubling SEO issues. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but we had a lot of fun doing it. It's about the journey. Mordy Oberstein: It was, and it was very insightful, I like to say. I like to think it was very insightful. Crystal Carter: Literally, it's just an excuse for me to fan-girl at Cindy Krum and Mike King and Greg Gifford. They're great folks. It was a real honor to be on the stage with them, you were there as well. Oh yes, George as well. I see you and George all the time, so I feel if I fan-girled at you all every day, that would be weird. Mordy Oberstein: That would be weird. Crystal Carter: "Oh my God, thank you for reading my email." That'd be so weird. Mordy Oberstein: You should totally do that. "Thank you so much for reading this email. I can't believe you. Oh my gosh, you are the greatest." Crystal Carter: Every time I log into a meeting with George, I'm like, "oh my God, can I get a selfie? Can I get a selfie with you? Do you mind if I just..." Yeah, he'd lose mind. Mordy Oberstein: We sat down with some brilliant folks at Brighton SEO, in San Diego from our own Head of SEO Editorial here at Wix, George Nguyen, to MobileMoxie CEO, Cindy Krum. The COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg Gifford, to the founder of iPullRank, Mike King. Plus, we got insights straight from the live audience sitting right there at Brighton SEO, that I mentioned was in San Diego. Also, there was dancing. Crystal Carter: There was dancing. Mordy Oberstein: There was dancing. Crystal Carter: There were a few different dance moves happening during the episode. Mordy Oberstein: It was epic. It was the best dances ever. Crystal Carter: I know that you all can't see it over the podcast, however, the dance booths were- Mordy Oberstein: They were videoed. Crystal Carter: -inspiring, You could use that. Like nothing I've ever seen before. Mordy Oberstein: It was interpretive dance for SEO. Crystal Carter: It was interpretive dance. I think sometimes if you want to make it rain rankings, you need to do a dance and maybe that's the thing you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: When it rains, it pours, and that's what you got, a deluge of terrible dancing. Anyway, this is our very special live version of SERP's Up from Brighton SEO, in San Diego. We hope you enjoy it. Crystal Carter: All right, thank you so much for joining us for this session. My name is Crystal, the is Mordy, thank you for joining us for SERP's Up live. Mordy Oberstein: This is a live recording of our podcast SERP's Up, so that means that we're talking to you, our live audience, but also to our recorded audience who doesn't exist yet, but they will in two weeks when this comes out. This by the way, is not just shameless advertising, but we're actually going to use these during the session to ask you questions. Crystal and I'll be asking you questions, it's a yes no question. I'll tell you, "Hey, hold up green for yes and purple for no." We can survey you, we can interact with you, we can have a good time together. By the way, I will forget which one I say is yes or no, and I will switch them up, so stay on your toes. Crystal Carter: Do we want to do a trial run? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's do it, okay. Do you like SEO? Green for Yes. Purple for-who said No? Seriously? Crystal Carter: Do we have some PPC people in the place? No. Mordy Oberstein: The way this works is, we have multiple segments on our podcast and we're going to intro or integrate some of our segments to this live podcast recording with a cool set of guests. First up, from our own SEO Hub is the editor of the Hub, our head of SEO Editorial, the one, the only former editor of Search Engine Land, George Nguyen. Welcome to the show. This is unsolved, SEO mysteries, and if you walk out today's session feeling like we solved these mysteries, then we've done a horrible job. Go walk away with some context about some mysteries and maybe a bit of answers, but we're not going to solve anything definitively. That's just not how SEO works. It all depends, right? The first thing we wanted to talk about were content trends, I think that sets the stage for today. We're going to be talking about Google updates, we're talking about how to deal with your clients, we're talking about SGE because we obviously have to talk about AI at some point or I'll just walk out. We wanted to start off with content trends and George is the master of creating content and we thought, Hey George, let's talk to you about content and that'll set the stage for algorithm updates because algorithms impact content and clients need content and SEO revolves around content SGEs. George Nguyen: Are you trying to sell me on content? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to say content's really important. George Nguyen: I understand that. Mordy Oberstein: Do you? George Nguyen: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's good. That mystery is solved. That brings us to our first question, basically what is good content and how quickly does it change? I think that's something that we don't really appreciate, just how much content changes, how quickly it changes. What was good yesterday might not be good tomorrow. What do you think, George? George Nguyen: Think about your audience. If you're in the B2B audience, B2B folk, just raise up the thingy, the flag. Maybe 5% of you are B2B, your audience probably isn't going to change that much. It will change over time as technology is developed, but if you're direct to consumer, you are literally changing, it feels like every year. Think about how popular TikTok has become, right? We have some content on TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do TikTok. George Nguyen: Crystal does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Crystal does. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the whole thing. Good content. It might be good for somebody who's like me in their mid-thirties, a millennial, somebody who likes to read, but for somebody much younger, if I had a kid, maybe that's not the right thing here. You really have to think about what your audience is, and I feel like it's changing constantly. It's just what are you able to produce that really changes the lens. What you're able to do dictates what you consider to be good content no matter whatever your role is. If you're in an agency or in-house, you view what your success can be primarily through what you're able to accomplish. But you have to be more aspirational than that, because you look at all those other brands and that's what they're doing. Crystal Carter: Would you say that you define good content by whether or not it's helpful? George Nguyen: Yes. Definitely relevance, all the stuff that Google says, but I feel like we're at a point where how much more optimizing, how much more helpful. If you ask me a question, right now, there's a million ways I can answer it just like I am answering it for this podcast. Are you going to write content that same way? You have to choose a way, and that all comes down to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because what's helpful for one audience is not helpful for the other audience. I think to answer what is helpful content, Google's not going to tell us what helpful content is exactly. It really all depends on what you're trying to achieve, who your target audience is. I think it comes down to empathy. If you can really understand and really empathize with your audience and I think predict what their needs are going to be. When I write content, I guess I'm okay at content, but then George edits it makes it much better. One of the things I try to do is really predict, okay, so if someone's reading this and are they going to have a difficult time with this sentence? Does this concept need to be explained? Does it maybe need to have a link so that they can go explore what exactly I'm talking about because I can't cover it right here. I think being able to predict the pain points and the problems that your audience is going to have with your content makes it helpful. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Is that helpful? Crystal Carter: I think that's helpful, but here's a question to the audience. Do you think that helpful content actually ranks? Mordy Oberstein: Loaded question. Crystal Carter: Green for Yes, purple for no. Okay, so I think we have a lot of greens. We have a lot of greens. I'd probably say that was 75% green on that. That, I think is good. I think that that comes down to people seeing the way that users respond to content that adds value in a helpful way. Is that something you've seen as well, George? George Nguyen: I think that the fundamental basis of what helpful content is isn't going to change between me and you talking about it to what it is on the internet. Are you answering the question? Think about all that relevance. When your partner is just asking a question, "Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?" And you start contextualizing, "Well, I had this for lunch." That's not helpful. Remember, the same thing, you have a question, "What is a meta title?" "Well, before the internet." That's not helpful. You need the answer upfront, those things aren't going to change. The way that we approach that has changed a little bit, but we demand answers immediately and so that's always going to be what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: But on that idea of it not changing, at a certain point things do evolve and things do change. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the idea of does SEO impact content trends or do wider content trends impact SEO? George Nguyen: It's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? The listicle. How many of you, just raise the flag here if you spend time optimizing listicles still in this day and age? Don't lie to me. We're not above this. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for saying no. George Nguyen: Yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: I love listicles. I'm not going to lie. I love them. Mordy Oberstein: We have a debate about this. Crystal Carter: I love listicles, I love a list. Mordy Oberstein: I hate listicles, they're the worst. Crystal Carter: I love a list. I like to be able to scan and then pick the thing I want to invest my time in. Mordy Oberstein: When Danny Sullivan goes on Twitter? X? Whatever? He's like, "Yeah, unhelpful, let me show you an example." It's a listicle. Crystal Carter: I find them helpful. I will go through and I go, "I know all of those. I don't know that one. I'll check that out." Mordy Oberstein: Agree to disagree. Crystal Carter: There we go. George Nguyen: You always have these situations, okay, listicles, where is that in this debate? Or even recipes, like your blog recipes. All the SEO in the world, all the guidance that we tell people, well you're not leading with the main content and that's for other considerations. I feel like there's a giant influence, especially nowadays, think about what's ranking in terms of Axios. They publish incredibly concise short content, it's well optimized and that's what it's built to do. I don't know if you can hear this from the recording, but there's this Star Wars theme playing back now it's both fueling me but also making it very hard to concentrate. If you're distracted, I don't blame you for that. Yeah, there's definitely an overlap here, especially as the publishers, the people, the C-suite becomes more aware of SEO and the importance of ranking that one position might be millions of dollars for you on the SERP rate. Of course, it's going to influence because you need to make money ultimately, but then it's different if you're doing it for branding, then it looks different. Then there's Google's vision of it, and Bing's vision of it where it's Index now. There's so much there. Mordy Oberstein: I think one of the things that's interesting though, like RankBrain. RankBrain is a Google machine learning property and part of what its built to do is basically look at how users are behaving and assimilate that into their machine learning process and now change what ranks based upon what people want. I was doing an article or something, I don't remember, and I went to the way back machine and it was a product review, best microwave content. The page now, has the word "our" and "we" 150 times, if you go back, I don't know, two, three years ago, it only had it eight times. I don't know if that was an SEO saying, we think Google has the E for experience, let's add a bunch of "our" and "we" to the content, but it could also just be content has changed and people are writing in a different style. Google does realize that, that's literally what RankBrain is built to do and those things get assimilated into the algorithm and the algorithm is changing based upon what users are doing. Crystal Carter: I think it has a lot to do with the competitive landscape. I think we're all, as SEOs, we're all working in a competitive landscape. The content that we make doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you see that there's a trend that lots of people in your sector or in your vertical are using lots of video for instance, and then you are not using video, then it becomes a question of satisfying customer demand, satisfying customer expectations and remaining competitive there. I think that content trends, like you said, it's like a chicken and an egg. I think they pull and push at the same time with those things. George Nguyen: We will develop any tactic, we will test any tactic working with content at scale. If that's the case and you just want to outrank someone and you have all this time to try to do that, of course SEOs are going to find a way to push the limits of content, create new formats, and that's how we're going to affect it. Then, eventually we're going to take that and be like, "Look at what I did." Then speak about it on stage at a conference. That's how the game works essentially. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you George for coming on our podcast. I'll see you around the office. George Nguyen: Every meeting is like this pretty much, ladies and gentlemen. Mordy Oberstein: We get nothing done. For the first 10 minutes, the other people in the meeting are like, "Okay, enough jokes. You have to stop. We have to do work now." George Nguyen: Can I go? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you can go. George Nguyen: I did want to say one thing. This is the first session of the morning. I really appreciate you showing up here. I'll be at the Wix booth in between sessions and if you don't know anyone, if you're here alone, feel free to come by. Say hi, you know me. Mordy Oberstein: With candy. George Nguyen: Why do you-? Mordy Oberstein: Although we have coconut candy. George Nguyen: It was all good until you said that. Thank you everyone. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much George. Mordy Oberstein: We do a little segment on the podcast, we call, Is It New? All about Barry Schwartz. We sometimes go through different changes to the SERP and wonder if they're new. They never are, by the way, but we try to explore the impact of their new-ish status. In this case, we're doing something a little bit different with the segment. We're taking a look at algorithm updates because I think the entire landscape is new. This is a very special version of, Is This New? It's the Google algorithm update version of Is This New? To help us, we have the founder of MobileMoxie herself, she's an SEO legend, I would say an SEO-G. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I met Cindy, I met- Mordy Oberstein: It's Cindy Krum, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's Cindy Krum. I met her yesterday and I literally screamed a full fan girl, which I'm not ashamed of. Mordy Oberstein: Can we reenact that? Crystal Carter: No, I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm so honored, so pleased, and you're in for a real treat because Cindy's amazing and here she comes to the stage now. Cindy Krum: Hello, I'm excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: That chair is really comfortable by the way. Cindy Krum: It's pretty good. Yeah, I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the podcast. Cindy Krum: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show. Cindy Krum: Thank you. How are you guys doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm jet-lagged. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You? Cindy Krum: Yeah, not as jet-lagged as you. Mordy Oberstein: You all had snow last week. Cindy Krum: We did, a lot of snow. Mordy Oberstein: That's nuts. Cindy Krum: It got down to 11 degrees. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Okay, it's a podcast. We have the banter, I feel like I have to explain that. Let's kick this off about the algorithm updates. Let's ask the audience first. Do you see more rank volatility? Is rank more volatile than it normally is? Green if you think rank is more volatile, purple if you think it's not. Everyone from the audio audience, everyone except for Michelle Ford said the rank is more volatile than it was before. I feel like it's always that way. Crystal Carter: I think we've had another core update since the conference started. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There's been five in the last five minutes. Cindy Krum: It's constant. Mordy Oberstein: And a review update, another spam update. It's been crazy, right? Cindy Krum: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: There was the August core update, then there was a helpful content update in September, then a spam update in October, another core update in October, another core update in November, and now we're review update. Cindy Krum: Now they're overlapping them, so you can't really identify or know for sure which impacted what and when, and stuff like that, if it did at all. Although the good news is, I think in general, the rule for me at least still seems to be if you're doing really good clean SEO strategy and not really pushing the boundaries of the guidelines, then you don't get impacted by these things. Is that what you guys are seeing? Can I ask audience questions? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Green for if that's what you're seeing, okay. Crystal Carter: Generally keeping it- Mordy Oberstein: Good content. Cindy Krum: There's some purple, people who disagree. You're doing good content and following all the rules, but you're getting bouncy stuff. Crystal Carter: That's interesting. That's interesting. I think some verticals are finding that more than others. Cindy Krum: That's true, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Also, sometimes keywords are just like that. Cindy Krum: Yes, some keywords are more volatile. Mordy Oberstein: There's just volatile keywords. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Definitely, and I think that it's something that you've talked about being able to diagnose the impact of the different updates. I know that you can be very scientific with the way you break all of that down. Do you find that to be challenging for clients and things like that? Cindy Krum: Like I said, I haven't had a lot of clients who've been massively impacted, but I do find that clients are getting bored of hearing me freak out and be like, "There's an update and I just checked and everything looks fine, don't worry about it." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's always fine." It's the boy who cried wolf story, we used to have a couple updates a year or a couple major updates a year and we would make a big deal and be like, "No, I think everything's fine." We'd look really, really detailed. Now they're coming so fast that you can look but you can't get too detailed and you're like, "Nope, looks fine, looks fine. It's good." Mordy Oberstein: Is that the new norm? Is this the new norm? Cindy Krum: What I've been saying is that I think that part of what Google was going for when they switched from old school crawling indexing to mobile first indexing was this ability to make changes faster. Because remember, if it was about crawling, they would've called it mobile first crawling. It was about indexing, and they've changed the index to make it, I think more flexible and easier to change. Mordy Oberstein: The review update is going to be real time, basically. They're not going to announce future updates and it's going to just be basically constant, ongoing. It's almost like Penguin. Cindy Krum: I think that we should expect to see more of that with regular updates too. It'll just be, they don't necessarily have to announce everything. I think we're already seeing that things are going live and things are changing in an ongoing way. They're not always announcing it. Mordy Oberstein: You heard it here first, the core updates. I don't think they're going to keep announcing them, I think they're just going to put them real time, like the review update, which is going to be scary because you're not going to be able to figure out what's going on exactly. Cindy Krum: I think they may try and pull back and slow them down just so that people don't freak out, but they're still doing them, they're just not announcing all of them. I think Google's fighting an interesting battle because they're trying to look like they're being more transparent in ways that get them out of legal problems that they might or might not be having. They want to look like they're being transparent, but without being too transparent to make things too gameable, so they roll things out quietly sometimes. Then, if there's a risk, it's going to be a big fuss, then they'll give you a heads-up and be like, "Hey, next week this is happening." So they can say, "Oh no, we warned you." Crystal Carter: Sometimes within SEO chatter, you hear people talk about unconfirmed updates. Is that something that you pay attention to? Is that something that you think about. Cindy Krum: Yes, I definitely have seen unconfirmed updates, especially around things that are highly regulated. You see Google change their mind about how they feel about this topic or that topic, or changing just their understanding of a topic. Is this an informational query versus is this a e-commerce query. Mordy Oberstein: Unconfirmed update, Google, it's supposed to say a core update where they now announce them and they say, "Okay, it's coming." There's constant volatility, and we generally either see that in our own rankings or the SEO weather tools. You have MozCast and SEMrush Sensor and the Grumper, whatever. There are all these names for all these tools. I'm curious, this is a controversial question and if you're from one of the tools in here, this is probably one you want to pay attention to. Do you trust the SEO weather tools when they say, "There's a spike in rank volatility, there's an update, there's something going on." Do you believe them? Green for I believe the SEO weather tools. Purple for no, and it's a mixed bag. Cindy Krum: That's more purple than I expected. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot more purple than I expected. By the way, each tool is a little bit problematic, and I've worked on two of them. The inside scoop is there's different keyword sets. Moz is very transparent by the way, they'll tell you that MozCast is built in high search volume keywords. The SEMrush Sensor is much more diverse with the type of keyword, and there's a case for each way of doing it. It is interesting that people don't trust them as much as they used to. I think part of the reason is that they're always on, there's always something going on and you really believe something's really happening. I have a wild theory about some of this, I'm curious what you think. I think a lot of the spikes in volatility that are not part of a confirmed update is machine learning, basically recalibrating. It's saying, okay, I'm implementing X. Let me try see if that works. Let's try Y and reverse it and see which one is better. Okay, let's go with the X. Cindy Krum: You hit a threshold and that threshold is a signal to the algorithm to recalibrate or reevaluate. I think that's true. I think though, that let's say we have a tool that measures these things and we realize that we've totally missed this whole industry or there's a new industry popping up that didn't exist, like TikTok, creator studios, whatever, and we have to add a bunch of keywords. Adding this infusion of new keywords changes the model entirely, and unless there's a lot of transparency about that you don't realize. I think the weather tools also sometimes miss some things that might be very important to people, to SEOs, because they are trying to find signal from noise. They omit what they think is noise but might not be noise for you. Something that I'm going to show in my talk tomorrow is I have a tool that grabs a screenshot, full screenshot of mobile search results every single day for a particular keyword in a particular area on the same phone, pretty standardized. What I saw in testing is that even if your position can stay the same, the presentation of the position can change day by day. Where today it's one big picture, tomorrow it's two pictures, then it's a grid of four with a thing over here. It's always potentially in the same position, not always in the same position, but I think that the weather tools might call that noise not signal, but for you that's signal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. Mordy Oberstein: They totally miss them and they don't track that. Cindy Krum: Or because they have to show something that's statistically relevant for everyone and that's only relevant for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt with the weather tools. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, and I think particularly on mobile, there's only so much real estate on a screen as you know. If there's a new SERP feature that pops up that takes up 30% of the screen, that's really going to affect your click-through rate. Even if you're ranking number one, if you're below the SERP feature, then that's not really going to happen. Cindy Krum: You can see situations where they're ranking number one consistently, but the click-through rate is all over the place. Maybe it's because of the images or how it's presented or things that might not come into every single weather tool. What if the weather tools aren't checking pixels from the top and there's a knowledge graph that shows up all of a sudden? Or there's People Also Ask above it today and so click through and it tanks because everyone's clicking on People Also Ask. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like to look at all that data very directionally. It's not telling you anything in specific. It's okay, something might be going on here. It's a red flag thing. I wouldn't put too much stock in what they show. I know it's a little controversial. Cindy Krum: I think you can take stock and say when they're red, stuff's changing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right. That's true. Cindy Krum: When they're green, stuff might still be changing. Mordy Oberstein: Something to know about the weather tools, they all recalibrate after 20 or 30 days, because if they didn't, what would never really happen is it would be read the entire way through. I actually just looked at a bunch of data on this. If you look at 2022 and 2021, there's not much of a difference in the rank fluctuations. They're on average. If you go into 2023, the beginning part of 2023 looked very similar to 2022, and this actually ties into what I want to get into in a minute about AI. When you hit the summer, the end of the spring in 2023, ranks started going bonkers. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, how high was rank volatility? January through March, January through April was a three. When you got to May and you started going through the summer on a scale of one to 10, the level of volatility was an eight. The tools were still green because they recalibrate, eight was a new normal. You're looking at the tool, you're like, "Oh, it's green, everything's fine." But if you compare it to what rank was a few months ago, it's extreme. The green now, is way more volatile than the red back in January. Cindy Krum: Okay, so that's fascinating. But also, I think I want to talk a little bit about your choice of terms, rank volatility versus cert volatility because rank is specifying a numeric evaluation that used to be one through 10 or whatever. I think that Google has persuaded us to ignore things that matter when we're counting ranks because they're like, "Don't worry about the paid stuff up there and don't worry about the knowledge graph and don't worry about People Also Ask, those things don't rank." But they do. They push everything down. I think talking about rank volatility versus cert volatility, and maybe pixels from the top or some more universal metric where we can agree that every pixel counts. Pretending that a knowledge graph that's above you doesn't count is a lie. It counts and it's taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and when you're tracking by pixel, you don't see it because on the desktop, it's on the right-hand side. Cindy Krum: Right, but on mobile, pssh. Mordy Oberstein: Did you see, by the way, it was a Search Engine Land article. It was part of the whole antitrust DOJ trial thing which was going on, which is fascinating. Some document came out where it was Ben Gomes, I think, a former VP of search there. "We can get more ad clicks if we add refinement to the SERP and more filter." If you fast-forward to now, the SERP is filled with filters. Broaden this search, refine this search, the bubble filters on top, People Also Ask, there's tons of filtering going on. Cindy Krum: What you need to notice when you click any of those filters that are on your screen, especially desktop, is that it's executing a new search and showing new ads. This is a monetization strategy. Don't ever forget that Google's a business that's trying to make money. Mordy Oberstein: I do like the filters though. Cindy Krum: The filters can be nice. Mordy Oberstein: Do you like the filters on the SERP? Green for Yes. See people like filters. Cindy Krum: Okay, but here's the thing. Filters do two things for Google, filters get them the ability to show a new search result, increase their search volume and say, "Oh, we're getting loads more searches because that's a new search because you filtered it and show more ads." Also, filters I think, and people can tell me I'm wrong and people can make fun of me. I've always been bullish on voice search. But, filters are the future of voice search, because if you think about a phone tree when you're calling in to change your insurance or whatever, they're like press one for this or press two for that. Those are filters and you're going to be able to do that with voice with your Google Assistant or whatever, where they say, "Do you want to do this or that, or do you want to see this kind of filter versus that kind of filter." When they predetermine what your choices are, it's easier for them to latch in and preload or know what they're going to show. Then you don't go off the rails and come up with something that they hadn't thought of. They're coaxing you into something that they can answer instead of something that they potentially can't. Mordy Oberstein: As a serial podcaster, I pride myself on my pivots and I don't have one right now. Cindy Krum: Is my time up? Is that what you're saying? Mordy Oberstein: No, I want to talk about AI. I feel we have to talk about AI. Do you think that the rank is incredibly more volatile since the summer, basically. How much of that do you think is AI? Before we answer that, dear audience, do you believe Google when they say that they're not targeting AI content? Green, if you believe Google, purple if you don't. There's one person. Cindy Krum: Not a lot of trust- Mordy Oberstein: It's way in the back, who trust Google, that they're not targeting AI content. Even Michelle doesn't believe Google. I don't believe them either, by the way. They're definitely targeting AI content. Cindy Krum: They like to mince words and get really detailed in what targeting means. They're just saying, "We like the best content and we make AI content too, and if we're going to show AI content, why not ours?" Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory about this, that Google can't say for their stock pricing that we're anti AI. Cindy Krum: Yes, they cannot. Mordy Oberstein: So, we'll just say, "No, we're not targeting AI content. We're targeting low quality content." Pre-med, pre-law, same difference. Cindy Krum: Yes, exactly. Speaker 5: What I think is interesting about this though is that what I've seen is that on the one hand that I know that there's a lot of people within the affiliate space who have been really struggling with this. They've been making a lot of bulk content by AI and they've been getting a lot of traffic and then a lot of volatility. What I've also seen is teams, for instance, LinkedIn, they have these community posts and it says right at the top, this is an AI generated article. If people haven't seen these, essentially they have a collection and they'll say the topic is AI content, for instance. Then they'll have machine generated content and then they'll have spaces for people to contribute answers, individual answers. Those pages rank for tons of keywords and they have done since April. It's very interesting, they seem to be trying to hedge how they're managing that content. Are you seeing that across the space as well? Cindy Krum: Yes, but I don't know if it's an intentional effort to hedge. I think that they will also be studying what's ranking in their algorithm and then they'll do it better because that's their model and they can show ads on that. When you get to a LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's making money instead of Google. Google, they've said for years that they don't always know exactly how an algorithm is going to impact results. It's not a guaranteed thing and it can change over time. When they push the button to roll something out, they're watching too and that's why there are rollbacks where they're like, "That went a little bit too far." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, another piggyback on the ring volatility. When you see the tools go, you don't know if that's a reversal and there's really no net gain or loss. Cindy Krum: Yeah, I mean it's still bad for the month or whatever, that you were down. Yeah, for Google, they're looking at things in a much longer term and they're like, "Whatever." Mordy Oberstein: There's been again, a ton of rank volatility on the SERP since the summer basically, and you know what it reminds me of? Because I've been tracking stuff religiously for years, it reminds me of Covid, when Covid hit the SERP bonkers. Cindy Krum: It totally did. Mordy Oberstein: Because they couldn't figure it out. Cindy Krum: Totally new industries popping up, new things. Mordy Oberstein: Terms didn't mean the same things anymore- Cindy Krum: Terms meant different things. Mordy Oberstein: -and can totally switch. I think what's happening is the perfect storm, there's a ton of more content because of AI and it needs to figure out, do we want to actually rank this and there's a method to my madness, to tie into what George was talking about before. Content trends are changing. People are looking, they didn't pull experience out of their ass for EEAT. Cindy Krum: Content trends and content and creation trends are both changing, and so the algorithm has to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: People want experience and Google's like, "Okay, let's integrate into the algorithm." Everything's changing, and I think Google's having a really hard time figuring it out. Cindy Krum: I think that what's going to make the difference in the future potentially is, Google has this horrible situation where they have, let's say there's 5,000 dentists in the United States, and every one of those 5,000 dentists think that they have to write an article about why it's important to floss. Okay, and how different are those- Mordy Oberstein: Nobody flosses anyway, no matter how many times they write it, right? Green if you floss, I'm just kidding. Cindy Krum: I floss. So, all 5,000 are writing basically the same article about why it's important to floss. How is Google going to choose which of those 5,000 should rank? Maybe it could, maybe one or two of those dentists is writing a vastly superior article or maybe one or two of the dentists has a song that's going to get stuck in your head to remind you to floss. Or maybe there's only three dentists in this area, so they want to rank a local dentist. I think context and connection is going to be the new ranking factor that they're going to try and do. So, influencer marketing, super important, but not something we talk about as much in SEO. I think that for a listicle, if I was writing a listicle about my favorite travel hacks and things on Amazon that you could buy, you would be like, "I know Cindy and she travels like a mad woman and she knows this." But, if you knew someone else who had five kids, which I do not, by the way, and you had five kids, you'd be like, "I know that woman and she has to deal with what I have to deal with." So, more personalization, more context of who you are and who is recommending whatever, or where they are or what's going to resonate with you like the song to remember flossing or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a song? Do you know a song? Cindy Krum: No. Does anyone? Mordy Oberstein: I wish there was a song. If you're doing SEO for a dentist, it would totally help to have a song. Cindy Krum: It would help, something like Going to the Chapel, that going to get stuck in everyone's head. You're welcome. Crystal Carter: As long as it doesn't get stuck in your teeth. There you go. On that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us and for talking about this fantastic subject. Give us a big hand for Cindy. Cindy Krum: Yay. Now you want me over there, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. With rank being bonkers and with content changing, one of the problems are clients and communicating all of this to clients. So we're going to take a deep thought into how you're going to be communicating with clients and how to get buy-in for clients and how to deal with the clients and all the stuff for the clients with the master of disaster himself. The one, the only, the COO of Search Lab Digital, give it up for Greg-fricking-Gifford. Greg Gifford: I feel like you moved over because you don't want to sit by me. Cindy Krum: I want to sit by you. Mordy Oberstein: I need to razz you, you're C level now? Greg Gifford: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You have your own corner office and stuff? Greg Gifford: Yeah, only because I'm on the corner of a hallway. Mordy Oberstein: Is it in your house? Greg Gifford: No, no. I have an office. I can't work out of my house. I have too many kids and pets and my wife doesn't get that I'm working and I can't go do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I have the same problem, my kids will bang on the door. Greg Gifford: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They regularly just come into the meetings. Mordy Oberstein: They come into our meetings all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. I just give up. Greg Gifford: I'm old school. I need to be somewhere separate where I can mentally separate work from home. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That's good. Greg Gifford: When I'm home, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: C levelness aside, clients, it's a little complicated because if there's so much volatility, the SERP is changing, content is changing, everything's always changing. Like Cindy was talking about, two November updates, three October updates. At a certain point, do they just not believe you anymore? Greg Gifford: Yeah, we get the vast majority of our clients call us freaking out. "Oh my God, I saw that there's an update today. What are we doing to address it?" We're like, "Bro, we don't even know that it's affecting you yet. Slow your roll, calm down, it's fine." Then they're like, "Ah." We're like, "Okay." We don't share. Can I do a question? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Greg Gifford: Green, if you share ranking data with clients, how many people do?Purple, if you don't. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of greens. Greg Gifford: We do not share ranking data with clients. We in fact refuse to if even if clients ask for it, we say we won't. Crystal Carter: Why? Greg Gifford: Because, can I use adult language on this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. We'll edit it out of the podcast. Greg Gifford: This will be lots of beeps right here, folks. No, I think ranking data is a complete bull vanity metric and it doesn't mean anything to a client's bottom line. What's the point of sharing rank data? I've had clients in the past that in a space of 12 months tripled their organic traffic, doubled their leads, every month was a record setting month for sales, yet they still canceled with us because the owner of the company wanted to rank for some vanity term that wouldn't have gotten traffic anyway. No human would ever search for it, but all he cared about was, do I rank number one for this term? So he cancels. That's why we don't get into ranking data. When our clients freak out, they're like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're like, "Look, we have rank tracking running, you know we won't share it with you. You're fine. Nothing even changed." Crystal Carter: Yeah, honestly I'm having PTSD over this because I've definitely had clients like that who it was a little financial firm and they wanted to rank for financial advisors. I'm like, "You're not going to rank for that." Greg Gifford: Yeah, we had this one guy that was like, "I want to rank number one for Toyota Camry." Mordy Oberstein: Are you Toyota? Greg Gifford: This was also the guy that was complaining that $3,000 a month for SEO was too expensive and he spent $1,500 a month on paid search, so in his mind between the 3000 of SEO and the 1500 for management fee, and then I think it was a $500 management fee at that agency. He's like, "I'm spending $5,000 a month, I should be number one for Toyota Camry." We're like, "Bro, it doesn't work that way." Then we tried to explain to him like, "Hey man, look, Toyota's going to rank for that. You don't have more money." He goes, "No, it doesn't matter, because there's no way Toyota's spending $6,000 a month on SEO. I should be number one." We're like, "Buddy, no, no, no." Yeah, so we do get those calls where clients are freaking out because they hear about all these updates lately, but I think we're a little bit insulated because we only do local SEO and a lot of these updates, you'll get a lot of fluctuation for maybe a day or two when the update's rolling out. But, a week later, once everything's settled in, we really don't see much of an effect for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: Are you seeing Cindy, is it harder for you to communicate with the clients because there's so many updates? Cindy Krum: I do it a little bit differently, so I don't have clients coming to me going, "oh my God, there's an update." They're not paying attention to SEO. I go to them and be like, "Hey guys, there was an update. I've checked, it seems like you're fine, but let's just keep an eye on things and watch closely." It's a little bit different, but then I don't have anyone who thinks that they should rank for Toyota Camry, so it might be just a different kind of client. Greg Gifford: The day that SGE was released to beta where we could finally all apply to get in and see it. We had three clients call us and go, "What's your SGE strategy for us? What are you doing?" I'm like, "Bro, it came out today. We don't have a strategy for you." We still had a client last week call us and go, "What's my SGE strategy?" I'm like, "Bro, we do not care about SGE and we're not going to talk about it with you because most likely it is not coming out for at least another year or two. it's still SEO, let's do marketing. Let's release this stuff that answers the client's questions. That's going to bring them to you because you have the solution." It's just like the voice search thing years ago where everybody's like, "Oh my god, voice search, what do we do?" Nothing changed. Cindy Krum: It's so funny because your approach is the opposite of my approach. My approach should be like, "Dude, we've been doing SGE strategy, everything that we've been doing to get featured snippets and to have stuff that's easy to parse and easy to understand, that is what's going to help SGE, this is baked in." Greg Gifford: Our clients don't get featured snippets. We're like, "Bro, we just got you this amazing snippet, look at it." Okay, another question, let's be interactive. Green, if you think getting a featured snippet takes traffic away. Purple, if you think getting a featured snippet gives you more traffic. I'm really curious. More purples. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Greg Gifford: I'm a purple too, because we've tracked it and we'll get a featured snippet for how do you hook up Apple car play in a Kia Soul or something related to a car. You get it and you can track because it's going to that page and all of a sudden your traffic just goes like this. We tell them, "Hey, we got this." They're like, "Nobody's going to search for that. I don't care. I want to rank number one for this. Crystal Carter: Where's the Toyota Camry, Greg? Greg Gifford: That's why we just don't get into the rank tracking stuff. Mordy Oberstein: If I can ask the audience, do you have a harder time communicating with all these things going on with your clients now, because of all this stuff? Green, if you have a harder time communicating with clients and purple, if you have an easier time. Crystal Carter: Got a lot of arms up very high with the green. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of green. Crystal Carter: A lot of purple. Greg Gifford: We had a client that was a little bit more advanced, they understand the SERP layout more. This was April or May, they called us up. They're like, "Hey man, this People Also Ask section, do you guys have a strategy for that? Are you doing anything for that?" I'm like, "No." Mordy Oberstein: Did they ask you for every SERP feature and what your strategy is? Greg Gifford: They're like, "What's our strategy?" Mordy Oberstein: Do you have a related search strategy? Greg Gifford: Not, oh my god, I'm awesome, I'm C-suite, but I don't really talk to clients anymore, which is actually really badass that I don't have to talk to clients. I don't deal with a lot of this crap. This was a guy that I've known for 10 years who is a client, so yeah I'll talk to you. He's like, "What's our strategy there?" I'm like, "I don't have a strategy." He's like, "What? You guys are awesome. You've done so much good work. How are you ignoring this?" I'm like, "All right bro, let's jump on a Zoom." We jump on a Zoom. I'm like, "Let's do a screen share. Let's do a search for whatever your term is." It was a dealership term, and he shows up and there's five PAA questions and I'm like, "Let's click on this one. Look who ranks number one for that? Let's go back. Let's click on a second. Look who ranks number one for that?" I'm like, "Dude, you already rank because we are doing SEO the right way. We're not doing SEO for Google. We're doing SEO for your clients so that you're going to be the answer for what people are looking for and that's the right way to do it. You don't have to worry about what is this tricky thing that we're doing now just for this one update that just happened because that's not sustainable for long-term." Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you have strong feelings about clients. Greg Gifford: I love clients. Mordy Oberstein: Is anybody else getting that vibe? Greg Gifford: I love clients. I just get really spun up when I just keep getting these really asinine questions and I get it, they're curious, but what are you doing for SGE when it came out four hours ago? Come on, don't waste my time with questions like that. Mordy Oberstein: What kind of client do you think is going to be more successful now? Greg Gifford: I think for us, the clients that are the most successful are the ones that are actually engaged. There's a lot of people that will do SEO and do paid search and do marketing because they know they need to. But it's pulling teeth to get them on the phone to actually talk strategy. They're just like, "Just do it for me. I'm hiring you to do it." You need to tell us what's going on. You need to help us. What are the questions you're getting? Are these leads the right kind of leads because we can get you more leads. People are always like, "Your traffic's going up, your leads going up, SEO's winning, but sales are going down." You want to have those conversations and really dial in the customization of what you're doing but these people are too busy to talk to you. Those, I don't think are anywhere near as successful as the ones that are engaged and they do want to talk strategy and they do want to look forward. Even though we don't have contracts, we're month to month, we have to earn business every month. Some people treat it as month to month and they're like, "All right, cool. I'm here." Some people are like, "I'm not going anywhere. Let's talk about what our strategy is for the next two years." I think those are the ones that are more successful, because they're more engaged, they're more bought into this SEO thing is helping my business. Mordy Oberstein: Do you find the same thing, Cindy? Cindy Krum: Yes, to some degree. We have different models of business a little bit, but I do think that the customers that are the most successful are the ones that are wanting to work collaboratively and understand that I don't wish, pray, and do dances to make the rankings improve. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a whole dance. You don't do it? Cindy Krum: I mean, I do it. Greg Gifford: Show of green, if you want to see the dance right now, come on, help me out. Put those greens up, now you have to show us, the crowd wants it. Mordy Oberstein: My ranking dance. Then, automatic feature snippet. You have to nail the turn. For the audio audience, I just did a terrible dance, I'm so happy you're not here to see it. Greg Gifford: Please, can we somehow get the video team to make that into an animated GIF. Cindy Krum: It's like the baby dancing GIF. Mordy Oberstein: I forget where I am right now. Cindy Krum: Wait, so yes. Collaboration is important because the clients that just hire you and be like, "I paid you 5,000, why am I not ranking for Toyota Camry?" It's like, "Because, you didn't do what I said to do." Or because your developer tried but screwed it up and then pretended that they didn't do anything wrong. Crystal Carter: I do think it has to be collaborative because like you were saying, I've definitely had it with clients where I look at all the data and all the data's telling me we're winning. Yeah, we have tons of leads, tons of clicks, whatever. Then I talk to them and I was like, "So, how did those leads go?" I literally had a client that was like, "We didn't get more calls, did we, Julie?" She was like, "I'm not sure. I was on vacation." They're like, "Oh, I didn't." Literally, there was no one there to answer the phone. We were sending phone calls and there was no one there to answer the phone. If they don't tell you what's happening on the other end of the funnel, you can't complete the funnel, and if they don't make money, you don't make money. You have to work in collaboration and yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: We have a lot of people who are clients listening to this podcast. Not right now, eventually when this comes out. If you're listening to the podcast, talking to the audio audience, you're all here, but if you're a client, communicate with your SEOs. Cindy Krum: I've had clients, I was going to jump in. I've had clients that try and sneak things by me intentionally and they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't want SEO for this, so we duplicated all our product pages and put them on a separate domain. But, we don't want SEO for that, so don't worry about it." Keeping secrets from your SEO team is like keeping secrets from your doctor. It's not going to help you. Crystal Carter: It's not good for you. "Oh yeah, we're going to migrate the site tomorrow." I was like, "What?" Speaker 7: Surprise. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: If you have clients and they're communicating with you but they're a little bit concerned about what's going on. How do you walk them off that cliff? Greg Gifford: Again, I think because of our model of we're months to month, we are really centered in on the relationship that we build with our clients. It's not always rainbows and unicorns, you're going to have months where traffic goes down. Some of our clients have a very ,seasonal business where it'll be up for a few months and then they know it's going to be down for the next six months. It's more about on our side, we found that it's better to build that relationship so that they trust us and they know that, "Hey, if my traffic just dropped 20% since last month for whatever reason, I trust that this team is there to help me." So many people have bad experiences from other agencies in the past that just do the BS checklist, SEO, that doesn't do anything. If you're lucky to get on a call once a month with some account manager who probably changes every two months and you just have this bad experience, so then you inherently mistrust all digital marketing moving forward. We work really hard to establish that trust so that they know we are the experts, we are in this with you. We are a partner, we're not a vendor because we care, because we have to earn that business every month so that we don't have to fire people or lay people off. So we work on that customer service and I think that really overcomes. I was joking about the weird customer calls, we don't get that often because the people that work with us choose to work with us because they trust that we are the solution and we are on top of these massive changes in volatility of the SERPs and different features that pop up and what's going on with local and new things that are coming out specifically just for car dealers in the business profile that other businesses can't do. They just trust that we are on top of things for them. I think where I work now, that's a different frame of mind than agencies I've worked for in the past where it was more about, "Your leads are up, your traffic's up. Hey, this is working guys." Then people are mad and they're leaving. It's the same checklist stuff for everybody due to the nature of some of the things that happen in automotive, and so I love where I am now where it's more about let's build this mutually beneficial long-term relationship. Even though it's a month to month thing, we assume that clients are going to be with us for a minimum of two, to two and a half years and we operate that way. It gets into their head that like, "Oh yeah, this is a long-term relationship and they are on our team. They're not just some vendor that we pay money to." I think that's made the biggest difference for us. Mordy Oberstein: It's a huge deal. It's the EEAT for your clients, I hate to use an SEO term, but it's an SEO conference. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of the audience, do you find that from a month to month, so purple for the stats and green for the relationship makes the difference for the outcomes for your clients. Got a lot of green. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. It's all pretty much green. Crystal Carter: A lot of green, a lot of green. I have Sean, who's in our customer relationships, manages that and he's like, "Yep, green." Mordy Oberstein: He's still holding up the green. You can't see it. Crystal Carter: All day the green. Thanks. I think you talked about the partnership element of the customer relationship things, and you also talked a little bit about marketing as well. Do you find that you need to help clients to navigate a few different channels in order to manage all of the different things that are happening in the SERP and on Google? Greg Gifford: Yeah, a hundred percent. A lot of our clients, they work with us because they know that we have a lot of top level experts. I'm not like, "Oh my God, I'm the best SEO in the world." But, I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm friends with all of the other top experts. We just have a better level of connection to what's going on than a lot of the crappy checklist SEO people they've worked with in the past. They come to us knowing that, "I know I need SEO, I know I need Facebook ads, I know I need YouTube pre-roll or whatever it would be, but I don't know how to do it and we haven't had success before. Can you help us?" They also trust us that when something comes out that's new, we can say, "Hey, look, here's this new thing that you can do. That's awesome." They just released LSAs for auto repair in California and Florida, so we came to all of our clients we're like, "Look, LSAs are a crapshoot. Maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's cheap, but this just came out for you and it's the first time you can do it. You need to be a first in the market, so that people are going to see you first and it's going to be amazing." They're all like, "Oh my gosh, thanks. I never would've known that was available if you hadn't come to us with that." Our team specifically wants to do that collaborative partnership approach as opposed to we're getting on a call, we're looking you up in our CRM to remember what the last call was about so we can pretend like we know you. We're really focused on, we want to build that long-term relationship with the clients we work with so they get that trust. We don't really have a lot of that, "Oh my gosh, there was an update. What do I do?" Or, "Oh my gosh, what happened here?" Crystal Carter: I think I see you nodding alon, Cindy. I know that you've been a big proponent of Google Merchant Center and people using additional channels to mix in with the SEO. Cindy Krum: Absolutely. I think that looking at LSA, even though it's not SEO, looking at just what's available is super important. Our job as SEOs is not just to do SEO, but to know the things that affect SEO. When LSAs come in, they push organic rankings down. That's not to say that we just need to get mad about it. We say, "Okay, that's pushing organic down, so do LSAs." It's not a pie where SEO loses because there's something new in there, you can leverage all of it for a huge benefit. Yeah, keeping an eye on everything that's coming into a search result should be part of how you envision your job. Whether you can impact it with organic stuff or not, you need to know what's there that might be taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of what's coming into search, I don't know if you saw, but SGE has been released in 120 countries. Our last unsolved SEO mystery is going to be about SGE. We're doing it a little segue that we call from the top of the SERP. I think we both like analyzing what's happened, what's working for sites that are ranking, what's changing at the top, something like LSAs. We have a little segue we do where we run through what's changing, what sites are doing that are ranking, what they're not doing and how you can improve. In this case, our from the top of the SERP is SGE because it's literally at the top of the SERP. To help us, you see what I did. Greg Gifford: That's clever. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm a master of pivots. As a podcast, you have to pat yourself on the back for the pivoting, which yeah, thank you. Which ruins the whole pivot, but it doesn't matter. To help us navigate the wide world of SGE, he's the only person outside of Joe Biden who could rock aviator shades the way he does. He's sitting right there. He is the one, the only, Mike or drop the Mike King. Mike King: Where's my band? Mordy Oberstein: You're not mic'd up. I forgot. Mike King: What up. What are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Aviator shades. Mike King: It's bright up here. Mordy Oberstein: It's so bright. It's so bright, I'm blinded. Mike King: Hey Cindy. Cindy Krum: Hey, good to see you. Mike King: You guys, Cindy is the smartest SEO ever. I've been saying it for years. It's a fact. Clap for that. Mordy Oberstein: What do you feel about Greg though? Mike King: Greg's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I love that you're holding the mic like you're rapping, man. Mike King: That's the only way to hold it. Nah, I love Greg too because he's such a great energetic presenter and he's been riding the whole movie thing for 10 years and it doesn't get old. I'm not even playing. Greg Gifford: I really just do that to keep myself entertained more than anything else. Mike King: It's dope. It's dope. Crystal Carter: Get out of the USP. Mordy Oberstein: There are new movies, right? Greg Gifford: Yeah, I have to update it every year. Mike King: Of course, of course. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: So, SGE. Mike King: Heard of it. Mordy Oberstein: You all in the audience. Are you worried about it? Green, if you're worried about SGE. Mike King: Green is not a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Mike King: Purple's more a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I was saying we should switch it up, see? Crystal Carter: We just have to pick one. There's two options. Mordy Oberstein: No, purple if you're worried. Mike King: Now they're confused, they're like, we're not doing this. Crystal Carter: Purple, if you're worried. Green, if you're not. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's worried. Crystal Carter: Sean's worried. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's very worried about the SGE. Are you worried? Mike King: No. Mordy Oberstein: Do you worry about anything? Mike King: No, I don't. Mordy Oberstein: So that's a bad question then, huh? Mike King: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mike King: I think it's an opportunity. Just like when feature snippets came out and everyone was like, "Oh, our traffic's going to die, blah, blah, blah." I think the reality of it is one, how people are meeting their information needs is changing dramatically. So it's not just Google, it's Chat GPT, it's TikTok, it's all these things. I think we as SEOs need to grow or evolve into these findability experts where we have to learn the interplay of channels and how to optimize for the different channels and so on. Undoubtedly, your clients are going to be like, "Hey, TikTok has a search, what do we do?" You can't just be like, "We only do local search." I mean, you can do it. You're going to have to have an answer to some degree and I'm not saying you need to be an expert in every channel, but search fundamentally works the same everywhere. There's a determination of relevance, there's a determination of user signals to reinforce those things. What is it that happens in TikTok that we need to be doing? Findability is definitely our future, but I think for SGE, users never wanted 10 results. They wanted an answer. Google is like, "Cool, let's give you an answer." It's not perfect right now, but it's a good step in that direction. There was a paper written by this guy, his name is Andre, I can't remember his last name. Mordy Oberstein: The Giant? Mike King: No. He's been at Google. He came from Alta Vista to Google with people like Jeff Dean and all these people. He's the guy that invented the informational transactional navigational query classification. He wrote this paper recently about what are called Delphic costs, and so Delphic costs is effectively the mental costs that you go through to get a search result. What he's talking about is no one ever wanted to have to go through 10 results and be like, "Is this right? Is this what I'm looking for?" Google has always tried to answer your question and it makes sense that they're going more in this direction. Crystal Carter: I think it's interesting. I think they're competing with so many more search engines now, we used to have a segment on the podcast called So Many Search Engines. Mordy Oberstein: We still have it. Crystal Carter: We haven't done it in ages, but there's so many different ways to answer a question now. The prime example I use for Chat GPT, I use a lot because George, who was on here earlier tried to teach me how to play Magic the Gathering and- Mike King: Get your manna. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I was struggling. I'm like, "Can I play this with summoning sickness? Is there trample? I don't understand. I'm very confused. Am I a wizard? I don't know what's going on." Basically there's been a lot of SEOed content around Magic the Gathering, 4,000, 7,000 words about the thing. I'm like, "Can I play this turn?" It's much easier for me to just literally talk into my phone and go, "I have this guy with this manna. Can I play this on this turn or can I not?" Then Chat GPT will just go, yes or no. Rather than me having to read through 17 pages of content. The SGE, if it's able to do that for some of that content, that's a win. Mordy Oberstein: Are you saying we've ruined the internet? Crystal Carter: No. Mike King: Put up a green if you're a content goblin. Nobody read that shit. Cindy Krum: Wait, wait. Can we do a green if we ruined the internet? Mordy Oberstein: Did SEOs ruin the internet? Green, if we've ruined the internet, according to the verdict, we have. Crystal Carter: Purple, No. Cindy Krum: Some people think so. Crystal Carter: Some people say yes. Cindy Krum: Maybe just you ruined the internet. Mordy Oberstein: It's that guy. Crystal Carter: He woke up in the morning, he was like, "You know what I'm going to do today?" Mordy Oberstein: It's like Pinky and the Brain. Mike King: Yeah, but I think to your point Crystal. We as SEOs, we can't unsee what it is that we do. When you're looking for something important and you're like, "Well, someone clearly optimized this. Some junior copywriter wrote this about whether or not I have cancer, I'm skipping this result." I think that is a reality of the internet, and people do have a sense of is this authentic? It's why we are like, "Okay, I have this ailment, where's the WebMD? Or where's Mayo Clinic or something like that." You don't trust what's on the web, but there's a lot of people that do, which is a problem. I think the standard audience is like, "If Google says it, it must be real." Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: I think that's one of the problems with SGE is because sometimes it's not right. It being Google, you inherently trust it, and so you're going to get bad information in those cases. Greg Gifford: Don't you think, right now it's not out, it's still beta because they want people to start thinking that way. By the time it's really officially out and in use, it's going to be way better than what it is right now. Mike King: I agree with that. Greg Gifford: Or do not think that. Mike King: No, I agree with that, but language models inherently have the ability to hallucinate. The way that SGE is built, it's taking the results and then using that to fine tune the language model to give you the actual response. It can still be wrong. `I don't know that the current generation of that technology is good enough to solve that problem. Greg Gifford: I totally agree. Everybody talks about SGE with us and we're like, "It's not coming out soon. Stop worrying about it. It's got to get better before it's going to be public." Mordy Oberstein: What does it look like in the end? When it goes live, it's out of beta. Forget the type of content, what does it even freaking look like? Because they've changed it 10 times. Greg Gifford: It looks Star Trek, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm wearing Star Trek socks. Greg Gifford: We're going to talk to our computer in a conversational way and get the answer that we want for most of this stuff. If you just want an answer like you said a minute ago, you don't want to read, you want the answer. Cindy Krum: I think it looks like a Google Home Hub with a knowledge graph and an answer and filters so you can drill down more and not 10 blue links or maybe any blue links or just a couple blue links. I wanted to build on what Mike was saying, I think when SGE came out, Google created part of its own problem by not doing citations. When you cite someone, then you could be like, "We didn't say it. They said it." But, when Google wasn't doing citations, then it's Google's fault and they're going to have to do citations for any number of reasons but the legal one and the getting it right or wrong is going to be a big part of that. Mordy Oberstein: Can I ask, about the citations and about updating content, if publishers are now going to block things like Bard- Mike King: Why? That's so shortsighted. Mordy Oberstein: I agree, but I think it's spiteful. I think because they can. Mike King: They can't, because if you block Bard, which you have to block Googlebot in general for, you're still going to get crawled by the common crawl, which is a data source that's used for training. It's a pyrrhic victory for you to do that. Cindy Krum: You're just going to get ripped off, someone's going to crawl and republish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I am with you. Mike King: Agree, but one of the things that I think we don't pay enough attention to is that search is also a branding channel. If you are searching for something and then there's a featured snippet and your brand is mentioned amongst other brands that are in that consideration set, that is a good thing for Mindshare. If you're not there because you want to just block Google from learning from your content as though it's so precious, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's stupid. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's the most under-talked about thing in the SEO world that is a personal, I am on a soapbox about this. Content fundamentally, yes, there's acquisitional content, but a lot of your content is branding content, a lot, and it's important to think about it like that. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about how that shows on the SERP and how that shows with things. I think that brings me to a question for the audience in terms of the SERP and SGE, can you optimize for SGE? Are you optimizing for SGE? Green for Yes, and purple for No. Mordy Oberstein: The people who said green, it's mostly green, maybe want to offer Greg some strategies so we can…. Greg Gifford: Okay, can we adjust the question? Okay, if you had a green, hold it up higher still. Keep the green up, so you're optimizing for SGE. Keep it up. How many of you that have it up, you're answering this because you're doing something different than you were doing before, specifically for SGE or you have it up because you're like, "I was doing good SEO anyway." Everybody put their cards down. Mike King: He didn't. Mordy Oberstein: For the audio audience, there was three people who said yes. Greg Gifford: But for the audio audience, most of the people that had it up, put it back down because doing the stuff for SGE, if you're doing legitimate SEO now, you're not really having to change that much. Mordy Oberstein: Not really. I can see you squirming in your seat right now. Mike King: I don't squirm. Come on. Don't make the people in listener world think that. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I take it back. Hey Aaron, can we edit that part out. Jury, forget what I just said, stricken from the record. Greg Gifford: I'm curious what you have to say about this. Mike King: No, I mean I think it goes back to things again about Cindy being the smartest SEO ever. She was talking about fraggles five years ago. Fraggles are basically the components of the content, the passages of the content that Google has identified as most relevant and is then serving it to the language model to then determine what to say in the response. In SGE, if you click on the carousel, the links in the carousel, it has the fraggle, what do you call it? The component at the end of the URL, it's the anchor link to the actual fraggle. Cindy Krum: Fragment. Mike King: Then it'll take you specifically to the line of text that Google has used. What I've done in my analysis of this is we've pulled those fraggle for a bunch of pages and then compared it against the AI snapshot. The one that has the highest cosign similarity, the one that's most relevant is the one that ranks best in the carousel. So it's really about optimizing those fraggles and identifying them if you want to get more visibility in those. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking, when- Mike King: Should I just drop the mic then? Mordy Oberstein: No, in nine minutes and 53 seconds. Mike King: He's like, no, don't break my equipment. Mordy Oberstein: You break it, you buy it, by the way. Mike King: I can afford it. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking then, I have to ask, I hate this question, we're going to ask it anyway. How does SGE impact traffic? Mike King: We don't know yet. Mordy Oberstein: What do you think? Mike King: Yeah, we've been modeling it and it's 30 to 40% based on a variety of different factors, but there's no way to know. We don't have any user behavior data on it. We don't have anything in GSE, I don't even know that SimilarWeb has anything yet. If they do holler at me, let's figure it out. We don't know. We have to wait and see until we get actual data. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, code red for the SEO tools, either they need to figure this out, because they're becoming- Mike King: It's already a code red for them. I was just talking about this in the other room, google shifted to semantic search 10 years ago. All of our SEO tools are still on the Lexical model, so really we are not doing something relevant to how stuff works right now. Effectively, we are still just making great content and Google is figuring it out and we're just messing around with all these tools that still do T-F-I-D-F. It's actually silly what we're doing as an industry right now. Cindy Krum: Also, all those tools and the weather tools and stuff like that, as far as I know, they're still focusing a lot on desktop results when more searches are happening on mobile, just more. Mike King: Facts. Mordy Oberstein: Also their keyword data sets are years old. They're almost irrelevant. Mike King: Sorry guys. Everything you're paying for is waste of money. Cindy Krum: The tools suck. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of click-through rate, and here's a question, maybe to the audience as well, do you think that for the SGE that brands who have a well-established brand will be less affected by a drop in clicks on the SGE? Green for Yes, purple for No. Is that too complicated a question? Cindy Krum: Say it again. Mordy Oberstein: Green, if it's too complicated. Crystal Carter: Basically, what I've experienced going through some of these AI SERPs and tools is that you sometimes get a repeat of people on a certain topic. I was trying to use Bard to figure out why my plant was dying, and what I found was that there was the same website that kept getting referenced for all of the different questions that I had about this plant. At the end of the day I was like, "I'm just going to go to the website because they've answered three of the questions already. So they probably have the whole bit of information there." Do you think that the brand overlap where people are getting that visibility in the circle lot, if that's going to make a difference between actually getting the click through? Mike King: Yes and no. What you're describing is actually a function of the context window. If you're asking Bard a bunch of questions about the same thing, all of those answers and questions are informing the next response. Whatever they looked up, because Bard is effectively a retrieval augmented generation implementation where it's just searching Google, the same way that SGE does based on your question, which is using its as a prompt. Then it's saying, "Okay, these are the pages that are most relevant to it." The original pages from your first questions remain in that context as you ask subsequent questions. That's part of why that same website kept coming up over and over. Is that going to impact SGE? Yes, it will on the follow-up questions, because again, the follow-up questions is bringing that context window concept to search. Crystal Carter: Then do you think it'll be more important for people to rank for those first questions? Mike King: Absolutely, and I think it's going to require that the content you create be more robust. Rather than the whole long tail strategy where it's like, "I'm going to make a hundred pages for a hundred queries." You may need to make 20 pages for five queries each, so that page answers several of those questions and remains in that context window. Cindy Krum: Google is crowdsourcing what they call these journeys. This came out when we started talking about MUM. They're looking at people who are using Bard or just using regular search to understand why their plant is dying. They're saying, "Lots of people have an Aloe plant and it's looking like this and here's the right journey." I think they'll fine tune, and I think at some point we'll get to a point where Google will try and add diversity to not just show the same website over and over again and then a QDF query deserves freshness or whatever. They're going to be honing these things in a similar model to what we've seen them go through historically with the current results. Don't you think so? Mike King: Yep. Crystal Carter: Then do you think as part of thinking about the way we create content within this space, that understanding the user journey rather than just the keyword as you were saying, or even just the semantics is going to be a critical point? Mike King: Yeah, and I think to Greg's point, at least at iPullRank, we've been on that for a long time. I was on that persona driven keyword research back in 2012, and that's been how we've always done it. Google is just making it more explicit like, "These search journeys actually matter, and we are building around that because we understand that people are searching to fulfill a specific need." They're not just keywords. They are people doing a series of things so they can do something in the real world. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost trying to do an entity-based optimization, which I know you're going to- Cindy Krum: Also, when they've mapped that journey and they've modeled the journey, their processors don't have to work so hard for the estimation of what's going to come next. They can be working in the background to get that information, serve it faster, which they're always trying to serve things faster. Mike King: To Greg's earlier point, SGE being a test is largely so that they can get the data that they need and also cache a lot of these responses, which is another reason why it's gotten a lot faster since it first rolled out. Greg Gifford: Wait a minute, so are you saying Google does something and tells SEOs about it to get us to give them more data? No way. No way. Mordy Oberstein: So, go back to what you said earlier before about whether or not the LMs are even capable of spitting out content that's going to be good, ultimately speaking. At a certain point I feel like they're going to end up with a problem. I don't think it's going to be, and they're not going to backtrack on using SGE and putting it out there. You're going to end up, I think in a situation where you're going to have a lot of great answers coming out of the SGE and you're going to have a lot of garbage coming out of the SGE. Mike King: I feel like you just led me in your question. What do you want me to say to you? Mordy Oberstein: What happens to the ecosystem? How are they going to handle that? Mike King: I think the bigger problem is that we're at a space where all content moving forward is inherently polluted. What I mean by that, is there's a cutoff on what content is from November of last year because it's pre-Chat GPT. Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate. There already was, but it's accelerating at such a rate that Google has had to solve that and that's where the helpful content update comes into play. I think that the primary mechanism that they have to use to understand this is information gain because with Chat GPT, you're regurgitating things in different ways more or less unless you're doing a rag model or something like that. Google is trying to sift through to say, where is the net new information here? It can't just be like, "Okay, well we have 500 pages about flossing." Like you said, and everyone is just like, "Here's how you floss." So what do you rank? Yes, we can go back to links and all of that, but Google has to understand where is there something new, otherwise users aren't going to feel like search quality is good enough. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. I'm just conscious that we need to wrap up and I think it's fantastic and thank you so, so much. So, a big hand to all of our guests who have given us such amazing conversations. Before we wrap up, to the audience, green for Yes and purple for No. If you'd like to see Mordy do his ranking dance again. Greg Gifford: You all better put your greens up. Crystal Carter: Green. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember what I did. Greg Gifford: Now we'll have two different GIFs to show. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, I got to get in the zone. Wait, can I do a different one? Greg Gifford: Please do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to do my Axl Rose. Cindy Krum: Do the featured snippet dance. Greg Gifford: Oh my gosh. Please make a GIF of this. Mike King: This is Donald Trump campaign energy right now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. I really appreciate that. Crystal Carter: Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful, fantastic Brighton SEO. Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter George Nguyen Cindy Krum Greg Gifford Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Mobile Moxie Search Lab Digital iPullRank Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter George Nguyen Cindy Krum Greg Gifford Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Mobile Moxie Search Lab Digital iPullRank Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on this episode of the SERP's Up podcast everybody, we have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here and I’m joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the unequivocally, unparalleled greatest person on the planet. Too far. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There are definitely better people than myself. Mordy Oberstein: Just because my wife is listening. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Also, I've met better people than me. It's fine, I do my best. I think we all do our best. I think we can sum it up as Crystal Carter, doing her best. I'm fine with that. Mordy Oberstein: I can think of some people who do not do their best. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: That's going to those people. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I think maybe they're doing their best and maybe they still need to grow. There we go. I aim for some positives there. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. Yeah. We're still going to put a positive spin on things. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. That's a lot of slashes. But we can also take the mystery out of writing a good title tag and meta description with Wix's brand new AI meta-tag creator. Run the tag creation process with more efficiency using the new AI tag creator tool. Okay, fine, doesn't really solve any mystery of writing at all. Crystal Carter: Not particularly, but we're getting some great feedback on it. I had somebody on the Wix blog was like, "There are several things I love about Wix blog. I'll list them here for you. The SEO optimization tool just keeps getting better with AI. The editor is easy to use and yet powerful." Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Wow. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: That's quite-. Two likes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's like my washing machine. My washing machine broke and I got a new one and I said to my husband, "You hear that?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Exactly. Exactly." Mordy Oberstein: The same thing. I just got a new washing machine two weeks ago, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: By the time it's done, when it's on the spin cycle, you're like, "What'd you say? What was that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the old one looks like it went through something real serious. Crystal Carter: Shoes. Shoes is the worst. Mordy Oberstein: My kids' laundry. Okay, so the AI tag creator tool we have on Wix doesn't solve any mysteries, but you know what does solve some mysteries? Our session from Brighton SEO, in San Diego, we talked about unsolved SEO mysteries. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see, I do see that. The pivot. It was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just for clarification, we didn't actually solve anything at the session either. We just added more nuance and clarification and contextualization to some troubling SEO issues. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but we had a lot of fun doing it. It's about the journey. Mordy Oberstein: It was, and it was very insightful, I like to say. I like to think it was very insightful. Crystal Carter: Literally, it's just an excuse for me to fan-girl at Cindy Krum and Mike King and Greg Gifford. They're great folks. It was a real honor to be on the stage with them, you were there as well. Oh yes, George as well. I see you and George all the time, so I feel if I fan-girled at you all every day, that would be weird. Mordy Oberstein: That would be weird. Crystal Carter: "Oh my God, thank you for reading my email." That'd be so weird. Mordy Oberstein: You should totally do that. "Thank you so much for reading this email. I can't believe you. Oh my gosh, you are the greatest." Crystal Carter: Every time I log into a meeting with George, I'm like, "oh my God, can I get a selfie? Can I get a selfie with you? Do you mind if I just..." Yeah, he'd lose mind. Mordy Oberstein: We sat down with some brilliant folks at Brighton SEO, in San Diego from our own Head of SEO Editorial here at Wix, George Nguyen, to MobileMoxie CEO, Cindy Krum. The COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg Gifford, to the founder of iPullRank, Mike King. Plus, we got insights straight from the live audience sitting right there at Brighton SEO, that I mentioned was in San Diego. Also, there was dancing. Crystal Carter: There was dancing. Mordy Oberstein: There was dancing. Crystal Carter: There were a few different dance moves happening during the episode. Mordy Oberstein: It was epic. It was the best dances ever. Crystal Carter: I know that you all can't see it over the podcast, however, the dance booths were- Mordy Oberstein: They were videoed. Crystal Carter: -inspiring, You could use that. Like nothing I've ever seen before. Mordy Oberstein: It was interpretive dance for SEO. Crystal Carter: It was interpretive dance. I think sometimes if you want to make it rain rankings, you need to do a dance and maybe that's the thing you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: When it rains, it pours, and that's what you got, a deluge of terrible dancing. Anyway, this is our very special live version of SERP's Up from Brighton SEO, in San Diego. We hope you enjoy it. Crystal Carter: All right, thank you so much for joining us for this session. My name is Crystal, the is Mordy, thank you for joining us for SERP's Up live. Mordy Oberstein: This is a live recording of our podcast SERP's Up, so that means that we're talking to you, our live audience, but also to our recorded audience who doesn't exist yet, but they will in two weeks when this comes out. This by the way, is not just shameless advertising, but we're actually going to use these during the session to ask you questions. Crystal and I'll be asking you questions, it's a yes no question. I'll tell you, "Hey, hold up green for yes and purple for no." We can survey you, we can interact with you, we can have a good time together. By the way, I will forget which one I say is yes or no, and I will switch them up, so stay on your toes. Crystal Carter: Do we want to do a trial run? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's do it, okay. Do you like SEO? Green for Yes. Purple for-who said No? Seriously? Crystal Carter: Do we have some PPC people in the place? No. Mordy Oberstein: The way this works is, we have multiple segments on our podcast and we're going to intro or integrate some of our segments to this live podcast recording with a cool set of guests. First up, from our own SEO Hub is the editor of the Hub, our head of SEO Editorial, the one, the only former editor of Search Engine Land, George Nguyen. Welcome to the show. This is unsolved, SEO mysteries, and if you walk out today's session feeling like we solved these mysteries, then we've done a horrible job. Go walk away with some context about some mysteries and maybe a bit of answers, but we're not going to solve anything definitively. That's just not how SEO works. It all depends, right? The first thing we wanted to talk about were content trends, I think that sets the stage for today. We're going to be talking about Google updates, we're talking about how to deal with your clients, we're talking about SGE because we obviously have to talk about AI at some point or I'll just walk out. We wanted to start off with content trends and George is the master of creating content and we thought, Hey George, let's talk to you about content and that'll set the stage for algorithm updates because algorithms impact content and clients need content and SEO revolves around content SGEs. George Nguyen: Are you trying to sell me on content? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to say content's really important. George Nguyen: I understand that. Mordy Oberstein: Do you? George Nguyen: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's good. That mystery is solved. That brings us to our first question, basically what is good content and how quickly does it change? I think that's something that we don't really appreciate, just how much content changes, how quickly it changes. What was good yesterday might not be good tomorrow. What do you think, George? George Nguyen: Think about your audience. If you're in the B2B audience, B2B folk, just raise up the thingy, the flag. Maybe 5% of you are B2B, your audience probably isn't going to change that much. It will change over time as technology is developed, but if you're direct to consumer, you are literally changing, it feels like every year. Think about how popular TikTok has become, right? We have some content on TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do TikTok. George Nguyen: Crystal does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Crystal does. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the whole thing. Good content. It might be good for somebody who's like me in their mid-thirties, a millennial, somebody who likes to read, but for somebody much younger, if I had a kid, maybe that's not the right thing here. You really have to think about what your audience is, and I feel like it's changing constantly. It's just what are you able to produce that really changes the lens. What you're able to do dictates what you consider to be good content no matter whatever your role is. If you're in an agency or in-house, you view what your success can be primarily through what you're able to accomplish. But you have to be more aspirational than that, because you look at all those other brands and that's what they're doing. Crystal Carter: Would you say that you define good content by whether or not it's helpful? George Nguyen: Yes. Definitely relevance, all the stuff that Google says, but I feel like we're at a point where how much more optimizing, how much more helpful. If you ask me a question, right now, there's a million ways I can answer it just like I am answering it for this podcast. Are you going to write content that same way? You have to choose a way, and that all comes down to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because what's helpful for one audience is not helpful for the other audience. I think to answer what is helpful content, Google's not going to tell us what helpful content is exactly. It really all depends on what you're trying to achieve, who your target audience is. I think it comes down to empathy. If you can really understand and really empathize with your audience and I think predict what their needs are going to be. When I write content, I guess I'm okay at content, but then George edits it makes it much better. One of the things I try to do is really predict, okay, so if someone's reading this and are they going to have a difficult time with this sentence? Does this concept need to be explained? Does it maybe need to have a link so that they can go explore what exactly I'm talking about because I can't cover it right here. I think being able to predict the pain points and the problems that your audience is going to have with your content makes it helpful. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Is that helpful? Crystal Carter: I think that's helpful, but here's a question to the audience. Do you think that helpful content actually ranks? Mordy Oberstein: Loaded question. Crystal Carter: Green for Yes, purple for no. Okay, so I think we have a lot of greens. We have a lot of greens. I'd probably say that was 75% green on that. That, I think is good. I think that that comes down to people seeing the way that users respond to content that adds value in a helpful way. Is that something you've seen as well, George? George Nguyen: I think that the fundamental basis of what helpful content is isn't going to change between me and you talking about it to what it is on the internet. Are you answering the question? Think about all that relevance. When your partner is just asking a question, "Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?" And you start contextualizing, "Well, I had this for lunch." That's not helpful. Remember, the same thing, you have a question, "What is a meta title?" "Well, before the internet." That's not helpful. You need the answer upfront, those things aren't going to change. The way that we approach that has changed a little bit, but we demand answers immediately and so that's always going to be what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: But on that idea of it not changing, at a certain point things do evolve and things do change. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the idea of does SEO impact content trends or do wider content trends impact SEO? George Nguyen: It's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? The listicle. How many of you, just raise the flag here if you spend time optimizing listicles still in this day and age? Don't lie to me. We're not above this. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for saying no. George Nguyen: Yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: I love listicles. I'm not going to lie. I love them. Mordy Oberstein: We have a debate about this. Crystal Carter: I love listicles, I love a list. Mordy Oberstein: I hate listicles, they're the worst. Crystal Carter: I love a list. I like to be able to scan and then pick the thing I want to invest my time in. Mordy Oberstein: When Danny Sullivan goes on Twitter? X? Whatever? He's like, "Yeah, unhelpful, let me show you an example." It's a listicle. Crystal Carter: I find them helpful. I will go through and I go, "I know all of those. I don't know that one. I'll check that out." Mordy Oberstein: Agree to disagree. Crystal Carter: There we go. George Nguyen: You always have these situations, okay, listicles, where is that in this debate? Or even recipes, like your blog recipes. All the SEO in the world, all the guidance that we tell people, well you're not leading with the main content and that's for other considerations. I feel like there's a giant influence, especially nowadays, think about what's ranking in terms of Axios. They publish incredibly concise short content, it's well optimized and that's what it's built to do. I don't know if you can hear this from the recording, but there's this Star Wars theme playing back now it's both fueling me but also making it very hard to concentrate. If you're distracted, I don't blame you for that. Yeah, there's definitely an overlap here, especially as the publishers, the people, the C-suite becomes more aware of SEO and the importance of ranking that one position might be millions of dollars for you on the SERP rate. Of course, it's going to influence because you need to make money ultimately, but then it's different if you're doing it for branding, then it looks different. Then there's Google's vision of it, and Bing's vision of it where it's Index now. There's so much there. Mordy Oberstein: I think one of the things that's interesting though, like RankBrain. RankBrain is a Google machine learning property and part of what its built to do is basically look at how users are behaving and assimilate that into their machine learning process and now change what ranks based upon what people want. I was doing an article or something, I don't remember, and I went to the way back machine and it was a product review, best microwave content. The page now, has the word "our" and "we" 150 times, if you go back, I don't know, two, three years ago, it only had it eight times. I don't know if that was an SEO saying, we think Google has the E for experience, let's add a bunch of "our" and "we" to the content, but it could also just be content has changed and people are writing in a different style. Google does realize that, that's literally what RankBrain is built to do and those things get assimilated into the algorithm and the algorithm is changing based upon what users are doing. Crystal Carter: I think it has a lot to do with the competitive landscape. I think we're all, as SEOs, we're all working in a competitive landscape. The content that we make doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you see that there's a trend that lots of people in your sector or in your vertical are using lots of video for instance, and then you are not using video, then it becomes a question of satisfying customer demand, satisfying customer expectations and remaining competitive there. I think that content trends, like you said, it's like a chicken and an egg. I think they pull and push at the same time with those things. George Nguyen: We will develop any tactic, we will test any tactic working with content at scale. If that's the case and you just want to outrank someone and you have all this time to try to do that, of course SEOs are going to find a way to push the limits of content, create new formats, and that's how we're going to affect it. Then, eventually we're going to take that and be like, "Look at what I did." Then speak about it on stage at a conference. That's how the game works essentially. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you George for coming on our podcast. I'll see you around the office. George Nguyen: Every meeting is like this pretty much, ladies and gentlemen. Mordy Oberstein: We get nothing done. For the first 10 minutes, the other people in the meeting are like, "Okay, enough jokes. You have to stop. We have to do work now." George Nguyen: Can I go? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you can go. George Nguyen: I did want to say one thing. This is the first session of the morning. I really appreciate you showing up here. I'll be at the Wix booth in between sessions and if you don't know anyone, if you're here alone, feel free to come by. Say hi, you know me. Mordy Oberstein: With candy. George Nguyen: Why do you-? Mordy Oberstein: Although we have coconut candy. George Nguyen: It was all good until you said that. Thank you everyone. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much George. Mordy Oberstein: We do a little segment on the podcast, we call, Is It New? All about Barry Schwartz. We sometimes go through different changes to the SERP and wonder if they're new. They never are, by the way, but we try to explore the impact of their new-ish status. In this case, we're doing something a little bit different with the segment. We're taking a look at algorithm updates because I think the entire landscape is new. This is a very special version of, Is This New? It's the Google algorithm update version of Is This New? To help us, we have the founder of MobileMoxie herself, she's an SEO legend, I would say an SEO-G. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I met Cindy, I met- Mordy Oberstein: It's Cindy Krum, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's Cindy Krum. I met her yesterday and I literally screamed a full fan girl, which I'm not ashamed of. Mordy Oberstein: Can we reenact that? Crystal Carter: No, I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm so honored, so pleased, and you're in for a real treat because Cindy's amazing and here she comes to the stage now. Cindy Krum: Hello, I'm excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: That chair is really comfortable by the way. Cindy Krum: It's pretty good. Yeah, I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the podcast. Cindy Krum: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show. Cindy Krum: Thank you. How are you guys doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm jet-lagged. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You? Cindy Krum: Yeah, not as jet-lagged as you. Mordy Oberstein: You all had snow last week. Cindy Krum: We did, a lot of snow. Mordy Oberstein: That's nuts. Cindy Krum: It got down to 11 degrees. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Okay, it's a podcast. We have the banter, I feel like I have to explain that. Let's kick this off about the algorithm updates. Let's ask the audience first. Do you see more rank volatility? Is rank more volatile than it normally is? Green if you think rank is more volatile, purple if you think it's not. Everyone from the audio audience, everyone except for Michelle Ford said the rank is more volatile than it was before. I feel like it's always that way. Crystal Carter: I think we've had another core update since the conference started. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There's been five in the last five minutes. Cindy Krum: It's constant. Mordy Oberstein: And a review update, another spam update. It's been crazy, right? Cindy Krum: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: There was the August core update, then there was a helpful content update in September, then a spam update in October, another core update in October, another core update in November, and now we're review update. Cindy Krum: Now they're overlapping them, so you can't really identify or know for sure which impacted what and when, and stuff like that, if it did at all. Although the good news is, I think in general, the rule for me at least still seems to be if you're doing really good clean SEO strategy and not really pushing the boundaries of the guidelines, then you don't get impacted by these things. Is that what you guys are seeing? Can I ask audience questions? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Green for if that's what you're seeing, okay. Crystal Carter: Generally keeping it- Mordy Oberstein: Good content. Cindy Krum: There's some purple, people who disagree. You're doing good content and following all the rules, but you're getting bouncy stuff. Crystal Carter: That's interesting. That's interesting. I think some verticals are finding that more than others. Cindy Krum: That's true, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Also, sometimes keywords are just like that. Cindy Krum: Yes, some keywords are more volatile. Mordy Oberstein: There's just volatile keywords. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Definitely, and I think that it's something that you've talked about being able to diagnose the impact of the different updates. I know that you can be very scientific with the way you break all of that down. Do you find that to be challenging for clients and things like that? Cindy Krum: Like I said, I haven't had a lot of clients who've been massively impacted, but I do find that clients are getting bored of hearing me freak out and be like, "There's an update and I just checked and everything looks fine, don't worry about it." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's always fine." It's the boy who cried wolf story, we used to have a couple updates a year or a couple major updates a year and we would make a big deal and be like, "No, I think everything's fine." We'd look really, really detailed. Now they're coming so fast that you can look but you can't get too detailed and you're like, "Nope, looks fine, looks fine. It's good." Mordy Oberstein: Is that the new norm? Is this the new norm? Cindy Krum: What I've been saying is that I think that part of what Google was going for when they switched from old school crawling indexing to mobile first indexing was this ability to make changes faster. Because remember, if it was about crawling, they would've called it mobile first crawling. It was about indexing, and they've changed the index to make it, I think more flexible and easier to change. Mordy Oberstein: The review update is going to be real time, basically. They're not going to announce future updates and it's going to just be basically constant, ongoing. It's almost like Penguin. Cindy Krum: I think that we should expect to see more of that with regular updates too. It'll just be, they don't necessarily have to announce everything. I think we're already seeing that things are going live and things are changing in an ongoing way. They're not always announcing it. Mordy Oberstein: You heard it here first, the core updates. I don't think they're going to keep announcing them, I think they're just going to put them real time, like the review update, which is going to be scary because you're not going to be able to figure out what's going on exactly. Cindy Krum: I think they may try and pull back and slow them down just so that people don't freak out, but they're still doing them, they're just not announcing all of them. I think Google's fighting an interesting battle because they're trying to look like they're being more transparent in ways that get them out of legal problems that they might or might not be having. They want to look like they're being transparent, but without being too transparent to make things too gameable, so they roll things out quietly sometimes. Then, if there's a risk, it's going to be a big fuss, then they'll give you a heads-up and be like, "Hey, next week this is happening." So they can say, "Oh no, we warned you." Crystal Carter: Sometimes within SEO chatter, you hear people talk about unconfirmed updates. Is that something that you pay attention to? Is that something that you think about. Cindy Krum: Yes, I definitely have seen unconfirmed updates, especially around things that are highly regulated. You see Google change their mind about how they feel about this topic or that topic, or changing just their understanding of a topic. Is this an informational query versus is this a e-commerce query. Mordy Oberstein: Unconfirmed update, Google, it's supposed to say a core update where they now announce them and they say, "Okay, it's coming." There's constant volatility, and we generally either see that in our own rankings or the SEO weather tools. You have MozCast and SEMrush Sensor and the Grumper, whatever. There are all these names for all these tools. I'm curious, this is a controversial question and if you're from one of the tools in here, this is probably one you want to pay attention to. Do you trust the SEO weather tools when they say, "There's a spike in rank volatility, there's an update, there's something going on." Do you believe them? Green for I believe the SEO weather tools. Purple for no, and it's a mixed bag. Cindy Krum: That's more purple than I expected. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot more purple than I expected. By the way, each tool is a little bit problematic, and I've worked on two of them. The inside scoop is there's different keyword sets. Moz is very transparent by the way, they'll tell you that MozCast is built in high search volume keywords. The SEMrush Sensor is much more diverse with the type of keyword, and there's a case for each way of doing it. It is interesting that people don't trust them as much as they used to. I think part of the reason is that they're always on, there's always something going on and you really believe something's really happening. I have a wild theory about some of this, I'm curious what you think. I think a lot of the spikes in volatility that are not part of a confirmed update is machine learning, basically recalibrating. It's saying, okay, I'm implementing X. Let me try see if that works. Let's try Y and reverse it and see which one is better. Okay, let's go with the X. Cindy Krum: You hit a threshold and that threshold is a signal to the algorithm to recalibrate or reevaluate. I think that's true. I think though, that let's say we have a tool that measures these things and we realize that we've totally missed this whole industry or there's a new industry popping up that didn't exist, like TikTok, creator studios, whatever, and we have to add a bunch of keywords. Adding this infusion of new keywords changes the model entirely, and unless there's a lot of transparency about that you don't realize. I think the weather tools also sometimes miss some things that might be very important to people, to SEOs, because they are trying to find signal from noise. They omit what they think is noise but might not be noise for you. Something that I'm going to show in my talk tomorrow is I have a tool that grabs a screenshot, full screenshot of mobile search results every single day for a particular keyword in a particular area on the same phone, pretty standardized. What I saw in testing is that even if your position can stay the same, the presentation of the position can change day by day. Where today it's one big picture, tomorrow it's two pictures, then it's a grid of four with a thing over here. It's always potentially in the same position, not always in the same position, but I think that the weather tools might call that noise not signal, but for you that's signal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. Mordy Oberstein: They totally miss them and they don't track that. Cindy Krum: Or because they have to show something that's statistically relevant for everyone and that's only relevant for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt with the weather tools. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, and I think particularly on mobile, there's only so much real estate on a screen as you know. If there's a new SERP feature that pops up that takes up 30% of the screen, that's really going to affect your click-through rate. Even if you're ranking number one, if you're below the SERP feature, then that's not really going to happen. Cindy Krum: You can see situations where they're ranking number one consistently, but the click-through rate is all over the place. Maybe it's because of the images or how it's presented or things that might not come into every single weather tool. What if the weather tools aren't checking pixels from the top and there's a knowledge graph that shows up all of a sudden? Or there's People Also Ask above it today and so click through and it tanks because everyone's clicking on People Also Ask. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like to look at all that data very directionally. It's not telling you anything in specific. It's okay, something might be going on here. It's a red flag thing. I wouldn't put too much stock in what they show. I know it's a little controversial. Cindy Krum: I think you can take stock and say when they're red, stuff's changing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right. That's true. Cindy Krum: When they're green, stuff might still be changing. Mordy Oberstein: Something to know about the weather tools, they all recalibrate after 20 or 30 days, because if they didn't, what would never really happen is it would be read the entire way through. I actually just looked at a bunch of data on this. If you look at 2022 and 2021, there's not much of a difference in the rank fluctuations. They're on average. If you go into 2023, the beginning part of 2023 looked very similar to 2022, and this actually ties into what I want to get into in a minute about AI. When you hit the summer, the end of the spring in 2023, ranks started going bonkers. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, how high was rank volatility? January through March, January through April was a three. When you got to May and you started going through the summer on a scale of one to 10, the level of volatility was an eight. The tools were still green because they recalibrate, eight was a new normal. You're looking at the tool, you're like, "Oh, it's green, everything's fine." But if you compare it to what rank was a few months ago, it's extreme. The green now, is way more volatile than the red back in January. Cindy Krum: Okay, so that's fascinating. But also, I think I want to talk a little bit about your choice of terms, rank volatility versus cert volatility because rank is specifying a numeric evaluation that used to be one through 10 or whatever. I think that Google has persuaded us to ignore things that matter when we're counting ranks because they're like, "Don't worry about the paid stuff up there and don't worry about the knowledge graph and don't worry about People Also Ask, those things don't rank." But they do. They push everything down. I think talking about rank volatility versus cert volatility, and maybe pixels from the top or some more universal metric where we can agree that every pixel counts. Pretending that a knowledge graph that's above you doesn't count is a lie. It counts and it's taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and when you're tracking by pixel, you don't see it because on the desktop, it's on the right-hand side. Cindy Krum: Right, but on mobile, pssh. Mordy Oberstein: Did you see, by the way, it was a Search Engine Land article. It was part of the whole antitrust DOJ trial thing which was going on, which is fascinating. Some document came out where it was Ben Gomes, I think, a former VP of search there. "We can get more ad clicks if we add refinement to the SERP and more filter." If you fast-forward to now, the SERP is filled with filters. Broaden this search, refine this search, the bubble filters on top, People Also Ask, there's tons of filtering going on. Cindy Krum: What you need to notice when you click any of those filters that are on your screen, especially desktop, is that it's executing a new search and showing new ads. This is a monetization strategy. Don't ever forget that Google's a business that's trying to make money. Mordy Oberstein: I do like the filters though. Cindy Krum: The filters can be nice. Mordy Oberstein: Do you like the filters on the SERP? Green for Yes. See people like filters. Cindy Krum: Okay, but here's the thing. Filters do two things for Google, filters get them the ability to show a new search result, increase their search volume and say, "Oh, we're getting loads more searches because that's a new search because you filtered it and show more ads." Also, filters I think, and people can tell me I'm wrong and people can make fun of me. I've always been bullish on voice search. But, filters are the future of voice search, because if you think about a phone tree when you're calling in to change your insurance or whatever, they're like press one for this or press two for that. Those are filters and you're going to be able to do that with voice with your Google Assistant or whatever, where they say, "Do you want to do this or that, or do you want to see this kind of filter versus that kind of filter." When they predetermine what your choices are, it's easier for them to latch in and preload or know what they're going to show. Then you don't go off the rails and come up with something that they hadn't thought of. They're coaxing you into something that they can answer instead of something that they potentially can't. Mordy Oberstein: As a serial podcaster, I pride myself on my pivots and I don't have one right now. Cindy Krum: Is my time up? Is that what you're saying? Mordy Oberstein: No, I want to talk about AI. I feel we have to talk about AI. Do you think that the rank is incredibly more volatile since the summer, basically. How much of that do you think is AI? Before we answer that, dear audience, do you believe Google when they say that they're not targeting AI content? Green, if you believe Google, purple if you don't. There's one person. Cindy Krum: Not a lot of trust- Mordy Oberstein: It's way in the back, who trust Google, that they're not targeting AI content. Even Michelle doesn't believe Google. I don't believe them either, by the way. They're definitely targeting AI content. Cindy Krum: They like to mince words and get really detailed in what targeting means. They're just saying, "We like the best content and we make AI content too, and if we're going to show AI content, why not ours?" Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory about this, that Google can't say for their stock pricing that we're anti AI. Cindy Krum: Yes, they cannot. Mordy Oberstein: So, we'll just say, "No, we're not targeting AI content. We're targeting low quality content." Pre-med, pre-law, same difference. Cindy Krum: Yes, exactly. Speaker 5: What I think is interesting about this though is that what I've seen is that on the one hand that I know that there's a lot of people within the affiliate space who have been really struggling with this. They've been making a lot of bulk content by AI and they've been getting a lot of traffic and then a lot of volatility. What I've also seen is teams, for instance, LinkedIn, they have these community posts and it says right at the top, this is an AI generated article. If people haven't seen these, essentially they have a collection and they'll say the topic is AI content, for instance. Then they'll have machine generated content and then they'll have spaces for people to contribute answers, individual answers. Those pages rank for tons of keywords and they have done since April. It's very interesting, they seem to be trying to hedge how they're managing that content. Are you seeing that across the space as well? Cindy Krum: Yes, but I don't know if it's an intentional effort to hedge. I think that they will also be studying what's ranking in their algorithm and then they'll do it better because that's their model and they can show ads on that. When you get to a LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's making money instead of Google. Google, they've said for years that they don't always know exactly how an algorithm is going to impact results. It's not a guaranteed thing and it can change over time. When they push the button to roll something out, they're watching too and that's why there are rollbacks where they're like, "That went a little bit too far." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, another piggyback on the ring volatility. When you see the tools go, you don't know if that's a reversal and there's really no net gain or loss. Cindy Krum: Yeah, I mean it's still bad for the month or whatever, that you were down. Yeah, for Google, they're looking at things in a much longer term and they're like, "Whatever." Mordy Oberstein: There's been again, a ton of rank volatility on the SERP since the summer basically, and you know what it reminds me of? Because I've been tracking stuff religiously for years, it reminds me of Covid, when Covid hit the SERP bonkers. Cindy Krum: It totally did. Mordy Oberstein: Because they couldn't figure it out. Cindy Krum: Totally new industries popping up, new things. Mordy Oberstein: Terms didn't mean the same things anymore- Cindy Krum: Terms meant different things. Mordy Oberstein: -and can totally switch. I think what's happening is the perfect storm, there's a ton of more content because of AI and it needs to figure out, do we want to actually rank this and there's a method to my madness, to tie into what George was talking about before. Content trends are changing. People are looking, they didn't pull experience out of their ass for EEAT. Cindy Krum: Content trends and content and creation trends are both changing, and so the algorithm has to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: People want experience and Google's like, "Okay, let's integrate into the algorithm." Everything's changing, and I think Google's having a really hard time figuring it out. Cindy Krum: I think that what's going to make the difference in the future potentially is, Google has this horrible situation where they have, let's say there's 5,000 dentists in the United States, and every one of those 5,000 dentists think that they have to write an article about why it's important to floss. Okay, and how different are those- Mordy Oberstein: Nobody flosses anyway, no matter how many times they write it, right? Green if you floss, I'm just kidding. Cindy Krum: I floss. So, all 5,000 are writing basically the same article about why it's important to floss. How is Google going to choose which of those 5,000 should rank? Maybe it could, maybe one or two of those dentists is writing a vastly superior article or maybe one or two of the dentists has a song that's going to get stuck in your head to remind you to floss. Or maybe there's only three dentists in this area, so they want to rank a local dentist. I think context and connection is going to be the new ranking factor that they're going to try and do. So, influencer marketing, super important, but not something we talk about as much in SEO. I think that for a listicle, if I was writing a listicle about my favorite travel hacks and things on Amazon that you could buy, you would be like, "I know Cindy and she travels like a mad woman and she knows this." But, if you knew someone else who had five kids, which I do not, by the way, and you had five kids, you'd be like, "I know that woman and she has to deal with what I have to deal with." So, more personalization, more context of who you are and who is recommending whatever, or where they are or what's going to resonate with you like the song to remember flossing or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a song? Do you know a song? Cindy Krum: No. Does anyone? Mordy Oberstein: I wish there was a song. If you're doing SEO for a dentist, it would totally help to have a song. Cindy Krum: It would help, something like Going to the Chapel, that going to get stuck in everyone's head. You're welcome. Crystal Carter: As long as it doesn't get stuck in your teeth. There you go. On that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us and for talking about this fantastic subject. Give us a big hand for Cindy. Cindy Krum: Yay. Now you want me over there, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. With rank being bonkers and with content changing, one of the problems are clients and communicating all of this to clients. So we're going to take a deep thought into how you're going to be communicating with clients and how to get buy-in for clients and how to deal with the clients and all the stuff for the clients with the master of disaster himself. The one, the only, the COO of Search Lab Digital, give it up for Greg-fricking-Gifford. Greg Gifford: I feel like you moved over because you don't want to sit by me. Cindy Krum: I want to sit by you. Mordy Oberstein: I need to razz you, you're C level now? Greg Gifford: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You have your own corner office and stuff? Greg Gifford: Yeah, only because I'm on the corner of a hallway. Mordy Oberstein: Is it in your house? Greg Gifford: No, no. I have an office. I can't work out of my house. I have too many kids and pets and my wife doesn't get that I'm working and I can't go do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I have the same problem, my kids will bang on the door. Greg Gifford: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They regularly just come into the meetings. Mordy Oberstein: They come into our meetings all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. I just give up. Greg Gifford: I'm old school. I need to be somewhere separate where I can mentally separate work from home. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That's good. Greg Gifford: When I'm home, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: C levelness aside, clients, it's a little complicated because if there's so much volatility, the SERP is changing, content is changing, everything's always changing. Like Cindy was talking about, two November updates, three October updates. At a certain point, do they just not believe you anymore? Greg Gifford: Yeah, we get the vast majority of our clients call us freaking out. "Oh my God, I saw that there's an update today. What are we doing to address it?" We're like, "Bro, we don't even know that it's affecting you yet. Slow your roll, calm down, it's fine." Then they're like, "Ah." We're like, "Okay." We don't share. Can I do a question? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Greg Gifford: Green, if you share ranking data with clients, how many people do?Purple, if you don't. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of greens. Greg Gifford: We do not share ranking data with clients. We in fact refuse to if even if clients ask for it, we say we won't. Crystal Carter: Why? Greg Gifford: Because, can I use adult language on this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. We'll edit it out of the podcast. Greg Gifford: This will be lots of beeps right here, folks. No, I think ranking data is a complete bull vanity metric and it doesn't mean anything to a client's bottom line. What's the point of sharing rank data? I've had clients in the past that in a space of 12 months tripled their organic traffic, doubled their leads, every month was a record setting month for sales, yet they still canceled with us because the owner of the company wanted to rank for some vanity term that wouldn't have gotten traffic anyway. No human would ever search for it, but all he cared about was, do I rank number one for this term? So he cancels. That's why we don't get into ranking data. When our clients freak out, they're like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're like, "Look, we have rank tracking running, you know we won't share it with you. You're fine. Nothing even changed." Crystal Carter: Yeah, honestly I'm having PTSD over this because I've definitely had clients like that who it was a little financial firm and they wanted to rank for financial advisors. I'm like, "You're not going to rank for that." Greg Gifford: Yeah, we had this one guy that was like, "I want to rank number one for Toyota Camry." Mordy Oberstein: Are you Toyota? Greg Gifford: This was also the guy that was complaining that $3,000 a month for SEO was too expensive and he spent $1,500 a month on paid search, so in his mind between the 3000 of SEO and the 1500 for management fee, and then I think it was a $500 management fee at that agency. He's like, "I'm spending $5,000 a month, I should be number one for Toyota Camry." We're like, "Bro, it doesn't work that way." Then we tried to explain to him like, "Hey man, look, Toyota's going to rank for that. You don't have more money." He goes, "No, it doesn't matter, because there's no way Toyota's spending $6,000 a month on SEO. I should be number one." We're like, "Buddy, no, no, no." Yeah, so we do get those calls where clients are freaking out because they hear about all these updates lately, but I think we're a little bit insulated because we only do local SEO and a lot of these updates, you'll get a lot of fluctuation for maybe a day or two when the update's rolling out. But, a week later, once everything's settled in, we really don't see much of an effect for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: Are you seeing Cindy, is it harder for you to communicate with the clients because there's so many updates? Cindy Krum: I do it a little bit differently, so I don't have clients coming to me going, "oh my God, there's an update." They're not paying attention to SEO. I go to them and be like, "Hey guys, there was an update. I've checked, it seems like you're fine, but let's just keep an eye on things and watch closely." It's a little bit different, but then I don't have anyone who thinks that they should rank for Toyota Camry, so it might be just a different kind of client. Greg Gifford: The day that SGE was released to beta where we could finally all apply to get in and see it. We had three clients call us and go, "What's your SGE strategy for us? What are you doing?" I'm like, "Bro, it came out today. We don't have a strategy for you." We still had a client last week call us and go, "What's my SGE strategy?" I'm like, "Bro, we do not care about SGE and we're not going to talk about it with you because most likely it is not coming out for at least another year or two. it's still SEO, let's do marketing. Let's release this stuff that answers the client's questions. That's going to bring them to you because you have the solution." It's just like the voice search thing years ago where everybody's like, "Oh my god, voice search, what do we do?" Nothing changed. Cindy Krum: It's so funny because your approach is the opposite of my approach. My approach should be like, "Dude, we've been doing SGE strategy, everything that we've been doing to get featured snippets and to have stuff that's easy to parse and easy to understand, that is what's going to help SGE, this is baked in." Greg Gifford: Our clients don't get featured snippets. We're like, "Bro, we just got you this amazing snippet, look at it." Okay, another question, let's be interactive. Green, if you think getting a featured snippet takes traffic away. Purple, if you think getting a featured snippet gives you more traffic. I'm really curious. More purples. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Greg Gifford: I'm a purple too, because we've tracked it and we'll get a featured snippet for how do you hook up Apple car play in a Kia Soul or something related to a car. You get it and you can track because it's going to that page and all of a sudden your traffic just goes like this. We tell them, "Hey, we got this." They're like, "Nobody's going to search for that. I don't care. I want to rank number one for this. Crystal Carter: Where's the Toyota Camry, Greg? Greg Gifford: That's why we just don't get into the rank tracking stuff. Mordy Oberstein: If I can ask the audience, do you have a harder time communicating with all these things going on with your clients now, because of all this stuff? Green, if you have a harder time communicating with clients and purple, if you have an easier time. Crystal Carter: Got a lot of arms up very high with the green. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of green. Crystal Carter: A lot of purple. Greg Gifford: We had a client that was a little bit more advanced, they understand the SERP layout more. This was April or May, they called us up. They're like, "Hey man, this People Also Ask section, do you guys have a strategy for that? Are you doing anything for that?" I'm like, "No." Mordy Oberstein: Did they ask you for every SERP feature and what your strategy is? Greg Gifford: They're like, "What's our strategy?" Mordy Oberstein: Do you have a related search strategy? Greg Gifford: Not, oh my god, I'm awesome, I'm C-suite, but I don't really talk to clients anymore, which is actually really badass that I don't have to talk to clients. I don't deal with a lot of this crap. This was a guy that I've known for 10 years who is a client, so yeah I'll talk to you. He's like, "What's our strategy there?" I'm like, "I don't have a strategy." He's like, "What? You guys are awesome. You've done so much good work. How are you ignoring this?" I'm like, "All right bro, let's jump on a Zoom." We jump on a Zoom. I'm like, "Let's do a screen share. Let's do a search for whatever your term is." It was a dealership term, and he shows up and there's five PAA questions and I'm like, "Let's click on this one. Look who ranks number one for that? Let's go back. Let's click on a second. Look who ranks number one for that?" I'm like, "Dude, you already rank because we are doing SEO the right way. We're not doing SEO for Google. We're doing SEO for your clients so that you're going to be the answer for what people are looking for and that's the right way to do it. You don't have to worry about what is this tricky thing that we're doing now just for this one update that just happened because that's not sustainable for long-term." Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you have strong feelings about clients. Greg Gifford: I love clients. Mordy Oberstein: Is anybody else getting that vibe? Greg Gifford: I love clients. I just get really spun up when I just keep getting these really asinine questions and I get it, they're curious, but what are you doing for SGE when it came out four hours ago? Come on, don't waste my time with questions like that. Mordy Oberstein: What kind of client do you think is going to be more successful now? Greg Gifford: I think for us, the clients that are the most successful are the ones that are actually engaged. There's a lot of people that will do SEO and do paid search and do marketing because they know they need to. But it's pulling teeth to get them on the phone to actually talk strategy. They're just like, "Just do it for me. I'm hiring you to do it." You need to tell us what's going on. You need to help us. What are the questions you're getting? Are these leads the right kind of leads because we can get you more leads. People are always like, "Your traffic's going up, your leads going up, SEO's winning, but sales are going down." You want to have those conversations and really dial in the customization of what you're doing but these people are too busy to talk to you. Those, I don't think are anywhere near as successful as the ones that are engaged and they do want to talk strategy and they do want to look forward. Even though we don't have contracts, we're month to month, we have to earn business every month. Some people treat it as month to month and they're like, "All right, cool. I'm here." Some people are like, "I'm not going anywhere. Let's talk about what our strategy is for the next two years." I think those are the ones that are more successful, because they're more engaged, they're more bought into this SEO thing is helping my business. Mordy Oberstein: Do you find the same thing, Cindy? Cindy Krum: Yes, to some degree. We have different models of business a little bit, but I do think that the customers that are the most successful are the ones that are wanting to work collaboratively and understand that I don't wish, pray, and do dances to make the rankings improve. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a whole dance. You don't do it? Cindy Krum: I mean, I do it. Greg Gifford: Show of green, if you want to see the dance right now, come on, help me out. Put those greens up, now you have to show us, the crowd wants it. Mordy Oberstein: My ranking dance. Then, automatic feature snippet. You have to nail the turn. For the audio audience, I just did a terrible dance, I'm so happy you're not here to see it. Greg Gifford: Please, can we somehow get the video team to make that into an animated GIF. Cindy Krum: It's like the baby dancing GIF. Mordy Oberstein: I forget where I am right now. Cindy Krum: Wait, so yes. Collaboration is important because the clients that just hire you and be like, "I paid you 5,000, why am I not ranking for Toyota Camry?" It's like, "Because, you didn't do what I said to do." Or because your developer tried but screwed it up and then pretended that they didn't do anything wrong. Crystal Carter: I do think it has to be collaborative because like you were saying, I've definitely had it with clients where I look at all the data and all the data's telling me we're winning. Yeah, we have tons of leads, tons of clicks, whatever. Then I talk to them and I was like, "So, how did those leads go?" I literally had a client that was like, "We didn't get more calls, did we, Julie?" She was like, "I'm not sure. I was on vacation." They're like, "Oh, I didn't." Literally, there was no one there to answer the phone. We were sending phone calls and there was no one there to answer the phone. If they don't tell you what's happening on the other end of the funnel, you can't complete the funnel, and if they don't make money, you don't make money. You have to work in collaboration and yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: We have a lot of people who are clients listening to this podcast. Not right now, eventually when this comes out. If you're listening to the podcast, talking to the audio audience, you're all here, but if you're a client, communicate with your SEOs. Cindy Krum: I've had clients, I was going to jump in. I've had clients that try and sneak things by me intentionally and they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't want SEO for this, so we duplicated all our product pages and put them on a separate domain. But, we don't want SEO for that, so don't worry about it." Keeping secrets from your SEO team is like keeping secrets from your doctor. It's not going to help you. Crystal Carter: It's not good for you. "Oh yeah, we're going to migrate the site tomorrow." I was like, "What?" Speaker 7: Surprise. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: If you have clients and they're communicating with you but they're a little bit concerned about what's going on. How do you walk them off that cliff? Greg Gifford: Again, I think because of our model of we're months to month, we are really centered in on the relationship that we build with our clients. It's not always rainbows and unicorns, you're going to have months where traffic goes down. Some of our clients have a very ,seasonal business where it'll be up for a few months and then they know it's going to be down for the next six months. It's more about on our side, we found that it's better to build that relationship so that they trust us and they know that, "Hey, if my traffic just dropped 20% since last month for whatever reason, I trust that this team is there to help me." So many people have bad experiences from other agencies in the past that just do the BS checklist, SEO, that doesn't do anything. If you're lucky to get on a call once a month with some account manager who probably changes every two months and you just have this bad experience, so then you inherently mistrust all digital marketing moving forward. We work really hard to establish that trust so that they know we are the experts, we are in this with you. We are a partner, we're not a vendor because we care, because we have to earn that business every month so that we don't have to fire people or lay people off. So we work on that customer service and I think that really overcomes. I was joking about the weird customer calls, we don't get that often because the people that work with us choose to work with us because they trust that we are the solution and we are on top of these massive changes in volatility of the SERPs and different features that pop up and what's going on with local and new things that are coming out specifically just for car dealers in the business profile that other businesses can't do. They just trust that we are on top of things for them. I think where I work now, that's a different frame of mind than agencies I've worked for in the past where it was more about, "Your leads are up, your traffic's up. Hey, this is working guys." Then people are mad and they're leaving. It's the same checklist stuff for everybody due to the nature of some of the things that happen in automotive, and so I love where I am now where it's more about let's build this mutually beneficial long-term relationship. Even though it's a month to month thing, we assume that clients are going to be with us for a minimum of two, to two and a half years and we operate that way. It gets into their head that like, "Oh yeah, this is a long-term relationship and they are on our team. They're not just some vendor that we pay money to." I think that's made the biggest difference for us. Mordy Oberstein: It's a huge deal. It's the EEAT for your clients, I hate to use an SEO term, but it's an SEO conference. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of the audience, do you find that from a month to month, so purple for the stats and green for the relationship makes the difference for the outcomes for your clients. Got a lot of green. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. It's all pretty much green. Crystal Carter: A lot of green, a lot of green. I have Sean, who's in our customer relationships, manages that and he's like, "Yep, green." Mordy Oberstein: He's still holding up the green. You can't see it. Crystal Carter: All day the green. Thanks. I think you talked about the partnership element of the customer relationship things, and you also talked a little bit about marketing as well. Do you find that you need to help clients to navigate a few different channels in order to manage all of the different things that are happening in the SERP and on Google? Greg Gifford: Yeah, a hundred percent. A lot of our clients, they work with us because they know that we have a lot of top level experts. I'm not like, "Oh my God, I'm the best SEO in the world." But, I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm friends with all of the other top experts. We just have a better level of connection to what's going on than a lot of the crappy checklist SEO people they've worked with in the past. They come to us knowing that, "I know I need SEO, I know I need Facebook ads, I know I need YouTube pre-roll or whatever it would be, but I don't know how to do it and we haven't had success before. Can you help us?" They also trust us that when something comes out that's new, we can say, "Hey, look, here's this new thing that you can do. That's awesome." They just released LSAs for auto repair in California and Florida, so we came to all of our clients we're like, "Look, LSAs are a crapshoot. Maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's cheap, but this just came out for you and it's the first time you can do it. You need to be a first in the market, so that people are going to see you first and it's going to be amazing." They're all like, "Oh my gosh, thanks. I never would've known that was available if you hadn't come to us with that." Our team specifically wants to do that collaborative partnership approach as opposed to we're getting on a call, we're looking you up in our CRM to remember what the last call was about so we can pretend like we know you. We're really focused on, we want to build that long-term relationship with the clients we work with so they get that trust. We don't really have a lot of that, "Oh my gosh, there was an update. What do I do?" Or, "Oh my gosh, what happened here?" Crystal Carter: I think I see you nodding alon, Cindy. I know that you've been a big proponent of Google Merchant Center and people using additional channels to mix in with the SEO. Cindy Krum: Absolutely. I think that looking at LSA, even though it's not SEO, looking at just what's available is super important. Our job as SEOs is not just to do SEO, but to know the things that affect SEO. When LSAs come in, they push organic rankings down. That's not to say that we just need to get mad about it. We say, "Okay, that's pushing organic down, so do LSAs." It's not a pie where SEO loses because there's something new in there, you can leverage all of it for a huge benefit. Yeah, keeping an eye on everything that's coming into a search result should be part of how you envision your job. Whether you can impact it with organic stuff or not, you need to know what's there that might be taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of what's coming into search, I don't know if you saw, but SGE has been released in 120 countries. Our last unsolved SEO mystery is going to be about SGE. We're doing it a little segue that we call from the top of the SERP. I think we both like analyzing what's happened, what's working for sites that are ranking, what's changing at the top, something like LSAs. We have a little segue we do where we run through what's changing, what sites are doing that are ranking, what they're not doing and how you can improve. In this case, our from the top of the SERP is SGE because it's literally at the top of the SERP. To help us, you see what I did. Greg Gifford: That's clever. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm a master of pivots. As a podcast, you have to pat yourself on the back for the pivoting, which yeah, thank you. Which ruins the whole pivot, but it doesn't matter. To help us navigate the wide world of SGE, he's the only person outside of Joe Biden who could rock aviator shades the way he does. He's sitting right there. He is the one, the only, Mike or drop the Mike King. Mike King: Where's my band? Mordy Oberstein: You're not mic'd up. I forgot. Mike King: What up. What are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Aviator shades. Mike King: It's bright up here. Mordy Oberstein: It's so bright. It's so bright, I'm blinded. Mike King: Hey Cindy. Cindy Krum: Hey, good to see you. Mike King: You guys, Cindy is the smartest SEO ever. I've been saying it for years. It's a fact. Clap for that. Mordy Oberstein: What do you feel about Greg though? Mike King: Greg's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I love that you're holding the mic like you're rapping, man. Mike King: That's the only way to hold it. Nah, I love Greg too because he's such a great energetic presenter and he's been riding the whole movie thing for 10 years and it doesn't get old. I'm not even playing. Greg Gifford: I really just do that to keep myself entertained more than anything else. Mike King: It's dope. It's dope. Crystal Carter: Get out of the USP. Mordy Oberstein: There are new movies, right? Greg Gifford: Yeah, I have to update it every year. Mike King: Of course, of course. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: So, SGE. Mike King: Heard of it. Mordy Oberstein: You all in the audience. Are you worried about it? Green, if you're worried about SGE. Mike King: Green is not a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Mike King: Purple's more a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I was saying we should switch it up, see? Crystal Carter: We just have to pick one. There's two options. Mordy Oberstein: No, purple if you're worried. Mike King: Now they're confused, they're like, we're not doing this. Crystal Carter: Purple, if you're worried. Green, if you're not. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's worried. Crystal Carter: Sean's worried. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's very worried about the SGE. Are you worried? Mike King: No. Mordy Oberstein: Do you worry about anything? Mike King: No, I don't. Mordy Oberstein: So that's a bad question then, huh? Mike King: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mike King: I think it's an opportunity. Just like when feature snippets came out and everyone was like, "Oh, our traffic's going to die, blah, blah, blah." I think the reality of it is one, how people are meeting their information needs is changing dramatically. So it's not just Google, it's Chat GPT, it's TikTok, it's all these things. I think we as SEOs need to grow or evolve into these findability experts where we have to learn the interplay of channels and how to optimize for the different channels and so on. Undoubtedly, your clients are going to be like, "Hey, TikTok has a search, what do we do?" You can't just be like, "We only do local search." I mean, you can do it. You're going to have to have an answer to some degree and I'm not saying you need to be an expert in every channel, but search fundamentally works the same everywhere. There's a determination of relevance, there's a determination of user signals to reinforce those things. What is it that happens in TikTok that we need to be doing? Findability is definitely our future, but I think for SGE, users never wanted 10 results. They wanted an answer. Google is like, "Cool, let's give you an answer." It's not perfect right now, but it's a good step in that direction. There was a paper written by this guy, his name is Andre, I can't remember his last name. Mordy Oberstein: The Giant? Mike King: No. He's been at Google. He came from Alta Vista to Google with people like Jeff Dean and all these people. He's the guy that invented the informational transactional navigational query classification. He wrote this paper recently about what are called Delphic costs, and so Delphic costs is effectively the mental costs that you go through to get a search result. What he's talking about is no one ever wanted to have to go through 10 results and be like, "Is this right? Is this what I'm looking for?" Google has always tried to answer your question and it makes sense that they're going more in this direction. Crystal Carter: I think it's interesting. I think they're competing with so many more search engines now, we used to have a segment on the podcast called So Many Search Engines. Mordy Oberstein: We still have it. Crystal Carter: We haven't done it in ages, but there's so many different ways to answer a question now. The prime example I use for Chat GPT, I use a lot because George, who was on here earlier tried to teach me how to play Magic the Gathering and- Mike King: Get your manna. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I was struggling. I'm like, "Can I play this with summoning sickness? Is there trample? I don't understand. I'm very confused. Am I a wizard? I don't know what's going on." Basically there's been a lot of SEOed content around Magic the Gathering, 4,000, 7,000 words about the thing. I'm like, "Can I play this turn?" It's much easier for me to just literally talk into my phone and go, "I have this guy with this manna. Can I play this on this turn or can I not?" Then Chat GPT will just go, yes or no. Rather than me having to read through 17 pages of content. The SGE, if it's able to do that for some of that content, that's a win. Mordy Oberstein: Are you saying we've ruined the internet? Crystal Carter: No. Mike King: Put up a green if you're a content goblin. Nobody read that shit. Cindy Krum: Wait, wait. Can we do a green if we ruined the internet? Mordy Oberstein: Did SEOs ruin the internet? Green, if we've ruined the internet, according to the verdict, we have. Crystal Carter: Purple, No. Cindy Krum: Some people think so. Crystal Carter: Some people say yes. Cindy Krum: Maybe just you ruined the internet. Mordy Oberstein: It's that guy. Crystal Carter: He woke up in the morning, he was like, "You know what I'm going to do today?" Mordy Oberstein: It's like Pinky and the Brain. Mike King: Yeah, but I think to your point Crystal. We as SEOs, we can't unsee what it is that we do. When you're looking for something important and you're like, "Well, someone clearly optimized this. Some junior copywriter wrote this about whether or not I have cancer, I'm skipping this result." I think that is a reality of the internet, and people do have a sense of is this authentic? It's why we are like, "Okay, I have this ailment, where's the WebMD? Or where's Mayo Clinic or something like that." You don't trust what's on the web, but there's a lot of people that do, which is a problem. I think the standard audience is like, "If Google says it, it must be real." Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: I think that's one of the problems with SGE is because sometimes it's not right. It being Google, you inherently trust it, and so you're going to get bad information in those cases. Greg Gifford: Don't you think, right now it's not out, it's still beta because they want people to start thinking that way. By the time it's really officially out and in use, it's going to be way better than what it is right now. Mike King: I agree with that. Greg Gifford: Or do not think that. Mike King: No, I agree with that, but language models inherently have the ability to hallucinate. The way that SGE is built, it's taking the results and then using that to fine tune the language model to give you the actual response. It can still be wrong. `I don't know that the current generation of that technology is good enough to solve that problem. Greg Gifford: I totally agree. Everybody talks about SGE with us and we're like, "It's not coming out soon. Stop worrying about it. It's got to get better before it's going to be public." Mordy Oberstein: What does it look like in the end? When it goes live, it's out of beta. Forget the type of content, what does it even freaking look like? Because they've changed it 10 times. Greg Gifford: It looks Star Trek, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm wearing Star Trek socks. Greg Gifford: We're going to talk to our computer in a conversational way and get the answer that we want for most of this stuff. If you just want an answer like you said a minute ago, you don't want to read, you want the answer. Cindy Krum: I think it looks like a Google Home Hub with a knowledge graph and an answer and filters so you can drill down more and not 10 blue links or maybe any blue links or just a couple blue links. I wanted to build on what Mike was saying, I think when SGE came out, Google created part of its own problem by not doing citations. When you cite someone, then you could be like, "We didn't say it. They said it." But, when Google wasn't doing citations, then it's Google's fault and they're going to have to do citations for any number of reasons but the legal one and the getting it right or wrong is going to be a big part of that. Mordy Oberstein: Can I ask, about the citations and about updating content, if publishers are now going to block things like Bard- Mike King: Why? That's so shortsighted. Mordy Oberstein: I agree, but I think it's spiteful. I think because they can. Mike King: They can't, because if you block Bard, which you have to block Googlebot in general for, you're still going to get crawled by the common crawl, which is a data source that's used for training. It's a pyrrhic victory for you to do that. Cindy Krum: You're just going to get ripped off, someone's going to crawl and republish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I am with you. Mike King: Agree, but one of the things that I think we don't pay enough attention to is that search is also a branding channel. If you are searching for something and then there's a featured snippet and your brand is mentioned amongst other brands that are in that consideration set, that is a good thing for Mindshare. If you're not there because you want to just block Google from learning from your content as though it's so precious, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's stupid. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's the most under-talked about thing in the SEO world that is a personal, I am on a soapbox about this. Content fundamentally, yes, there's acquisitional content, but a lot of your content is branding content, a lot, and it's important to think about it like that. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about how that shows on the SERP and how that shows with things. I think that brings me to a question for the audience in terms of the SERP and SGE, can you optimize for SGE? Are you optimizing for SGE? Green for Yes, and purple for No. Mordy Oberstein: The people who said green, it's mostly green, maybe want to offer Greg some strategies so we can…. Greg Gifford: Okay, can we adjust the question? Okay, if you had a green, hold it up higher still. Keep the green up, so you're optimizing for SGE. Keep it up. How many of you that have it up, you're answering this because you're doing something different than you were doing before, specifically for SGE or you have it up because you're like, "I was doing good SEO anyway." Everybody put their cards down. Mike King: He didn't. Mordy Oberstein: For the audio audience, there was three people who said yes. Greg Gifford: But for the audio audience, most of the people that had it up, put it back down because doing the stuff for SGE, if you're doing legitimate SEO now, you're not really having to change that much. Mordy Oberstein: Not really. I can see you squirming in your seat right now. Mike King: I don't squirm. Come on. Don't make the people in listener world think that. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I take it back. Hey Aaron, can we edit that part out. Jury, forget what I just said, stricken from the record. Greg Gifford: I'm curious what you have to say about this. Mike King: No, I mean I think it goes back to things again about Cindy being the smartest SEO ever. She was talking about fraggles five years ago. Fraggles are basically the components of the content, the passages of the content that Google has identified as most relevant and is then serving it to the language model to then determine what to say in the response. In SGE, if you click on the carousel, the links in the carousel, it has the fraggle, what do you call it? The component at the end of the URL, it's the anchor link to the actual fraggle. Cindy Krum: Fragment. Mike King: Then it'll take you specifically to the line of text that Google has used. What I've done in my analysis of this is we've pulled those fraggle for a bunch of pages and then compared it against the AI snapshot. The one that has the highest cosign similarity, the one that's most relevant is the one that ranks best in the carousel. So it's really about optimizing those fraggles and identifying them if you want to get more visibility in those. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking, when- Mike King: Should I just drop the mic then? Mordy Oberstein: No, in nine minutes and 53 seconds. Mike King: He's like, no, don't break my equipment. Mordy Oberstein: You break it, you buy it, by the way. Mike King: I can afford it. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking then, I have to ask, I hate this question, we're going to ask it anyway. How does SGE impact traffic? Mike King: We don't know yet. Mordy Oberstein: What do you think? Mike King: Yeah, we've been modeling it and it's 30 to 40% based on a variety of different factors, but there's no way to know. We don't have any user behavior data on it. We don't have anything in GSE, I don't even know that SimilarWeb has anything yet. If they do holler at me, let's figure it out. We don't know. We have to wait and see until we get actual data. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, code red for the SEO tools, either they need to figure this out, because they're becoming- Mike King: It's already a code red for them. I was just talking about this in the other room, google shifted to semantic search 10 years ago. All of our SEO tools are still on the Lexical model, so really we are not doing something relevant to how stuff works right now. Effectively, we are still just making great content and Google is figuring it out and we're just messing around with all these tools that still do T-F-I-D-F. It's actually silly what we're doing as an industry right now. Cindy Krum: Also, all those tools and the weather tools and stuff like that, as far as I know, they're still focusing a lot on desktop results when more searches are happening on mobile, just more. Mike King: Facts. Mordy Oberstein: Also their keyword data sets are years old. They're almost irrelevant. Mike King: Sorry guys. Everything you're paying for is waste of money. Cindy Krum: The tools suck. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of click-through rate, and here's a question, maybe to the audience as well, do you think that for the SGE that brands who have a well-established brand will be less affected by a drop in clicks on the SGE? Green for Yes, purple for No. Is that too complicated a question? Cindy Krum: Say it again. Mordy Oberstein: Green, if it's too complicated. Crystal Carter: Basically, what I've experienced going through some of these AI SERPs and tools is that you sometimes get a repeat of people on a certain topic. I was trying to use Bard to figure out why my plant was dying, and what I found was that there was the same website that kept getting referenced for all of the different questions that I had about this plant. At the end of the day I was like, "I'm just going to go to the website because they've answered three of the questions already. So they probably have the whole bit of information there." Do you think that the brand overlap where people are getting that visibility in the circle lot, if that's going to make a difference between actually getting the click through? Mike King: Yes and no. What you're describing is actually a function of the context window. If you're asking Bard a bunch of questions about the same thing, all of those answers and questions are informing the next response. Whatever they looked up, because Bard is effectively a retrieval augmented generation implementation where it's just searching Google, the same way that SGE does based on your question, which is using its as a prompt. Then it's saying, "Okay, these are the pages that are most relevant to it." The original pages from your first questions remain in that context as you ask subsequent questions. That's part of why that same website kept coming up over and over. Is that going to impact SGE? Yes, it will on the follow-up questions, because again, the follow-up questions is bringing that context window concept to search. Crystal Carter: Then do you think it'll be more important for people to rank for those first questions? Mike King: Absolutely, and I think it's going to require that the content you create be more robust. Rather than the whole long tail strategy where it's like, "I'm going to make a hundred pages for a hundred queries." You may need to make 20 pages for five queries each, so that page answers several of those questions and remains in that context window. Cindy Krum: Google is crowdsourcing what they call these journeys. This came out when we started talking about MUM. They're looking at people who are using Bard or just using regular search to understand why their plant is dying. They're saying, "Lots of people have an Aloe plant and it's looking like this and here's the right journey." I think they'll fine tune, and I think at some point we'll get to a point where Google will try and add diversity to not just show the same website over and over again and then a QDF query deserves freshness or whatever. They're going to be honing these things in a similar model to what we've seen them go through historically with the current results. Don't you think so? Mike King: Yep. Crystal Carter: Then do you think as part of thinking about the way we create content within this space, that understanding the user journey rather than just the keyword as you were saying, or even just the semantics is going to be a critical point? Mike King: Yeah, and I think to Greg's point, at least at iPullRank, we've been on that for a long time. I was on that persona driven keyword research back in 2012, and that's been how we've always done it. Google is just making it more explicit like, "These search journeys actually matter, and we are building around that because we understand that people are searching to fulfill a specific need." They're not just keywords. They are people doing a series of things so they can do something in the real world. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost trying to do an entity-based optimization, which I know you're going to- Cindy Krum: Also, when they've mapped that journey and they've modeled the journey, their processors don't have to work so hard for the estimation of what's going to come next. They can be working in the background to get that information, serve it faster, which they're always trying to serve things faster. Mike King: To Greg's earlier point, SGE being a test is largely so that they can get the data that they need and also cache a lot of these responses, which is another reason why it's gotten a lot faster since it first rolled out. Greg Gifford: Wait a minute, so are you saying Google does something and tells SEOs about it to get us to give them more data? No way. No way. Mordy Oberstein: So, go back to what you said earlier before about whether or not the LMs are even capable of spitting out content that's going to be good, ultimately speaking. At a certain point I feel like they're going to end up with a problem. I don't think it's going to be, and they're not going to backtrack on using SGE and putting it out there. You're going to end up, I think in a situation where you're going to have a lot of great answers coming out of the SGE and you're going to have a lot of garbage coming out of the SGE. Mike King: I feel like you just led me in your question. What do you want me to say to you? Mordy Oberstein: What happens to the ecosystem? How are they going to handle that? Mike King: I think the bigger problem is that we're at a space where all content moving forward is inherently polluted. What I mean by that, is there's a cutoff on what content is from November of last year because it's pre-Chat GPT. Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate. There already was, but it's accelerating at such a rate that Google has had to solve that and that's where the helpful content update comes into play. I think that the primary mechanism that they have to use to understand this is information gain because with Chat GPT, you're regurgitating things in different ways more or less unless you're doing a rag model or something like that. Google is trying to sift through to say, where is the net new information here? It can't just be like, "Okay, well we have 500 pages about flossing." Like you said, and everyone is just like, "Here's how you floss." So what do you rank? Yes, we can go back to links and all of that, but Google has to understand where is there something new, otherwise users aren't going to feel like search quality is good enough. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. I'm just conscious that we need to wrap up and I think it's fantastic and thank you so, so much. So, a big hand to all of our guests who have given us such amazing conversations. Before we wrap up, to the audience, green for Yes and purple for No. If you'd like to see Mordy do his ranking dance again. Greg Gifford: You all better put your greens up. Crystal Carter: Green. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember what I did. Greg Gifford: Now we'll have two different GIFs to show. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, I got to get in the zone. Wait, can I do a different one? Greg Gifford: Please do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to do my Axl Rose. Cindy Krum: Do the featured snippet dance. Greg Gifford: Oh my gosh. Please make a GIF of this. Mike King: This is Donald Trump campaign energy right now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. I really appreciate that. Crystal Carter: Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful, fantastic Brighton SEO. Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. 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