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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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is it so easy to get helpful content so wrong? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Search Engine Journal’s Managing Editor, Ben Steele to discuss why writing helpful content is not as easy as it sounds. We get into some common pitfalls when writing helpful content and how to best avoid them so that your content can rank. We’re extra “helpful” as we put some meat on Google’s advice to write “great content” on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Writing helpful content ain't easy is it so easy to get helpful content so wrong? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Search Engine Journal’s Managing Editor, Ben Steele to discuss why writing helpful content is not as easy as it sounds. We get into some common pitfalls when writing helpful content and how to best avoid them so that your content can rank. We’re extra “helpful” as we put some meat on Google’s advice to write “great content” on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 92 | June 19, 2024 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 50:38 This week’s guests Ben Steele Ben is a proud content goblin with over 10 years of experience as a writer, editor, and content strategist. At SEJ, Ben manages the ebooks program and assists the Editor-in-Chief with editorial operations. You'll find his personal touch on every new ebook SEJ releases. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us, SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who makes it look so easy. It's the legit, makes it all look so easy when it is not easy, the one, the only, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I can't remember what it is. What is it that I make look easy? Mordy Oberstein: It's all of it. It's all of it. Crystal Carter: It's all of it? Mordy Oberstein: You're doing the conferences, all the stuff. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of flapping that happens in between. Yeah, there's just a lot of flopping that happens in between. And there's a lot of many, many piles of makeup to look like I have slept a decent night's sleep- Mordy Oberstein: Oh my god. Crystal Carter: ... when I am there at the conference and having had been up for far too late the night before. There are various tactics and techniques. My top tip, for ladies anyway, and for anybody who is partial to this particular garment, is if you were traveling anywhere, basically, I only pack dresses and onesies and it just means that you can minimize how much you have to pack, and you can pack more outfits in a smaller amount of space. It's really, really useful. So if you have a onesie or a jumpsuit that's way less; Takes up way less space than having to pack a bunch of different things. That's super useful. Also, hydration. Mordy Oberstein: Wear the same clothes multiple days. The choice is yours. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. There's lots of ways to do it. Lots of ways to get to the same- Mordy Oberstein: I recommend your way. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's- Mordy Oberstein: If you're around other people. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. It's useful. It's useful. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Well, with those fashion tips, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only describe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also start building content now with a Wix CMS, as this week, we're talking about the ins and outs of just right good content and why it's way harder than you think. Hence, the whole Crystal makes it look easy. Get it? It all comes together. Crystal Carter: How easy. Mordy Oberstein: All comes together. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We're talking the temptations of quick and fast content creation for SEO, creating the content your audience craves, and why it might not be what you think. And how to write great content that actually has meaning. To help us record a great podcast, SEJ, Search Engine Journal's managing editor Ben Steele will join us in just a few moments. Plus, we see what Google's People Also Asked tells us about how Google sees "good content." And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So uncap your pens and dip your feathers in ink, or just use the keyboard, how quaint, as episode 92 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you see how the pen is mightier than the SGE Because SGE doesn't produce good content. That's me saying SGE doesn't produce good content. Crystal Carter: Do they talk about pens on SGE? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but they say all sorts of wacky things about what you should do with them. Crystal Carter: About ballpoint pens or fountain pens or the permanent marker pens. Those are the best ones. I mean, Sharpie, they're really just- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, those are good if you have kids under the age of anything. Crystal Carter: For kids, I like the sniffing pens, which is terrible. Why would you encourage children to sniff pens? Mordy Oberstein: Whoa. No, no. You don't want to give the kids a permanent marker to sniff? Crystal Carter: No, but the ones that smell? Like the blue ones smell like blueberry and- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I know what you mean. Crystal Carter: ... like those ones, but why would you encourage children to sniff pens? It's not a good thing, but I used to love them, but now as an adult- Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. I'm bringing it up, not encouraging it. Crystal Carter: As an adult, as a parent, I'm like, "Why would I? I wouldn't want to do that. It's-" Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm not saying you should. Crystal Carter: ... It's not good. That's not good content. Mordy Oberstein: That's not good content. That might be the easy thing to do, but it's not good content. Crystal Carter: It's not good content- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So let me give a little bit of a history of this. Okay, Christina, why are we talking about just write good content if you're not super involved in the SEO space, you're a casual SEO-er? Google has been trying to rank quality content for the longest time, but it's really made ginormous shifts and paradigm shifts. We talked about this before on the podcast since around 2018, had the core updates and the this and the that and the helpful content update, which is no more, but that's confusing and I want to get into that right now. And the advice that Google has been giving, Google's Danny Sullivan, their Search Liaison, is look guys, the links and the this and the... Just write good content. Write content that's valuable to the user, write content that's helpful to the user, write content that the people are actually going to want and going to use and it's going to be meaningful to them. Just write good content. And SEOs are like, "Just write good content like, let's not make magic pixie dust." So there's been some controversy around just write good content. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that just writing good content is not as easy as you think. This is why we're doing the episode. So now let me introduce to you Search Engine Journal's own Blue Ben Steele or Ben Blue Steele, Ben Steele. Ben Steele: Hello. Mordy Oberstein: How are you? Ben Steele: What an amazing intro. I'm doing pretty good. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: I'm tired after that intro. Ben Steele: It sounds tiring. Mordy Oberstein: I should really sniff some markers. Crystal Carter: No, don't. Seriously, don't. Ben Steele: Did you see, someone posted a screenshot of an SGE answer that suggested that in order to help pass a kidney stone, you should drink at least two quarts of urine in a day? Mordy Oberstein: Not only are we aware, but we covered it on It's New with- Ben Steele: Oh, hell yes. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. But you know why? Ben Steele: So wily. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's sterile and I like the taste. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little much. It really is a little- Crystal Carter: Did somebody post it on Reddit? Is that what happened? Ben Steele: Yeah, I don't get how that came up. That's weird. Crystal Carter: How did it end up in the SGE? Mordy Oberstein: It got confused. They changed it later where it meant drink two quarts of water so that it helps your urine. It got confused. It put the word in the wrong place. Crystal Carter: Did it go, "I'm an LLM. I'm sorry. I cannot understand the internet and I'm not want to talk to you anymore. Please ask a different question"? Mordy Oberstein: That's how you know, by the way, it's an LLM, not a person. The person would double down like, "No, no. You should drink two things. I'm right." Ben Steele: Is this SGE or is this Bear Grylls? Crystal Carter: Right? Right. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So just in case someone's not familiar with Search Engine Journal, please do tell us about SEJ. Ben Steele: Sure, yeah. Searchenginejournal.com is a website that covers all things SEO and digital marketing. We have prolific news writers who cover everything that's going on in the SEO industry. And we also have a team dedicated to creating really helpful content, which is what we're talking about today and about SEO and how to manage your own websites and your own businesses when it comes to existing in the digital space. We have a ton of really fantastic contributors who are expert SEOs in the industry as well, and so we've got their insights coming through the door all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You have a weekly now with Kevin Indig. Ben Steele: Yeah, we're sharing some of the content that he puts out on his newsletter, which is really exciting. Mordy Oberstein: I love Kevin. Ben Steele: He's great. Mordy Oberstein: Love Kevin. Crystal Carter: He's somebody who makes a lot of good content. Mordy Oberstein: Quite helpful. He's quite helpful as a person in general. Anyway, so we're talking about helpful content and one of the things that we talked about before we got onto the show, way back when we decided on this topic for the show actually, was Google saying, "Yeah, just write good content. It sounds super easy," and SEOs are like, "Give me something more." But at the same time, a lot of SEOs are creating, or they're trying to leverage, we'll call it fast food of content. It's super quick. We're trying to get super quick wins, super quick content. Let's get it out there, get it done, reach huge audiences. And then they feel like they're kind of wondering, why doesn't Google love me? Isn't my content helpful? But I don't think they really understand what helpful content is. Ben Steele: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So what is helpful content and can it be fast content? Ben Steele: The answer to the second question is yes, but... At least in my opinion. See, a lot of folks get hung up on the way that algorithms work. And what I've always said is, your primary responsibility as a content focused SEO or someone writing content in the first place is to meet expectations. And fantastic content will exceed them, but the primary goal you have is to set them and then meet them. And that's a problem that a lot of people struggle with is first of all, you have to do a lot of research to work out what kinds of expectations you should be looking for, and then actually properly fulfilling them is hard. So yes, fast content exists, and I think that a lot of people are trying to optimize right now especially, for quick answers and fast content. Because they know that if you can do that right, well then you can get in search features. You can potentially show up in SGE, because SGE is pulling answers from page 60 of Google if it's a good answer to the question. One lead did a great webinar on that with our own print. And so quick answers does not actually mean quick to create, is the problem. So you can create content that's good, that's fast to consume and that can even benefit you, but the amount of work that goes into that is quite significant. That's something that people get hung up on, is that like, "Oh, I can just make some quick snippets and some quick things and it'll be great." Well, no, they'll be quick. Good content should be quick for the user to understand, but that doesn't mean it's going to be quick for you to make. That's something I see quite a lot, is short means fast. Sorry, go ahead. Crystal Carter: There's that thing, that it's like, "I'm sorry this email is so long," or, "I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter." There's that sort of thing as well. It takes time to make something concise. It takes time to make something that is edited down to something that's actually useful. And LLMs are terrible for this, so if you get an LLM and you say, "Give me the answer to this question," they'll go off on tangents that are unrelated, they'll talk about stuff that you don't need to hear about. They'll cover lots of different stuff just because they're trying to cover all the bases necessarily, but they don't always give you just the thing that you need until you drill down the prompt really, really precisely. And that takes time in itself, so I think that's worth considering. But I think one of the other things that came to mind while you were talking was people trying to jump ahead without going through some of the steps in between. So trying to find shortcuts with some of these tools or trying to find shortcuts to good content. Like, "Oh, if I just add this thing, that'll be the thing that makes the difference." And I think it's like I took my kid ice skating and he was trying to do a bunch of jumps and stuff, but he'd only just learned how to ice skate. And he was like, "Oh, I want to do these jumps." And I'm like, "Look here. All good ice skaters can do jumps. They can do the Lutz, then the quadruple Lutz or the double axle or whatever. Yes, good figure skaters can do that, but they're also very good at just skating. All of them are very good at skating. You can't skip that step. You still have to learn how to skate. Of course, you're going to learn how to do your double axle and you go spinning around and all that sort of stuff. Of course you'll learn how to do all that if you want to be a great skater, if you want to be really good at that. But you also have to learn to be a very good skater. Same with ice hockey players. They're also all very, very good at skating before they can do any of the other stuff." Mordy Oberstein: Except for the goalie, because he's not moving. Crystal Carter: They're good at standing up when they're covered in lots of pads. That's a feat in itself. Ben Steele: For sure. Yeah, my particular favorite YouTube rabbit hole is historical martial arts. And when a lot of those folks talk about how they train, it's interesting because in the movies when people are training to sword fight, they're doing all these fancy things. And if you watch somebody who does HEMA actually doing a training session, they'll spend hours just skipping around with no weapon in their hand, just working on their footwork. And they look ridiculous doing it, but it's like that's what you have to do. You have to get the footwork to a point where you don't think about it, and then you can put a weapon in your hands. Mordy Oberstein: Chasing chickens, right? Ben Steele: Yeah. Crystal Carter: There's lots of boring stuff that people do in order to learn how to do that stuff. And I mean, even in the age of LLMs, learning how to clean data, learning how to sort out the data that you're giving to your LLM, the data that you're giving to whatever tools you're using to help you do that stuff is something that is boring, time-consuming, and takes practice. And you have to figure out how to make sure that your prompts make sense and all that sort of stuff. And that's stuff that you have to build up. You can't skip the steps. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I think makes it so hard for writing content because you think, I speak English, I write English, I can write content. It's not like that. I'll give you an example. I was looking at a bunch of sites that got impact... A bunch of pages rather, that got impacted by the March 2024 core update for this post that I'm supposed to be writing up for the Wix SEO hub. But by the time this article comes out, that post will be well released. But one of the things that I saw, and two of the examples that I was looking at, two of the three examples so far that I really want to focus on, the pages that did well, did a good job of addressing how the user's going to experience the thing. For example, one of them is about hip surgery. And it was about the doctor's going to do this, then the doctor will do that, and then you can expect the doctor to do this. And it was really walking you through not just like what is hip surgery, but what is hip surgery for you and what is it going to mean for you? And it was very different than the other kind of content ranking. And the way I'll define it is, it was not sterile content. It was not, what is hip surgery, what are the different types of hip surgery, how do you recover from hip surgery? It was meaningful in the sense that it was dealing with an actual person or a group of people in mind. And I was thinking, I was looking at these other pages that are still, some of them aren't ranking well, some of them are still ranking and they're still very, very sterile. And I feel like in the future, Google's going to eventually drop those off. If I was a smart SEO and I'm going to now rework this page for my client and it's completely sterile, how would I do that? And I was thinking, how would I do that on this page if I didn't want to start from scratch? That would be really difficult. And it took me a long time to figure out, you know what I would do with this page? I would probably do this, because I've spent the better part of 10 years doing that; Of thinking about how am I going to... Not just how am I going to write this page or this post. How am I going to position this post? How am I going to differentiate this post? What angle am I going to take with this post? And even after doing this for 10 years, with this particular page, I sat there for a good 20 minute, I don’t know what to do with this thing. It's creating hopeful content. It's not easy. Ben Steele: No. Mordy Oberstein: It's very hard to position that the right way. Ben Steele: Yeah, and I'm having that experience myself right now where one of my primary responsibilities is ebooks, and we're currently writing our annual ebook about our ranking factors. And when I sat down to this thing, I was like, "What the heck am I going to say about ranking factors after the last year? How could I possibly be helpful to an SEO who's like, 'What the heck is going on right now?'?" And so that took a long time to work out and we're getting there. I just submitted the draft, so- Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Ben Steele: ... fingers crossed. Mordy Oberstein: Roll back the curtains. What did you do? What was your thought process? How did you go? Because you're right. That's one of those kind of pieces of content where, okay, here are the top most important ranking factors. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's been done a million times before, and to be honest with you, we talked about this podcast, we have a whole episode about it, it's really not that helpful. So then what did you do? Could you share secrets? Ben Steele: Yeah. All right. So we did that the last, I think, three years. That's what our book has looked like of, here are a bunch of ranking factors. And we took a myth busting approach, which we found to be relatively helpful at the time, which is here are all the misconceptions. We're going to bust those myths. We're going to talk about what we have evidence for and we're going to go over... I think we did like 80 or so per book or something- Mordy Oberstein: I've referenced those before. They're good. Ben Steele: ... Oh, really? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Ben Steele: Awesome. And I sat down to it this year and I was talking with Katie, our Editor in Chief, and we were like, "We can't do that again this year. It doesn't make sense. It's not helpful anymore because everything is currently changing. Whatever we write in the book, the production process is long enough that it's highly likely to be out of date by the time it's gone to publish. So what can we do?" And so we decided on a bit of a mix. The first thing we did was we looked at the format of our most popular ebooks, and it's always the expert roundup format, when we get a bunch of SEO experts. I ask them questions, they answer them, and then I put it all together and you've got an ebook full of a bunch of varied insights from a bunch of different people. And then you have me talking about what I think the trends look like. And those are by and large our most popular books. Those are our SEO trends and PPC trends books that we do at the end of the year. And so we said, "Okay, what if we take this successful format and apply it to ranking factors so that we can have a broad diversity of opinions on what ranking factors means? We know that our audience likes hearing from these people and so let's see what happens." And so that's kind of what we did. We changed the format. We were at first a little worried, like, "We've done it in a very specific way for three years. What's going to happen?" Because like I just talked about, setting expectations and then delivering on them is one of the core parts of being a successful SEO. And I can get more into that a little later. And so we're like, "Well, we are completely overturning the expectations that we've set the last three years, so is that going to work?" And we're like, "We got to take the risk because it's better to risk this than to be unhelpful. And we think that analyzing individual ranking factors is unhelpful at this point." The book talks about the change, it talks a little bit about some of the things that we do at SEJ to account for the changes that are going on and the disruption and the instability. We asked people, "What do you think are ranking factors that matter right now?" And we ask people, "What do you think is going on? And what do you think about content in this wacky state of serfs, to be honest?" We had a lot of conversations about what does the advice make good content look like when good content isn't really being rewarded a lot of the time? How can we sit here with a straight face and repeat the same old advice when it's clearly not working right now? But we also talk about some of the things that we've done that have seen an impact, and it does ultimately come back to making good content. And it's just about being more specific about the way you do it, more intentional, unfortunately, in the end, that appears to be the secret. Mordy Oberstein: That's, by the way, a great point. You started off saying the same format wasn't going to work. And I feel that's one mentality that content writers and SEOs kind of fall into, is helpful content is one thing, and it's not one thing. It's constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. The notion of good content in general is evolving. Think of an ad. Think of an ad back then in the 1950s. That was considered good ad content. Come on down. You look at it now like it's schlocky, it's gimmicky, it's ridiculous. But it was good content back then. And a hundred years from now, people look back at our, and like, "That? Really? That was good content?" So it's constantly progressing, constantly evolving. So to think helpful content is X isn't the right way to look at it. Helpful content might mean X for Google right now, but in a year from now, it won't be. That's why we look at algorithm, because you see how is it progressing. What's different in this update versus some of the trends we've seen in previous updates? Ben Steele: Yeah. Mm-hm. Crystal Carter: And I think also the piece that you did there of looking at... You're giving us a very top level summary of how you did this, but you looked at what does our audience enjoy, what does our audience appreciate? And I think that's really important. I think that when people are making good content, and especially, especially, especially now where there's so much AI content out there, there's so much uncertainty from lots of different venues, lots of different channels, et cetera, you have a community. You have a user base that you know, you have your own data from your own sources, and you know that your audience likes this. You know that your audience likes to hear from multiple perspectives and you are able to provide them with the thing that they like. Even if it doesn't rank right, even if this content doesn't rank, you know that you're serving those users. And if you serve those users, then those users will refer to you, will talk about you, will come back to you, will reference you, will search for you on the SERP and will find you, and you will be useful to those users. And Google will see that. So I think when people think about good content, I think that it's so important to put the users first. We have a few different pieces of content around the Wix SEO Learning Hub that are around this as well. And I think that that's super, super important. And I think that you just can't go wrong. You can't go wrong if you are thinking about what your users want first because they'll appreciate that and what works with your users. At the same time, I think that what Mordy's saying about the evolution of content is really important as well. So I think that format can change as well. So what makes content good can sometimes change from the format. So you're talking about an ebook. Ebooks have really evolved. I remember when ebooks were pretty much like a PDF sort of thing. And sometimes they're that, sometimes you can also get them on a Kindle thing, sometimes you can get a combination of a few articles altogether. I know y'all do that a little bit as well. And there's lots of different ways that you can do an ebook these days. And there's lots of new channels for ebooks. And I think that that's really important. Similarly, and I'm going to date myself here, but if I think back in the day, we would get the Sears catalog and we'd go around and we'd circle the things that we wanted. And back in the day, that was- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, those days. Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... good content, right? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hm. That's great. Crystal Carter: I'd be like, "Check out that Barbie house. This is what I want." Mordy Oberstein: That was fun, when it came in the mail. That was- Crystal Carter: Right? It was good. And to me, to 9-year-old me, that was great content. That was fantastic. But now people have their Amazon wishlist or whatever, or people have their wishlist on wherever, and that's more useful because you don't have to carry around the 600 page thing. And if the price changes, you can see it in real time and things. So the format there can also make content good. And I think that that's really important to think about as well, and for SEOs to not just necessarily fall back on what they always do, as Mordy was saying, but to pay attention to new opportunities to connect with people. And even new methods to connect with people in order to make the content good. Ben Steele: And you know what one of the biggest changes has been for the better internally when it comes to performance? It's been collaboration. So as an SEO, or I'm more editor, less practicing SEO, so as a content specialist I'll say, I don't necessarily have all of the information, all of the knowledge and all of the expertise required to front to back create an experience fully that an audience member wants. But the closer I work with my marketing team, the closer I work with my sales team, the more I can get that data, get that understanding, and take insights from the expertise of the other fantastic people I work with. And the more I do that, the closer that we collaborate, the better an idea we get of things like, what does our audience want? What do they respond to? And so collaboration and breaking down silos is a very important part around content. If you want content to be successful, you really need information from all these sources. And it's been a huge... We've been doing this internally for a while where we try and sort of, like I said, break down the silos and make everyone's reporting and everyone's expertise available across different teams so that we can make use of that information and get fully aligned on our company goals. And it's had huge impact. And we've noticed that when we make these decisions, these audience focused decisions that are backed up by good data from our marketing and sales teams, that even if Google doesn't reward us right away, we can tell that the audience rewards us, and that's when we know we're doing something right. I think that's something that is going to be critical looking forward too, is remember that Google isn't your ultimate end goal. It's one of your channels, but if you're serving your users in whichever... That works in any channel, right? And the path of the algorithms is ostensibly, allegedly to reward behavior like that. Right? Mordy Oberstein: Well and it wants to follow the user, right? It wants- Ben Steele: Right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Google wants us break it down. Google wants ad clicks. The results have to be good at being relative to what users are expecting. So Google's chasing users while we're chasing algorithms. The point you made about experience and that whole narrative and actual expertise and collaborating with people who have the actual knowledge, I think that's been one of the more healthy things that's been going on in the SEO industry for the past, I don't know, couple of years, whatever it's been. And I think it's fascinating to see that shift. That wasn't a part of the conversation when I got into SEO at all. You send the content brief over to a content writer from every content market and they create the content, you're good to go. I think now though, the next step is going to be, okay, we understand the experience, we understand the value of expertise, the value of firsthand knowledge, all that kind of stuff. Now we need to focus on the best way to transmit that knowledge and transmit that information. Because the value of the content and the helpfulness of the content is only as good as A, the actual substance itself, and B, how you transmit it. Just use a crude example, if I were to say to you, "Give me the salt now, jerk," you wouldn't really want to pass the salt to me. But if I said, "Please pass me the salt," you would pass me the salt. So it's not just the content itself, but it's how you say it that's super important. I don't think that's been part of the narrative yet at all, but I really hope that it will be. Crystal Carter: You think people should be more polite to Google? Mordy Oberstein: Now we're getting spicy. Crystal Carter: I said that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure this is helpful. Ben Steele: I think you can actually see, in the stumbles that Google's making, you can see the intent here. For things that exactly what you're talking about, Mordy, where it comes to not just the substance, but the experience of your content. And I think that a lot of these kind of the stumbling blocks are indicative of yes, they're trying to do what they're saying. And we're in a period of big disruption and there's a lot of missteps been happening all at once, but you can kind of see the direction even in the stumbles made by the algorithms. And we had a contributor in the ebook, here's a sneak peek, make a point that, I think it was Kevin Rowe made the point that we're seeing AI algorithms get released, but training them is different to how they act in the wild. And he was saying that eventually you just have to kind of release them and let them learn in a live environment, and that's going to be full of problems and mistakes, and then you fix them as they come up. And so he thinks that's what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. I agree with that. Ben Steele: I found that to be a pretty insightful comment because it's like, okay, so yeah, we have a ton of disruption. And he likened it to learning how to box. If you can hit a non-human target as much as you want, but eventually you got to get in the ring and get hit. And this is Google's algorithms getting hit, but then they get better. And you can see in where they're as stumbling is that they're trying to account for things like how you present your content. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing issues where original content is getting pushed down in the SERPs by content that is just kind of regurgitating it, but making it a little bit more accessible more quickly. And that's obviously not an ideal use case, but you can see the attempt to be like, "Okay, what's the user experience of this? How easily can a user parse this content?" Mordy Oberstein: On that note, if somebody wanted to attempt to hit you up for some knowledge and information about writing helpful content, where could they find you? Ben Steele: These days, I am mostly on LinkedIn. I've pulled back my X, Twitter, whatever presence quite significantly. So for me personally, it's just Ben Steele on LinkedIn, and you can find me by searching my name with Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: We will link to that in the show notes. Is your LinkedIn profile a picture like you giving the Blue Steel look? Crystal Carter: From the left. It might be. Mordy Oberstein: That'd be great, if it was. Ben Steele: I'll have to get updated headshots. Mordy Oberstein: You can have AI do it for you. Ben Steele: Oh. Yeah. Crystal Carter: For anyone who does not know that reference, please go and watch Zoolander. Your life will be better for it. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Be at least 10 times as big. Crystal Carter: We're men. We're men. Mordy Oberstein: I got the black lung- Ben Steele: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Keep an eye out for the ebook. When does that come out? Ben Steele: June 11th is when the ebook comes out. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we'll be able to link to it. Nice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because this will be out on the 19th. Mordy Oberstein: On the 19th, so- Ben Steele: Oh. Heck yeah. All right. Crystal Carter: Tell your team, you're like, "Look at me. I'm just marketing the book we just dropped. You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: The audience get a backstage look at our scheduling. Ben Steele: Awesome. Thank you guys. Mordy Oberstein: So much fun. Yeah. Okay, so we'll link the ebook in the show notes. Check it out, have a gander at it, and check out SEJ and check out Ben. Ben Steele: Thank you guys so much. It's been a wonderful experience being on here. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's been fantastic having you. Talk to you soon. Speaking of good content, what happens if we start running Google searches about good content? What could we learn? We'll find out as we have some fun with Google's People Also Asked box. So I decided to throw in some... When I say fun, by the way, it is not going to be fun. I'm just giving you a little spoiler alert, this is not fun. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I decided to throw a bunch of keywords into Google: What kind of content do users want, how to write good content, what is good content? And I'll tell you, I personally have been on mobile. This is an interesting point, I should tweet about this. I find myself clicking on more PAAs on mobile now than I used to and I'm- Crystal Carter: Why is that? Mordy Oberstein: ... sure it's because the things I'm searching for or Google's... Maybe it was showing them higher up than they used to, or the results aren't so great, so I'm like, "Ah, I might as well click on the PAA." Or maybe I'm not good at searching anymore, so that secondary question's really what I wanted, and Google did a good job showing me that question. Whatever it is. I'll tell you, when I searched for these things, I didn't find much of it helpful. Crystal Carter: Okay, Mordy Oberstein: Okay, here we go. Sorry, Google, you can't win all the time. What kind of content do users want? The first question is, what type of content is most consumed? That one's not bad. That one's not bad. Maybe I'm looking for, okay, what kind of content are people going to actually consume? Kind of an offshoot of that, what kind of content is most engaging? Particularly, I'm looking for something around social media content. Maybe I really meant social media content. I would look for something engaging. Okay, fine. Okay. The third one is, what is the most used content type? I don't even know what that question means. And then the fourth one is, what content gets the most attention? Which is really the same thing as the second question, it was content's the most engaging? So not very helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. They're odd questions. I had a look at, how do you know if content is good? That was my seed question. The featured snippet there was from Quora. Mordy Oberstein: Ah. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Where I go for all of my high quality substantive information. Crystal Carter: Obviously. And so the questions came off of that was, how to tell if content is good. There's an answer there from Sitecore. How do you know if content is successful? Another one from Sitecore. Sitecore crushing it here. And then we had, what defines good content? That's a good question as well. And how to determine good quality. A lot of these are very, very, very similar, which I think is really interesting because how to determine quality content, how to tell if content is good, what defines good content, and how do you tell if content is good, they're very, very similar. I think it's very interesting because essentially what you get with the PAAs is that they are essentially a repository for a lot of the featured snippets. So it's very interesting that you would have different featured snippets. And you see this really regularly, different featured snippets, different PAAs for very, very similar questions, which is what you found as well you were looking at- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, very similar across the board. I have other ones that are also very similar. Just to give you some contrast, by the way, if you're listening to this, if you search for how to throw a curveball, and these are the things I would actually click on, how do you throw a curveball correctly? Okay, fine. That's maybe a little bit too similar to the query itself. What is the proper curveball grip? Is it bad for an 11-year-old to throw a curveball? It's a very specific intent, which is true, it is bad for their wrist. And then, how do to throw a 12 to 6 curveball? So certain curveballs go, imagine that the curve goes from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock. That's old school curveball. The more modern curveball kind of goes from, I don't know, 1 o'clock to 1 o'clock. Not 4 o'clock, 7 at clocks. I'm bad at clocks. So it's a little bit different. They're very differentiated. They're different questions for different intents and really helps you go down the curveball wormhole. If I search for, what is good content, I get, what does good content mean? That's what I asked. That's what I asked. What is good quality content? So okay, slight variance. How to make good content? Okay, fine. What is good content versus bad content? I get you're adding in the extra contrast. Yeah. But that's a little bit like, all right, same but different. I actually threw that into people also. I actually go into Also Asked, so you could see the further breakdown. So if you go into what does good content mean, Also Asked breaks down the next PAA questions being, how would you know a good content? Crystal Carter: A good content. I love the misspellings. I love the bad grammar and the PAAs. They're my favorite. Mordy Oberstein: What is an example content? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: What is excellent content? Crystal Carter: Okay? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What type of content is best? Yes. Crystal Carter: For? Mordy Oberstein: What does bad content mean? So I was a little bit surprised that Google took the word mean very literally. Like, define the word content. That's not what I was looking for exactly. Crystal Carter: And I think it can be very surprising. I think this is one of the reasons why it's worth going through the PAAs with a tool like Also Asked. With a tool following, just going to the SERP and following that path as well. There's so many tiny subtleties that make the difference. The other thing I think that's also worth thinking about particularly, and I think of this when I'm looking at competitor research and stuff, is also checking the actual search volume for them. Because just because there's a featured snippet, doesn't mean that that's actually getting any search volume very much at all. So that's worth looking at as well because it could very well be that maybe they have... I looked up, are smoothies good for you? Because I've heard people who say that actually, smoothies have too much sugar or they take out all the fiber, where some people are like, "I juice every day." So anyway. Mordy Oberstein: That's what Barry Bond said. Crystal Carter: With something like that, it might be that more people are asking more of one particular, or phrasing the question in one particular way and getting to the serp in that way, even though they're very, very similar. Sometimes you can see that those slight differences can make a really big difference in terms of search volume. Because the chances are that you'll probably, in terms of featured snippet, PAA sort of thing, you may very well be at the top for the high search volume thing. But if you go for that one, you might also rank somewhere lower down for the other one. So that's worth thinking about as well. But yeah, the PAAs, the way that they arrange them can be very interesting in terms of the similarities between the words and everything. Mordy Oberstein: So it just goes to show you, sometimes you can learn a lot from the PAAs and sometimes you can't. Crystal Carter: I still don't know if smoothies are healthy or not. I still can't tell. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. If it tastes good, not healthy. It tastes meh, probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Does it have kale in it? That's probably healthy if- Mordy Oberstein: Kale in it is definitely healthy no matter how much sugar you put in it. That- Crystal Carter: Some of them are just like a juiced salad. Some of them are like, "We put kale and celery and thing," and you're like- Mordy Oberstein: That's healthy, but that doesn't sound too appetizing to me. Crystal Carter: Spirulina, like all these things. Mordy Oberstein: Wheatgrass. Crystal Carter: Wheatgrass. I actually like wheatgrass. Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. You know what else is interesting? Whatever's happening in the SEO news this week is always interesting, and it's usually always covered by Barry Schwartz. So here's our ode to Barry each and every week, and some other people who cover the SEO news as well, like the great folks over at Search Engine Journal. Here's this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. First up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google, sometimes search experiments conflict causing issues. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast, Gary, however you pronounce his last name, was talking about Google experiments and said that sometimes that multiple experiments can cause conflicts with each other. He wrote, "Very often these experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other." Glenn Gabe chimed in on X writing, "Sometimes problems in the service and maybe what we see as changes are due to multiple experiments running that don't work well with each other." You can even see this with the algorithm updates themselves sometimes, which is why I think Google tries to integrate things into the core as much as possible, in my honest opinion. And folks have covered this for a while. Glenn has some great posts on this, on warring algorithm updates. So for example, back when you had the review updates being announced before they were called the Product Review Updates, you might see a site, I don't know, gain a whole bunch of rankings with that update. Month later comes along a core update and kills all those rankings. So sometimes those systems can compete with each other. I was talking about this on LinkedIn, I don't know when. I post too many things on LinkedIn, so good luck finding it. But sometimes if you don't think about... If think SEO factors, for lack of a better word in isolation, and you don't try to think how everything kind of balances out, you could end up focusing on things the wrong way. I think the example that I gave was, oh, I'll focus on links. I'll get a lot of links. So if you're focused on the link factor in SEO, you'll grab all these links, but then what happens when the user actually gets to the site? Because Google rewards it with rankings because you get so many great links, yada, yada, yada. The user gets to the site, the site's not great. So now the user behavior side of the algorithm, however that plays itself out, whole separate controversy, would say, "Oh, wait a second. This site's actually not so great. You got all the great links. Okay, okay, I see that, but let's actually demote the website because the behavior on the site or whatever shows that this site maybe isn't what people want. Maybe it's not quality." So you have to think about the algorithm harmoniously. Anyway, getting a little bit off track with that. This from Danny Goodwin covering Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land where we got Meta Barry there. 13 SEO takeaways, some Googles, Elizabeth Tucker at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz interviewed Elizabeth Tucker, who's the Director of Product Management of Google Search, and Danny wrote up a summary of the 13 things you should know about what Barry and Elizabeth covered. There's a whole bunch of really cool things in there. I'll kind of roll through just a few of them. For example, there's a whole thing on why SEO should focus on the big picture. Elizabeth said, "We are trying to satisfy people with all these different informational needs with all sorts of different great types of content and websites. I do worry that when people kind of get down in the weeds on specific technical details or signals we may or may not have, it might take away from that big picture question of, is this helpful, yada, yada, yada." Absolutely a hundred percent agree. They got into why the March 2024 core update took 45 days to roll out. Basically saying that that was the biggest update that they basically ever had, with Elizabeth saying that there was some re-architecture work going on. They said that we actually had a mini war room going on. We were doing live monitoring, co-capacity and latency in our data centers, because it is unusual for us to roll out so many different changes at once. We did so successfully. Part of that was actually why the announcement about the March 2024 core update took a little bit while for Google to announce it, basically saying they want to make sure that things were... I'll just quote them. Why am I trying to put words in their mouth? Quoting Elizabeth, "We wanted to make sure all the changes were entirely rolled out. Hundreds of people were involved. So just answering the question of, are we done yet, involves so many different pings, et cetera." One of the interesting things that I took away from the article, and I'll end here because it's a whole bunch of other things about what causes radical fluctuations, how many systems are involved in Google's core updates. Danny does a really nice job kind of covering the conversation that Barry had with Elizabeth, but there's a section that Danny has about how Google defines low quality. And I'm going to reignite this debate, I guess. I don't know why it's a debate at this point in the SEO world, but whatever. Google basically said like, "We look at the Search Quality Rater guidelines as our definition of quality." I will read through this as much as I can. It's a lot. I don't want to take up too much. It's supposed to be snappy, Mordy. Elizabeth said, "We rigorously define high quality, low quality. We give examples, and this document is truly the foundation of how third party evaluators then go and evaluate results for quality, meaning the Search Quality Rater guidelines." Elizabeth wanted to say that there's no one size fits all for quality, "It's actually a fairly nuanced thing." Completely agree with that. Quality is incredibly nuanced. She offers an example of how that might be, why that might be, and then she says, "So we've laid it out in our Search Quality Rater guidelines. We take into account the quality of the main content, things like accuracy for informational content, talent and skill. We look at things like page experience. Can people find the main content easily?" So she says, "So take a look. It's all there. I said this before, I'll say it again. The Quality Rater guidelines should give you a directional look at how Google is thinking about quality. What is actually in the algorithm or not, different question, but it will give you a look inside the brain or the mind of Google." Continuing with Danny Goodwin covering Google's statements, this one is Danny covering Liz Reed and an all hands quote, or not quote, titled the article, Head of Google Search: AI mistakes won't prevent progress. Basically, Google had an all hands saying, "Hey, look, there's going to be problems. We're going to tackle them. That shouldn't mean we don't move forward with the AI. I don't know what you want to call the AI world on the SERP and so forth, yada, yada, yada." I mean, Google kind of has to say that. Obviously I think they do mean that, but they also kind of have to get that message out there. I think it's a very important message for them and then how their whole wider ecosystem works. That's all I'm going to say about that. Read into that what you want to. One thing that I took away was a quote where she said, "We don't just have to understand the quality of the site or the page. We have to understand each passage of a page." So in the AI overview, you have different links to different subsections of the AI overview. For example, one I always go back to was, how to prevent kidney stones, and in there is a section about diet. Google might have to understand, hey, wait a second, we're going to link out to that page there. We have to understand that this page has a section about diet, and that section about diet and kidney stones is really good, and that's the one we're going to link to when we cover that subtopic. It is an interesting conversation, and I think maybe we should have a little bit more of a conversation about, of how Google is understanding the subsections of pages. Anyway, that is again, not so snappy this week, Mordy. Got to do a better job. I talk fast. I try to talk fast. Maybe that's not a good thing, but I try to make it snappy by talking faster and it's not working. There's just so much news going on. Anyway, this is the not so snappy news. Yeah, so that was ever so snappy, as usual. Crystal Carter: Yeah, newsy news. There's been so much news. The news has been really tricky. Or the news has been really interesting because there's been a lot of really big things like the updates and people starting new search engines and stuff like that. And then there's been a lot of little, tiny, teeny tiny- Mordy Oberstein: If you like the teeny tiny things and the big thing, as always make sure to check out It's New over at Wix SEO Hub, and RustyBrick's YouTube channel. Speaking of news people, our follow of the week are two news people. Hey, we're going full on SEJ this week as our follow of the week this week is Angie Nikoleychuk, and Heather Campbell, both from SEJ. Crystal Carter: Angie and Heather are so, so, so, so super nice. Mordy Oberstein: They are the nicest team, by the way. Crystal Carter: They're so nice. Mordy Oberstein: Behind the scenes? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: So nice, so easy to work with. Love working with SEJ people. Crystal Carter: They're super nice and I think it's- Mordy Oberstein: Great team. Crystal Carter: ... one of those things like, sometimes folks are popular or whatever or have a big following and you sort of wonder why. And then you meet them and you're like, "Oh, this is why. Because y'all do really good stuff." Mordy Oberstein: And we had Angie on for one of our live SEO audit. Angie's great. She'll tell me she'll listen to the Edge of the News Podcast, which I do their news every week, and like, "Yeah, I really disagree with what you said there." I love that. I love that. That's great. Crystal Carter: No, it's good. She's got such great insight and she brings a lot of her CRO knowledge into the stuff that she does, and she was great on the site audit. We did a site audit on quick wins, and definitely worth having a look at. I think that's evergreen content, so go and check that out as well. Mordy Oberstein: And definitely also check out Heather Campbell, who's been fabulous on the things we're working on with her as well. Heather is the Director of Marketing at Search Engine Journal and does a lot of their write-ups also for them, so give her a big follow. We'll link to their social media profiles in the show notes. And hope you found this episode helpful. Crystal Carter: I did. I got lots of helpful tips. Mordy Oberstein: At the end of the day, just write good content. That's all. Just do it. Crystal Carter: Write good content, and may the algorithm be forever in your favor. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so I definitely let the algorithm be in your favor, and then do us a favor and tune in for our next episode. So that means thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the unsung heroes of SEO; Those who maintain rank. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over on wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning up at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ben Steele Angie Nikoleychuk Heather Campbell Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Google Ranking Systems & Signals 2024 The Rise of Situational Content News: Google: Sometimes Search Experiments Conflict Causing Issues 13 SEO takeaways from Google’s Elizabeth Tucker at SMX Advanced Head of Google Search: AI mistakes won’t prevent progress Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ben Steele Angie Nikoleychuk Heather Campbell Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Google Ranking Systems & Signals 2024 The Rise of Situational Content News: Google: Sometimes Search Experiments Conflict Causing Issues 13 SEO takeaways from Google’s Elizabeth Tucker at SMX Advanced Head of Google Search: AI mistakes won’t prevent progress Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us, SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who makes it look so easy. It's the legit, makes it all look so easy when it is not easy, the one, the only, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I can't remember what it is. What is it that I make look easy? Mordy Oberstein: It's all of it. It's all of it. Crystal Carter: It's all of it? Mordy Oberstein: You're doing the conferences, all the stuff. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of flapping that happens in between. Yeah, there's just a lot of flopping that happens in between. And there's a lot of many, many piles of makeup to look like I have slept a decent night's sleep- Mordy Oberstein: Oh my god. Crystal Carter: ... when I am there at the conference and having had been up for far too late the night before. There are various tactics and techniques. My top tip, for ladies anyway, and for anybody who is partial to this particular garment, is if you were traveling anywhere, basically, I only pack dresses and onesies and it just means that you can minimize how much you have to pack, and you can pack more outfits in a smaller amount of space. It's really, really useful. So if you have a onesie or a jumpsuit that's way less; Takes up way less space than having to pack a bunch of different things. That's super useful. Also, hydration. Mordy Oberstein: Wear the same clothes multiple days. The choice is yours. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. There's lots of ways to do it. Lots of ways to get to the same- Mordy Oberstein: I recommend your way. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's- Mordy Oberstein: If you're around other people. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. It's useful. It's useful. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Well, with those fashion tips, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only describe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also start building content now with a Wix CMS, as this week, we're talking about the ins and outs of just right good content and why it's way harder than you think. Hence, the whole Crystal makes it look easy. Get it? It all comes together. Crystal Carter: How easy. Mordy Oberstein: All comes together. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We're talking the temptations of quick and fast content creation for SEO, creating the content your audience craves, and why it might not be what you think. And how to write great content that actually has meaning. To help us record a great podcast, SEJ, Search Engine Journal's managing editor Ben Steele will join us in just a few moments. Plus, we see what Google's People Also Asked tells us about how Google sees "good content." And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So uncap your pens and dip your feathers in ink, or just use the keyboard, how quaint, as episode 92 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you see how the pen is mightier than the SGE Because SGE doesn't produce good content. That's me saying SGE doesn't produce good content. Crystal Carter: Do they talk about pens on SGE? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but they say all sorts of wacky things about what you should do with them. Crystal Carter: About ballpoint pens or fountain pens or the permanent marker pens. Those are the best ones. I mean, Sharpie, they're really just- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, those are good if you have kids under the age of anything. Crystal Carter: For kids, I like the sniffing pens, which is terrible. Why would you encourage children to sniff pens? Mordy Oberstein: Whoa. No, no. You don't want to give the kids a permanent marker to sniff? Crystal Carter: No, but the ones that smell? Like the blue ones smell like blueberry and- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I know what you mean. Crystal Carter: ... like those ones, but why would you encourage children to sniff pens? It's not a good thing, but I used to love them, but now as an adult- Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. I'm bringing it up, not encouraging it. Crystal Carter: As an adult, as a parent, I'm like, "Why would I? I wouldn't want to do that. It's-" Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm not saying you should. Crystal Carter: ... It's not good. That's not good content. Mordy Oberstein: That's not good content. That might be the easy thing to do, but it's not good content. Crystal Carter: It's not good content- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So let me give a little bit of a history of this. Okay, Christina, why are we talking about just write good content if you're not super involved in the SEO space, you're a casual SEO-er? Google has been trying to rank quality content for the longest time, but it's really made ginormous shifts and paradigm shifts. We talked about this before on the podcast since around 2018, had the core updates and the this and the that and the helpful content update, which is no more, but that's confusing and I want to get into that right now. And the advice that Google has been giving, Google's Danny Sullivan, their Search Liaison, is look guys, the links and the this and the... Just write good content. Write content that's valuable to the user, write content that's helpful to the user, write content that the people are actually going to want and going to use and it's going to be meaningful to them. Just write good content. And SEOs are like, "Just write good content like, let's not make magic pixie dust." So there's been some controversy around just write good content. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that just writing good content is not as easy as you think. This is why we're doing the episode. So now let me introduce to you Search Engine Journal's own Blue Ben Steele or Ben Blue Steele, Ben Steele. Ben Steele: Hello. Mordy Oberstein: How are you? Ben Steele: What an amazing intro. I'm doing pretty good. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: I'm tired after that intro. Ben Steele: It sounds tiring. Mordy Oberstein: I should really sniff some markers. Crystal Carter: No, don't. Seriously, don't. Ben Steele: Did you see, someone posted a screenshot of an SGE answer that suggested that in order to help pass a kidney stone, you should drink at least two quarts of urine in a day? Mordy Oberstein: Not only are we aware, but we covered it on It's New with- Ben Steele: Oh, hell yes. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. But you know why? Ben Steele: So wily. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's sterile and I like the taste. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little much. It really is a little- Crystal Carter: Did somebody post it on Reddit? Is that what happened? Ben Steele: Yeah, I don't get how that came up. That's weird. Crystal Carter: How did it end up in the SGE? Mordy Oberstein: It got confused. They changed it later where it meant drink two quarts of water so that it helps your urine. It got confused. It put the word in the wrong place. Crystal Carter: Did it go, "I'm an LLM. I'm sorry. I cannot understand the internet and I'm not want to talk to you anymore. Please ask a different question"? Mordy Oberstein: That's how you know, by the way, it's an LLM, not a person. The person would double down like, "No, no. You should drink two things. I'm right." Ben Steele: Is this SGE or is this Bear Grylls? Crystal Carter: Right? Right. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So just in case someone's not familiar with Search Engine Journal, please do tell us about SEJ. Ben Steele: Sure, yeah. Searchenginejournal.com is a website that covers all things SEO and digital marketing. We have prolific news writers who cover everything that's going on in the SEO industry. And we also have a team dedicated to creating really helpful content, which is what we're talking about today and about SEO and how to manage your own websites and your own businesses when it comes to existing in the digital space. We have a ton of really fantastic contributors who are expert SEOs in the industry as well, and so we've got their insights coming through the door all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You have a weekly now with Kevin Indig. Ben Steele: Yeah, we're sharing some of the content that he puts out on his newsletter, which is really exciting. Mordy Oberstein: I love Kevin. Ben Steele: He's great. Mordy Oberstein: Love Kevin. Crystal Carter: He's somebody who makes a lot of good content. Mordy Oberstein: Quite helpful. He's quite helpful as a person in general. Anyway, so we're talking about helpful content and one of the things that we talked about before we got onto the show, way back when we decided on this topic for the show actually, was Google saying, "Yeah, just write good content. It sounds super easy," and SEOs are like, "Give me something more." But at the same time, a lot of SEOs are creating, or they're trying to leverage, we'll call it fast food of content. It's super quick. We're trying to get super quick wins, super quick content. Let's get it out there, get it done, reach huge audiences. And then they feel like they're kind of wondering, why doesn't Google love me? Isn't my content helpful? But I don't think they really understand what helpful content is. Ben Steele: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So what is helpful content and can it be fast content? Ben Steele: The answer to the second question is yes, but... At least in my opinion. See, a lot of folks get hung up on the way that algorithms work. And what I've always said is, your primary responsibility as a content focused SEO or someone writing content in the first place is to meet expectations. And fantastic content will exceed them, but the primary goal you have is to set them and then meet them. And that's a problem that a lot of people struggle with is first of all, you have to do a lot of research to work out what kinds of expectations you should be looking for, and then actually properly fulfilling them is hard. So yes, fast content exists, and I think that a lot of people are trying to optimize right now especially, for quick answers and fast content. Because they know that if you can do that right, well then you can get in search features. You can potentially show up in SGE, because SGE is pulling answers from page 60 of Google if it's a good answer to the question. One lead did a great webinar on that with our own print. And so quick answers does not actually mean quick to create, is the problem. So you can create content that's good, that's fast to consume and that can even benefit you, but the amount of work that goes into that is quite significant. That's something that people get hung up on, is that like, "Oh, I can just make some quick snippets and some quick things and it'll be great." Well, no, they'll be quick. Good content should be quick for the user to understand, but that doesn't mean it's going to be quick for you to make. That's something I see quite a lot, is short means fast. Sorry, go ahead. Crystal Carter: There's that thing, that it's like, "I'm sorry this email is so long," or, "I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter." There's that sort of thing as well. It takes time to make something concise. It takes time to make something that is edited down to something that's actually useful. And LLMs are terrible for this, so if you get an LLM and you say, "Give me the answer to this question," they'll go off on tangents that are unrelated, they'll talk about stuff that you don't need to hear about. They'll cover lots of different stuff just because they're trying to cover all the bases necessarily, but they don't always give you just the thing that you need until you drill down the prompt really, really precisely. And that takes time in itself, so I think that's worth considering. But I think one of the other things that came to mind while you were talking was people trying to jump ahead without going through some of the steps in between. So trying to find shortcuts with some of these tools or trying to find shortcuts to good content. Like, "Oh, if I just add this thing, that'll be the thing that makes the difference." And I think it's like I took my kid ice skating and he was trying to do a bunch of jumps and stuff, but he'd only just learned how to ice skate. And he was like, "Oh, I want to do these jumps." And I'm like, "Look here. All good ice skaters can do jumps. They can do the Lutz, then the quadruple Lutz or the double axle or whatever. Yes, good figure skaters can do that, but they're also very good at just skating. All of them are very good at skating. You can't skip that step. You still have to learn how to skate. Of course, you're going to learn how to do your double axle and you go spinning around and all that sort of stuff. Of course you'll learn how to do all that if you want to be a great skater, if you want to be really good at that. But you also have to learn to be a very good skater. Same with ice hockey players. They're also all very, very good at skating before they can do any of the other stuff." Mordy Oberstein: Except for the goalie, because he's not moving. Crystal Carter: They're good at standing up when they're covered in lots of pads. That's a feat in itself. Ben Steele: For sure. Yeah, my particular favorite YouTube rabbit hole is historical martial arts. And when a lot of those folks talk about how they train, it's interesting because in the movies when people are training to sword fight, they're doing all these fancy things. And if you watch somebody who does HEMA actually doing a training session, they'll spend hours just skipping around with no weapon in their hand, just working on their footwork. And they look ridiculous doing it, but it's like that's what you have to do. You have to get the footwork to a point where you don't think about it, and then you can put a weapon in your hands. Mordy Oberstein: Chasing chickens, right? Ben Steele: Yeah. Crystal Carter: There's lots of boring stuff that people do in order to learn how to do that stuff. And I mean, even in the age of LLMs, learning how to clean data, learning how to sort out the data that you're giving to your LLM, the data that you're giving to whatever tools you're using to help you do that stuff is something that is boring, time-consuming, and takes practice. And you have to figure out how to make sure that your prompts make sense and all that sort of stuff. And that's stuff that you have to build up. You can't skip the steps. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I think makes it so hard for writing content because you think, I speak English, I write English, I can write content. It's not like that. I'll give you an example. I was looking at a bunch of sites that got impact... A bunch of pages rather, that got impacted by the March 2024 core update for this post that I'm supposed to be writing up for the Wix SEO hub. But by the time this article comes out, that post will be well released. But one of the things that I saw, and two of the examples that I was looking at, two of the three examples so far that I really want to focus on, the pages that did well, did a good job of addressing how the user's going to experience the thing. For example, one of them is about hip surgery. And it was about the doctor's going to do this, then the doctor will do that, and then you can expect the doctor to do this. And it was really walking you through not just like what is hip surgery, but what is hip surgery for you and what is it going to mean for you? And it was very different than the other kind of content ranking. And the way I'll define it is, it was not sterile content. It was not, what is hip surgery, what are the different types of hip surgery, how do you recover from hip surgery? It was meaningful in the sense that it was dealing with an actual person or a group of people in mind. And I was thinking, I was looking at these other pages that are still, some of them aren't ranking well, some of them are still ranking and they're still very, very sterile. And I feel like in the future, Google's going to eventually drop those off. If I was a smart SEO and I'm going to now rework this page for my client and it's completely sterile, how would I do that? And I was thinking, how would I do that on this page if I didn't want to start from scratch? That would be really difficult. And it took me a long time to figure out, you know what I would do with this page? I would probably do this, because I've spent the better part of 10 years doing that; Of thinking about how am I going to... Not just how am I going to write this page or this post. How am I going to position this post? How am I going to differentiate this post? What angle am I going to take with this post? And even after doing this for 10 years, with this particular page, I sat there for a good 20 minute, I don’t know what to do with this thing. It's creating hopeful content. It's not easy. Ben Steele: No. Mordy Oberstein: It's very hard to position that the right way. Ben Steele: Yeah, and I'm having that experience myself right now where one of my primary responsibilities is ebooks, and we're currently writing our annual ebook about our ranking factors. And when I sat down to this thing, I was like, "What the heck am I going to say about ranking factors after the last year? How could I possibly be helpful to an SEO who's like, 'What the heck is going on right now?'?" And so that took a long time to work out and we're getting there. I just submitted the draft, so- Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Ben Steele: ... fingers crossed. Mordy Oberstein: Roll back the curtains. What did you do? What was your thought process? How did you go? Because you're right. That's one of those kind of pieces of content where, okay, here are the top most important ranking factors. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's been done a million times before, and to be honest with you, we talked about this podcast, we have a whole episode about it, it's really not that helpful. So then what did you do? Could you share secrets? Ben Steele: Yeah. All right. So we did that the last, I think, three years. That's what our book has looked like of, here are a bunch of ranking factors. And we took a myth busting approach, which we found to be relatively helpful at the time, which is here are all the misconceptions. We're going to bust those myths. We're going to talk about what we have evidence for and we're going to go over... I think we did like 80 or so per book or something- Mordy Oberstein: I've referenced those before. They're good. Ben Steele: ... Oh, really? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Ben Steele: Awesome. And I sat down to it this year and I was talking with Katie, our Editor in Chief, and we were like, "We can't do that again this year. It doesn't make sense. It's not helpful anymore because everything is currently changing. Whatever we write in the book, the production process is long enough that it's highly likely to be out of date by the time it's gone to publish. So what can we do?" And so we decided on a bit of a mix. The first thing we did was we looked at the format of our most popular ebooks, and it's always the expert roundup format, when we get a bunch of SEO experts. I ask them questions, they answer them, and then I put it all together and you've got an ebook full of a bunch of varied insights from a bunch of different people. And then you have me talking about what I think the trends look like. And those are by and large our most popular books. Those are our SEO trends and PPC trends books that we do at the end of the year. And so we said, "Okay, what if we take this successful format and apply it to ranking factors so that we can have a broad diversity of opinions on what ranking factors means? We know that our audience likes hearing from these people and so let's see what happens." And so that's kind of what we did. We changed the format. We were at first a little worried, like, "We've done it in a very specific way for three years. What's going to happen?" Because like I just talked about, setting expectations and then delivering on them is one of the core parts of being a successful SEO. And I can get more into that a little later. And so we're like, "Well, we are completely overturning the expectations that we've set the last three years, so is that going to work?" And we're like, "We got to take the risk because it's better to risk this than to be unhelpful. And we think that analyzing individual ranking factors is unhelpful at this point." The book talks about the change, it talks a little bit about some of the things that we do at SEJ to account for the changes that are going on and the disruption and the instability. We asked people, "What do you think are ranking factors that matter right now?" And we ask people, "What do you think is going on? And what do you think about content in this wacky state of serfs, to be honest?" We had a lot of conversations about what does the advice make good content look like when good content isn't really being rewarded a lot of the time? How can we sit here with a straight face and repeat the same old advice when it's clearly not working right now? But we also talk about some of the things that we've done that have seen an impact, and it does ultimately come back to making good content. And it's just about being more specific about the way you do it, more intentional, unfortunately, in the end, that appears to be the secret. Mordy Oberstein: That's, by the way, a great point. You started off saying the same format wasn't going to work. And I feel that's one mentality that content writers and SEOs kind of fall into, is helpful content is one thing, and it's not one thing. It's constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. The notion of good content in general is evolving. Think of an ad. Think of an ad back then in the 1950s. That was considered good ad content. Come on down. You look at it now like it's schlocky, it's gimmicky, it's ridiculous. But it was good content back then. And a hundred years from now, people look back at our, and like, "That? Really? That was good content?" So it's constantly progressing, constantly evolving. So to think helpful content is X isn't the right way to look at it. Helpful content might mean X for Google right now, but in a year from now, it won't be. That's why we look at algorithm, because you see how is it progressing. What's different in this update versus some of the trends we've seen in previous updates? Ben Steele: Yeah. Mm-hm. Crystal Carter: And I think also the piece that you did there of looking at... You're giving us a very top level summary of how you did this, but you looked at what does our audience enjoy, what does our audience appreciate? And I think that's really important. I think that when people are making good content, and especially, especially, especially now where there's so much AI content out there, there's so much uncertainty from lots of different venues, lots of different channels, et cetera, you have a community. You have a user base that you know, you have your own data from your own sources, and you know that your audience likes this. You know that your audience likes to hear from multiple perspectives and you are able to provide them with the thing that they like. Even if it doesn't rank right, even if this content doesn't rank, you know that you're serving those users. And if you serve those users, then those users will refer to you, will talk about you, will come back to you, will reference you, will search for you on the SERP and will find you, and you will be useful to those users. And Google will see that. So I think when people think about good content, I think that it's so important to put the users first. We have a few different pieces of content around the Wix SEO Learning Hub that are around this as well. And I think that that's super, super important. And I think that you just can't go wrong. You can't go wrong if you are thinking about what your users want first because they'll appreciate that and what works with your users. At the same time, I think that what Mordy's saying about the evolution of content is really important as well. So I think that format can change as well. So what makes content good can sometimes change from the format. So you're talking about an ebook. Ebooks have really evolved. I remember when ebooks were pretty much like a PDF sort of thing. And sometimes they're that, sometimes you can also get them on a Kindle thing, sometimes you can get a combination of a few articles altogether. I know y'all do that a little bit as well. And there's lots of different ways that you can do an ebook these days. And there's lots of new channels for ebooks. And I think that that's really important. Similarly, and I'm going to date myself here, but if I think back in the day, we would get the Sears catalog and we'd go around and we'd circle the things that we wanted. And back in the day, that was- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, those days. Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... good content, right? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hm. That's great. Crystal Carter: I'd be like, "Check out that Barbie house. This is what I want." Mordy Oberstein: That was fun, when it came in the mail. That was- Crystal Carter: Right? It was good. And to me, to 9-year-old me, that was great content. That was fantastic. But now people have their Amazon wishlist or whatever, or people have their wishlist on wherever, and that's more useful because you don't have to carry around the 600 page thing. And if the price changes, you can see it in real time and things. So the format there can also make content good. And I think that that's really important to think about as well, and for SEOs to not just necessarily fall back on what they always do, as Mordy was saying, but to pay attention to new opportunities to connect with people. And even new methods to connect with people in order to make the content good. Ben Steele: And you know what one of the biggest changes has been for the better internally when it comes to performance? It's been collaboration. So as an SEO, or I'm more editor, less practicing SEO, so as a content specialist I'll say, I don't necessarily have all of the information, all of the knowledge and all of the expertise required to front to back create an experience fully that an audience member wants. But the closer I work with my marketing team, the closer I work with my sales team, the more I can get that data, get that understanding, and take insights from the expertise of the other fantastic people I work with. And the more I do that, the closer that we collaborate, the better an idea we get of things like, what does our audience want? What do they respond to? And so collaboration and breaking down silos is a very important part around content. If you want content to be successful, you really need information from all these sources. And it's been a huge... We've been doing this internally for a while where we try and sort of, like I said, break down the silos and make everyone's reporting and everyone's expertise available across different teams so that we can make use of that information and get fully aligned on our company goals. And it's had huge impact. And we've noticed that when we make these decisions, these audience focused decisions that are backed up by good data from our marketing and sales teams, that even if Google doesn't reward us right away, we can tell that the audience rewards us, and that's when we know we're doing something right. I think that's something that is going to be critical looking forward too, is remember that Google isn't your ultimate end goal. It's one of your channels, but if you're serving your users in whichever... That works in any channel, right? And the path of the algorithms is ostensibly, allegedly to reward behavior like that. Right? Mordy Oberstein: Well and it wants to follow the user, right? It wants- Ben Steele: Right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Google wants us break it down. Google wants ad clicks. The results have to be good at being relative to what users are expecting. So Google's chasing users while we're chasing algorithms. The point you made about experience and that whole narrative and actual expertise and collaborating with people who have the actual knowledge, I think that's been one of the more healthy things that's been going on in the SEO industry for the past, I don't know, couple of years, whatever it's been. And I think it's fascinating to see that shift. That wasn't a part of the conversation when I got into SEO at all. You send the content brief over to a content writer from every content market and they create the content, you're good to go. I think now though, the next step is going to be, okay, we understand the experience, we understand the value of expertise, the value of firsthand knowledge, all that kind of stuff. Now we need to focus on the best way to transmit that knowledge and transmit that information. Because the value of the content and the helpfulness of the content is only as good as A, the actual substance itself, and B, how you transmit it. Just use a crude example, if I were to say to you, "Give me the salt now, jerk," you wouldn't really want to pass the salt to me. But if I said, "Please pass me the salt," you would pass me the salt. So it's not just the content itself, but it's how you say it that's super important. I don't think that's been part of the narrative yet at all, but I really hope that it will be. Crystal Carter: You think people should be more polite to Google? Mordy Oberstein: Now we're getting spicy. Crystal Carter: I said that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure this is helpful. Ben Steele: I think you can actually see, in the stumbles that Google's making, you can see the intent here. For things that exactly what you're talking about, Mordy, where it comes to not just the substance, but the experience of your content. And I think that a lot of these kind of the stumbling blocks are indicative of yes, they're trying to do what they're saying. And we're in a period of big disruption and there's a lot of missteps been happening all at once, but you can kind of see the direction even in the stumbles made by the algorithms. And we had a contributor in the ebook, here's a sneak peek, make a point that, I think it was Kevin Rowe made the point that we're seeing AI algorithms get released, but training them is different to how they act in the wild. And he was saying that eventually you just have to kind of release them and let them learn in a live environment, and that's going to be full of problems and mistakes, and then you fix them as they come up. And so he thinks that's what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. I agree with that. Ben Steele: I found that to be a pretty insightful comment because it's like, okay, so yeah, we have a ton of disruption. And he likened it to learning how to box. If you can hit a non-human target as much as you want, but eventually you got to get in the ring and get hit. And this is Google's algorithms getting hit, but then they get better. And you can see in where they're as stumbling is that they're trying to account for things like how you present your content. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing issues where original content is getting pushed down in the SERPs by content that is just kind of regurgitating it, but making it a little bit more accessible more quickly. And that's obviously not an ideal use case, but you can see the attempt to be like, "Okay, what's the user experience of this? How easily can a user parse this content?" Mordy Oberstein: On that note, if somebody wanted to attempt to hit you up for some knowledge and information about writing helpful content, where could they find you? Ben Steele: These days, I am mostly on LinkedIn. I've pulled back my X, Twitter, whatever presence quite significantly. So for me personally, it's just Ben Steele on LinkedIn, and you can find me by searching my name with Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: We will link to that in the show notes. Is your LinkedIn profile a picture like you giving the Blue Steel look? Crystal Carter: From the left. It might be. Mordy Oberstein: That'd be great, if it was. Ben Steele: I'll have to get updated headshots. Mordy Oberstein: You can have AI do it for you. Ben Steele: Oh. Yeah. Crystal Carter: For anyone who does not know that reference, please go and watch Zoolander. Your life will be better for it. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Be at least 10 times as big. Crystal Carter: We're men. We're men. Mordy Oberstein: I got the black lung- Ben Steele: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Keep an eye out for the ebook. When does that come out? Ben Steele: June 11th is when the ebook comes out. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we'll be able to link to it. Nice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because this will be out on the 19th. Mordy Oberstein: On the 19th, so- Ben Steele: Oh. Heck yeah. All right. Crystal Carter: Tell your team, you're like, "Look at me. I'm just marketing the book we just dropped. You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: The audience get a backstage look at our scheduling. Ben Steele: Awesome. Thank you guys. Mordy Oberstein: So much fun. Yeah. Okay, so we'll link the ebook in the show notes. Check it out, have a gander at it, and check out SEJ and check out Ben. Ben Steele: Thank you guys so much. It's been a wonderful experience being on here. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's been fantastic having you. Talk to you soon. Speaking of good content, what happens if we start running Google searches about good content? What could we learn? We'll find out as we have some fun with Google's People Also Asked box. So I decided to throw in some... When I say fun, by the way, it is not going to be fun. I'm just giving you a little spoiler alert, this is not fun. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I decided to throw a bunch of keywords into Google: What kind of content do users want, how to write good content, what is good content? And I'll tell you, I personally have been on mobile. This is an interesting point, I should tweet about this. I find myself clicking on more PAAs on mobile now than I used to and I'm- Crystal Carter: Why is that? Mordy Oberstein: ... sure it's because the things I'm searching for or Google's... Maybe it was showing them higher up than they used to, or the results aren't so great, so I'm like, "Ah, I might as well click on the PAA." Or maybe I'm not good at searching anymore, so that secondary question's really what I wanted, and Google did a good job showing me that question. Whatever it is. I'll tell you, when I searched for these things, I didn't find much of it helpful. Crystal Carter: Okay, Mordy Oberstein: Okay, here we go. Sorry, Google, you can't win all the time. What kind of content do users want? The first question is, what type of content is most consumed? That one's not bad. That one's not bad. Maybe I'm looking for, okay, what kind of content are people going to actually consume? Kind of an offshoot of that, what kind of content is most engaging? Particularly, I'm looking for something around social media content. Maybe I really meant social media content. I would look for something engaging. Okay, fine. Okay. The third one is, what is the most used content type? I don't even know what that question means. And then the fourth one is, what content gets the most attention? Which is really the same thing as the second question, it was content's the most engaging? So not very helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. They're odd questions. I had a look at, how do you know if content is good? That was my seed question. The featured snippet there was from Quora. Mordy Oberstein: Ah. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Where I go for all of my high quality substantive information. Crystal Carter: Obviously. And so the questions came off of that was, how to tell if content is good. There's an answer there from Sitecore. How do you know if content is successful? Another one from Sitecore. Sitecore crushing it here. And then we had, what defines good content? That's a good question as well. And how to determine good quality. A lot of these are very, very, very similar, which I think is really interesting because how to determine quality content, how to tell if content is good, what defines good content, and how do you tell if content is good, they're very, very similar. I think it's very interesting because essentially what you get with the PAAs is that they are essentially a repository for a lot of the featured snippets. So it's very interesting that you would have different featured snippets. And you see this really regularly, different featured snippets, different PAAs for very, very similar questions, which is what you found as well you were looking at- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, very similar across the board. I have other ones that are also very similar. Just to give you some contrast, by the way, if you're listening to this, if you search for how to throw a curveball, and these are the things I would actually click on, how do you throw a curveball correctly? Okay, fine. That's maybe a little bit too similar to the query itself. What is the proper curveball grip? Is it bad for an 11-year-old to throw a curveball? It's a very specific intent, which is true, it is bad for their wrist. And then, how do to throw a 12 to 6 curveball? So certain curveballs go, imagine that the curve goes from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock. That's old school curveball. The more modern curveball kind of goes from, I don't know, 1 o'clock to 1 o'clock. Not 4 o'clock, 7 at clocks. I'm bad at clocks. So it's a little bit different. They're very differentiated. They're different questions for different intents and really helps you go down the curveball wormhole. If I search for, what is good content, I get, what does good content mean? That's what I asked. That's what I asked. What is good quality content? So okay, slight variance. How to make good content? Okay, fine. What is good content versus bad content? I get you're adding in the extra contrast. Yeah. But that's a little bit like, all right, same but different. I actually threw that into people also. I actually go into Also Asked, so you could see the further breakdown. So if you go into what does good content mean, Also Asked breaks down the next PAA questions being, how would you know a good content? Crystal Carter: A good content. I love the misspellings. I love the bad grammar and the PAAs. They're my favorite. Mordy Oberstein: What is an example content? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: What is excellent content? Crystal Carter: Okay? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What type of content is best? Yes. Crystal Carter: For? Mordy Oberstein: What does bad content mean? So I was a little bit surprised that Google took the word mean very literally. Like, define the word content. That's not what I was looking for exactly. Crystal Carter: And I think it can be very surprising. I think this is one of the reasons why it's worth going through the PAAs with a tool like Also Asked. With a tool following, just going to the SERP and following that path as well. There's so many tiny subtleties that make the difference. The other thing I think that's also worth thinking about particularly, and I think of this when I'm looking at competitor research and stuff, is also checking the actual search volume for them. Because just because there's a featured snippet, doesn't mean that that's actually getting any search volume very much at all. So that's worth looking at as well because it could very well be that maybe they have... I looked up, are smoothies good for you? Because I've heard people who say that actually, smoothies have too much sugar or they take out all the fiber, where some people are like, "I juice every day." So anyway. Mordy Oberstein: That's what Barry Bond said. Crystal Carter: With something like that, it might be that more people are asking more of one particular, or phrasing the question in one particular way and getting to the serp in that way, even though they're very, very similar. Sometimes you can see that those slight differences can make a really big difference in terms of search volume. Because the chances are that you'll probably, in terms of featured snippet, PAA sort of thing, you may very well be at the top for the high search volume thing. But if you go for that one, you might also rank somewhere lower down for the other one. So that's worth thinking about as well. But yeah, the PAAs, the way that they arrange them can be very interesting in terms of the similarities between the words and everything. Mordy Oberstein: So it just goes to show you, sometimes you can learn a lot from the PAAs and sometimes you can't. Crystal Carter: I still don't know if smoothies are healthy or not. I still can't tell. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. If it tastes good, not healthy. It tastes meh, probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Does it have kale in it? That's probably healthy if- Mordy Oberstein: Kale in it is definitely healthy no matter how much sugar you put in it. That- Crystal Carter: Some of them are just like a juiced salad. Some of them are like, "We put kale and celery and thing," and you're like- Mordy Oberstein: That's healthy, but that doesn't sound too appetizing to me. Crystal Carter: Spirulina, like all these things. Mordy Oberstein: Wheatgrass. Crystal Carter: Wheatgrass. I actually like wheatgrass. Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. You know what else is interesting? Whatever's happening in the SEO news this week is always interesting, and it's usually always covered by Barry Schwartz. So here's our ode to Barry each and every week, and some other people who cover the SEO news as well, like the great folks over at Search Engine Journal. Here's this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. First up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google, sometimes search experiments conflict causing issues. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast, Gary, however you pronounce his last name, was talking about Google experiments and said that sometimes that multiple experiments can cause conflicts with each other. He wrote, "Very often these experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other." Glenn Gabe chimed in on X writing, "Sometimes problems in the service and maybe what we see as changes are due to multiple experiments running that don't work well with each other." You can even see this with the algorithm updates themselves sometimes, which is why I think Google tries to integrate things into the core as much as possible, in my honest opinion. And folks have covered this for a while. Glenn has some great posts on this, on warring algorithm updates. So for example, back when you had the review updates being announced before they were called the Product Review Updates, you might see a site, I don't know, gain a whole bunch of rankings with that update. Month later comes along a core update and kills all those rankings. So sometimes those systems can compete with each other. I was talking about this on LinkedIn, I don't know when. I post too many things on LinkedIn, so good luck finding it. But sometimes if you don't think about... If think SEO factors, for lack of a better word in isolation, and you don't try to think how everything kind of balances out, you could end up focusing on things the wrong way. I think the example that I gave was, oh, I'll focus on links. I'll get a lot of links. So if you're focused on the link factor in SEO, you'll grab all these links, but then what happens when the user actually gets to the site? Because Google rewards it with rankings because you get so many great links, yada, yada, yada. The user gets to the site, the site's not great. So now the user behavior side of the algorithm, however that plays itself out, whole separate controversy, would say, "Oh, wait a second. This site's actually not so great. You got all the great links. Okay, okay, I see that, but let's actually demote the website because the behavior on the site or whatever shows that this site maybe isn't what people want. Maybe it's not quality." So you have to think about the algorithm harmoniously. Anyway, getting a little bit off track with that. This from Danny Goodwin covering Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land where we got Meta Barry there. 13 SEO takeaways, some Googles, Elizabeth Tucker at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz interviewed Elizabeth Tucker, who's the Director of Product Management of Google Search, and Danny wrote up a summary of the 13 things you should know about what Barry and Elizabeth covered. There's a whole bunch of really cool things in there. I'll kind of roll through just a few of them. For example, there's a whole thing on why SEO should focus on the big picture. Elizabeth said, "We are trying to satisfy people with all these different informational needs with all sorts of different great types of content and websites. I do worry that when people kind of get down in the weeds on specific technical details or signals we may or may not have, it might take away from that big picture question of, is this helpful, yada, yada, yada." Absolutely a hundred percent agree. They got into why the March 2024 core update took 45 days to roll out. Basically saying that that was the biggest update that they basically ever had, with Elizabeth saying that there was some re-architecture work going on. They said that we actually had a mini war room going on. We were doing live monitoring, co-capacity and latency in our data centers, because it is unusual for us to roll out so many different changes at once. We did so successfully. Part of that was actually why the announcement about the March 2024 core update took a little bit while for Google to announce it, basically saying they want to make sure that things were... I'll just quote them. Why am I trying to put words in their mouth? Quoting Elizabeth, "We wanted to make sure all the changes were entirely rolled out. Hundreds of people were involved. So just answering the question of, are we done yet, involves so many different pings, et cetera." One of the interesting things that I took away from the article, and I'll end here because it's a whole bunch of other things about what causes radical fluctuations, how many systems are involved in Google's core updates. Danny does a really nice job kind of covering the conversation that Barry had with Elizabeth, but there's a section that Danny has about how Google defines low quality. And I'm going to reignite this debate, I guess. I don't know why it's a debate at this point in the SEO world, but whatever. Google basically said like, "We look at the Search Quality Rater guidelines as our definition of quality." I will read through this as much as I can. It's a lot. I don't want to take up too much. It's supposed to be snappy, Mordy. Elizabeth said, "We rigorously define high quality, low quality. We give examples, and this document is truly the foundation of how third party evaluators then go and evaluate results for quality, meaning the Search Quality Rater guidelines." Elizabeth wanted to say that there's no one size fits all for quality, "It's actually a fairly nuanced thing." Completely agree with that. Quality is incredibly nuanced. She offers an example of how that might be, why that might be, and then she says, "So we've laid it out in our Search Quality Rater guidelines. We take into account the quality of the main content, things like accuracy for informational content, talent and skill. We look at things like page experience. Can people find the main content easily?" So she says, "So take a look. It's all there. I said this before, I'll say it again. The Quality Rater guidelines should give you a directional look at how Google is thinking about quality. What is actually in the algorithm or not, different question, but it will give you a look inside the brain or the mind of Google." Continuing with Danny Goodwin covering Google's statements, this one is Danny covering Liz Reed and an all hands quote, or not quote, titled the article, Head of Google Search: AI mistakes won't prevent progress. Basically, Google had an all hands saying, "Hey, look, there's going to be problems. We're going to tackle them. That shouldn't mean we don't move forward with the AI. I don't know what you want to call the AI world on the SERP and so forth, yada, yada, yada." I mean, Google kind of has to say that. Obviously I think they do mean that, but they also kind of have to get that message out there. I think it's a very important message for them and then how their whole wider ecosystem works. That's all I'm going to say about that. Read into that what you want to. One thing that I took away was a quote where she said, "We don't just have to understand the quality of the site or the page. We have to understand each passage of a page." So in the AI overview, you have different links to different subsections of the AI overview. For example, one I always go back to was, how to prevent kidney stones, and in there is a section about diet. Google might have to understand, hey, wait a second, we're going to link out to that page there. We have to understand that this page has a section about diet, and that section about diet and kidney stones is really good, and that's the one we're going to link to when we cover that subtopic. It is an interesting conversation, and I think maybe we should have a little bit more of a conversation about, of how Google is understanding the subsections of pages. Anyway, that is again, not so snappy this week, Mordy. Got to do a better job. I talk fast. I try to talk fast. Maybe that's not a good thing, but I try to make it snappy by talking faster and it's not working. There's just so much news going on. Anyway, this is the not so snappy news. Yeah, so that was ever so snappy, as usual. Crystal Carter: Yeah, newsy news. There's been so much news. The news has been really tricky. Or the news has been really interesting because there's been a lot of really big things like the updates and people starting new search engines and stuff like that. And then there's been a lot of little, tiny, teeny tiny- Mordy Oberstein: If you like the teeny tiny things and the big thing, as always make sure to check out It's New over at Wix SEO Hub, and RustyBrick's YouTube channel. Speaking of news people, our follow of the week are two news people. Hey, we're going full on SEJ this week as our follow of the week this week is Angie Nikoleychuk, and Heather Campbell, both from SEJ. Crystal Carter: Angie and Heather are so, so, so, so super nice. Mordy Oberstein: They are the nicest team, by the way. Crystal Carter: They're so nice. Mordy Oberstein: Behind the scenes? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: So nice, so easy to work with. Love working with SEJ people. Crystal Carter: They're super nice and I think it's- Mordy Oberstein: Great team. Crystal Carter: ... one of those things like, sometimes folks are popular or whatever or have a big following and you sort of wonder why. And then you meet them and you're like, "Oh, this is why. Because y'all do really good stuff." Mordy Oberstein: And we had Angie on for one of our live SEO audit. Angie's great. She'll tell me she'll listen to the Edge of the News Podcast, which I do their news every week, and like, "Yeah, I really disagree with what you said there." I love that. I love that. That's great. Crystal Carter: No, it's good. She's got such great insight and she brings a lot of her CRO knowledge into the stuff that she does, and she was great on the site audit. We did a site audit on quick wins, and definitely worth having a look at. I think that's evergreen content, so go and check that out as well. Mordy Oberstein: And definitely also check out Heather Campbell, who's been fabulous on the things we're working on with her as well. Heather is the Director of Marketing at Search Engine Journal and does a lot of their write-ups also for them, so give her a big follow. We'll link to their social media profiles in the show notes. And hope you found this episode helpful. Crystal Carter: I did. I got lots of helpful tips. Mordy Oberstein: At the end of the day, just write good content. That's all. Just do it. Crystal Carter: Write good content, and may the algorithm be forever in your favor. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so I definitely let the algorithm be in your favor, and then do us a favor and tune in for our next episode. So that means thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the unsung heroes of SEO; Those who maintain rank. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over on wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning up at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. 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What should you know about an SEO study before making conclusions? Why is understanding the methodology of an SEO important? How do you share complex data with clients and stakeholders? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, alongside SEO consultant Jess Joyce, untangle the web of data imperfections in SEO studies. Bring a skeptical eye when reviewing an SEO study. A lot goes into creating a valid study with repeatable, statistically relevant results. Understanding the methodology and the limitations of an SEO study are can help you understand what’s really being presented. Join us as we chew on some “crunchy” data perspectives in this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Learning to use SEO data studies the right way What should you know about an SEO study before making conclusions? Why is understanding the methodology of an SEO important? How do you share complex data with clients and stakeholders? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, alongside SEO consultant Jess Joyce, untangle the web of data imperfections in SEO studies. Bring a skeptical eye when reviewing an SEO study. A lot goes into creating a valid study with repeatable, statistically relevant results. Understanding the methodology and the limitations of an SEO study are can help you understand what’s really being presented. Join us as we chew on some “crunchy” data perspectives in this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 112 | November 27, 2024 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 43:17 This week’s guests Jess Joyce Jess is a Toronto SEO Consultant (Search Engine Optimization), & a web developer who’s worked with companies including Mashable, Fast Company, Honda, CIBC, Budweiser, Pfizer and for companies from startups to large agencies, optimizing the web for over 20 years now. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining this SERP's Up podcast. We're serving up some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the very deeply thorough, data-driven, data dynamic, data diving head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter who's shaking her head like what are you even saying at this point? I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know what he's talking about, man. Like data? Data shmada. I'm winging it, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just trying to tie the topic into your adjectives. Crystal Carter: I'm winging it. Aren't we all? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I've been winging it for 40 years. Crystal Carter: Never did me any harm, as they say. No. Mordy Oberstein: Cholesterol is too high? Eat more of it. Data. Crystal Carter: No, he's not my favorite Next Gen character. You know what? I think over the years it's probably, I mean there's Picard obviously, but I think it's probably going to be Riker's definitely higher up there just because of the idea of Riker-ing over a chair, which I didn't realize until I saw the super cut and I was like, "This is amazing. How did I never see it?" Mordy Oberstein: When you're that tall, that's what you would do. Crystal Carter: And then once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's perfect. Although I think that the actor who plays Data has had some of the widest range, but then there was also... Is it Wil Wheaton or whatever? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, now you'd open up a Pandora's box with Wesley Crusher. Okay. Crystal Carter: Right. Wesley Crusher, just his second act on the Big Bang Theory. I was not expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: So there's that. But then I guess also Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg has happened in recent career. So anyway, so yeah, there we go. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, how we get from data into Star Trek? Crystal Carter: Data. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Data. Oh, that went right over my head. Wow. Wow. I'm like, I'm all down to talk about Star Trek. I just didn't understand how we got here Data. Oh my, wow. I really warfed that. Crystal Carter: You know what we should do this podcast? Make it so Mordy Oberstein: I'm engaged. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight and check out our SEO course over on the Wix studio SEO Learning Hub. But where you can also get tons of deep dives and deep takes across all of the content that the Wix Studio SEO Hub has to offer. As today, we take a hard look at what you should know about an SEO study before drawing any conclusions. While understanding the methodology of a study is huge, the data mindset and how to avoid its pitfalls and know they who wrote the study, why authorship comes into focus. SEO consultant extraordinaire, Jess Joyce will share how she shares complex data with clients and stakeholders. Plus, we'll pick apart a few SEO studies to see what lessons we learn from them and how we approach them. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So like Mike Tyson in a boxing ring, we've got something for you to chew on and it's crunchy as we help you better understand the SEO data crunchers of the world on this 112 episode of SERP's Up. Crystal Carter: That's quite the intro. Quite the intro. Mordy Oberstein: Well, now that I did, I was thinking, what do I do with the data thing? Oh, you're chewing on numbers or crunching on numbers. Okay, I'll go Mike Tyson chewing on people's ears. Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: I should have went Data Star Trek and it is just whoosh. Crystal Carter: Hey, we're going to forge ahead just like Jordy. It'll be fine. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Crystal Carter: Okay. So. Mordy Oberstein: I've got some cues for you, but anyway. Crystal Carter: Oh, I recognize that reference. Okay. Right. Okay. So resistance is futile when it comes to data studies. Basically, when we're working in SEO, we are inundated with data all the time, client data, market data, all sorts of stuff. But how do you sift through all of it? How do you make sense of everything? I know that this is something that Mordy has worked loads on and has written on extensively, so we're going to get into the discussion very quickly. But just as a primer, I tend to think of these studies in three different categories, and I think that they should really be assessed for the value in these different ways as well. So to my mind, SEO data studies tend to fall into a few categories. You have your case studies, which are looking at outcomes for a particular client or project or instance or something like that. Then you have your data study that's looking at large scale data. So for instance, when you're looking at the impact of an algorithm over an entire set of keywords, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have your targeted data study, which is a little bit of a combination of the two. And with case studies, these tend to be centered on the client outcomes. And these mean that there's a particular set of circumstances. So if you're trying to find out whether or not this is valuable for your project and whether or not this is relevant to you, it's very important that you understand exactly what the parameters were of the case study, and they can be incredibly valuable. If you're on a similar vertical, and let's say you're working on, I don't know, a project and it's a retail client, and they sell the same kind of- Mordy Oberstein: Selling Star Trek T-shirts. Crystal Carter: Selling Star Trek T-shirts, right? For Comic-Con or something, right? So let's say that you're that product vertical and there's somebody else who did a case study for the same kind of industry, then you are very likely to take a lot of learnings from that, right? You're facing similar challenges and they can help you figure out how to boldly go where you want to go. Now, it is worth though, bringing in a little bit of skepticism when you're looking at case studies because people don't share everything. They can't. They can't, they couldn't possibly. And they don't share all of the things that go into it. So it could be that they did this project and it was all SEO and nothing else was involved. Or it could be that yes, there was SEO involved and of course it contributed to it, but there was also 20,000 pounds worth of paid put on it per day or something like that. Or it could have been that there was also a digital PR campaign that they didn't mention. Or it could be that there were various other things behind it. It could be that somebody was on TV. I've seen incredible SEO lifts because somebody was on television and had a big PR spike. So that is something that's worth thinking about. Yes, there's probably some learnings that you can take from a case study, but don't always expect exactly the same results if you implement the same things that they're advocating for, because it's impossible to know everything that went into that particular instance. That is a very, very big, it depends in that particular case. And I can see you nodding your head, Mordy. I don't know if you want to jump in on- Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. You're on a roll. You're going, I'm with you. I'm with all hockey stick growth in my case study. Okay, okay. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And yeah, they can't show you all of the things. And sometimes one of the big things that can vary, particularly when I look at case studies, is the market. So sometimes in emerging markets you'll see people and they're like, yeah, we did this particular thing and we saw 7000% growth. And then if you tried to do the same thing in an established market like the US or the UK or France, Germany, et cetera, then you might have a challenge making the same kind of impact because there are more competitors in the mix. And so that can be a real challenge as well. It's not to undermine what the folks who are getting those gains have done. Well done, fantastic and well done. But it can sometimes be a challenge to do the same thing in a more established, more competitive market. So that's something to consider with case studies. So pay attention to them, but don't necessarily expect the same results. Data studies tend to come from folks with large data sets to work from and within the SEO space, a lot of times this comes from tools teams. So this will come from folks like Ahrefs, from StatMoz, SE Ranking, Semrush, and lots of folks are doing great data studies here and they provide a great amount of data for algorithm updates in particular, or when certain SERP features emerge, and they can say, this SERP feature is visible. So I've certainly paid a lot of attention to Dr. Pete will be like, oh, featured snippets have gone up 15% or they've dropped 20%, or things like that. And they're able to give you a broad understanding of what's going on around the web. These are really, really interesting. The challenge with these studies is that it's important to remember that there's limitations that are based on the tool. So sometimes tools providers will have a certain data set that they're looking at, or they will have certain features that they're able to see that maybe others aren't able to see, or maybe there's a certain feature that they don't see, or maybe there's certain markets that they're not looking at. So for instance, I spend a lot of time looking at Semrush. Semrush doesn't cover every market. It's a great, fantastic, wonderful tool, but it doesn't cover every market. So if they're less strong in your market, then it might be less easy to see what's going on there. And if they don't store data on a region that you're working in, for instance, then the data set might be slightly less relevant for you. So it could still have an impact, but it might not be a like-for-like relevancy for you. And it doesn't mean that you should ignore the data. It's worth carrying out your own experiments to see if you can replicate the findings. Absolutely. But you need to think about assessing your own data set and coming up with your own set of benchmarks for when things are changing or where there's visibility changes or which competitors tend to have the same impact as you and those sorts of things. It's worth looking at that when you're comparing your own results with large-scale data studies. Mordy Oberstein: The data, just a peek behind the scenes on the big data studies, they are very difficult and you need to pay attention to what they write. Usually they do at the beginning, sometimes at the end, sometimes not at all. If it's not there at all, run. What the methodology of the study was. What kind of keywords did they use? For example, let's say, I don't know, you have, just forget a study for a second. You have the SEO weather tools. So you have MozCast, and let's say you have the Semrush sensor, and they'll often show different things and it's because they're built on different types of keywords. Moz uses high search volume keywords on purpose because they think that that simulates being more like your average user on the average day. Whereas Semrush is looking at normalized keywords to make it look like, okay, this is the web as a whole. Both make sense. They're just both very different. So you have to look at the types of how many keywords, what types of keywords. It's very easy to get lost in the verbiage too. Oh, we looked at 5 million data points. What you might have looked at was not 5 million keywords. You might have looked at one keyword 5 million times, for 5 million days, which is a different kind of data than looking at a hundred thousand keywords for a hundred thousand days. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It's very confusing. They're not always very transparent about how they on purpose. And also it's easy to get this data wrong. I cannot tell you, and big kudos to the Semrush team for this, how many times I've done a data poll with the Semrush team, looked at the data like something's not right here. And I don't even know. I just know something isn't right. Let's dig in and see did something go wrong somewhere or are we actually comfortable with the results? I'm like, oh, actually what we ended up doing was there was an over-emphasis on this type of keyword or there was an over whatever, whatever on this. Let's try to adjust the data set and run it again and see, but you need to have a team that's willing to do that and is dedicated to do that. And somebody like me, or let's say like Patrick Stocks or like Dr. Pete who are working at these tool who are- Crystal Carter: Marcus Tober. Mordy Oberstein: SEO people. Marcus Tober, et cetera totally. Who are big data SEO people who could say, no, no, no, I know just looking at this, something's off somewhere. Let's re-figure this thing out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You definitely have to dig into those. And I think that the tricky thing is with the big data studies is that very often what people want to hear about is the brand new thing. They want to hear about the brand new thing. It was- Mordy Oberstein: It was the hardest thing to pull. Crystal Carter: AI overviews. Exactly, exactly. Right? Because you don't have historic data and you've just set up this tool to identify it on the SERP. So for instance, AI overviews is something that's on there and everybody wants to know what's going on with AI overviews and there's various different studies that keep coming out and there's various tools that are trying to measure it, but they're just tricky to keep up with and they're tricky to quantify it. Mordy Oberstein: We spoke about this on the previous podcast episode about this and it was in our recent Searchlight newsletter, make sure you subscribe, but in the newsletter we talked about, yeah, the studies are great, but if you start thinking into it a little bit more, all these different tool providers are trying to catch up with each other. They did a study, we need to do a study. They did a study, we need to do a study. And that's helpful for them and it's good, it's good for everybody. You get data, they get clicks and likes and whatever and signups and whatever, but there also is a little bit of a need for deeper data and don't think that with that data you have the full story. You don't yet. No one has it yet. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right, right, right. Entirely. And the methodology point that you brought up is super, super important as well. Understanding, we looked at SERP results in the United States, we looked at the health vertical, we looked at newspaper sites or things like that. Because like you said, sometimes they're like, oh, we looked at 700,000 keywords. Well, for some websites that's just their ranking keywords. I literally had just logged into Semrush and I don't know, sometimes they have URLs that are there, and the first one I clicked, wildlifeorg.com, they rank for 300,000 keywords. So if you said, we assess 300,000 keywords, you're still only assessing one website. Mordy Oberstein: You could assess 5 million keywords. But if they're all the same kind of keyword, how to buy socks, how to buy pants, how to buy a shirt, how to buy glasses, how to buy earrings, how to buy a tree, how to buy a light, how to buy a computer. I'm just looking into the things I'm looking at right now. Crystal Carter: You're just naming things in the room. Mordy Oberstein: It's all going to be the same kind of SERP of the same kind of results, Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. So it's really important to think about that. And that's a really important thing when you're thinking about any kind of information. In academic studies, they always have a section that talks about methodology. Mordy Oberstein: And it's called, by the way, limitations. That's the name of it. Because every methodology has limitations. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have your variables. It's all part of the scientific method. All these studies are using scientific method. So you have your hypothesis, you have your variables, you have your controls, you have your criteria, you have all of that sort of stuff. And it's really important that you're looking at that. Mordy Oberstein: $1,000 to the SEO tool who instead of calling their section methodology, calls it what the academics call limitations. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's not a good marketing thing. You would never do that. That's why I'm offering a thousand dollars. I'm not saying you should do that, by the way. Crystal Carter: I mean, you might have somebody calling you up for a check. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right, so now moving on to my favorite type of study, which I think is my favorite type of, and I think a lot of SEOs really like these ones. So I'm calling these targeted studies. This is my verbiage, my terminology, but these are my favorite. This is essentially where people are combining the best of a case study set up with the best of a big data studies and they scale them up. So Cyrus Shepard is known for this type of research. He did a big, big case study on title tags. They looked at lots of title tags and variations on them, and they tested all of these title tags and said, "This has this. According to the data that we have in 60% of cases, this is the outcome. In 70% of cases, this is the outcome." That sort of thing. Lily Ray is known for her studies where she monitors whole cohorts of websites that are affected by the same algorithm updates. So she's been studying winners and losers, and so she'll look at those sorts of things like individual websites and then she'll do a deep dive into single websites as well. This is something that you look at as well, Mordy, when you're doing your studies as well. So you'll say this is the big picture. This is a case study based on this one particular one. Glenn Gabe is somebody who's great for this as well, where he will share lots of information of the helpful content updates seems to be having this impact at scale. Here are a few people that I've been watching who are having that situation. The thing that's tricky about some of these ones, and I think they're great, I think they're wonderful, but the thing that's tricky about these ones is if you are monitoring some sites and you're not inside the site, then sometimes you're flying a little bit blind in terms of the] study. Mordy Oberstein: It's anecdotal or can be anecdotal. Crystal Carter: Well, so I had a situation where, so at MozCon I was talking about forums and all of the data that I could see from all the tools was telling me that there was definitely a trend of around September in 2023 loads of forum sites saw a big uptick in terms of traffic. Reddit saw a huge hockey stick and loads of legacy forums saw this as well. And the numbers that I found in terms of the numbers was from one particular website said that it was up 7000% according to one SEO tool. At MozCon, one of the guys from the website was like, I'm not sure what they're measuring because I am only seeing two or three times as much traffic, not 7000% more traffic. We did see an uptick, a big uptick, but not exactly those numbers. So that I think is really, really interesting. So sometimes with some of the tools, again, depending on the tools that people are using for some of these targeted studies, sometimes there's limitations with regards to that. So when people will share information, it's very important that they share what kind of tools that they're using. So for instance, Lily Ray very often uses Systrix and she'll say, this is what Systrix is showing. And Glenn Gabe always shares which tool he's using, and sometimes he'll show multiple tools as well. And that's really important to see as well because if you have a case where somebody's like, well, that's not what's reflecting in my traffic. I know you're looking at this website, but our website actually isn't seeing that. If you actually end up speaking to the SEO as I did in that case, then you can say, oh, well the tool is showing me this. Based on the evidence I've got, this is what I've got. But yeah, those are the challenges with those, but they're very, very useful for keeping track of trends. Mordy Oberstein: I love those. I love those a lot. And what's great about what Lily and what Glenn do, and Cyrus, that they're not just tracking five or six sites. Glenn has, I don't know, an index of 400 sites. I'm making up the number. I don't know the exact number he has, but it's a lot. It's a lot of sites. So it's not just a small sample size. But yeah, it can be like what they're seeing and what you're seeing could be very, very different. Looking at a pattern within a core update kind of thing, and I find 10 examples of this, if I write up a post highlighting two or three of those examples, the first thing I try to start, this is just what I'm seeing. This is one sliver of the entire internet, sliver of a sliver of the internet. You could be seeing something completely different, and you probably are because there's probably a million things happening at one time. Crystal Carter: All the time. I think it's really, really valuable. I think particularly for folks who are trying to do the day-to-day, it can be really, really valuable to have the combination because I think that if you have somebody just giving you loads of data, sometimes I'm like, well, now what? What do I do with all this information? So even if you do have somebody who's like, this is the sliver of what I've seen. Based on this data, what do we actually do now? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: It's really, really- Mordy Oberstein: That's a whole other can of worms. Crystal Carter: Yes. It's really, really useful. But I think also data just becomes increasingly more important for SEOs and understanding these studies and being able to report and tell stories in terms of this is really, really important. I think Lily Ray is somebody who in particular, she recently changed her job title. She's head of strategy and research, not just strategy, but research. So that's recognition for all of the studies that she's been doing. And I've seen lots more SEOs who have switched either to being data folks or have added that as part of their role or managing teams there as well. So being able to understand these data studies, being able to write your own, being able to assess data coherently is super, super important to SEOs today. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to end off with a quick point that Barry Adams once made, having some data is better than having no data. None of the data is perfect. All of it points to a certain direction. It's all, this is the trend or this is where things are heading. It's very directional. Even if it's not correlation doesn't mean it caused it. Blah, blah, blah. Forget that discussion. Even if it's not that discussion, it's still not perfect. It's still not going to be a hundred percent. So take it all in the right framework and the right frame of mind. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And the second thing is data studies are like your family, everyone's got an agenda. So keep in mind who's writing it and why, and that's all I'm going to say. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, moving on from that little spicy little bit. Sometimes we need to share complex data with our own audiences and with our own clients or with our own teams. How do you go about doing that? Well, here's Jess Joyce about how or what things you should consider when translating complex data into content your audience, whoever that might be, internal, external, whatever, can actually understand. Jess Joyce: So you guys have asked what things should you consider when translating complex data into content your audience can understand whether that be an article or sharing data in a report, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And how I go about that. So I think it's the same approach that I take to every piece of content is try to land people with context. I think context is everything that search engines are missing because when you're Googling something, it can mean so many different things, which I know they've added updates for, which is great, but it can still mean so many other things and other contexts that go into things. So landing things with context really helps. We're starting to see that being a noob about it is probably the wrong approach to take to it. Answering the what is content out of the gate is just not a great idea, but ensuring that your audience, so doing your audience checking and such is really good to do. Knowing your ICP and all those marketing terms so that you know who you're talking to so you can use the same terminology that they're using is really helpful. And then also making sure that you use examples in that, whether that be quotes or visualizations or something to engage the user throughout it and making sure you highlight the key points that you want to ensure that you nail down with whatever piece of content that you're writing or data, because especially if it's more complex, I don't want to read through 300 pages of a complex data report when I can just get the TLDR. We tell folks all the time to write out key summaries, the key takeaways that top stuff that's really helpful with like Nerd Wallet content, they do that really well. So I think translating that into content that anyone can understand with summaries or top tips is really helpful for everyone and not just search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much. Jess. Make sure to give Jess a follow-over on social media, link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. It's interesting to point out that change in what people are expecting from when you're transmitting that content and how you start off. I agree the start off point is a little bit higher level than what it used to be, so do that, which is good for complex stuff. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think also presumably you can just link people. If they're not sure, You can just, you don't know what this is, here's a link. But I think also we have tools that are able to cover that. So I get complicated documents from my insurance company about various different things. If I don't know what that word means, then I just go, "ChatGPT, what does that mean?" And it goes, "It means this." And I go, "Thank you." And then you can move forward. But I think that you want to spend the bulk of the communication dissecting the complicated ideas. That's what you need to do. And I don't think you need to not necessarily explain yourself. You can qualify it, you can certainly explain all your acronyms and things like that, but you can jump right in. And I think that it's really important and really valuable to have that as a skill because there's been tons of times when I've talked to clients and you give them data and they're like, what is this? And if you're not able to dissect it, if you're not able to explain yourself, then it can become a big challenge for folks. Mordy Oberstein: Huge challenge. Now talk is cheap, and I mentioned this on social media before, it's why I talk a lot. If talk was expensive, I wouldn't do as much talking as I currently do. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: That said, why don't we have a look at some actual SEO studies that talk about why we thought they were effective so that you can approach SEO studies in a brand new light when you approach them with a segment called It's New. Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: It's new because it's a new way for you to approach SEO studies. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. That because it's a new thing on the SERP, which is why we need a next segment. Crystal Carter: Or a new study. Mordy Oberstein: Or a new study. Yeah, these are all old, really old. Crystal Carter: This one's our 2022. Mordy Oberstein: I went with what I knew was good. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I mean I could have gone the other direction. Here's a bunch of bad ones, let's bash them. That would've been good radio. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: But I knew you wouldn't appreciate that. Crystal Carter: All right, what you got? Mordy Oberstein: What do I got? I got from 2022, but it's a famous SEO study from Patrick Stocks who was a booby over at Ahrefs, almost half of Google Search Console clicks go to hit in terms of study by Ahrefs, and it's one of these seminal SEO studies where we learn that, wait a second, the GSC data isn't as transparent as you actually think, and it's not as much data there for you as you actually think, and that's not all there like you might actually think. And it really changed the minds or the mindset of some SEOs' take towards Google Search Console. And the things I liked about it was it gave you practical tips. It wasn't just like, here's big data for big data's sake. There was a purpose. We rely on search console to X extent. Maybe that's not actually the case and the author is super trustworthy. Patrick is super-duper... If Patrick says it as it pertains to SEO, like I don't know about Patrick's talking about comedy, if Patrick's an expert, he's very funny though, but for SEO data, take it because he's great. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. I'm looking at this study and there's a couple of great trust signals and great high value signals that they have straight out the gate. So first of all, they have Patrick Stocks who's an established SEO author and it's got in his bio and he's done some great stuff and he's worked for the team for ages. Then it says it's been reviewed by two other people who are also solid, fantastic folks. So in the first paragraph they explain why you should check out this study because most SEOs consider Google Search Console as their source of trust. What if I told you Google Search Console doesn't tell you all of the keywords that you get traffic from. In fact, the tool doesn't show you a term for nearly half the clicks. That, now I'm hooked. I'm interested. They've established the issue that they're trying to address. So that's their hypothesis is that. And then they say these instances of hidden terms account for 46% of all clicks in our study, and our study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. So they've told you the data, they've told you the websites, they've told you the scale of it, they've told you all of that sort of stuff within the first, completely above the fold, it tells you all of that sort of stuff. Also, it says that they last updated in November 2022. So this is also really useful as well. So in internet time, November '22, which Google Search Console, that's probably fine. That's probably not the difference, that probably hasn't changed much between now and then, but it's worth double checking or something if there's been any updates to that, if there's been any updates around this conversation, if you're interested in this particular topic. Also, and this tells you the parameters of it that basically this is a combination study. This is one of those targeted studies where basically they've got big scale data and they've got account data as well, and then you can take from that what you want, but they laid out all their cards on the table. Those are great trust signals. And as somebody with a brain, I can go through and I can go, okay, based on all of this, I will now assess your study and see how relevant this is to my particular situation or how interesting this is, and I can compare and contrast what I see in my Google Search Console with what you've got here. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So great study. Okay, number two comes from some dude named Mordy and I chose this one not because I'm narcissistic because I was looking for three quick examples so I can get on with my day. Crystal Carter: Lazy Mordy Oberstein: Time efficient. Crystal Carter: Don't work harder, work smarter. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Hey, that's our newsletter segment. Market smarter, not harder. Google's product reviews algorithm update winners and losers. This comes back from 2021, it's an article from SEJ. The reason why I included this one is not because it's a great study and it's fantastic. It's that there's an entire section, my approach to analyzing the update was specifically word, I found five or six websites that showed this pattern. I was very hesitant to write about to begin with because that's not a lot of sites. But it was interesting, and I literally wrote somewhere, here, to be clear, what I'm about to share is based on my qualitative analysis. It is not a definitive study based on deep data. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Take it for what it is. So that transparency was great. Even the authorship is so-so. Crystal Carter: That Mordy guy, I don't know- Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what he is thinking. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. But yeah, no, I think that that's super important though because it is useful and I think that the other thing is that even though it's a few websites that you're looking at, you've gone into them extensively and that amount of research is something that is valuable and the way that you compare them also gives people the ability to compare themselves to that set of criteria. Mordy Oberstein: So in comparing different websites to each other and their rankings after an update and why maybe one went up and one went down. And showing, by the way, there's correlation between the two websites. There's inverse ranking patterns. Like, okay, well you could see in some of the screenshots in the article, they're just opposite patterns. They clearly Google, we like this one, don't like that one. Get this one in there. Get rid of that one. And I spent hours and hours reading through the website's content to do this. It wasn't like a five-minute thing. Anyway, enough about me and on to Moz and Dr. Pete who how could we have a conversation about studies out this doozy of a study from, I don't know what you... 2024. It was updated in 2024. Look at that. Something current and relevant, which is unique for me in general in life. Anyway, from Dr. Pete, charting 10 years of the Google algorithm, and the reason why I like this study is the absolute phenomenal use of visuals in a deep data study. The visual became a hack. That's how good the visual was. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Also, we tried to contextualize the data, why he thinks it was happening and he's cleared his opinion, but I always appreciate that's what you were saying before, why do I care about this? He's trying to show what this might actually mean for you or mean for looking at the SERP. And it's not very long. Not every deep dive needs to be incredibly long. He did it really quickly. Crystal Carter: This again comes back to the tools providers or whoever's supplying the data, what they have at their disposal. So I asked Dr. Pete for some algo information on this, and they've had MozCast for years. He's able to pull on 10 years of data that they've been tracking consistently, and so he's able to pull on the data set. And since he's been doing it consistently, he's able to build on that very quickly. So I asked him for some data and he was like, "Yeah." And just pulled the full data set for me very kindly because he already has that stuff. And I think that people who've been studying something, just like you would have a professor at a university who has been studying, I don't know, the Romans or something for like 15, 20, 30 years, if you have somebody who's been studying the algorithm and using similar data set or using similar tools for 10 years, this ain't their first rodeo. They can see what's new, they can see what's different, they can see when the algo's spicier than it normally is. And Dr. Pete's been somebody who's been doing that for all this time and he's got the chops to write something shorter because he has all of the data behind it. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. He's got that whole, especially around this topic, that intuition that you need in order to be like, okay, I see the data. I know what this means. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Here we go. Let's roll. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's totally good. I also want to shout out, I know this isn't on the sheet or whatever, but speaking of people who've been studying things for a while or particular conversations, I want to shout out Rand Fishkin zero-click studies. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's got a lot of play through the years. Crystal Carter: Right. So he's been studying these for ages. 2019, he published a study about zero-click searches. 2021, he published another study about zero-click searches. 2024, he recently published another study about zero-click searches. And this is something that the SEO space has been fascinated by the entire time, and I think that within his studies, the most recent one, he has a whole section, again, this is super valuable, but he has a whole section that says caveats and data limitations. He also cites his previous two studies, so if you've been following this conversation or if you're new to the conversation, you can go back and read the other articles and see how this has evolved over the time. But yeah, he has a whole section about caveats and limitations. He's got five different caveats to explain all of the different information, all of the other things that he talks about, like click stream panelists might have changed or iOS, there's minimal coverage of mobile iOS devices are currently available within the panel. He explains all of those things, and I think that while some people might think when they're presenting data to clients or whatever, that talking about the caveats might make their study seem less robust, I think that declaring your caveats makes it seem more robust. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. A gazillion percent. Yeah. You knows who's a study unto himself? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Barry's a study unto himself, and to the psychology of the human mind, really. Crystal Carter: I think so. How can he be more efficient? That's what he studies. Efficiency. Mordy Oberstein: I think he should really put his cell phone in his shirt pocket up top. That's why when he has to answer it, it's right there. I don't know why he puts it in his pants pocket like every other person does. I wouldn't. Crystal Carter: I wouldn't. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy News, snappy news. Three for you this week. First up from Barry Schwartz over at SCRoundtable.com. Google Search Console finally drops the page experience reports. So the page experience report in search console is no longer, you can still track the HTTPS report and the corporate files report separately, fine, but the actual page experience report is no more. Per Google, they wrote, "We're removing the page experience report and search console. That page summarized data from the corporate vitals and HTTPS reports, which will continue to be available as they are. We decided to remove this page to reduce unnecessary clutter in search console." Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Barry wrote, and I could not have said it better myself, "I wish they would just say the reason was because SEO is obsessed about it as a ranking factor when in a reality it makes almost zero impact on ranking. But no, Google said it was to reduce unnecessary clutter." Barry nails it on the head. There's nothing else I need to add to that. He just completely nailed it. Wow. Barry going full “scorched-earth” there. Okay. Also from Barry, Schwartz, this time on search engine land, Google site reputation abuse policy now includes first party involvement or oversight of content. So we've seen this before where Google has gone after third party hosted content that really's got nothing to do with the website, like on the coupon sites, yada, yada, yada. To quote, it's new. Yada, yada, yada. Now, Google's saying, yeah, even if you are involved as the website itself, let's say with, I don't know, you hire a third party to manage the content on the website, everything that they're doing is completely under your umbrella. You understand it, you approve it, you sign off on everything. Still a problem. Google also said, this is not algorithmic. They did say that there are algorithmic things in place to make sure that you stay in your lane and focus on what you focus on. Chris Long has a really good article linked to it also on Search Engine Land, where basically saying, "The fact that this is manual and Google can't get rid of this stuff algorithmically points out a really big flaw in how Google's able to handle this content as a whole. We've talked about that on its new, a few times we've griped about that." I completely agree with Chris. Onto Semrush.com. This one from yours, truly. I did a study exploring URL volatility in Google's AI overviews. It's a little data study. We looked at 1500 keywords that produced a AI overview for at least 20 out of 30 or 31 actually days across October, and then pulling out the data around how consistent were the URLs inside the AI overviews. The point being, hey, you might want to target an AI overview, but if your URLs can't be consistently shown there, is it really worth it or not? Now, obviously it, quote, unquote, "It all depends on the keyword." And it does. There's a lot of stats in here. I'll give you some of the top stats that I saw. One, out of all the 1500 keywords that I looked at, 0% of them show the same URLs every single day across the data period. Zero. Not one. 91% of the URLs in the study were at some point removed from the AI overview. That's a lot. We only saw 43% of them return to the AI overview within the data period. They may have returned later. I don't know. But in the data period, only 43% of them ever returned, so more than half left the AI overview, never came back. Also, the average number of consecutive days that a URL's showed inside the AI overview was 3.3 on mobile and 3.9, so like four days on desktop. There is a lot of fluctuation inside of the AI overviews in terms of URLs. Does that mean your URLs are not showing consistently day in, day out? No. Don't know about your specific URLs. You need to track it. I'm just pointing out the average across a relatively limited dataset, but it does point out the need, in my opinion, like I wrote at the end of the article, to really track the heck out of your AI overviews and the URL placement, because it could be, yeah, you're getting in there, but then tomorrow you're not, and the day after you're not, and then you're back again, and how worthwhile is the focus on that? By the way, one more thing we really do need to look at is the CTR. Yes, AI overviews might show up. We have data on that when, how often, blah, blah, blah. URL consistency? Now we have data on that, but what's the CTR? Are people actually engaging with the AI overviews and clicking? Don't know yet, so there's a lot of unknowns in this AI overview picture, but now we have a little bit less unknown with my latest data study. Pat on the back to me, yada, yada, yada. That's this week's snappy news. I can't stop doing the yada, yada, yada thing from Barry. Sorry, Barry. Was stealing your thunder. By the way, for the record. Barry says he does keep his cell phone in his shirt pocket so that it's easier to pull out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but your hands are at your hips. Mordy Oberstein: The whole thing is awkward. Let's say, I don't know, you're leaning over to flush the toilet. It doesn't fall out into the toilet? I'm going to ask him that? Crystal Carter: You ask that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm going to write it on my list of things to ask Barry. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Does your phone fall out in the toilet? If yes, I'm never borrowing it. Not that I ever borrow his phone. Crystal Carter: There's some studies on that. Mordy Oberstein: There probably are studies on that. Crystal Carter: There are. There's studies on how clean people's phones are. I'm just saying. Don't look. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you're looking for a great collection of information and SEO studies and all sorts of things, Backlinko has some really great information for you and Leigh McKenzie who's driving the organic content over at Backlinko will be a great person for you to follow. He's always sharing roundup of all sorts of information around SEO on LinkedIn, so give Leigh over at Backlinko, a Semrush company, a follow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. He also listed his podcast, one of the best podcasts ever. Crystal Carter: He's got great taste. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, great take. This wasn't quid pro quo, by the way. We didn't say, oh, we'll feature. It was organic. We didn't even know. Crystal Carter: Hey, and I tell you what, if you also think that we're one of the best podcasts, leave us a review. Just saying. That's some great data. That's some great data for us and for everybody who's using Spotify or Apple or any of your other favorite podcast channels. Mordy Oberstein: That is quite logical. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter: I appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I'm raising that one eyebrow to be the other Star Trek nerd data person guy. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I've killed the moment. Crystal Carter: I have a lot of Star Trek references. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: All right. In that case, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Oh, you're going to miss us? Don't worry. We're back next week with a new episode. We dive into who and when to hire if you're a digital marketing team. Look forward 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 on the Wix Studio Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or our rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Jess Joyce Leigh McKenzie Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Almost Half of GSC Clicks Go to Hidden Terms - A Study by Ahrefs Google’s Product Reviews Algorithm Update: Winners & Loser s Charting 10 Years of The Google Algorithm News: Google Search Console Finally Drops The Page Experience Report Google site reputation abuse policy now includes first-party involvement or oversight of content Google’s site reputation abuse policy is a band-aid for a bullet wound Exploring URL Volatility in Google's AI Overviews Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Jess Joyce Leigh McKenzie Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Almost Half of GSC Clicks Go to Hidden Terms - A Study by Ahrefs Google’s Product Reviews Algorithm Update: Winners & Loser s Charting 10 Years of The Google Algorithm News: Google Search Console Finally Drops The Page Experience Report Google site reputation abuse policy now includes first-party involvement or oversight of content Google’s site reputation abuse policy is a band-aid for a bullet wound Exploring URL Volatility in Google's AI Overviews Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining this SERP's Up podcast. We're serving up some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the very deeply thorough, data-driven, data dynamic, data diving head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter who's shaking her head like what are you even saying at this point? I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know what he's talking about, man. Like data? Data shmada. I'm winging it, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just trying to tie the topic into your adjectives. Crystal Carter: I'm winging it. Aren't we all? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I've been winging it for 40 years. Crystal Carter: Never did me any harm, as they say. No. Mordy Oberstein: Cholesterol is too high? Eat more of it. Data. Crystal Carter: No, he's not my favorite Next Gen character. You know what? I think over the years it's probably, I mean there's Picard obviously, but I think it's probably going to be Riker's definitely higher up there just because of the idea of Riker-ing over a chair, which I didn't realize until I saw the super cut and I was like, "This is amazing. How did I never see it?" Mordy Oberstein: When you're that tall, that's what you would do. Crystal Carter: And then once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's perfect. Although I think that the actor who plays Data has had some of the widest range, but then there was also... Is it Wil Wheaton or whatever? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, now you'd open up a Pandora's box with Wesley Crusher. Okay. Crystal Carter: Right. Wesley Crusher, just his second act on the Big Bang Theory. I was not expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: So there's that. But then I guess also Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg has happened in recent career. So anyway, so yeah, there we go. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, how we get from data into Star Trek? Crystal Carter: Data. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Data. Oh, that went right over my head. Wow. Wow. I'm like, I'm all down to talk about Star Trek. I just didn't understand how we got here Data. Oh my, wow. I really warfed that. Crystal Carter: You know what we should do this podcast? Make it so Mordy Oberstein: I'm engaged. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight and check out our SEO course over on the Wix studio SEO Learning Hub. But where you can also get tons of deep dives and deep takes across all of the content that the Wix Studio SEO Hub has to offer. As today, we take a hard look at what you should know about an SEO study before drawing any conclusions. While understanding the methodology of a study is huge, the data mindset and how to avoid its pitfalls and know they who wrote the study, why authorship comes into focus. SEO consultant extraordinaire, Jess Joyce will share how she shares complex data with clients and stakeholders. Plus, we'll pick apart a few SEO studies to see what lessons we learn from them and how we approach them. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So like Mike Tyson in a boxing ring, we've got something for you to chew on and it's crunchy as we help you better understand the SEO data crunchers of the world on this 112 episode of SERP's Up. Crystal Carter: That's quite the intro. Quite the intro. Mordy Oberstein: Well, now that I did, I was thinking, what do I do with the data thing? Oh, you're chewing on numbers or crunching on numbers. Okay, I'll go Mike Tyson chewing on people's ears. Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: I should have went Data Star Trek and it is just whoosh. Crystal Carter: Hey, we're going to forge ahead just like Jordy. It'll be fine. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Crystal Carter: Okay. So. Mordy Oberstein: I've got some cues for you, but anyway. Crystal Carter: Oh, I recognize that reference. Okay. Right. Okay. So resistance is futile when it comes to data studies. Basically, when we're working in SEO, we are inundated with data all the time, client data, market data, all sorts of stuff. But how do you sift through all of it? How do you make sense of everything? I know that this is something that Mordy has worked loads on and has written on extensively, so we're going to get into the discussion very quickly. But just as a primer, I tend to think of these studies in three different categories, and I think that they should really be assessed for the value in these different ways as well. So to my mind, SEO data studies tend to fall into a few categories. You have your case studies, which are looking at outcomes for a particular client or project or instance or something like that. Then you have your data study that's looking at large scale data. So for instance, when you're looking at the impact of an algorithm over an entire set of keywords, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have your targeted data study, which is a little bit of a combination of the two. And with case studies, these tend to be centered on the client outcomes. And these mean that there's a particular set of circumstances. So if you're trying to find out whether or not this is valuable for your project and whether or not this is relevant to you, it's very important that you understand exactly what the parameters were of the case study, and they can be incredibly valuable. If you're on a similar vertical, and let's say you're working on, I don't know, a project and it's a retail client, and they sell the same kind of- Mordy Oberstein: Selling Star Trek T-shirts. Crystal Carter: Selling Star Trek T-shirts, right? For Comic-Con or something, right? So let's say that you're that product vertical and there's somebody else who did a case study for the same kind of industry, then you are very likely to take a lot of learnings from that, right? You're facing similar challenges and they can help you figure out how to boldly go where you want to go. Now, it is worth though, bringing in a little bit of skepticism when you're looking at case studies because people don't share everything. They can't. They can't, they couldn't possibly. And they don't share all of the things that go into it. So it could be that they did this project and it was all SEO and nothing else was involved. Or it could be that yes, there was SEO involved and of course it contributed to it, but there was also 20,000 pounds worth of paid put on it per day or something like that. Or it could have been that there was also a digital PR campaign that they didn't mention. Or it could be that there were various other things behind it. It could be that somebody was on TV. I've seen incredible SEO lifts because somebody was on television and had a big PR spike. So that is something that's worth thinking about. Yes, there's probably some learnings that you can take from a case study, but don't always expect exactly the same results if you implement the same things that they're advocating for, because it's impossible to know everything that went into that particular instance. That is a very, very big, it depends in that particular case. And I can see you nodding your head, Mordy. I don't know if you want to jump in on- Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. You're on a roll. You're going, I'm with you. I'm with all hockey stick growth in my case study. Okay, okay. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And yeah, they can't show you all of the things. And sometimes one of the big things that can vary, particularly when I look at case studies, is the market. So sometimes in emerging markets you'll see people and they're like, yeah, we did this particular thing and we saw 7000% growth. And then if you tried to do the same thing in an established market like the US or the UK or France, Germany, et cetera, then you might have a challenge making the same kind of impact because there are more competitors in the mix. And so that can be a real challenge as well. It's not to undermine what the folks who are getting those gains have done. Well done, fantastic and well done. But it can sometimes be a challenge to do the same thing in a more established, more competitive market. So that's something to consider with case studies. So pay attention to them, but don't necessarily expect the same results. Data studies tend to come from folks with large data sets to work from and within the SEO space, a lot of times this comes from tools teams. So this will come from folks like Ahrefs, from StatMoz, SE Ranking, Semrush, and lots of folks are doing great data studies here and they provide a great amount of data for algorithm updates in particular, or when certain SERP features emerge, and they can say, this SERP feature is visible. So I've certainly paid a lot of attention to Dr. Pete will be like, oh, featured snippets have gone up 15% or they've dropped 20%, or things like that. And they're able to give you a broad understanding of what's going on around the web. These are really, really interesting. The challenge with these studies is that it's important to remember that there's limitations that are based on the tool. So sometimes tools providers will have a certain data set that they're looking at, or they will have certain features that they're able to see that maybe others aren't able to see, or maybe there's a certain feature that they don't see, or maybe there's certain markets that they're not looking at. So for instance, I spend a lot of time looking at Semrush. Semrush doesn't cover every market. It's a great, fantastic, wonderful tool, but it doesn't cover every market. So if they're less strong in your market, then it might be less easy to see what's going on there. And if they don't store data on a region that you're working in, for instance, then the data set might be slightly less relevant for you. So it could still have an impact, but it might not be a like-for-like relevancy for you. And it doesn't mean that you should ignore the data. It's worth carrying out your own experiments to see if you can replicate the findings. Absolutely. But you need to think about assessing your own data set and coming up with your own set of benchmarks for when things are changing or where there's visibility changes or which competitors tend to have the same impact as you and those sorts of things. It's worth looking at that when you're comparing your own results with large-scale data studies. Mordy Oberstein: The data, just a peek behind the scenes on the big data studies, they are very difficult and you need to pay attention to what they write. Usually they do at the beginning, sometimes at the end, sometimes not at all. If it's not there at all, run. What the methodology of the study was. What kind of keywords did they use? For example, let's say, I don't know, you have, just forget a study for a second. You have the SEO weather tools. So you have MozCast, and let's say you have the Semrush sensor, and they'll often show different things and it's because they're built on different types of keywords. Moz uses high search volume keywords on purpose because they think that that simulates being more like your average user on the average day. Whereas Semrush is looking at normalized keywords to make it look like, okay, this is the web as a whole. Both make sense. They're just both very different. So you have to look at the types of how many keywords, what types of keywords. It's very easy to get lost in the verbiage too. Oh, we looked at 5 million data points. What you might have looked at was not 5 million keywords. You might have looked at one keyword 5 million times, for 5 million days, which is a different kind of data than looking at a hundred thousand keywords for a hundred thousand days. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It's very confusing. They're not always very transparent about how they on purpose. And also it's easy to get this data wrong. I cannot tell you, and big kudos to the Semrush team for this, how many times I've done a data poll with the Semrush team, looked at the data like something's not right here. And I don't even know. I just know something isn't right. Let's dig in and see did something go wrong somewhere or are we actually comfortable with the results? I'm like, oh, actually what we ended up doing was there was an over-emphasis on this type of keyword or there was an over whatever, whatever on this. Let's try to adjust the data set and run it again and see, but you need to have a team that's willing to do that and is dedicated to do that. And somebody like me, or let's say like Patrick Stocks or like Dr. Pete who are working at these tool who are- Crystal Carter: Marcus Tober. Mordy Oberstein: SEO people. Marcus Tober, et cetera totally. Who are big data SEO people who could say, no, no, no, I know just looking at this, something's off somewhere. Let's re-figure this thing out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You definitely have to dig into those. And I think that the tricky thing is with the big data studies is that very often what people want to hear about is the brand new thing. They want to hear about the brand new thing. It was- Mordy Oberstein: It was the hardest thing to pull. Crystal Carter: AI overviews. Exactly, exactly. Right? Because you don't have historic data and you've just set up this tool to identify it on the SERP. So for instance, AI overviews is something that's on there and everybody wants to know what's going on with AI overviews and there's various different studies that keep coming out and there's various tools that are trying to measure it, but they're just tricky to keep up with and they're tricky to quantify it. Mordy Oberstein: We spoke about this on the previous podcast episode about this and it was in our recent Searchlight newsletter, make sure you subscribe, but in the newsletter we talked about, yeah, the studies are great, but if you start thinking into it a little bit more, all these different tool providers are trying to catch up with each other. They did a study, we need to do a study. They did a study, we need to do a study. And that's helpful for them and it's good, it's good for everybody. You get data, they get clicks and likes and whatever and signups and whatever, but there also is a little bit of a need for deeper data and don't think that with that data you have the full story. You don't yet. No one has it yet. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right, right, right. Entirely. And the methodology point that you brought up is super, super important as well. Understanding, we looked at SERP results in the United States, we looked at the health vertical, we looked at newspaper sites or things like that. Because like you said, sometimes they're like, oh, we looked at 700,000 keywords. Well, for some websites that's just their ranking keywords. I literally had just logged into Semrush and I don't know, sometimes they have URLs that are there, and the first one I clicked, wildlifeorg.com, they rank for 300,000 keywords. So if you said, we assess 300,000 keywords, you're still only assessing one website. Mordy Oberstein: You could assess 5 million keywords. But if they're all the same kind of keyword, how to buy socks, how to buy pants, how to buy a shirt, how to buy glasses, how to buy earrings, how to buy a tree, how to buy a light, how to buy a computer. I'm just looking into the things I'm looking at right now. Crystal Carter: You're just naming things in the room. Mordy Oberstein: It's all going to be the same kind of SERP of the same kind of results, Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. So it's really important to think about that. And that's a really important thing when you're thinking about any kind of information. In academic studies, they always have a section that talks about methodology. Mordy Oberstein: And it's called, by the way, limitations. That's the name of it. Because every methodology has limitations. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have your variables. It's all part of the scientific method. All these studies are using scientific method. So you have your hypothesis, you have your variables, you have your controls, you have your criteria, you have all of that sort of stuff. And it's really important that you're looking at that. Mordy Oberstein: $1,000 to the SEO tool who instead of calling their section methodology, calls it what the academics call limitations. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's not a good marketing thing. You would never do that. That's why I'm offering a thousand dollars. I'm not saying you should do that, by the way. Crystal Carter: I mean, you might have somebody calling you up for a check. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right, so now moving on to my favorite type of study, which I think is my favorite type of, and I think a lot of SEOs really like these ones. So I'm calling these targeted studies. This is my verbiage, my terminology, but these are my favorite. This is essentially where people are combining the best of a case study set up with the best of a big data studies and they scale them up. So Cyrus Shepard is known for this type of research. He did a big, big case study on title tags. They looked at lots of title tags and variations on them, and they tested all of these title tags and said, "This has this. According to the data that we have in 60% of cases, this is the outcome. In 70% of cases, this is the outcome." That sort of thing. Lily Ray is known for her studies where she monitors whole cohorts of websites that are affected by the same algorithm updates. So she's been studying winners and losers, and so she'll look at those sorts of things like individual websites and then she'll do a deep dive into single websites as well. This is something that you look at as well, Mordy, when you're doing your studies as well. So you'll say this is the big picture. This is a case study based on this one particular one. Glenn Gabe is somebody who's great for this as well, where he will share lots of information of the helpful content updates seems to be having this impact at scale. Here are a few people that I've been watching who are having that situation. The thing that's tricky about some of these ones, and I think they're great, I think they're wonderful, but the thing that's tricky about these ones is if you are monitoring some sites and you're not inside the site, then sometimes you're flying a little bit blind in terms of the] study. Mordy Oberstein: It's anecdotal or can be anecdotal. Crystal Carter: Well, so I had a situation where, so at MozCon I was talking about forums and all of the data that I could see from all the tools was telling me that there was definitely a trend of around September in 2023 loads of forum sites saw a big uptick in terms of traffic. Reddit saw a huge hockey stick and loads of legacy forums saw this as well. And the numbers that I found in terms of the numbers was from one particular website said that it was up 7000% according to one SEO tool. At MozCon, one of the guys from the website was like, I'm not sure what they're measuring because I am only seeing two or three times as much traffic, not 7000% more traffic. We did see an uptick, a big uptick, but not exactly those numbers. So that I think is really, really interesting. So sometimes with some of the tools, again, depending on the tools that people are using for some of these targeted studies, sometimes there's limitations with regards to that. So when people will share information, it's very important that they share what kind of tools that they're using. So for instance, Lily Ray very often uses Systrix and she'll say, this is what Systrix is showing. And Glenn Gabe always shares which tool he's using, and sometimes he'll show multiple tools as well. And that's really important to see as well because if you have a case where somebody's like, well, that's not what's reflecting in my traffic. I know you're looking at this website, but our website actually isn't seeing that. If you actually end up speaking to the SEO as I did in that case, then you can say, oh, well the tool is showing me this. Based on the evidence I've got, this is what I've got. But yeah, those are the challenges with those, but they're very, very useful for keeping track of trends. Mordy Oberstein: I love those. I love those a lot. And what's great about what Lily and what Glenn do, and Cyrus, that they're not just tracking five or six sites. Glenn has, I don't know, an index of 400 sites. I'm making up the number. I don't know the exact number he has, but it's a lot. It's a lot of sites. So it's not just a small sample size. But yeah, it can be like what they're seeing and what you're seeing could be very, very different. Looking at a pattern within a core update kind of thing, and I find 10 examples of this, if I write up a post highlighting two or three of those examples, the first thing I try to start, this is just what I'm seeing. This is one sliver of the entire internet, sliver of a sliver of the internet. You could be seeing something completely different, and you probably are because there's probably a million things happening at one time. Crystal Carter: All the time. I think it's really, really valuable. I think particularly for folks who are trying to do the day-to-day, it can be really, really valuable to have the combination because I think that if you have somebody just giving you loads of data, sometimes I'm like, well, now what? What do I do with all this information? So even if you do have somebody who's like, this is the sliver of what I've seen. Based on this data, what do we actually do now? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: It's really, really- Mordy Oberstein: That's a whole other can of worms. Crystal Carter: Yes. It's really, really useful. But I think also data just becomes increasingly more important for SEOs and understanding these studies and being able to report and tell stories in terms of this is really, really important. I think Lily Ray is somebody who in particular, she recently changed her job title. She's head of strategy and research, not just strategy, but research. So that's recognition for all of the studies that she's been doing. And I've seen lots more SEOs who have switched either to being data folks or have added that as part of their role or managing teams there as well. So being able to understand these data studies, being able to write your own, being able to assess data coherently is super, super important to SEOs today. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to end off with a quick point that Barry Adams once made, having some data is better than having no data. None of the data is perfect. All of it points to a certain direction. It's all, this is the trend or this is where things are heading. It's very directional. Even if it's not correlation doesn't mean it caused it. Blah, blah, blah. Forget that discussion. Even if it's not that discussion, it's still not perfect. It's still not going to be a hundred percent. So take it all in the right framework and the right frame of mind. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And the second thing is data studies are like your family, everyone's got an agenda. So keep in mind who's writing it and why, and that's all I'm going to say. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, moving on from that little spicy little bit. Sometimes we need to share complex data with our own audiences and with our own clients or with our own teams. How do you go about doing that? Well, here's Jess Joyce about how or what things you should consider when translating complex data into content your audience, whoever that might be, internal, external, whatever, can actually understand. Jess Joyce: So you guys have asked what things should you consider when translating complex data into content your audience can understand whether that be an article or sharing data in a report, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And how I go about that. So I think it's the same approach that I take to every piece of content is try to land people with context. I think context is everything that search engines are missing because when you're Googling something, it can mean so many different things, which I know they've added updates for, which is great, but it can still mean so many other things and other contexts that go into things. So landing things with context really helps. We're starting to see that being a noob about it is probably the wrong approach to take to it. Answering the what is content out of the gate is just not a great idea, but ensuring that your audience, so doing your audience checking and such is really good to do. Knowing your ICP and all those marketing terms so that you know who you're talking to so you can use the same terminology that they're using is really helpful. And then also making sure that you use examples in that, whether that be quotes or visualizations or something to engage the user throughout it and making sure you highlight the key points that you want to ensure that you nail down with whatever piece of content that you're writing or data, because especially if it's more complex, I don't want to read through 300 pages of a complex data report when I can just get the TLDR. We tell folks all the time to write out key summaries, the key takeaways that top stuff that's really helpful with like Nerd Wallet content, they do that really well. So I think translating that into content that anyone can understand with summaries or top tips is really helpful for everyone and not just search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much. Jess. Make sure to give Jess a follow-over on social media, link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. It's interesting to point out that change in what people are expecting from when you're transmitting that content and how you start off. I agree the start off point is a little bit higher level than what it used to be, so do that, which is good for complex stuff. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think also presumably you can just link people. If they're not sure, You can just, you don't know what this is, here's a link. But I think also we have tools that are able to cover that. So I get complicated documents from my insurance company about various different things. If I don't know what that word means, then I just go, "ChatGPT, what does that mean?" And it goes, "It means this." And I go, "Thank you." And then you can move forward. But I think that you want to spend the bulk of the communication dissecting the complicated ideas. That's what you need to do. And I don't think you need to not necessarily explain yourself. You can qualify it, you can certainly explain all your acronyms and things like that, but you can jump right in. And I think that it's really important and really valuable to have that as a skill because there's been tons of times when I've talked to clients and you give them data and they're like, what is this? And if you're not able to dissect it, if you're not able to explain yourself, then it can become a big challenge for folks. Mordy Oberstein: Huge challenge. Now talk is cheap, and I mentioned this on social media before, it's why I talk a lot. If talk was expensive, I wouldn't do as much talking as I currently do. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: That said, why don't we have a look at some actual SEO studies that talk about why we thought they were effective so that you can approach SEO studies in a brand new light when you approach them with a segment called It's New. Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: It's new because it's a new way for you to approach SEO studies. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. That because it's a new thing on the SERP, which is why we need a next segment. Crystal Carter: Or a new study. Mordy Oberstein: Or a new study. Yeah, these are all old, really old. Crystal Carter: This one's our 2022. Mordy Oberstein: I went with what I knew was good. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I mean I could have gone the other direction. Here's a bunch of bad ones, let's bash them. That would've been good radio. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: But I knew you wouldn't appreciate that. Crystal Carter: All right, what you got? Mordy Oberstein: What do I got? I got from 2022, but it's a famous SEO study from Patrick Stocks who was a booby over at Ahrefs, almost half of Google Search Console clicks go to hit in terms of study by Ahrefs, and it's one of these seminal SEO studies where we learn that, wait a second, the GSC data isn't as transparent as you actually think, and it's not as much data there for you as you actually think, and that's not all there like you might actually think. And it really changed the minds or the mindset of some SEOs' take towards Google Search Console. And the things I liked about it was it gave you practical tips. It wasn't just like, here's big data for big data's sake. There was a purpose. We rely on search console to X extent. Maybe that's not actually the case and the author is super trustworthy. Patrick is super-duper... If Patrick says it as it pertains to SEO, like I don't know about Patrick's talking about comedy, if Patrick's an expert, he's very funny though, but for SEO data, take it because he's great. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. I'm looking at this study and there's a couple of great trust signals and great high value signals that they have straight out the gate. So first of all, they have Patrick Stocks who's an established SEO author and it's got in his bio and he's done some great stuff and he's worked for the team for ages. Then it says it's been reviewed by two other people who are also solid, fantastic folks. So in the first paragraph they explain why you should check out this study because most SEOs consider Google Search Console as their source of trust. What if I told you Google Search Console doesn't tell you all of the keywords that you get traffic from. In fact, the tool doesn't show you a term for nearly half the clicks. That, now I'm hooked. I'm interested. They've established the issue that they're trying to address. So that's their hypothesis is that. And then they say these instances of hidden terms account for 46% of all clicks in our study, and our study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. So they've told you the data, they've told you the websites, they've told you the scale of it, they've told you all of that sort of stuff within the first, completely above the fold, it tells you all of that sort of stuff. Also, it says that they last updated in November 2022. So this is also really useful as well. So in internet time, November '22, which Google Search Console, that's probably fine. That's probably not the difference, that probably hasn't changed much between now and then, but it's worth double checking or something if there's been any updates to that, if there's been any updates around this conversation, if you're interested in this particular topic. Also, and this tells you the parameters of it that basically this is a combination study. This is one of those targeted studies where basically they've got big scale data and they've got account data as well, and then you can take from that what you want, but they laid out all their cards on the table. Those are great trust signals. And as somebody with a brain, I can go through and I can go, okay, based on all of this, I will now assess your study and see how relevant this is to my particular situation or how interesting this is, and I can compare and contrast what I see in my Google Search Console with what you've got here. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So great study. Okay, number two comes from some dude named Mordy and I chose this one not because I'm narcissistic because I was looking for three quick examples so I can get on with my day. Crystal Carter: Lazy Mordy Oberstein: Time efficient. Crystal Carter: Don't work harder, work smarter. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Hey, that's our newsletter segment. Market smarter, not harder. Google's product reviews algorithm update winners and losers. This comes back from 2021, it's an article from SEJ. The reason why I included this one is not because it's a great study and it's fantastic. It's that there's an entire section, my approach to analyzing the update was specifically word, I found five or six websites that showed this pattern. I was very hesitant to write about to begin with because that's not a lot of sites. But it was interesting, and I literally wrote somewhere, here, to be clear, what I'm about to share is based on my qualitative analysis. It is not a definitive study based on deep data. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Take it for what it is. So that transparency was great. Even the authorship is so-so. Crystal Carter: That Mordy guy, I don't know- Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what he is thinking. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. But yeah, no, I think that that's super important though because it is useful and I think that the other thing is that even though it's a few websites that you're looking at, you've gone into them extensively and that amount of research is something that is valuable and the way that you compare them also gives people the ability to compare themselves to that set of criteria. Mordy Oberstein: So in comparing different websites to each other and their rankings after an update and why maybe one went up and one went down. And showing, by the way, there's correlation between the two websites. There's inverse ranking patterns. Like, okay, well you could see in some of the screenshots in the article, they're just opposite patterns. They clearly Google, we like this one, don't like that one. Get this one in there. Get rid of that one. And I spent hours and hours reading through the website's content to do this. It wasn't like a five-minute thing. Anyway, enough about me and on to Moz and Dr. Pete who how could we have a conversation about studies out this doozy of a study from, I don't know what you... 2024. It was updated in 2024. Look at that. Something current and relevant, which is unique for me in general in life. Anyway, from Dr. Pete, charting 10 years of the Google algorithm, and the reason why I like this study is the absolute phenomenal use of visuals in a deep data study. The visual became a hack. That's how good the visual was. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Also, we tried to contextualize the data, why he thinks it was happening and he's cleared his opinion, but I always appreciate that's what you were saying before, why do I care about this? He's trying to show what this might actually mean for you or mean for looking at the SERP. And it's not very long. Not every deep dive needs to be incredibly long. He did it really quickly. Crystal Carter: This again comes back to the tools providers or whoever's supplying the data, what they have at their disposal. So I asked Dr. Pete for some algo information on this, and they've had MozCast for years. He's able to pull on 10 years of data that they've been tracking consistently, and so he's able to pull on the data set. And since he's been doing it consistently, he's able to build on that very quickly. So I asked him for some data and he was like, "Yeah." And just pulled the full data set for me very kindly because he already has that stuff. And I think that people who've been studying something, just like you would have a professor at a university who has been studying, I don't know, the Romans or something for like 15, 20, 30 years, if you have somebody who's been studying the algorithm and using similar data set or using similar tools for 10 years, this ain't their first rodeo. They can see what's new, they can see what's different, they can see when the algo's spicier than it normally is. And Dr. Pete's been somebody who's been doing that for all this time and he's got the chops to write something shorter because he has all of the data behind it. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. He's got that whole, especially around this topic, that intuition that you need in order to be like, okay, I see the data. I know what this means. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Here we go. Let's roll. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's totally good. I also want to shout out, I know this isn't on the sheet or whatever, but speaking of people who've been studying things for a while or particular conversations, I want to shout out Rand Fishkin zero-click studies. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's got a lot of play through the years. Crystal Carter: Right. So he's been studying these for ages. 2019, he published a study about zero-click searches. 2021, he published another study about zero-click searches. 2024, he recently published another study about zero-click searches. And this is something that the SEO space has been fascinated by the entire time, and I think that within his studies, the most recent one, he has a whole section, again, this is super valuable, but he has a whole section that says caveats and data limitations. He also cites his previous two studies, so if you've been following this conversation or if you're new to the conversation, you can go back and read the other articles and see how this has evolved over the time. But yeah, he has a whole section about caveats and limitations. He's got five different caveats to explain all of the different information, all of the other things that he talks about, like click stream panelists might have changed or iOS, there's minimal coverage of mobile iOS devices are currently available within the panel. He explains all of those things, and I think that while some people might think when they're presenting data to clients or whatever, that talking about the caveats might make their study seem less robust, I think that declaring your caveats makes it seem more robust. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. A gazillion percent. Yeah. You knows who's a study unto himself? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Barry's a study unto himself, and to the psychology of the human mind, really. Crystal Carter: I think so. How can he be more efficient? That's what he studies. Efficiency. Mordy Oberstein: I think he should really put his cell phone in his shirt pocket up top. That's why when he has to answer it, it's right there. I don't know why he puts it in his pants pocket like every other person does. I wouldn't. Crystal Carter: I wouldn't. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy News, snappy news. Three for you this week. First up from Barry Schwartz over at SCRoundtable.com. Google Search Console finally drops the page experience reports. So the page experience report in search console is no longer, you can still track the HTTPS report and the corporate files report separately, fine, but the actual page experience report is no more. Per Google, they wrote, "We're removing the page experience report and search console. That page summarized data from the corporate vitals and HTTPS reports, which will continue to be available as they are. We decided to remove this page to reduce unnecessary clutter in search console." Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Barry wrote, and I could not have said it better myself, "I wish they would just say the reason was because SEO is obsessed about it as a ranking factor when in a reality it makes almost zero impact on ranking. But no, Google said it was to reduce unnecessary clutter." Barry nails it on the head. There's nothing else I need to add to that. He just completely nailed it. Wow. Barry going full “scorched-earth” there. Okay. Also from Barry, Schwartz, this time on search engine land, Google site reputation abuse policy now includes first party involvement or oversight of content. So we've seen this before where Google has gone after third party hosted content that really's got nothing to do with the website, like on the coupon sites, yada, yada, yada. To quote, it's new. Yada, yada, yada. Now, Google's saying, yeah, even if you are involved as the website itself, let's say with, I don't know, you hire a third party to manage the content on the website, everything that they're doing is completely under your umbrella. You understand it, you approve it, you sign off on everything. Still a problem. Google also said, this is not algorithmic. They did say that there are algorithmic things in place to make sure that you stay in your lane and focus on what you focus on. Chris Long has a really good article linked to it also on Search Engine Land, where basically saying, "The fact that this is manual and Google can't get rid of this stuff algorithmically points out a really big flaw in how Google's able to handle this content as a whole. We've talked about that on its new, a few times we've griped about that." I completely agree with Chris. Onto Semrush.com. This one from yours, truly. I did a study exploring URL volatility in Google's AI overviews. It's a little data study. We looked at 1500 keywords that produced a AI overview for at least 20 out of 30 or 31 actually days across October, and then pulling out the data around how consistent were the URLs inside the AI overviews. The point being, hey, you might want to target an AI overview, but if your URLs can't be consistently shown there, is it really worth it or not? Now, obviously it, quote, unquote, "It all depends on the keyword." And it does. There's a lot of stats in here. I'll give you some of the top stats that I saw. One, out of all the 1500 keywords that I looked at, 0% of them show the same URLs every single day across the data period. Zero. Not one. 91% of the URLs in the study were at some point removed from the AI overview. That's a lot. We only saw 43% of them return to the AI overview within the data period. They may have returned later. I don't know. But in the data period, only 43% of them ever returned, so more than half left the AI overview, never came back. Also, the average number of consecutive days that a URL's showed inside the AI overview was 3.3 on mobile and 3.9, so like four days on desktop. There is a lot of fluctuation inside of the AI overviews in terms of URLs. Does that mean your URLs are not showing consistently day in, day out? No. Don't know about your specific URLs. You need to track it. I'm just pointing out the average across a relatively limited dataset, but it does point out the need, in my opinion, like I wrote at the end of the article, to really track the heck out of your AI overviews and the URL placement, because it could be, yeah, you're getting in there, but then tomorrow you're not, and the day after you're not, and then you're back again, and how worthwhile is the focus on that? By the way, one more thing we really do need to look at is the CTR. Yes, AI overviews might show up. We have data on that when, how often, blah, blah, blah. URL consistency? Now we have data on that, but what's the CTR? Are people actually engaging with the AI overviews and clicking? Don't know yet, so there's a lot of unknowns in this AI overview picture, but now we have a little bit less unknown with my latest data study. Pat on the back to me, yada, yada, yada. That's this week's snappy news. I can't stop doing the yada, yada, yada thing from Barry. Sorry, Barry. Was stealing your thunder. By the way, for the record. Barry says he does keep his cell phone in his shirt pocket so that it's easier to pull out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but your hands are at your hips. Mordy Oberstein: The whole thing is awkward. Let's say, I don't know, you're leaning over to flush the toilet. It doesn't fall out into the toilet? I'm going to ask him that? Crystal Carter: You ask that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm going to write it on my list of things to ask Barry. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Does your phone fall out in the toilet? If yes, I'm never borrowing it. Not that I ever borrow his phone. Crystal Carter: There's some studies on that. Mordy Oberstein: There probably are studies on that. Crystal Carter: There are. There's studies on how clean people's phones are. I'm just saying. Don't look. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you're looking for a great collection of information and SEO studies and all sorts of things, Backlinko has some really great information for you and Leigh McKenzie who's driving the organic content over at Backlinko will be a great person for you to follow. He's always sharing roundup of all sorts of information around SEO on LinkedIn, so give Leigh over at Backlinko, a Semrush company, a follow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. He also listed his podcast, one of the best podcasts ever. Crystal Carter: He's got great taste. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, great take. This wasn't quid pro quo, by the way. We didn't say, oh, we'll feature. It was organic. We didn't even know. Crystal Carter: Hey, and I tell you what, if you also think that we're one of the best podcasts, leave us a review. Just saying. That's some great data. That's some great data for us and for everybody who's using Spotify or Apple or any of your other favorite podcast channels. Mordy Oberstein: That is quite logical. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter: I appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I'm raising that one eyebrow to be the other Star Trek nerd data person guy. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I've killed the moment. Crystal Carter: I have a lot of Star Trek references. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: All right. In that case, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Oh, you're going to miss us? Don't worry. We're back next week with a new episode. We dive into who and when to hire if you're a digital marketing team. Look forward 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 on the Wix Studio Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or our 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

Abby Gleason is an SEO leader driving organic growth for SaaS and eCommerce brands since 2017. She is currently a senior SEO product manager at Upwork. Abby loves to share what she learns, and her insights have been featured in Moz, Search Engine Land, and Women in Tech SEO. Abby Gleason Senior SEO Product Manager at Upwork Abby Gleason is an SEO leader driving organic growth for SaaS and eCommerce brands since 2017. She is currently a senior SEO product manager at Upwork. Abby loves to share what she learns, and her insights have been featured in Moz, Search Engine Land, and Women in Tech SEO. Articles & Resources 7 May 2024 SEO lessons from Reddit: Takeaways for your own content strategy 19 Oct 2023 What is keyword difficulty and why does it matter for SEO? 13 Jun 2023 How to use TikTok for SEO keyword research 13 Apr 2023 How to find trending keywords for SEO campaigns Resources Abby Gleason Keyword difficulty assessment matrix Complete this matrix to get a fully-reasoned breakdown of how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keywords in the SERPs. Get 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

Alla is product manager at Wix. Best known for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, she is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. Alla also collaborates with various teams and contributes to the development of multiple products and features. Alla Avgustinov Product Manager, Wix Alla is product manager at Wix. Best known for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, she is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. Alla also collaborates with various teams and contributes to the development of multiple products and features. Articles & Resources 24 Sept 2024 Generate additional revenue streams with Wix & Google AdSense Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Jandira is a technical SEO A/B testing consultant. She works to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites, delivering profitable, attributable results. She also enjoys staying on top of SEO industry news and providing SEO advice to small minority businesses. Jandira Neto SEO Testing Consultant at SearchPilot Jandira is a technical SEO A/B testing consultant. She works to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites, delivering profitable, attributable results. She also enjoys staying on top of SEO industry news and providing SEO advice to small minority businesses. Articles & Resources 19 Dec 2023 SEO A/B testing: Experiment for superior title tags and meta descriptions Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Bengü is the SEO team lead at Popupsmart, where she consistently seeks innovative strategies to enhance website performance, increase organic rankings, and maximize conversion rates. She also enjoys staying up-to-date on the latest developments in the SEO world. Bengü Sarıca Dinçer SEO Team Lead at Popupsmart Bengü is the SEO team lead at Popupsmart, where she consistently seeks innovative strategies to enhance website performance, increase organic rankings, and maximize conversion rates. She also enjoys staying up-to-date on the latest developments in the SEO world. Articles & Resources 22 Nov 2023 Automate backlink monitoring for free with Google Sheets and GA4 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

Dr. Marie Haynes has been helping businesses perform well in Google's ever changing algorithms since 2008. A recognized leader in the SEO industry, digital marketers around the world use her book and checklist to evaluate website quality like a Google quality rater. Marie Haynes Owner, Marie Haynes Consulting Inc. Dr. Marie Haynes has been helping businesses perform well in Google's ever changing algorithms since 2008. A recognized leader in the SEO industry, digital marketers around the world use her book and checklist to evaluate website quality like a Google quality rater. Articles & Resources 11 Oct 2022 According to Google: How to recover from a core update 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

Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that works with some of the worlds most successful brands. He's also the author of Create Once. Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too. Ross Simmonds CEO of Foundation Marketing Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that works with some of the worlds most successful brands. He's also the author of Create Once. Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too . Articles & Resources 16 Jan 2025 How to use AI to win at social media marketing in 2025 9 Apr 2024 Content distribution 101: What it is and how to use it 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