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

Flora Bazie is a bilingual (EN/FR) digital accessibility expert and speaker. She helps organizations meet legal compliance, boost SEO, and design for all abilities. Founder of LinoraTech Inc., She empowers and inspires teams and professionals. Flora Bazie CEO, Digital Accessibility Expert at LinoraTech Inc. Flora Bazie is a bilingual (EN/FR) digital accessibility expert and speaker. She helps organizations meet legal compliance, boost SEO, and design for all abilities. Founder of LinoraTech Inc. , She empowers and inspires teams and professionals. Articles & Resources 14 May 2025 The European Accessibility Act: A practical guide for compliance & SEO Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

Optimizing for accessibility and SEO? Yes. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss accessibility standards. Dive into why the standards matter for marketing and beyond and how they overlap with doing good SEO. Katherine Watier Ong, owner of WO Strategies, stops by to walk you through the integration process of proper accessibility in technical SEO. Plus, Wix’s own Neil Osman joins to discuss the future of accessibility technology and shares plenty of strategies along the way. Tune in as we grant you access to insights on why accessibility on your website means reliability to the user on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Real talk on SEO and accessibility Optimizing for accessibility and SEO? Yes. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss accessibility standards. Dive into why the standards matter for marketing and beyond and how they overlap with doing good SEO. Katherine Watier Ong, owner of WO Strategies, stops by to walk you through the integration process of proper accessibility in technical SEO. Plus, Wix’s own Neil Osman joins to discuss the future of accessibility technology and shares plenty of strategies along the way. Tune in as we grant you access to insights on why accessibility on your website means reliability to the user on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 87 | May 16, 2024 | 60 MIN 00:00 / 1:00:03 This week’s guests Katherine Watier Ong Katherine Watier Ong owns WO Strategies LLC, a boutique organic traffic consultancy. WO Strategies is a DC-based organic traffic marketing partner and trainer to primarily science-based, enterprise-sized organizations. We focus on making sure scientific answers are discoverable in search. Before starting her business, she built and ran Ketchum PR's online marketing and analytics team, servicing their clients globally. She has developed award-winning campaigns and worked with organizations ranging from federal agencies, foreign governments, startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies focused on G2C, B2B, and B2C audiences. She has spoken about online marketing issues, AI, and search engine optimization for the Digital Strategy Summit, Voice Global, BrightonSEO, Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Online Marketing Summit, the American Marketing Association, Public Relations Society of America, DC Digital Capital Week, and a variety of other events and conferences. She hosts the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, focusing on the soft skills required for success in digital marketing. Neil Osman As a visually impaired veteran front-end developer, web accessibility is very important to me. I've been messing with accessibility practices for more than two decades now, and still feel the excitement each morning. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever and accessible, ask whatever you want, out there on social media. She'll always be happy to answer your SEO questions because she is accessible. She's the head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everyone. I will ask to answer some questions. I will not answer every question. I'm just going to put that out there right now. Mordy Obertstein: No, but you know there are people out there on the social media space, "I'm an influencer. I'm not answering your questions. I'm not talking to you." Crystal Carter: That's true. That's true. That's true. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you're accessible. You'll talk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I talk to people. I don't hide away. And also, I get people in my DMs sometimes. Also, just want to shout out. Okay, so somebody messaged me and they were like, "Oh, can you help me with this thing?" Or whatever, and I was like, "I don't think I'm your girl for this particular thing," but I sent the recommendation over to Crystal Waddle. She was like, yeah, this is like a great recommend. So I think that sometimes- Mordy Obertstein: The great union of Crystals. Crystal Carter: Yes, she's one of the fantastic and SEO Crystals. We are shine brightly wherever we go. And yeah, I think that that's something that maybe just remember that if you're not able to help someone, then maybe you can point them in the right direction. That's always great and it's valuable for everybody, and I think that that's going to be a great project. So shout out to Crystal Waddle there, whose doing some cool stuff. Mordy Obertstein: She is. She's great. Crystal Carter: She's great. Mordy Obertstein: By the way, on the Crystal thing, is there a monthly Crystals of SEO media? Because I will tell you, I was talking to Crystal Ortiz about this, another SEO Crystal. I don't know any Crystals outside of SEO, but in SEO, I know tons of Crystals. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? It's because there's a lot of SEOs who are millennials. And basically in the eighties there was, I'm just putting myself out here, but basically in the eighties there were a lot of kids named Crystal because of Dynasty. So there was Crystal and Alexis on Dynasty. I met an Alexis and she was like, "I'm also named after Dynasty." So when I was growing up, there was Crystal C, Crystal B, Crystal L. There were Crystals in all the classes. I think it's like there was a lot of Kylie's who were born in the nineties, for instance. I'm guessing maybe there's some kids named Dua who are born around now. There's a lot of kids who were born in the nineties who were named Logan after Wolverine from all of the action- Mordy Obertstein: Oh really? Crystal Carter: ... yeah, I know a couple of Logans. Mordy Obertstein: I like that name. That's a good name. Crystal Carter: It's a good name. Mordy Obertstein: By the way, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Zales. No, it's brought to you by, Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also run accessibility audit on your website with the accessibility wizard built into the Wix and Wix studio platforms. Catch instances where you left out alt text have poor color contrast and more all in one click with our accessibility wizard. There's no actual wizard of accessibility. It's not like a Merlin doesn't pop up. It's a tool. So if you're expecting a wizard to come out of nowhere and fix your accessibility, that's not what actually happens. But it would be amazing if there was a dude with a long white beard and a big stick who did. Also, accessibility Moses the way I'm describing it. Crystal Carter: That's all. He could part the traffic and separate the organic from the bots. Mordy Obertstein: Thou shalt not pass with thy poor accessibility. This bridge, right? Going with another wizard. Crystal Carter: Right. And it'll be easy to use if you're on a tablet. Mordy Obertstein: Oh, like, hey, we've gone off the rails. By the way, we're talking about accessibility in SEO this week in case you haven't figured it out. But there's an tremendous amount of overlap as we get into when optimizing for accessibility is optimizing for SEO. Why having an accessible website is both good manners and good marketing, and are there signals of a more accessible Google? WL strategies, Katherine Watier Ong stops by to share how to integrate accessibility into your technical SEO audits. Plus, Wix's own accessibility wizard, Neil Osmond joins us, talk about the future of accessibility and accessibility focused website technology. And of course we get the snappies of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So we hope you are open for all as we hit great info for you on this. The 87th episode of the Surf's Up podcast as having a site that performs good and does some good is within your reach. You might say it's accessible. I might say it. Yeah, if you're listening, would you actually say it or you might say it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, we try to make the podcast accessible. It's on multiple platforms, it's success... We add a transcript to our podcast for people who want to read the transcript. We have it so it's Audible as well for people who maybe don't want to read the transcript or hands-free or whatever, things like that. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. No, you are- Crystal Carter: High contrast in our visuals. We're trying. We're trying. Mordy Obertstein: You're absolutely... We are. Crystal Carter: Yeah. If people have recommendations for other things, like give us a shout. If you're saying like, "Hey, there's a bit that I can't access," let us know. Mordy Obertstein: And we also make the lowercase a, We make it our podcast accessible to all types of SEO learners, no matter your level. So it's accessible in the front. Crystal Carter: We're trying, we're thinking to everybody. You know why? Because we care. Mordy Obertstein: Deeply. Crystal Carter: A lot. Mordy Obertstein: Did that come off inauthentic? Crystal Carter: It's true, we do. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, no, I do. I just want to make sure I didn't sound inauthentic when I said, "Deeply." Anyway, we should probably move on. Okay, so what is accessibility? What are we talking about? So in a nutshell, accessibility means making your websites and the elements contained within your website usable for all people, whether they have, let's say a visual impairment or hearing difficulty, whatever it may be. You want to create a website experience where everybody can access the information on your website. So what does making a site accessible actually mean? Or practically, what does it mean? So there are a lot of things and it's way too long of a list and it's way more holistic than you might generally think, but it means things like having a button that doesn't say click here because when you have a text to audio reader, they don't know what here is. That would be a thing. Making sure you have descriptive headers that aren't overly relying on idioms or jargon or aren't visually centric or they're playing off an image that you have only having one H1, which is actually an SEO best practice. But Google said, yeah, you could have more, but for accessibility you can't. Alt texts obviously audio transcripts, avoiding low contrast text, text rather avoiding content that isn't only available inside of an image, which by the way is an SEO thing because Google can't read that content that you have in an image either. And generally avoiding things that are really only about or summarizing things that are only in an image. So if you create an infographic let's say, and you don't have a summary that describes the infographic in some kind of readable text that would be inaccessible to some of your users. The A11Y project has an entire checklist. We'll link to that in the show notes so you have a more prolific list there and there are real implications and a ramifications to this. There's a precedent for lawsuits if your site's not accessible. And that's based on in the US at least it's based on the Americans with Disabilities Act and that's just the US. And the US is not nearly as strict as other countries, particularly the European Union, which has an act in an effect since 2019 that's founded on the WCAG standards and that European Accessibility Act, and I'll end with this and hand it over to Crystal, they're going to enforce compliance as of June 28th, 2025, which is not that far off in the future if your website is fundamentally not accessible. So accessibility isn't just good. Marketing isn't just good manners. I mentioned before it's going to be good avoiding lawsuits. Crystal Carter: It's good business. And I think that that's something that people overlook because here's the thing. So one of the ways that people talk about accessibility is there's that dropped curb thing. So basically you've all seen this, but apparently back in the day it's like suitcases with wheels on them. I remember before wheels were on suitcases. Mordy Obertstein: I remember that. What were we thinking? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Obertstein: Why? It took us so long to figure out, you know what would be a great thing to have wheels for? This really heavy-ass suitcase that I need to shlep through the entire freaking airport. Crystal Carter: Yeah, let me take the steamer trunk on my back. It's insane. It's madness. Mordy Obertstein: That's madness. Crystal Carter: So I remember that and that was ridiculous. But similarly with drop curves. So people used to just build, they'd have a sidewalk and they'd just have a sidewalk. At some point, somebody was like, we should have a drop curve, which is basically so that somebody who has a wheelchair can go, who can cross the street and cross onto the other side and they don't have to do the bumping down or whichever and all that sort of stuff, which is really inconvenient and really unsafe as well. Well, guess what? Those are great for everybody. If you have limited sight, it tells you that this is a safe place to cross. It's good for people who can walk but maybe have mobility challenges. It's good for people who are pushing push chairs. It's good for people riding bicycles. It's good for lots of people. And that's a lot of the things with some of the stuff that you were just talking about in terms of accessibility. So you were saying, "Don't say click here." I hate, click here. What am I clicking on? Tell me what it is. Tell me what it is. That's not easy for- Mordy Obertstein: Scammy, by the way. The click here, my mind the second you have that on your page, you could have the most prestigious product and service on the planet means you say, "Click here." I feel like you're a YouTube spammer of some kind. Crystal Carter: Right? So click what? Tell me what it is. Alt text images also really useful. Interestingly, interestingly, there's a lot of tools that are adding alt text automatically. So for instance, we have a great tool for helping you add alt text to your website into your web pages within Wix SEO tools. If you haven't gone back to the SEO, SEO set a checklist, please do that because they've added that in and it's really useful and it's really great. But similarly, if you're using PowerPoint, when you add an image into PowerPoint, it adds in alt text based on the thing. I added in that picture of John Cusack holding up that meme. And it was like someone holding up a sign and I was like, "Oh, okay. Thank you very much PowerPoint." These things are really, really useful." Audio transcripts. Sometimes I need to be able to search the podcast and say, "What was that thing that he was talking about?" And I can just search it with Ctrl F and I can find the piece of text. That is great. And that's also great for SEO because you, and they transcript, they transcribe all the YouTube videos for the same reason because they are easier to find bits of information and things like that. So it is great business, business from an SEO point of view, it's also great because if you have users who are trying to come to your website, you want them to feel welcome, you want them to feel like they can use your website. And I will tell you right now that if you go to a website or you go to something and it doesn't feel usable, you just leave. You just leave. Mordy Obertstein: Totally. Crystal Carter: Whereas if there's one where it is accessible, then not only will you use it, but that will be your go-to, because you know that it's easy for you to use as opposed to these other ones that you've been, you don't want to trawl around looking for 17 other websites. This one works. You will go to that one and you will use that one. For instance, and again, this is a lowercase accessibility thing, but just something to think about. I have dietary considerations to think about. I'm lactose intolerant, and if I look at a menu and they don't tell me which things have dairy in them, it's like a whole pain in the butt. It's so exhausting. I don't want to have to talk to you about all the things. Just tell me what's what. If you don't have it, cool, that's fine. I will go somewhere else. If you do have it, then great. And I think that it is very, very similar when people are thinking about accessibility stuff, the places where it's easy for them to go, it'll be really useful. And also I think that people forget that some of these things can be deal-breakers for wider groups. So if you have a client, we used to work with medical clients and the agency I was working at previously used to work with the NHS, and they have to be accessible. Everything has to be accessible for the NHS. Every single thing has to be accessible for the NHS. So if your website isn't accessible to the NHS, and guess what, you ain't getting that contract. Mordy Obertstein: We'll get into that later in a little bit with Katherine. Government contracts are very different. They have a different set of laws in the US at least, that they have to align with. And it's a good example of how you're limiting your audience and your potential market if you don't make your website accessible. I think one of the classic things you hear is, "Well, mean how many people are there out there with an audio or a visual impairment?" There's 26,514 nursing homes in the US as of 2023. My wife works in nursing homes, so I'm pretty familiar with this. I would like to go into a nursing home and see how many of the people don't have a visual or audio impairment. Crystal Carter: Yo, I'm wearing glasses right now and I- Mordy Obertstein: I can't see anything without my glasses on. Crystal Carter: And people forget about that. And on my phone, I have a little accessibility dude on the corner of my phone because, sometimes I forget to wear my glasses. I've only started wearing glasses in the last couple of years and so I forget that I can't see. And so sometimes- Mordy Obertstein: I'll pull up my glasses sometimes when I'm reading something because it's annoying on my phone to read it without, so it's like right in my face. I feel like an old person, but I'd say, Hey, I do that and that's fine. I'm okay with this. But the page, if the page is set up in a way that it's not accessible to the words, the font isn't big enough, it's super annoying. It's annoying with my glasses on because of the way the screen is set up and it's annoying my glasses off because I can't see it. Crystal Carter: So that high contrast thing, that's another point. The high contrast thing, that's just, that's everybody. Mordy Obertstein: That's just good. I was on a website with my wife the other day and the background is all black and the font is neon pink. It's like, why did they do this? It's killing my eyes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so these are things to think about and I think that there's a lot of overlap with UX, so a lot of good UX will work well with that and a lot of good CROs. So a lot of CROs will think about things like high contrast, making sure that the clickable elements are not on top of each other. That's not good practice to have clickable elements like too close together, and good UX will flag that. So a lot of times there's a lot of alignment, but with good UX and good accessible websites. So I think that that's worth thinking about. But I think that sometimes you don't even know who's not coming to your website when you are not taking accessibility into consideration because people just won't... They just won't engage. Mordy Obertstein: They'll click and they'll bounce. Which by the way, from an SEO point, if you ever want to talk about user behavior, neighbor boost, whatever it is, that bouncing is a signal. Crystal Carter: And if you're looking at certain tools and things that you're finding that on certain situations or in certain places, a lot of people are bouncing or they're not coming through, that's something to think about. And I think that there are ways that can add in... You can use add-ons to make your site more accessible. Sometimes you see the little accessibility guy on certain websites and you can click on that and it can make it more accessible for people in that way. Another thing that I've started to see, and I think we talk about this as well, is making pages listenable. So people will add an audio, an audio file onto a long read article. I love those because I get tired, I get very tired staring at a screen for a long time and reading 3,000 words, 6,000 words of an article. Mordy Obertstein: It's like, listen in the background. Crystal Carter: Listen in the background like people would do to a podcast. Do some stretching, make a sandwich while listening to this article or just listen to, if it's something that's a new topic to me, I'll listen to it to sort of pick up the key phrases, pick up some of the things, and then go back into it to read the text, to get deep dive into the sections that I'm interested in. And this is something that is useful for people who have visual challenges. This is also useful for people who have temporary disabilities, I guess you would say, temporary things like when you don't have your hands because your hands are full. Because you've got your shopping in one hand, you've got the kids in the other hand, you can still listen to the content in that way, or you're driving for instance, and you want to be able to search up the information. There's things like that where you can have speakable to speakable schema, for instance, where you can say, "Hey, is Denny's open right now?" And that your Tesla or something we'll talk about, I don't know if people in Tesla's go to Denny's, I'm sure they do sometimes. Anyway, your Tesla will say, "Yes, Denny's is open right now and stuff." You go, "Thanks. Thanks car." Mordy Obertstein: By the way, just throw another stat into this to show you how you're limiting your audience. You're not talking about the point about having a temporary impairment is a great point. 6 million people in the US had cataract surgery last year. It could be two years ago, whatever it is. 6 million people. My father had cataract surgery last year, actually. He's one of those 6 million. And he couldn't read anything for a few days or couldn't read anything well, for a few days. And so do you really want potentially 6 million of your customers to be like, oh man, this website is so much more annoying than I thought it was a week ago now. I just had cataract surgery. Crystal Carter: Similarly, I think the other is people will talk about, people who are doing accessibility will think about how can you experience this? Well, some people say, "Well, try to use your website without looking at it. Try to use your website without looking at it. Try tabbing through it, using a voice reader, using a screen reader, et cetera, and see what it's like." And I think that that is something that's worth thinking about because it's very difficult sometimes to pay attention to challenges that aren't in your first frame of reference. And even with the best will in the world, probably the best example I've had of this was when I was on maternity leave and I was pushing a buggy around, pushing a shoulder around, I suddenly was very, very aware of how many places had stairs everywhere, and it was impossible for me to get this push chair, this stroller. Mordy Obertstein: New York City subway. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Obertstein: Super annoying. Crystal Carter: And as soon as you have that, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is a horrible way. This is horrible. Why isn't this like this? Why isn’t there an elevator?" Mordy Obertstein: That's an example, because the New York City subway does have an elevator, but just because you have the thing there, it doesn't work. Well, half of them are broken half the time. Where is the elevator? God knows where it is. So sometimes you think, "Oh, I created it. It's accessible. I have the thing there." But you haven't really thought about how you've rolled that experience out in a way where it's made the accessibility actually accessible. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah. "Oh, I ticked the box." It's like, "Yeah, but have you tested it? Have you tested it? And is it okay?" Right, because there's lots of places, and again, wheelchair access is probably one that we're all very familiar with, but sometimes they just have the ramp, so they'll have the ramp. That's the way that you access the place. And there's lots of times where people prefer the ramp over the stairs. People who are perfectly capable of using the stairs will prefer the ramp because the ramp is better, and the ramp is easier for people to access. And certainly if you're pushing something heavy or you're doing whatever, these are the things. So have a look at it, have a look at it that actually tests your accessible features. Because like you said, making accessibility accessible, it's really important. I think what another example is on a bus for instance, you have those buses. There's some buses where you go to the bus stop and the curb is raised. And so if the bus shows up and somebody needs to go on a wheelchair, they can just roll straight on. Then there's some places where the curve is dropped and the bus driver has to get out of their seat and they've got to take the ramp and they've got to put it down and then they've got to do all the thing. And it's a whole big thing. And it's like when I show up with my lactose intolerance and they're like, "Oh, let me get you this ring binder. Let me get you this trapper keeper notebook that's all covered in grease and grime and things and a million other people's smudges and have you flip through that." I don't want that. Just put it on the menu. Just put it on the menu. Then I know everybody knows, or there's an app or something. Make it accessible. Give people the information, give people the tools in order to use your content and to access your site, access your services really well. Mordy Obertstein: And that's where the web is going. One of the things you pointed out, we were talking about this, was that Google started to add all of the audio readers to all of their, not to all of their, increasingly to their documentation. At a certain point, as the web becomes more and more accessible, you're running the risk of being left behind and created the optic. You don't care, which if you don't actually care, you should at a minimum care about the optic of caring. Because you're going to come off as, I don't know what, it's a good word I'm allowed to use on the, you're going to come out like a jerk. And people move off of your brand because they'll look at it. People who don't have any impairments will look at it like, "Oh, this website is... Come on, seriously?" And they'll move off the website because of it. Crystal Carter: And I think also, so speaking of Google, Google's also added in a lot of those accessibility elements to their Google business profile. So in Google business profile, you can declare this is wheelchair accessible. You can declare things like that. Mordy Obertstein: You see, that's where the internet is going. That's a big deal. All those attributes were a big deal. They are a big deal. In the local space, people will say, yes, a million percent, we add in those attributes. They're super helpful to the consumer. Crystal Carter: It shows your users that you care about them. Like we said, on our podcasts, we try to make sure that it's accessible in lots of different ways. For instance, because we care. We want people to be able to use it. And I think it's important to remember and to acknowledge the times when you feel like you're on a website and you're like, "Why can't I access this? Why is this too small? Why is this too close together? Why is this not accessible?" Take a moment, pause and experience the experience of that and think about that when you're building your website. Also, I think it's worth testing it with folks that you know who might be in that audience just to make sure that they are able to access it. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It's just like, "Hey, what do you think of this website? Your honest opinion." And I think that it can get you a lot. It can help you get really far in the process. Mordy Obertstein: You know what can also help you, some tips about how to integrate accessibility into your SEO audits and what that actually means, and why that actually makes sense and why there's an overlap to begin with. Here is the owner of WO Strategies, Katherine Watier Ong on just that. Katherine Watier Ong: I stumbled into checking website accessibility as an SEO when I started working on federal.gov websites. At this point, I've worked on three. Cancer.gov, healthit.gov, and the Fisheries Division of NOAA, so fisheries.noaa.gov. And there's just so much related to SEO that's important for accessibility. So I just couldn't help highlighting areas where I thought they weren't meeting 508 compliance, because the feds need to meet this level of compliance. And usually feds think they're fine and they have some obvious stuff usually handled like transcript for audio or video, but then having alt text for all of their images and text navigation, the screen reader can read, some of that stuff usually falls by the way of side. Right now I'm in the middle of a tech audit for a large international nonprofit looking at four of their websites, and I sense that they might need a full accessibility audit. So to make my case for that audit, I usually just use the default stuff in Microsoft. So I turn on a screen reader, I use Microsoft's default, and then I video record my session using Microsoft's game bar recording functionality. And in one instance, I noticed that they had these instructional videos for how to use the website, but they didn't have unique link names. So when you listen to the screen reader, it just said, "Video, video, video." And none of the videos had transcripts. And then in another instance, the JavaScript that they're using on this website had garbled the navigation so much that you could just hear that garbled confusion in the screen reader. I think it's kind of powerful to see how an actual user would experience the website by using these recordings. Oftentimes I get a hint of whether or not there's trouble. I run a Chrome Lighthouse report, obviously that pulls some stuff, but then I also use WebAIM's Wave tool, the checker to check a variety of other stuff like low contrast issues, form field labeling, tech size, that kind of thing. Now with the feds, you just have to mention 508 compliance, and usually they're motivated to fix the issues. But with this international nonprofit, I pulled together all of the regulating laws related to disabilities for every country they're trying to appear in, as well as the US laws. I'm also going to try to tie page speed to accessibility. As cheaper mobile phones have slower processors and obviously certain geographic areas don't have great internet speeds, and I know their goal is to be in front of everyday users in all these different countries. So we'll see how it goes with persuading them to take this seriously. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much Katherine. Make sure to give Katherine a follow over on X, over at K-W-A-T-I-E-R link in the show notes. And you see a second you start to a certain type of client. If you're not thinking about accessibility, you're immediately out. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's really interesting that she mentioned a few government spaces as well. Gov.UK is an award-winning site for both accessibility and for UX, and they keep it super simple. And I think that the accessibility that she's talking about in terms of device and data access is also really important. There are certain GEOs. For instance, I know that in Johannesburg for instance, data is incredibly expensive. It's like some of the most expensive data on earth or something. And I've had it before where we had a client who was working in that area and they were saying like, "Oh yeah, we want to have a video on the page." And somebody local was like, "Nah." Like what? It was like, "Nah, nobody's going to watch that video because it's too much on the data." So that should not be on the page. Don't put it on the page and things. And I think that that's really important to think about as well because again, it will make your site more accessible to other users. I had an app recently that updated beyond the capabilities of my little phone, and I had a terrible time using it when I changed my phone, it was perfectly fine. But I think when you are thinking about accessibility both with a capital A and with the lowercase, you're also broadening the scope of your audience, which is what growth is about. And I think if you're like, "Oh, there's nobody who needs this." It's like, "Well, nobody, that's your current user that needs this." Mordy Obertstein: Tell you 6 million people got cataracts in the US, had surgery alone in the US. Crystal Carter: And I think you say, "Oh, people who don't have disabilities..." Honestly, by the time people get past 30 years old, tell me somebody who doesn't have a bum knee, or hearing- Mordy Obertstein: I can't hear anything. My wife talks, I can't hear anything. It's like as if I didn't hear it Hear, Didn't you hear? I'm like, no, I didn't hear. Crystal Carter: Right. Let's be honest here. Mordy Obertstein: I do. I can't hear. I have bad hearing. Crystal Carter: Let's be honest here, about what people need and how people access sites access the web. And yeah, I think that you'll only win. And chances are it's not even going to cost that much to implement. Mordy Obertstein: No, it could. Must be. It can be sometimes a big overhaul, but the truth is most of the times, not. And either way, you're going to end up at a point where you're exposing yourself to lawsuits if you're operating in the EU for sure. Crystal Carter: And that costs more. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. And that's going to cost more. And also you're setting yourself up to end up being looked at like you're behind the times, which is not what you want to do as a brand. And again, you're limiting your market. It makes zero sense most of the time. Things you are right are very simple. Again, don't have a black background with pink highlight neon text. I can't read that. And I can see with my glasses on. Now with that, we have a very special treat for you about talking about building your website and making it accessible. It's one thing to talk about accessibility, it's another thing to talk to someone who's actually worked on working to create all new ways for site owners and site matters to ensure that their websites are actually accessible. So join us as we go across the Wix-verse, we talk to Wix's own accessibility specialist, Neil Osmond. Mordy Obertstein: Welcome to the show, Neil. It's an honor to have you here. Neil Osman: Thanks for having me. Mordy Obertstein: So there's a lot of talk about accessibility is becoming more in focus as we spoke about earlier in the show, but you've done a lot to help Wix site owners be able to create more accessible websites more efficiently and more accessibly, for lack of a better word. And before we get into it all, I just wanted to catch up with you. What have you done? What have you worked on? What have you done to help our Wix ecosystem? Because you're the man. Neil Osman: We are a team of specialists and I'm one of them. But yeah, our methodic, the way we try to tackle this complex thing in Wix is to do a shift left. And by shift left, I mean making everything accessible by design. So our users will not need to care about it too much, though they should as far as their content is concerned. So all of the viewer, the infrastructure, the components, the directionality, all this technical stuff, they're exempted from having to deal with it and we take care of everything. And by the way, internally also, that was a very laborious effort to do a shift left instead of fixing bags and vicious cycle of bugs and things like that. So we tried to do an organizational shift left. Crystal Carter: How difficult is it to get buy-in for that sort of thing? I know that there are some people who work in teams and they try to make the case for accessibility and they find it a little bit tricky. What is your top tip for making that case, for building that sort of access as a first port of call? What's your top tip for getting buy-in for that? Neil Osman: My top tip would be to consider all kinds of personas that might use your site. And usually we're not fully aware of personas type like blind users or visually impaired visitors or elderly visitors or users maybe with diverse, with new diversity, all kinds of, or just sighted keyboard users. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people sometimes forget that. I always call it, capital A accessibility. Thinking about that sort of thing also impacts lowercase accessibility, people being able to use it on their mobile or people being able to use it with voice search or things like that. So if I'm out and about with my son and I don't have fingers to type, or when Mordy sends me voice messages that are just like, yeah, okay. And I'm like, "You couldn't type that?" He was like, "I was busy." Making sure that people have different ways that they can access the information is- Neil Osman: Absolutely Crystal Carter: ... great for lots of users. Neil Osman: Another common example that I hear a lot is you sit in a bar, in a cafe, you are looking at a video. So captions really help them with the noise around you. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, no, for real. I look at YouTube videos and captions with the sound off all the time. A huge thing. Neil Osman: No, it's a common pattern that lots of accessibility enhancements take away to the mainstream. And usually when there are good accessible solutions, it helps everyone. It's not always the case, because not all accessibility solutions are great, but the ones that are great, in high probability, they will serve everyone. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think is that something that you think about when you're thinking about which accessibility optimizations to add to websites? Neil Osman: Absolutely. And most of the time it would be, let's take the simple solution, the straight one, let's not complex too much. But on the other end there's a notion that accessible sites are ugly sites and we want to tackle this one because it's not true. We can make everything accessible, even the most complicated application. So I think that it's kind of a philosophy, but things should be simple to the visitors and in that regard, yeah, I think it's more helpful for your visitors to not complex things too much, like invent the navigation, invent the visual conventions and affordances. Mordy Obertstein: I want to swing back to something you were mentioning earlier, because it's very similar to what we have on the SEO side, where we have the Wix infrastructure for SEO makes it easy for bots to crawl and discover your pages and so forth and so forth. But what you do with the content from an SEO point of view, is really on you. We can't write your title tags for, we have an AI thing that can write your title tags for you, but you still need to click to do that and then accept the AI suggestion. And it's a fine balance. And I'm wondering how do you go about tackling or deciding what guidance you're going to build for our users to be able to create more accessible websites? I know we have the accessibility wizard and so forth, but how do you sit down and say, "You know what? This is the next thing we need to tackle to help guide our users to making more accessible websites." Neil Osman: So I think that in this regard, we have three main areas of concern. One is headings, the other one is alternative text for images, and also choice of colors. So let's take one by one. So let's start with headings. Headings are very important. I like the metaphor of the book, the H1, the main heading should be a single one. And that's the book title. And then each chapter is the H two, the secondary headings. And then if the chapters are complex or have lots of content, maybe it'll be a good idea to split them into H3s. So when a visitor or user or reader wants to go straight to chapter three and to the second thing, so it can straight go to that chapter, chapter through headings. Yeah, maybe I'm assuming that everyone understands why it's important for users with disabilities. So lots of users that use assistive technology, they have all kinds of shortcuts. So they cannot scheme the page and look at it and go straight well and point, and click the thing they're interested in. So instead of that, they have alternative mechanisms like navigating through headings. So headings should represent the structure and hierarchy in relationship of the content. And as side effects, it also helps the primary screen reader user of the web, which is Google, which works quite similarly. Crystal Carter: I mean, I, as a sighted user, I can't stand it when I go to a page and the headings don't make sense. If I look at the headings and the headings are just like, "And now read more related posts," I'm just like, "What is this?" I can't stand when they're, so I can't imagine how frustrating that must be for somebody with limited sight trying to navigate a page and it just makes no sense. You just leave. You would just leave. You'd just go to someone... Neil Osman: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: And the contrast stuff, the color contrast is something that I will freely admit. I've used the accessibility words under my own size. I thought it was fine. I thought this is fine. And you don't really realize because while I have many shortcomings, I can see with my glasses on. With my glasses off, I can't see a thing. I'm blind as a the bat. Neil Osman: By the way, that very substantial percentage of men are colorblind. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, interesting. Wayne Gretzky was colorblind. I don't think I'll realize that. Yeah, a little hockey fact for you. I'm pretty sure that's true. Wait, don't take me to the bank on that. I'm pretty sure it's true. But yeah, there's a lot of issues there. And you don't think about it because you're designing it. It looks nice. It looks like I could read it. I see it, by the way, in kids' books all the time. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Facts. Yes. Mordy Obertstein: They put the black text on a dark color character and you can't read squat. Crystal Carter: No, no. Neil Osman: Interesting. Crystal Carter: I can think of the one right off the top of my head. It's an astronomy book and they're telling me about Saturn and its black text on a dark purple cloud or something, and I'm like, "I don't know anything about this planet anymore." We just have to think there's no hope for me. Mordy Obertstein: Was it one of the real planets or was like Pluto, who cares? Crystal Carter: Pluto can't keep itself together. It's a helper belt. Guys, guys manage your orbit. Mordy Obertstein: Pluto's that crazy uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving, you don't want there anyway. Crystal Carter: He's like, "Hey." And you're like, "Are you still around? I thought were in Florida." Mordy Obertstein: "I thought we got rid of you." Neil Osman: But at least at Wix, all the presets and templates are designs- Mordy Obertstein: That's amazing. Neil Osman: ... as needed, but when users start playing with it might have contrast issues. And for this, we have the Wizard to detect these issues. Crystal Carter: Yes. The Accessibility Wizard is turning three this year. Mordy Obertstein: Is it really? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's turning three this year. And I think it such an amazing thing. And I think that, can you just tell us about what the goals are for the Accessibility Wizard and how it works for people that aren't aware? Neil Osman: Absolutely. Absolutely. So as I said before, all of the infrastructure should be accessible by designs and users should not care about. But as Mordy mentioned, user content is their domain and they should take care of it. So the Wizard scans all of the site pages and detect these kind of issues and allow users straight in the editor to fix it. It's not just a reporting tool, it's a product that help users fix things on the spot. Yeah, and we have big plans for the Wizard, but we leave it as a surprise. Mordy Obertstein: Not even a little? I know we're working on a lot of stuff for accessibility. It's really in focus for us right now, not even a little tease? Neil Osman: So we have partners in mind, we want to tailor something for them. They have multiple sides and we work hard on a new architecture, so to work on all editors and there's going to be a very fancy engine rules and better coverage and sorting and filtering. Mordy Obertstein: I don't think you've said too much. No, I think it was perfect, because I don't know what you're talking about and I work here. Crystal Carter: But I think that the making it really easy for website builders and website managers to manage your accessibility is really key. And the best example that I've seen of that is adding the alt text updates into the SEO set of checklists, like the blog assistant so that you go onto your blog and they're like, "You're missing alt text." And you're like, "Where?" And they're like, "Here, here, here and here. Do you want to fill it in?" And you're like, "Yeah, okay." And then you just do. And we've seen an incredible number of users take that up, which has been fantastic. Neil Osman: That's fantastic. What do you think about the AI enhancements? Crystal Carter: I think that some of those, we've been using vision AI, Google's, vision AI to add tags or to make images more searchable in Wix for years. And I think that it's very good at categorizing images, so it makes sense that it would make help, that it would be a big help for adding alt text images. Neil Osman: Truth is, I'm a bit ambivalent about this because on the one hand, yeah, we see uplift and that's great and no alt or partially good alt for sure, partially good alt are better than nothing and gives more value. But I think we should up our game a bit because user rely on this. So let's consider an example. Okay, you're a merchant, you have a store and you sell Nike shoes, and for each model you have a few products. Okay? Now what the alt, because one from the front, one from the side, one from, I don't know, from behind. What kind of alt can you give? And I think AI is not... It's very challenging to write, to do good prompt engineering to good results, but it's doable. I think it's doable and it's a challenge, but I think that, hey, if the merchant chose to include a photo from the front, so maybe it communicates them, it gives this source the information they're looking for, oh, that's the model that you see, I don't know, something like this. And that should be the alt text, right? Not just the Nike and the model number or what have benefit. Mordy Obertstein: If you understand the page better, you can pull in all sorts of stuff to the image, one would assume. Well, you can take a product description and have AI summarize a product description and pull that in to be, if you know that's the image. Also, it's one image. Just make it really simple. You have, I don't know, a pair of socks, which is complicated when it's more than one image. Neil Osman: Right. Exactly. Mordy Obertstein: Right. But if it's a page with one image, you can take the description and summarize it and put that as the alt text, theoretically. Neil Osman: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, yeah, you are correct. Mordy Obertstein: Bottom line is you should not be using more than one product image now is what I'm saying, which is not what you should be doing. Don't take that advice. Neil Osman: Absolutely. Yeah. We have the gallery for this and- Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, that's more challenging. Neil Osman: ... it gives our office lots of value. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I have a question which is slightly off-piece. So Mordy, forgive me for going on a tangent. Mordy Obertstein: That's what this podcast is about. Crystal Carter: So I've been seeing a lot, and this is something that I've noticed and something that the first time I saw this was I was reading an article on, it's called Guardian Long Reads, and they're really long articles, I don't know, 7,000 words or something like that. And they had an audio of it and it was like an excerpt for a book or an interview with an author who'd just written a book and they had basically the author reading the article. I've started also seeing these snippets on Google. They've started listen to this article, and I think Hacker Noon also does it Medium had it for a while. What's your opinion on those in terms of making content more accessible? Neil Osman: Oh, I think that these are great enhancements because many, many user prefer to consume the content in audio format. And having a few options to consume the content is great. That's useful by the way, listening and reading at the same time. Usually people with attention deficit and things like that and the context changes. Sometimes you want to consume the content on the way to work or when you're running. Yeah, it's great. So if the content is available only in audio, it's very important to have a transcription. And by the way, there are two kinds of solutions. A synthetic one and a natural one, someone reads it and you have a ready-made audio. But nowadays, screen readers, not the traditional ones, but those maintained by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, they are and they're powered through AI. It's a revolution. It's so much better than it used to be. It's really natural with all them. Mordy Obertstein: I'm looking forward to the point in time where you can have a voice like, Waze or Google Maps, you have different voices redo the directions. I want Arnold Schwarzenegger reading my Google documentation to me. Neil Osman: What Apple push towards this goal. You can record for 15 minutes a voice and then it can be used as the voice that will. Mordy Obertstein: Perfect. This is all I want out of life. I'm glad. I'm glad it's already here then. Neil Osman: Why Arnold, by the way? Mordy Obertstein: I love Arnold. I think he's hilarious. Yeah, I love a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan now. Old Arnold from way back when was kind of a creep, but yeah, new Arnold is way better than old Arnold. Neil Osman: Yeah. You are from California? Mordy Obertstein: No, Crystal is from California. Neil Osman: Oh. Where you are you from, Mordy? Mordy Obertstein: New York. Neil Osman: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: I mean now. Yeah, I'm originally from New York. Now I'm international. Where can people, we could find Crystal in California, which we can't anymore, because she doesn't live in California anymore. Where can people find you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn, TikTok? Neil Osman: I'm a bit on like Twitter, but I got tired of it. Yeah, but I still have an account and I communicate with professionals over there and. Mordy Obertstein: Oh, okay, cool. Neil Osman: LinkedIn properly is also active. Mordy Obertstein: So we will link to those in the show notes. Neil, thank you so much for all that you do to help our users and thanks so much for joining us today. Neil Osman: Thank you. Was a blast. Thanks. Mordy Obertstein: You know who's always making the SEO news very accessible? Crystal Carter: Whose that? Mordy Obertstein: Literally he has his articles, he has his daily video series called, It's New, which you can find right here on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, where it's indicated because Crystal and I do this daily with him. It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Hey. Mordy Obertstein: He makes it accessible. Crystal Carter: He does, he does. He does. Mordy Obertstein: He's very accessible on Twitter as well. You reach out to Barry, is it new? No. Your birthday? Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think also we talked about language as well. I think language is also really, really important. I think Barry writes in a very matter of fact kind of way like this happened and this happened and that happened. Mordy Obertstein: That's true. Crystal Carter: And I think that's really, really useful. I think it's particularly useful when we think about accessibility in a lowercase a kind of way in terms of international audiences like, [foreign language 00:48:44] from school or whatever. But when I know my accent is- Mordy Obertstein: Espanol. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I know my accent is sometimes better than that. But anyway- Mordy Obertstein: That's a combination of, I don't know what. Texas, Espanol. Crystal Carter: Espanol, [foreign language 00:49:01]. Anyway, but I can't understand super complex sentences. I can understand smaller sentences in Spanish and straightforward sentences, but I can't understand super complex sentences. And I think that when you're speaking to an international audience, it's really important to think about that as well. Don't dumb it down, but don't make it overly complex for no reason at all. And I would say that Barry's very good at speaking very clearly and has a very wide-ranging international audience For that reason. Mordy Obertstein: What we're trying to say is its time for the Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Snappy News. You heard of the Yankee Clipper. Well now Google's the coupon clipper for the record, you may not have heard of the Yankee Clipper and that's Joe DiMaggio, but you may not have heard of either. Mordy, stop with the baseball references. I can't, I'm sorry. From Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land, Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being de-listed. So as we spoke about on this podcast before, back in the beginning of March, Google when announcing it's March 2024 core update and the spam update said, "Hey, come May 5th, we're going to be targeting Parasite SEO." And indeed they are. Barry confirmed with Danny Sullivan from Google who said that right now they're only doing manual actions. Dan said the algorithmic component will indeed come as we've said, but that's not live yet. What is Parasite SEO's, Google's calling on site reputation abuse. Barry writes, when third party sites host low quality content provided by third parties to piggyback on the ranking power of those third party websites. So for example, if I am, I don't know, coupon, superdupercoupon.com and no one's looking up, I can't rank for whatever keyword I'm trying to rank for. So I'll go to CNN, say, "Hey CNN, I'd like to host an article on your website because you rank for everything. So now I'll rank for my coupon keyword because you rank for everything. I will siphon off your authority." Google says, quote, "A third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefit from the site. Such content ranking highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given site." So the issue is, in my opinion, and maybe I'm putting words in Google's mouth, who knows. If I go to CNN and I see CNN's branding everywhere, and then I'm reading this article about whatever that this third party site is hosting on CNN, a reader might get confused, like, "Look at this, this is CNN," but it's not actually as trustworthy as CNN or whatever. I don't know. ABC News, wherever they're hosting this content. What Google did say, and I'm personally against me, speckling, I think this is why algorithmically it's hard. A lot of times you have content that's editorial content or surgeon and journal, they have advertisement, what do they call it? Oh, man. Announcements I think they call it. And it's articles like Crystal Carter, the host of this podcast has written an announcement article on search a journal, and it's all about SEO. It's great content because its from Crystal. So it's probably the best content on the whole website, just saying, and it makes sense to have that on search a journal. It was about SEO, I think it was about a SEO checklist or whatever it was. So that's exactly the kind of content and the quality of content that you'd want to see on an SEO news and blog site. So that makes sense. So Google said, "Many publications host advertising content that is intended for the regular readers rather than to primarily manipulate search rankings, sometimes calls native advertising or advertorial. This kind of typically won't confuse regular readers of the publication when they find on the publisher's site directly or when arriving at it from Google search results." I think that makes a complicated algorithmically and I think that's why they need to implement the manual actions to train the algorithm. That's me saying that. That's how Google's saying that. I'm a smart person, I think. Anyway, Barry also wrote this time on Search Engine Roundtable. "Google Site repetition Abuse isn't about linking." So Danny Sullivan, again, Google search liaison made it to quote Barry, "Crystal clear that the cyber petition abuse policy has zero to do with linking." This means that who you link to and or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with manual actions earlier this week. So it's not about links, it's purely about the content itself. Okay, so that's clarified. Thank you, Barry. Also, from Barry Schwartz and also from Search Engine Roundtable about Barry again with a monopoly on the news. Sundar Pichai Google CEO responds to Google's search quality issues. Google, CEO sat down with Bloomberg, did whole interview about the, and one of the topics that came up was obviously AI and the quality of Google's results. I found personally that a lot of the ways that he answered the questions were very telling. We cover this on It's New, our daily news series with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn, and of course Krista Carter when I cover this with Barry. And I said, "Look at his body language and how Sundar replied to this comment and to that question," Barry was unhappy. Barry did not like the read between the lines body language thing. So I think there were some interesting tidbits in there about how he answered the questions. Barry clearly thought I was wrong. He's making faces at me while we were recording, It's New, rolling his eyes at me saying that's the most ridiculous thing he ever heard in the chat. But I do think that you can learn a lot from the way that Sundar answered the questions. I think, by the way, for the record, the quality issue, which he answered it as anytime there's a transition, you get an exposure to new content, AI is going to do it. Sorry, AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as a challenge, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's totally true. I think we do give Google a little bit too much of a hard time. I was talking about Melissa Popp on an interview that's going to be released in a few weeks for this very podcast about this. It's hard. There's a bunch of AI content, but there's a ton of AI content being spun up. Content trends and consumption trends have changed, expectations have changed, which we covered on this podcast numerous times. Google's got to keep up with all of that at the same time. I think I mentioned on, It's New, which I'm basically pitching, you should check out, It's New each day on Monday through Thursday rather. There's another layer on top. And I think some of the things that Google's done to address those issues have been very thinking about the immediate and not thinking about the long term, which I'm not criticizing them. It's hard to do that, hard to balance that, but I think that's also a layer. So it's a very, I think the quality of the results and the questions about the quality of the results, it's not a linear question or a linear equation. There's multiple layers to it and multiple people who are responsible for it, if you want to put it that way. But again, check out the interview. I was joking, by the way, Barry wasn't making faces at me and saying things in the comments, but he did say that he didn't think the body of language told him much, but I think it did. I think it did. I stand by that. And that's this week's, Snappy News. Hope you found all of that news, super accessible to you. Hope you did a good job with that. If I didn't, let me know out there on the social media verse, and I'll do my best to fix it. We also wanted to make a person who talks about SEO and accessibility accessible to you by telling you that you should be following, Miracle Inameti Archibong out there on social media on X. It's at M-I-R-A underscore I-N-A-M on LinkedIn. It'll just be her name. Crystal Carter: And she is a fantastic follower. She is an SEO over at John Lewis, and she does some great work, and she's been speaking on accessibility for years, before it was a little bit of a buzzword. She was talking about how to do alt text in a sort of programmatic way and how to make things more accessible. So she talked about that at MozCon. Mordy Obertstein: Oh yeah, I was there for that. That was a great speech. Crystal Carter: Yeah, really, really good. And she demonstrated, and it was the first time I'd ever heard an Audible screen reader going through. Mordy Obertstein: That's right. She went through it and it got stuck. Crystal Carter: It got stuck. And I think that that's really, really important because the other thing is that it also tells you how bots might be getting stuck on your website as well. So it's really, really useful to think about and forth between these two buttons. And it's very possible that if the screen reader's doing that, it's very possible the bots doing that as well. So everything should flow all together. And the way she illustrated it made it really, really clear to me that we got to do better for folks using screen readers. And yeah, she's a great follower for lots of reasons, but that one as well. Mordy Obertstein: So make sure to give Miracle a follow whatever you consume social media. I don't know if she's on TikTok or not, so I don't know if that applies to all social media, but LinkedIn and Twitter, X for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. No, Miracle is a great follower. Mordy Obertstein: When I say social media as an old person, I literally mean kind of Facebook, not really. Yeah, X and LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Mordy Obertstein: Because I'm an old person, which is why need to have things accessible, because I am blind as a bat without my glasses. My grandfather was literally blind. Crystal Carter: Was he really? Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. And the curb thing was a big deal. Crystal Carter: Right. I think, oh, and also in England you get the bump, so- Mordy Obertstein: The bumps. They don't have that in the US. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Bumps on the brakes. And also, I don't like it when they don't have, when you press the button for walking and there's no sound. Mordy Obertstein: No sound, that's... Crystal Carter: I really don't like that. Mordy Obertstein: You can hear a click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because sometimes you're just chatting away anyway when you're perfectly able or whatever, able to see that you could cross the road. You're chatting away and you don't notice it or whatever. Whereas when there's a sound, you hear it, and then you know that it's safe to go. Mordy Obertstein: See, you're speaking to your audience in different ways and making things accessible. Crystal Carter: Right. It's better for everybody. Mordy Obertstein: And if the local municipality can handle it, so can you. Crystal Carter: On that note... Mordy Obertstein: On that... Thanks for showing us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week, the new episode, as we dive into a look at what is often known as Holistic SEO and what that actually means. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you 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 and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Katherine Watier Ong Neil Osman Miracle Inameti-Archibong Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube WCAG Overview WO Strategies Wix Accessibility Wizard News: Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being delisted Google: Site Reputation Abuse Isn't About Linking Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, Responds To Google Search Quality Issues Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Katherine Watier Ong Neil Osman Miracle Inameti-Archibong Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube WCAG Overview WO Strategies Wix Accessibility Wizard News: Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being delisted Google: Site Reputation Abuse Isn't About Linking Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, Responds To Google Search Quality Issues Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever and accessible, ask whatever you want, out there on social media. She'll always be happy to answer your SEO questions because she is accessible. She's the head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everyone. I will ask to answer some questions. I will not answer every question. I'm just going to put that out there right now. Mordy Obertstein: No, but you know there are people out there on the social media space, "I'm an influencer. I'm not answering your questions. I'm not talking to you." Crystal Carter: That's true. That's true. That's true. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you're accessible. You'll talk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I talk to people. I don't hide away. And also, I get people in my DMs sometimes. Also, just want to shout out. Okay, so somebody messaged me and they were like, "Oh, can you help me with this thing?" Or whatever, and I was like, "I don't think I'm your girl for this particular thing," but I sent the recommendation over to Crystal Waddle. She was like, yeah, this is like a great recommend. So I think that sometimes- Mordy Obertstein: The great union of Crystals. Crystal Carter: Yes, she's one of the fantastic and SEO Crystals. We are shine brightly wherever we go. And yeah, I think that that's something that maybe just remember that if you're not able to help someone, then maybe you can point them in the right direction. That's always great and it's valuable for everybody, and I think that that's going to be a great project. So shout out to Crystal Waddle there, whose doing some cool stuff. Mordy Obertstein: She is. She's great. Crystal Carter: She's great. Mordy Obertstein: By the way, on the Crystal thing, is there a monthly Crystals of SEO media? Because I will tell you, I was talking to Crystal Ortiz about this, another SEO Crystal. I don't know any Crystals outside of SEO, but in SEO, I know tons of Crystals. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? It's because there's a lot of SEOs who are millennials. And basically in the eighties there was, I'm just putting myself out here, but basically in the eighties there were a lot of kids named Crystal because of Dynasty. So there was Crystal and Alexis on Dynasty. I met an Alexis and she was like, "I'm also named after Dynasty." So when I was growing up, there was Crystal C, Crystal B, Crystal L. There were Crystals in all the classes. I think it's like there was a lot of Kylie's who were born in the nineties, for instance. I'm guessing maybe there's some kids named Dua who are born around now. There's a lot of kids who were born in the nineties who were named Logan after Wolverine from all of the action- Mordy Obertstein: Oh really? Crystal Carter: ... yeah, I know a couple of Logans. Mordy Obertstein: I like that name. That's a good name. Crystal Carter: It's a good name. Mordy Obertstein: By the way, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Zales. No, it's brought to you by, Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also run accessibility audit on your website with the accessibility wizard built into the Wix and Wix studio platforms. Catch instances where you left out alt text have poor color contrast and more all in one click with our accessibility wizard. There's no actual wizard of accessibility. It's not like a Merlin doesn't pop up. It's a tool. So if you're expecting a wizard to come out of nowhere and fix your accessibility, that's not what actually happens. But it would be amazing if there was a dude with a long white beard and a big stick who did. Also, accessibility Moses the way I'm describing it. Crystal Carter: That's all. He could part the traffic and separate the organic from the bots. Mordy Obertstein: Thou shalt not pass with thy poor accessibility. This bridge, right? Going with another wizard. Crystal Carter: Right. And it'll be easy to use if you're on a tablet. Mordy Obertstein: Oh, like, hey, we've gone off the rails. By the way, we're talking about accessibility in SEO this week in case you haven't figured it out. But there's an tremendous amount of overlap as we get into when optimizing for accessibility is optimizing for SEO. Why having an accessible website is both good manners and good marketing, and are there signals of a more accessible Google? WL strategies, Katherine Watier Ong stops by to share how to integrate accessibility into your technical SEO audits. Plus, Wix's own accessibility wizard, Neil Osmond joins us, talk about the future of accessibility and accessibility focused website technology. And of course we get the snappies of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So we hope you are open for all as we hit great info for you on this. The 87th episode of the Surf's Up podcast as having a site that performs good and does some good is within your reach. You might say it's accessible. I might say it. Yeah, if you're listening, would you actually say it or you might say it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, we try to make the podcast accessible. It's on multiple platforms, it's success... We add a transcript to our podcast for people who want to read the transcript. We have it so it's Audible as well for people who maybe don't want to read the transcript or hands-free or whatever, things like that. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. No, you are- Crystal Carter: High contrast in our visuals. We're trying. We're trying. Mordy Obertstein: You're absolutely... We are. Crystal Carter: Yeah. If people have recommendations for other things, like give us a shout. If you're saying like, "Hey, there's a bit that I can't access," let us know. Mordy Obertstein: And we also make the lowercase a, We make it our podcast accessible to all types of SEO learners, no matter your level. So it's accessible in the front. Crystal Carter: We're trying, we're thinking to everybody. You know why? Because we care. Mordy Obertstein: Deeply. Crystal Carter: A lot. Mordy Obertstein: Did that come off inauthentic? Crystal Carter: It's true, we do. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, no, I do. I just want to make sure I didn't sound inauthentic when I said, "Deeply." Anyway, we should probably move on. Okay, so what is accessibility? What are we talking about? So in a nutshell, accessibility means making your websites and the elements contained within your website usable for all people, whether they have, let's say a visual impairment or hearing difficulty, whatever it may be. You want to create a website experience where everybody can access the information on your website. So what does making a site accessible actually mean? Or practically, what does it mean? So there are a lot of things and it's way too long of a list and it's way more holistic than you might generally think, but it means things like having a button that doesn't say click here because when you have a text to audio reader, they don't know what here is. That would be a thing. Making sure you have descriptive headers that aren't overly relying on idioms or jargon or aren't visually centric or they're playing off an image that you have only having one H1, which is actually an SEO best practice. But Google said, yeah, you could have more, but for accessibility you can't. Alt texts obviously audio transcripts, avoiding low contrast text, text rather avoiding content that isn't only available inside of an image, which by the way is an SEO thing because Google can't read that content that you have in an image either. And generally avoiding things that are really only about or summarizing things that are only in an image. So if you create an infographic let's say, and you don't have a summary that describes the infographic in some kind of readable text that would be inaccessible to some of your users. The A11Y project has an entire checklist. We'll link to that in the show notes so you have a more prolific list there and there are real implications and a ramifications to this. There's a precedent for lawsuits if your site's not accessible. And that's based on in the US at least it's based on the Americans with Disabilities Act and that's just the US. And the US is not nearly as strict as other countries, particularly the European Union, which has an act in an effect since 2019 that's founded on the WCAG standards and that European Accessibility Act, and I'll end with this and hand it over to Crystal, they're going to enforce compliance as of June 28th, 2025, which is not that far off in the future if your website is fundamentally not accessible. So accessibility isn't just good. Marketing isn't just good manners. I mentioned before it's going to be good avoiding lawsuits. Crystal Carter: It's good business. And I think that that's something that people overlook because here's the thing. So one of the ways that people talk about accessibility is there's that dropped curb thing. So basically you've all seen this, but apparently back in the day it's like suitcases with wheels on them. I remember before wheels were on suitcases. Mordy Obertstein: I remember that. What were we thinking? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Obertstein: Why? It took us so long to figure out, you know what would be a great thing to have wheels for? This really heavy-ass suitcase that I need to shlep through the entire freaking airport. Crystal Carter: Yeah, let me take the steamer trunk on my back. It's insane. It's madness. Mordy Obertstein: That's madness. Crystal Carter: So I remember that and that was ridiculous. But similarly with drop curves. So people used to just build, they'd have a sidewalk and they'd just have a sidewalk. At some point, somebody was like, we should have a drop curve, which is basically so that somebody who has a wheelchair can go, who can cross the street and cross onto the other side and they don't have to do the bumping down or whichever and all that sort of stuff, which is really inconvenient and really unsafe as well. Well, guess what? Those are great for everybody. If you have limited sight, it tells you that this is a safe place to cross. It's good for people who can walk but maybe have mobility challenges. It's good for people who are pushing push chairs. It's good for people riding bicycles. It's good for lots of people. And that's a lot of the things with some of the stuff that you were just talking about in terms of accessibility. So you were saying, "Don't say click here." I hate, click here. What am I clicking on? Tell me what it is. Tell me what it is. That's not easy for- Mordy Obertstein: Scammy, by the way. The click here, my mind the second you have that on your page, you could have the most prestigious product and service on the planet means you say, "Click here." I feel like you're a YouTube spammer of some kind. Crystal Carter: Right? So click what? Tell me what it is. Alt text images also really useful. Interestingly, interestingly, there's a lot of tools that are adding alt text automatically. So for instance, we have a great tool for helping you add alt text to your website into your web pages within Wix SEO tools. If you haven't gone back to the SEO, SEO set a checklist, please do that because they've added that in and it's really useful and it's really great. But similarly, if you're using PowerPoint, when you add an image into PowerPoint, it adds in alt text based on the thing. I added in that picture of John Cusack holding up that meme. And it was like someone holding up a sign and I was like, "Oh, okay. Thank you very much PowerPoint." These things are really, really useful." Audio transcripts. Sometimes I need to be able to search the podcast and say, "What was that thing that he was talking about?" And I can just search it with Ctrl F and I can find the piece of text. That is great. And that's also great for SEO because you, and they transcript, they transcribe all the YouTube videos for the same reason because they are easier to find bits of information and things like that. So it is great business, business from an SEO point of view, it's also great because if you have users who are trying to come to your website, you want them to feel welcome, you want them to feel like they can use your website. And I will tell you right now that if you go to a website or you go to something and it doesn't feel usable, you just leave. You just leave. Mordy Obertstein: Totally. Crystal Carter: Whereas if there's one where it is accessible, then not only will you use it, but that will be your go-to, because you know that it's easy for you to use as opposed to these other ones that you've been, you don't want to trawl around looking for 17 other websites. This one works. You will go to that one and you will use that one. For instance, and again, this is a lowercase accessibility thing, but just something to think about. I have dietary considerations to think about. I'm lactose intolerant, and if I look at a menu and they don't tell me which things have dairy in them, it's like a whole pain in the butt. It's so exhausting. I don't want to have to talk to you about all the things. Just tell me what's what. If you don't have it, cool, that's fine. I will go somewhere else. If you do have it, then great. And I think that it is very, very similar when people are thinking about accessibility stuff, the places where it's easy for them to go, it'll be really useful. And also I think that people forget that some of these things can be deal-breakers for wider groups. So if you have a client, we used to work with medical clients and the agency I was working at previously used to work with the NHS, and they have to be accessible. Everything has to be accessible for the NHS. Every single thing has to be accessible for the NHS. So if your website isn't accessible to the NHS, and guess what, you ain't getting that contract. Mordy Obertstein: We'll get into that later in a little bit with Katherine. Government contracts are very different. They have a different set of laws in the US at least, that they have to align with. And it's a good example of how you're limiting your audience and your potential market if you don't make your website accessible. I think one of the classic things you hear is, "Well, mean how many people are there out there with an audio or a visual impairment?" There's 26,514 nursing homes in the US as of 2023. My wife works in nursing homes, so I'm pretty familiar with this. I would like to go into a nursing home and see how many of the people don't have a visual or audio impairment. Crystal Carter: Yo, I'm wearing glasses right now and I- Mordy Obertstein: I can't see anything without my glasses on. Crystal Carter: And people forget about that. And on my phone, I have a little accessibility dude on the corner of my phone because, sometimes I forget to wear my glasses. I've only started wearing glasses in the last couple of years and so I forget that I can't see. And so sometimes- Mordy Obertstein: I'll pull up my glasses sometimes when I'm reading something because it's annoying on my phone to read it without, so it's like right in my face. I feel like an old person, but I'd say, Hey, I do that and that's fine. I'm okay with this. But the page, if the page is set up in a way that it's not accessible to the words, the font isn't big enough, it's super annoying. It's annoying with my glasses on because of the way the screen is set up and it's annoying my glasses off because I can't see it. Crystal Carter: So that high contrast thing, that's another point. The high contrast thing, that's just, that's everybody. Mordy Obertstein: That's just good. I was on a website with my wife the other day and the background is all black and the font is neon pink. It's like, why did they do this? It's killing my eyes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so these are things to think about and I think that there's a lot of overlap with UX, so a lot of good UX will work well with that and a lot of good CROs. So a lot of CROs will think about things like high contrast, making sure that the clickable elements are not on top of each other. That's not good practice to have clickable elements like too close together, and good UX will flag that. So a lot of times there's a lot of alignment, but with good UX and good accessible websites. So I think that that's worth thinking about. But I think that sometimes you don't even know who's not coming to your website when you are not taking accessibility into consideration because people just won't... They just won't engage. Mordy Obertstein: They'll click and they'll bounce. Which by the way, from an SEO point, if you ever want to talk about user behavior, neighbor boost, whatever it is, that bouncing is a signal. Crystal Carter: And if you're looking at certain tools and things that you're finding that on certain situations or in certain places, a lot of people are bouncing or they're not coming through, that's something to think about. And I think that there are ways that can add in... You can use add-ons to make your site more accessible. Sometimes you see the little accessibility guy on certain websites and you can click on that and it can make it more accessible for people in that way. Another thing that I've started to see, and I think we talk about this as well, is making pages listenable. So people will add an audio, an audio file onto a long read article. I love those because I get tired, I get very tired staring at a screen for a long time and reading 3,000 words, 6,000 words of an article. Mordy Obertstein: It's like, listen in the background. Crystal Carter: Listen in the background like people would do to a podcast. Do some stretching, make a sandwich while listening to this article or just listen to, if it's something that's a new topic to me, I'll listen to it to sort of pick up the key phrases, pick up some of the things, and then go back into it to read the text, to get deep dive into the sections that I'm interested in. And this is something that is useful for people who have visual challenges. This is also useful for people who have temporary disabilities, I guess you would say, temporary things like when you don't have your hands because your hands are full. Because you've got your shopping in one hand, you've got the kids in the other hand, you can still listen to the content in that way, or you're driving for instance, and you want to be able to search up the information. There's things like that where you can have speakable to speakable schema, for instance, where you can say, "Hey, is Denny's open right now?" And that your Tesla or something we'll talk about, I don't know if people in Tesla's go to Denny's, I'm sure they do sometimes. Anyway, your Tesla will say, "Yes, Denny's is open right now and stuff." You go, "Thanks. Thanks car." Mordy Obertstein: By the way, just throw another stat into this to show you how you're limiting your audience. You're not talking about the point about having a temporary impairment is a great point. 6 million people in the US had cataract surgery last year. It could be two years ago, whatever it is. 6 million people. My father had cataract surgery last year, actually. He's one of those 6 million. And he couldn't read anything for a few days or couldn't read anything well, for a few days. And so do you really want potentially 6 million of your customers to be like, oh man, this website is so much more annoying than I thought it was a week ago now. I just had cataract surgery. Crystal Carter: Similarly, I think the other is people will talk about, people who are doing accessibility will think about how can you experience this? Well, some people say, "Well, try to use your website without looking at it. Try to use your website without looking at it. Try tabbing through it, using a voice reader, using a screen reader, et cetera, and see what it's like." And I think that that is something that's worth thinking about because it's very difficult sometimes to pay attention to challenges that aren't in your first frame of reference. And even with the best will in the world, probably the best example I've had of this was when I was on maternity leave and I was pushing a buggy around, pushing a shoulder around, I suddenly was very, very aware of how many places had stairs everywhere, and it was impossible for me to get this push chair, this stroller. Mordy Obertstein: New York City subway. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Obertstein: Super annoying. Crystal Carter: And as soon as you have that, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is a horrible way. This is horrible. Why isn't this like this? Why isn’t there an elevator?" Mordy Obertstein: That's an example, because the New York City subway does have an elevator, but just because you have the thing there, it doesn't work. Well, half of them are broken half the time. Where is the elevator? God knows where it is. So sometimes you think, "Oh, I created it. It's accessible. I have the thing there." But you haven't really thought about how you've rolled that experience out in a way where it's made the accessibility actually accessible. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah. "Oh, I ticked the box." It's like, "Yeah, but have you tested it? Have you tested it? And is it okay?" Right, because there's lots of places, and again, wheelchair access is probably one that we're all very familiar with, but sometimes they just have the ramp, so they'll have the ramp. That's the way that you access the place. And there's lots of times where people prefer the ramp over the stairs. People who are perfectly capable of using the stairs will prefer the ramp because the ramp is better, and the ramp is easier for people to access. And certainly if you're pushing something heavy or you're doing whatever, these are the things. So have a look at it, have a look at it that actually tests your accessible features. Because like you said, making accessibility accessible, it's really important. I think what another example is on a bus for instance, you have those buses. There's some buses where you go to the bus stop and the curb is raised. And so if the bus shows up and somebody needs to go on a wheelchair, they can just roll straight on. Then there's some places where the curve is dropped and the bus driver has to get out of their seat and they've got to take the ramp and they've got to put it down and then they've got to do all the thing. And it's a whole big thing. And it's like when I show up with my lactose intolerance and they're like, "Oh, let me get you this ring binder. Let me get you this trapper keeper notebook that's all covered in grease and grime and things and a million other people's smudges and have you flip through that." I don't want that. Just put it on the menu. Just put it on the menu. Then I know everybody knows, or there's an app or something. Make it accessible. Give people the information, give people the tools in order to use your content and to access your site, access your services really well. Mordy Obertstein: And that's where the web is going. One of the things you pointed out, we were talking about this, was that Google started to add all of the audio readers to all of their, not to all of their, increasingly to their documentation. At a certain point, as the web becomes more and more accessible, you're running the risk of being left behind and created the optic. You don't care, which if you don't actually care, you should at a minimum care about the optic of caring. Because you're going to come off as, I don't know what, it's a good word I'm allowed to use on the, you're going to come out like a jerk. And people move off of your brand because they'll look at it. People who don't have any impairments will look at it like, "Oh, this website is... Come on, seriously?" And they'll move off the website because of it. Crystal Carter: And I think also, so speaking of Google, Google's also added in a lot of those accessibility elements to their Google business profile. So in Google business profile, you can declare this is wheelchair accessible. You can declare things like that. Mordy Obertstein: You see, that's where the internet is going. That's a big deal. All those attributes were a big deal. They are a big deal. In the local space, people will say, yes, a million percent, we add in those attributes. They're super helpful to the consumer. Crystal Carter: It shows your users that you care about them. Like we said, on our podcasts, we try to make sure that it's accessible in lots of different ways. For instance, because we care. We want people to be able to use it. And I think it's important to remember and to acknowledge the times when you feel like you're on a website and you're like, "Why can't I access this? Why is this too small? Why is this too close together? Why is this not accessible?" Take a moment, pause and experience the experience of that and think about that when you're building your website. Also, I think it's worth testing it with folks that you know who might be in that audience just to make sure that they are able to access it. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It's just like, "Hey, what do you think of this website? Your honest opinion." And I think that it can get you a lot. It can help you get really far in the process. Mordy Obertstein: You know what can also help you, some tips about how to integrate accessibility into your SEO audits and what that actually means, and why that actually makes sense and why there's an overlap to begin with. Here is the owner of WO Strategies, Katherine Watier Ong on just that. Katherine Watier Ong: I stumbled into checking website accessibility as an SEO when I started working on federal.gov websites. At this point, I've worked on three. Cancer.gov, healthit.gov, and the Fisheries Division of NOAA, so fisheries.noaa.gov. And there's just so much related to SEO that's important for accessibility. So I just couldn't help highlighting areas where I thought they weren't meeting 508 compliance, because the feds need to meet this level of compliance. And usually feds think they're fine and they have some obvious stuff usually handled like transcript for audio or video, but then having alt text for all of their images and text navigation, the screen reader can read, some of that stuff usually falls by the way of side. Right now I'm in the middle of a tech audit for a large international nonprofit looking at four of their websites, and I sense that they might need a full accessibility audit. So to make my case for that audit, I usually just use the default stuff in Microsoft. So I turn on a screen reader, I use Microsoft's default, and then I video record my session using Microsoft's game bar recording functionality. And in one instance, I noticed that they had these instructional videos for how to use the website, but they didn't have unique link names. So when you listen to the screen reader, it just said, "Video, video, video." And none of the videos had transcripts. And then in another instance, the JavaScript that they're using on this website had garbled the navigation so much that you could just hear that garbled confusion in the screen reader. I think it's kind of powerful to see how an actual user would experience the website by using these recordings. Oftentimes I get a hint of whether or not there's trouble. I run a Chrome Lighthouse report, obviously that pulls some stuff, but then I also use WebAIM's Wave tool, the checker to check a variety of other stuff like low contrast issues, form field labeling, tech size, that kind of thing. Now with the feds, you just have to mention 508 compliance, and usually they're motivated to fix the issues. But with this international nonprofit, I pulled together all of the regulating laws related to disabilities for every country they're trying to appear in, as well as the US laws. I'm also going to try to tie page speed to accessibility. As cheaper mobile phones have slower processors and obviously certain geographic areas don't have great internet speeds, and I know their goal is to be in front of everyday users in all these different countries. So we'll see how it goes with persuading them to take this seriously. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much Katherine. Make sure to give Katherine a follow over on X, over at K-W-A-T-I-E-R link in the show notes. And you see a second you start to a certain type of client. If you're not thinking about accessibility, you're immediately out. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's really interesting that she mentioned a few government spaces as well. Gov.UK is an award-winning site for both accessibility and for UX, and they keep it super simple. And I think that the accessibility that she's talking about in terms of device and data access is also really important. There are certain GEOs. For instance, I know that in Johannesburg for instance, data is incredibly expensive. It's like some of the most expensive data on earth or something. And I've had it before where we had a client who was working in that area and they were saying like, "Oh yeah, we want to have a video on the page." And somebody local was like, "Nah." Like what? It was like, "Nah, nobody's going to watch that video because it's too much on the data." So that should not be on the page. Don't put it on the page and things. And I think that that's really important to think about as well because again, it will make your site more accessible to other users. I had an app recently that updated beyond the capabilities of my little phone, and I had a terrible time using it when I changed my phone, it was perfectly fine. But I think when you are thinking about accessibility both with a capital A and with the lowercase, you're also broadening the scope of your audience, which is what growth is about. And I think if you're like, "Oh, there's nobody who needs this." It's like, "Well, nobody, that's your current user that needs this." Mordy Obertstein: Tell you 6 million people got cataracts in the US, had surgery alone in the US. Crystal Carter: And I think you say, "Oh, people who don't have disabilities..." Honestly, by the time people get past 30 years old, tell me somebody who doesn't have a bum knee, or hearing- Mordy Obertstein: I can't hear anything. My wife talks, I can't hear anything. It's like as if I didn't hear it Hear, Didn't you hear? I'm like, no, I didn't hear. Crystal Carter: Right. Let's be honest here. Mordy Obertstein: I do. I can't hear. I have bad hearing. Crystal Carter: Let's be honest here, about what people need and how people access sites access the web. And yeah, I think that you'll only win. And chances are it's not even going to cost that much to implement. Mordy Obertstein: No, it could. Must be. It can be sometimes a big overhaul, but the truth is most of the times, not. And either way, you're going to end up at a point where you're exposing yourself to lawsuits if you're operating in the EU for sure. Crystal Carter: And that costs more. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. And that's going to cost more. And also you're setting yourself up to end up being looked at like you're behind the times, which is not what you want to do as a brand. And again, you're limiting your market. It makes zero sense most of the time. Things you are right are very simple. Again, don't have a black background with pink highlight neon text. I can't read that. And I can see with my glasses on. Now with that, we have a very special treat for you about talking about building your website and making it accessible. It's one thing to talk about accessibility, it's another thing to talk to someone who's actually worked on working to create all new ways for site owners and site matters to ensure that their websites are actually accessible. So join us as we go across the Wix-verse, we talk to Wix's own accessibility specialist, Neil Osmond. Mordy Obertstein: Welcome to the show, Neil. It's an honor to have you here. Neil Osman: Thanks for having me. Mordy Obertstein: So there's a lot of talk about accessibility is becoming more in focus as we spoke about earlier in the show, but you've done a lot to help Wix site owners be able to create more accessible websites more efficiently and more accessibly, for lack of a better word. And before we get into it all, I just wanted to catch up with you. What have you done? What have you worked on? What have you done to help our Wix ecosystem? Because you're the man. Neil Osman: We are a team of specialists and I'm one of them. But yeah, our methodic, the way we try to tackle this complex thing in Wix is to do a shift left. And by shift left, I mean making everything accessible by design. So our users will not need to care about it too much, though they should as far as their content is concerned. So all of the viewer, the infrastructure, the components, the directionality, all this technical stuff, they're exempted from having to deal with it and we take care of everything. And by the way, internally also, that was a very laborious effort to do a shift left instead of fixing bags and vicious cycle of bugs and things like that. So we tried to do an organizational shift left. Crystal Carter: How difficult is it to get buy-in for that sort of thing? I know that there are some people who work in teams and they try to make the case for accessibility and they find it a little bit tricky. What is your top tip for making that case, for building that sort of access as a first port of call? What's your top tip for getting buy-in for that? Neil Osman: My top tip would be to consider all kinds of personas that might use your site. And usually we're not fully aware of personas type like blind users or visually impaired visitors or elderly visitors or users maybe with diverse, with new diversity, all kinds of, or just sighted keyboard users. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people sometimes forget that. I always call it, capital A accessibility. Thinking about that sort of thing also impacts lowercase accessibility, people being able to use it on their mobile or people being able to use it with voice search or things like that. So if I'm out and about with my son and I don't have fingers to type, or when Mordy sends me voice messages that are just like, yeah, okay. And I'm like, "You couldn't type that?" He was like, "I was busy." Making sure that people have different ways that they can access the information is- Neil Osman: Absolutely Crystal Carter: ... great for lots of users. Neil Osman: Another common example that I hear a lot is you sit in a bar, in a cafe, you are looking at a video. So captions really help them with the noise around you. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, no, for real. I look at YouTube videos and captions with the sound off all the time. A huge thing. Neil Osman: No, it's a common pattern that lots of accessibility enhancements take away to the mainstream. And usually when there are good accessible solutions, it helps everyone. It's not always the case, because not all accessibility solutions are great, but the ones that are great, in high probability, they will serve everyone. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think is that something that you think about when you're thinking about which accessibility optimizations to add to websites? Neil Osman: Absolutely. And most of the time it would be, let's take the simple solution, the straight one, let's not complex too much. But on the other end there's a notion that accessible sites are ugly sites and we want to tackle this one because it's not true. We can make everything accessible, even the most complicated application. So I think that it's kind of a philosophy, but things should be simple to the visitors and in that regard, yeah, I think it's more helpful for your visitors to not complex things too much, like invent the navigation, invent the visual conventions and affordances. Mordy Obertstein: I want to swing back to something you were mentioning earlier, because it's very similar to what we have on the SEO side, where we have the Wix infrastructure for SEO makes it easy for bots to crawl and discover your pages and so forth and so forth. But what you do with the content from an SEO point of view, is really on you. We can't write your title tags for, we have an AI thing that can write your title tags for you, but you still need to click to do that and then accept the AI suggestion. And it's a fine balance. And I'm wondering how do you go about tackling or deciding what guidance you're going to build for our users to be able to create more accessible websites? I know we have the accessibility wizard and so forth, but how do you sit down and say, "You know what? This is the next thing we need to tackle to help guide our users to making more accessible websites." Neil Osman: So I think that in this regard, we have three main areas of concern. One is headings, the other one is alternative text for images, and also choice of colors. So let's take one by one. So let's start with headings. Headings are very important. I like the metaphor of the book, the H1, the main heading should be a single one. And that's the book title. And then each chapter is the H two, the secondary headings. And then if the chapters are complex or have lots of content, maybe it'll be a good idea to split them into H3s. So when a visitor or user or reader wants to go straight to chapter three and to the second thing, so it can straight go to that chapter, chapter through headings. Yeah, maybe I'm assuming that everyone understands why it's important for users with disabilities. So lots of users that use assistive technology, they have all kinds of shortcuts. So they cannot scheme the page and look at it and go straight well and point, and click the thing they're interested in. So instead of that, they have alternative mechanisms like navigating through headings. So headings should represent the structure and hierarchy in relationship of the content. And as side effects, it also helps the primary screen reader user of the web, which is Google, which works quite similarly. Crystal Carter: I mean, I, as a sighted user, I can't stand it when I go to a page and the headings don't make sense. If I look at the headings and the headings are just like, "And now read more related posts," I'm just like, "What is this?" I can't stand when they're, so I can't imagine how frustrating that must be for somebody with limited sight trying to navigate a page and it just makes no sense. You just leave. You would just leave. You'd just go to someone... Neil Osman: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: And the contrast stuff, the color contrast is something that I will freely admit. I've used the accessibility words under my own size. I thought it was fine. I thought this is fine. And you don't really realize because while I have many shortcomings, I can see with my glasses on. With my glasses off, I can't see a thing. I'm blind as a the bat. Neil Osman: By the way, that very substantial percentage of men are colorblind. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, interesting. Wayne Gretzky was colorblind. I don't think I'll realize that. Yeah, a little hockey fact for you. I'm pretty sure that's true. Wait, don't take me to the bank on that. I'm pretty sure it's true. But yeah, there's a lot of issues there. And you don't think about it because you're designing it. It looks nice. It looks like I could read it. I see it, by the way, in kids' books all the time. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Facts. Yes. Mordy Obertstein: They put the black text on a dark color character and you can't read squat. Crystal Carter: No, no. Neil Osman: Interesting. Crystal Carter: I can think of the one right off the top of my head. It's an astronomy book and they're telling me about Saturn and its black text on a dark purple cloud or something, and I'm like, "I don't know anything about this planet anymore." We just have to think there's no hope for me. Mordy Obertstein: Was it one of the real planets or was like Pluto, who cares? Crystal Carter: Pluto can't keep itself together. It's a helper belt. Guys, guys manage your orbit. Mordy Obertstein: Pluto's that crazy uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving, you don't want there anyway. Crystal Carter: He's like, "Hey." And you're like, "Are you still around? I thought were in Florida." Mordy Obertstein: "I thought we got rid of you." Neil Osman: But at least at Wix, all the presets and templates are designs- Mordy Obertstein: That's amazing. Neil Osman: ... as needed, but when users start playing with it might have contrast issues. And for this, we have the Wizard to detect these issues. Crystal Carter: Yes. The Accessibility Wizard is turning three this year. Mordy Obertstein: Is it really? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's turning three this year. And I think it such an amazing thing. And I think that, can you just tell us about what the goals are for the Accessibility Wizard and how it works for people that aren't aware? Neil Osman: Absolutely. Absolutely. So as I said before, all of the infrastructure should be accessible by designs and users should not care about. But as Mordy mentioned, user content is their domain and they should take care of it. So the Wizard scans all of the site pages and detect these kind of issues and allow users straight in the editor to fix it. It's not just a reporting tool, it's a product that help users fix things on the spot. Yeah, and we have big plans for the Wizard, but we leave it as a surprise. Mordy Obertstein: Not even a little? I know we're working on a lot of stuff for accessibility. It's really in focus for us right now, not even a little tease? Neil Osman: So we have partners in mind, we want to tailor something for them. They have multiple sides and we work hard on a new architecture, so to work on all editors and there's going to be a very fancy engine rules and better coverage and sorting and filtering. Mordy Obertstein: I don't think you've said too much. No, I think it was perfect, because I don't know what you're talking about and I work here. Crystal Carter: But I think that the making it really easy for website builders and website managers to manage your accessibility is really key. And the best example that I've seen of that is adding the alt text updates into the SEO set of checklists, like the blog assistant so that you go onto your blog and they're like, "You're missing alt text." And you're like, "Where?" And they're like, "Here, here, here and here. Do you want to fill it in?" And you're like, "Yeah, okay." And then you just do. And we've seen an incredible number of users take that up, which has been fantastic. Neil Osman: That's fantastic. What do you think about the AI enhancements? Crystal Carter: I think that some of those, we've been using vision AI, Google's, vision AI to add tags or to make images more searchable in Wix for years. And I think that it's very good at categorizing images, so it makes sense that it would make help, that it would be a big help for adding alt text images. Neil Osman: Truth is, I'm a bit ambivalent about this because on the one hand, yeah, we see uplift and that's great and no alt or partially good alt for sure, partially good alt are better than nothing and gives more value. But I think we should up our game a bit because user rely on this. So let's consider an example. Okay, you're a merchant, you have a store and you sell Nike shoes, and for each model you have a few products. Okay? Now what the alt, because one from the front, one from the side, one from, I don't know, from behind. What kind of alt can you give? And I think AI is not... It's very challenging to write, to do good prompt engineering to good results, but it's doable. I think it's doable and it's a challenge, but I think that, hey, if the merchant chose to include a photo from the front, so maybe it communicates them, it gives this source the information they're looking for, oh, that's the model that you see, I don't know, something like this. And that should be the alt text, right? Not just the Nike and the model number or what have benefit. Mordy Obertstein: If you understand the page better, you can pull in all sorts of stuff to the image, one would assume. Well, you can take a product description and have AI summarize a product description and pull that in to be, if you know that's the image. Also, it's one image. Just make it really simple. You have, I don't know, a pair of socks, which is complicated when it's more than one image. Neil Osman: Right. Exactly. Mordy Obertstein: Right. But if it's a page with one image, you can take the description and summarize it and put that as the alt text, theoretically. Neil Osman: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, yeah, you are correct. Mordy Obertstein: Bottom line is you should not be using more than one product image now is what I'm saying, which is not what you should be doing. Don't take that advice. Neil Osman: Absolutely. Yeah. We have the gallery for this and- Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, that's more challenging. Neil Osman: ... it gives our office lots of value. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I have a question which is slightly off-piece. So Mordy, forgive me for going on a tangent. Mordy Obertstein: That's what this podcast is about. Crystal Carter: So I've been seeing a lot, and this is something that I've noticed and something that the first time I saw this was I was reading an article on, it's called Guardian Long Reads, and they're really long articles, I don't know, 7,000 words or something like that. And they had an audio of it and it was like an excerpt for a book or an interview with an author who'd just written a book and they had basically the author reading the article. I've started also seeing these snippets on Google. They've started listen to this article, and I think Hacker Noon also does it Medium had it for a while. What's your opinion on those in terms of making content more accessible? Neil Osman: Oh, I think that these are great enhancements because many, many user prefer to consume the content in audio format. And having a few options to consume the content is great. That's useful by the way, listening and reading at the same time. Usually people with attention deficit and things like that and the context changes. Sometimes you want to consume the content on the way to work or when you're running. Yeah, it's great. So if the content is available only in audio, it's very important to have a transcription. And by the way, there are two kinds of solutions. A synthetic one and a natural one, someone reads it and you have a ready-made audio. But nowadays, screen readers, not the traditional ones, but those maintained by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, they are and they're powered through AI. It's a revolution. It's so much better than it used to be. It's really natural with all them. Mordy Obertstein: I'm looking forward to the point in time where you can have a voice like, Waze or Google Maps, you have different voices redo the directions. I want Arnold Schwarzenegger reading my Google documentation to me. Neil Osman: What Apple push towards this goal. You can record for 15 minutes a voice and then it can be used as the voice that will. Mordy Obertstein: Perfect. This is all I want out of life. I'm glad. I'm glad it's already here then. Neil Osman: Why Arnold, by the way? Mordy Obertstein: I love Arnold. I think he's hilarious. Yeah, I love a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan now. Old Arnold from way back when was kind of a creep, but yeah, new Arnold is way better than old Arnold. Neil Osman: Yeah. You are from California? Mordy Obertstein: No, Crystal is from California. Neil Osman: Oh. Where you are you from, Mordy? Mordy Obertstein: New York. Neil Osman: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: I mean now. Yeah, I'm originally from New York. Now I'm international. Where can people, we could find Crystal in California, which we can't anymore, because she doesn't live in California anymore. Where can people find you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn, TikTok? Neil Osman: I'm a bit on like Twitter, but I got tired of it. Yeah, but I still have an account and I communicate with professionals over there and. Mordy Obertstein: Oh, okay, cool. Neil Osman: LinkedIn properly is also active. Mordy Obertstein: So we will link to those in the show notes. Neil, thank you so much for all that you do to help our users and thanks so much for joining us today. Neil Osman: Thank you. Was a blast. Thanks. Mordy Obertstein: You know who's always making the SEO news very accessible? Crystal Carter: Whose that? Mordy Obertstein: Literally he has his articles, he has his daily video series called, It's New, which you can find right here on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, where it's indicated because Crystal and I do this daily with him. It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Hey. Mordy Obertstein: He makes it accessible. Crystal Carter: He does, he does. He does. Mordy Obertstein: He's very accessible on Twitter as well. You reach out to Barry, is it new? No. Your birthday? Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think also we talked about language as well. I think language is also really, really important. I think Barry writes in a very matter of fact kind of way like this happened and this happened and that happened. Mordy Obertstein: That's true. Crystal Carter: And I think that's really, really useful. I think it's particularly useful when we think about accessibility in a lowercase a kind of way in terms of international audiences like, [foreign language 00:48:44] from school or whatever. But when I know my accent is- Mordy Obertstein: Espanol. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I know my accent is sometimes better than that. But anyway- Mordy Obertstein: That's a combination of, I don't know what. Texas, Espanol. Crystal Carter: Espanol, [foreign language 00:49:01]. Anyway, but I can't understand super complex sentences. I can understand smaller sentences in Spanish and straightforward sentences, but I can't understand super complex sentences. And I think that when you're speaking to an international audience, it's really important to think about that as well. Don't dumb it down, but don't make it overly complex for no reason at all. And I would say that Barry's very good at speaking very clearly and has a very wide-ranging international audience For that reason. Mordy Obertstein: What we're trying to say is its time for the Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Snappy News. You heard of the Yankee Clipper. Well now Google's the coupon clipper for the record, you may not have heard of the Yankee Clipper and that's Joe DiMaggio, but you may not have heard of either. Mordy, stop with the baseball references. I can't, I'm sorry. From Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land, Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being de-listed. So as we spoke about on this podcast before, back in the beginning of March, Google when announcing it's March 2024 core update and the spam update said, "Hey, come May 5th, we're going to be targeting Parasite SEO." And indeed they are. Barry confirmed with Danny Sullivan from Google who said that right now they're only doing manual actions. Dan said the algorithmic component will indeed come as we've said, but that's not live yet. What is Parasite SEO's, Google's calling on site reputation abuse. Barry writes, when third party sites host low quality content provided by third parties to piggyback on the ranking power of those third party websites. So for example, if I am, I don't know, coupon, superdupercoupon.com and no one's looking up, I can't rank for whatever keyword I'm trying to rank for. So I'll go to CNN, say, "Hey CNN, I'd like to host an article on your website because you rank for everything. So now I'll rank for my coupon keyword because you rank for everything. I will siphon off your authority." Google says, quote, "A third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefit from the site. Such content ranking highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given site." So the issue is, in my opinion, and maybe I'm putting words in Google's mouth, who knows. If I go to CNN and I see CNN's branding everywhere, and then I'm reading this article about whatever that this third party site is hosting on CNN, a reader might get confused, like, "Look at this, this is CNN," but it's not actually as trustworthy as CNN or whatever. I don't know. ABC News, wherever they're hosting this content. What Google did say, and I'm personally against me, speckling, I think this is why algorithmically it's hard. A lot of times you have content that's editorial content or surgeon and journal, they have advertisement, what do they call it? Oh, man. Announcements I think they call it. And it's articles like Crystal Carter, the host of this podcast has written an announcement article on search a journal, and it's all about SEO. It's great content because its from Crystal. So it's probably the best content on the whole website, just saying, and it makes sense to have that on search a journal. It was about SEO, I think it was about a SEO checklist or whatever it was. So that's exactly the kind of content and the quality of content that you'd want to see on an SEO news and blog site. So that makes sense. So Google said, "Many publications host advertising content that is intended for the regular readers rather than to primarily manipulate search rankings, sometimes calls native advertising or advertorial. This kind of typically won't confuse regular readers of the publication when they find on the publisher's site directly or when arriving at it from Google search results." I think that makes a complicated algorithmically and I think that's why they need to implement the manual actions to train the algorithm. That's me saying that. That's how Google's saying that. I'm a smart person, I think. Anyway, Barry also wrote this time on Search Engine Roundtable. "Google Site repetition Abuse isn't about linking." So Danny Sullivan, again, Google search liaison made it to quote Barry, "Crystal clear that the cyber petition abuse policy has zero to do with linking." This means that who you link to and or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with manual actions earlier this week. So it's not about links, it's purely about the content itself. Okay, so that's clarified. Thank you, Barry. Also, from Barry Schwartz and also from Search Engine Roundtable about Barry again with a monopoly on the news. Sundar Pichai Google CEO responds to Google's search quality issues. Google, CEO sat down with Bloomberg, did whole interview about the, and one of the topics that came up was obviously AI and the quality of Google's results. I found personally that a lot of the ways that he answered the questions were very telling. We cover this on It's New, our daily news series with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn, and of course Krista Carter when I cover this with Barry. And I said, "Look at his body language and how Sundar replied to this comment and to that question," Barry was unhappy. Barry did not like the read between the lines body language thing. So I think there were some interesting tidbits in there about how he answered the questions. Barry clearly thought I was wrong. He's making faces at me while we were recording, It's New, rolling his eyes at me saying that's the most ridiculous thing he ever heard in the chat. But I do think that you can learn a lot from the way that Sundar answered the questions. I think, by the way, for the record, the quality issue, which he answered it as anytime there's a transition, you get an exposure to new content, AI is going to do it. Sorry, AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as a challenge, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's totally true. I think we do give Google a little bit too much of a hard time. I was talking about Melissa Popp on an interview that's going to be released in a few weeks for this very podcast about this. It's hard. There's a bunch of AI content, but there's a ton of AI content being spun up. Content trends and consumption trends have changed, expectations have changed, which we covered on this podcast numerous times. Google's got to keep up with all of that at the same time. I think I mentioned on, It's New, which I'm basically pitching, you should check out, It's New each day on Monday through Thursday rather. There's another layer on top. And I think some of the things that Google's done to address those issues have been very thinking about the immediate and not thinking about the long term, which I'm not criticizing them. It's hard to do that, hard to balance that, but I think that's also a layer. So it's a very, I think the quality of the results and the questions about the quality of the results, it's not a linear question or a linear equation. There's multiple layers to it and multiple people who are responsible for it, if you want to put it that way. But again, check out the interview. I was joking, by the way, Barry wasn't making faces at me and saying things in the comments, but he did say that he didn't think the body of language told him much, but I think it did. I think it did. I stand by that. And that's this week's, Snappy News. Hope you found all of that news, super accessible to you. Hope you did a good job with that. If I didn't, let me know out there on the social media verse, and I'll do my best to fix it. We also wanted to make a person who talks about SEO and accessibility accessible to you by telling you that you should be following, Miracle Inameti Archibong out there on social media on X. It's at M-I-R-A underscore I-N-A-M on LinkedIn. It'll just be her name. Crystal Carter: And she is a fantastic follower. She is an SEO over at John Lewis, and she does some great work, and she's been speaking on accessibility for years, before it was a little bit of a buzzword. She was talking about how to do alt text in a sort of programmatic way and how to make things more accessible. So she talked about that at MozCon. Mordy Obertstein: Oh yeah, I was there for that. That was a great speech. Crystal Carter: Yeah, really, really good. And she demonstrated, and it was the first time I'd ever heard an Audible screen reader going through. Mordy Obertstein: That's right. She went through it and it got stuck. Crystal Carter: It got stuck. And I think that that's really, really important because the other thing is that it also tells you how bots might be getting stuck on your website as well. So it's really, really useful to think about and forth between these two buttons. And it's very possible that if the screen reader's doing that, it's very possible the bots doing that as well. So everything should flow all together. And the way she illustrated it made it really, really clear to me that we got to do better for folks using screen readers. And yeah, she's a great follower for lots of reasons, but that one as well. Mordy Obertstein: So make sure to give Miracle a follow whatever you consume social media. I don't know if she's on TikTok or not, so I don't know if that applies to all social media, but LinkedIn and Twitter, X for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. No, Miracle is a great follower. Mordy Obertstein: When I say social media as an old person, I literally mean kind of Facebook, not really. Yeah, X and LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Mordy Obertstein: Because I'm an old person, which is why need to have things accessible, because I am blind as a bat without my glasses. My grandfather was literally blind. Crystal Carter: Was he really? Mordy Obertstein: Yeah. And the curb thing was a big deal. Crystal Carter: Right. I think, oh, and also in England you get the bump, so- Mordy Obertstein: The bumps. They don't have that in the US. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Bumps on the brakes. And also, I don't like it when they don't have, when you press the button for walking and there's no sound. Mordy Obertstein: No sound, that's... Crystal Carter: I really don't like that. Mordy Obertstein: You can hear a click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because sometimes you're just chatting away anyway when you're perfectly able or whatever, able to see that you could cross the road. You're chatting away and you don't notice it or whatever. Whereas when there's a sound, you hear it, and then you know that it's safe to go. Mordy Obertstein: See, you're speaking to your audience in different ways and making things accessible. Crystal Carter: Right. It's better for everybody. Mordy Obertstein: And if the local municipality can handle it, so can you. Crystal Carter: On that note... Mordy Obertstein: On that... Thanks for showing us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week, the new episode, as we dive into a look at what is often known as Holistic SEO and what that actually means. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you 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 and 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

Simon Cox has been building, managing, optimizing, measuring, and taking websites apart since 1995. In-house at a global financial corporate for many years, he now offers freelance SEO consultancy, bakes bread, and crafts technical SEO Audits. Find him at simoncox.com. Simon Cox Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co Creative Simon Cox has been building, managing, optimizing, measuring, and taking websites apart since 1995. In-house at a global financial corporate for many years, he now offers freelance SEO consultancy, bakes bread, and crafts technical SEO Audits. Find him at simoncox.com . Articles & Resources 20 Oct 2022 A collaborative Google Docs content template for Wix Blogs Resources Simon Cox Blog optimization collaborative Google doc Use this collaborative document to streamline your blog publication process and improve on-page optimization. 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

Should SEOs target “head terms” (aka short tail keywords) or focus more on longtail keyword phrases? Is there actual value in head terms? If so, when and how should you implement short tail keywords into your SEO strategy? Join hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein as they dive into head terms and SEO strategy. Daniel Cheung also joins the show to share his passion for search-related insights by exploring the potential value of head terms and their poor conversion performance. It’s everything about short tail keywords on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Back Is the chase for "head terms" doomed to fail? Should SEOs target “head terms” (aka short tail keywords) or focus more on longtail keyword phrases? Is there actual value in head terms? If so, when and how should you implement short tail keywords into your SEO strategy? Join hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein as they dive into head terms and SEO strategy. Daniel Cheung also joins the show to share his passion for search-related insights by exploring the potential value of head terms and their poor conversion performance. It’s everything about short tail keywords on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 26 | February 22, 2023 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 33:44 This week’s guests Daniel Cheung Based in Sydney, Australia, Daniel K Cheung helps in-house SEO managers and marketing directors make the right decisions by making the complex simple when it comes to organic growth. He is passionate about sharing search-related insights and learnings. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the incredible, the fantastic, the "I'm going to Beyonce" head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I am indeed. I got Beyonce tickets and I think I could cry. Mordy Oberstein: Oh my God. Crystal Carter: I mean it's pretty amazing. I've never thought that I would be there, but there I am. I'm going to be there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so happy for you. When is the concert? Crystal Carter: I'll be going to the concert in the spring. I can't remember exactly the date, but I'm basically dropping everything so you won't be hearing from me on that day. I will- Mordy Oberstein: This is your Super Bowl. Crystal Carter: Yeah, this is my Super Bowl, although, but to be honest, for people who are fans of Beyonce, Rihanna, this is a pretty mega year. So Rihanna's performing at the Super Bowl. Beyonce is on tour. Taylor Swift is on tour. This is a big year for big shows, doing cool things. Also, it's my understanding that Rihanna's about to drop a Ventee kids fashion line, which is amazing as well. So- Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking forward to that. Crystal Carter: I know, but I'm just saying there's a whole... For my beehive SEO crew, of which I know there are many, because I did a Beyonce themed deck at Brighton in April, and literally everyone from the beehive amongst the SEO crew was like, "I loved it. It was amazing." And I was like, I knew there were some people like that here. I was chatting with Joy Sejaku about this. I'm chatting with them... And Brittany Muller was talking about this online and also there's a few other folks. I'm just saying there's overlap. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Crystal Carter: Shout out to the whole beehive. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out to all the Beyonce people. Well, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can now move on past head terms and get a keyword that will actually help your site grow by using Sam Rush's keyword integration inside of Wix. It's a free keyword research tool right inside of Wix, which brings us to today's show, is the Chase for Head Terms Doomed to Fail? Alternatively, we can call us episode, It's a Trap as going after short tell keywords, aka head terms, aka keywords like "best vacation" or "pizza" might not be the best idea if you want to drive not just traffic, but actual revenue to the website. We'll dive into why do clients and even some SEOs find head terms so attractive? When is it and when is it not worth it to go after a head term? And how does Google treat head terms and what does that mean for you and your clients' websites? Also, Daniel K Chung stops by to share the value of head terms within a very specific context. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO News for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness, go now, listen podcast as episode number 26 of the SERP's Up podcast is here to get into your head all about SEO and head terms. Get it? I said, "Go now, listen podcast." Get it? Head terms. Crystal Carter: I feel like we're heading in the right direction, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Mordy Oberstein: Go direction podcast. Also, when you speak in head terms it is the weirdest language. Dr. P has this thing to go into... He doesn't actually do this, but Dr. Pirmaz would like to do this, to go into a store like Best Buy or whatever electronics store and start yelling, "Buy laptop," as if you're searching on Google. Leaving Dr. Pete and his shenanigans aside. What exactly are head keywords? Let's dive into that quickly before we dive into whether or not you should be using them or not. So there are all sorts of keywords. There are things called long tail keywords and short tail keywords. We can get into why they are called long tail or short tail keywords, not because of the number of words in them by the way, that's a mess. But essentially a head keyword is something very, very top level. As opposed to "Shoe inserts for children between ages five and 11," it's, "Shoe inserts." Crystal Carter: And generally speaking you know you're looking at a head term if it falls into a few criteria. It doesn't always have to be one or two words, but they tend to be one or two words. Another one is that they have a large search volume, so something like over 10,000, and depending on the niche, but something like over 10,000 with search volume. I've seen some that'll just reference one shortly, but they can be hundreds of thousands of search volume per month. They also tend to have a very large number of search results. Something like in the billions. If you're looking at a keyword and it says that there are billions of search results, that's probably a head term. And the other thing you'll notice is that they have a large number of keyword variations and some of the tools will explain that for you. A good example, for instance is hats. That's a head term. If we think about, that one's got a keyword search volume globally of something like 500,000 for instance. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot. Crystal Carter: It's got 7 billion search results and the people ranking for that are people like Lids and Amazon. Mordy Oberstein: Hats.com, Crystal Carter: Hats.com, precisely. Then when we drill down a little bit into something like straw hats, that's still kind of a head term. It's better than hats, but that's coming in at 41 million keywords. And then if you get down further into something like, straw hats for women, that's giving you fewer on the search volume. But also we've gone down from a hundred thousand search volume down to sort of 13,000 search volume, and that's more niche. So that's the difference between a head term and as you get further into it. Mordy Oberstein: And usually the SERP tends to open up as you refine down. So again, a head term is very, very categorical and everyone is trying to arrange for those, we'll call them categories. Crystal Carter: Precisely. And clients love these because they are big and shiny. We were talking about Beyonce, but head terms are kind of the Beyonce of keywords. They're out in front and it looks really shiny and everybody's really interested in it, but sometimes clients are like, "Yeah, I want to rank for hats." And you're like, "You're not going to rank for hats because you're not Amazon, and I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to rank for hats, especially not with one piece of content and 15 pages or something." And Beyonce wasn't built in a day. Beyonce started off in a group and then she ended... And then she moved out in front. And no disrespect to Kelly and Michelle and the other people before, but she built up to that. And I think that that's something that clients don't always understand is that you don't dive straight in on the head terms. You use it, like you were saying, like a category, use it as sort of a topic and build your content around that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I always compare it to when you're recording somebody, it takes a long time for that person to feel comfortable with you to share their deepest, darkest, inner secrets with you. The same thing with rankings. It takes a while for Google to understand who you are, what you're all about, and blah blah, blah. So it's not going to rank you for hats, the one thing everybody's looking for right away. Crystal Carter: And I think also you have to remember that Google also steers people away from that. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: So Google has lots of ways that they sort of say, "Hats isn't enough guys, I need you to drill down. Are you talking fedoras? Are you talking baseball caps? Are you talking a top hat?" They manage this in lots of ways. So they give auto complete. There's those topic bubbles, there's disambiguation boxes, there's lots of those things. So one of the ways that people think about head terms is thinking about ways that they can connect with people on all of those different slits that come off of the head terms. And it's another reason why we always tell people to look at the SERP to better understand how Google's managing those head terms and other pieces of content. Mordy Oberstein: So they are these very shiny objects. First off, they're very simple. If I own a pizza store, so I will go after pizza, what else would I go after? Right? And so either it's really a lack of understanding of how search works. And you think, "Okay, I sell pizza, I'll go over after pizza." That's one part of the other is the, I know what's happening, I know what pizza represents on Google, I'm going to go after that. And it's almost like this shiny object that's not exactly... Not always relevant and to the point by the way, of the Google results themselves. If you search for hats, you get a carousel up top, unisex, kids, boys, cap, truckers, snapback, bucket, a door nearby, craft blank. I don't know what that means. New era, Nike, I can go on. Crystal Carter: They're giving you more options to filter your results to drill down. Mordy Oberstein: Which is Google telling you that when somebody searches for hats, they really don't just want hats. What they really want is either a trucker hat or they want a Nike hat or they want a kids hat. Crystal Carter: Whatever, boy hat, bucket hat. Mordy Oberstein: Yankees hat, all the things, except for Red Sox hats. Nobody wants those, don't even bother going after it. But you see how Google treats head terms as if you didn't really mean to search for that, which means that you as a content creator should take a lesson away from that, that your audience didn't really want... They wanted something much more specific. So give them that. Crystal Carter: We've had some really good articles on the Wix SEO Hub talking about this a little bit more. So we have someone talking about long tail keywords and they were explaining a few things around that. And they were saying that with that, that we should be thinking about them as part of creating your long tail keyword strategy. And Jon Stickler talks about how when you do a content cluster, that the head term should be the core of the content cluster. So for instance, if you were to talk about hats, you would say the core would be hats, that you make sure that there a cluster around the word hats and then it broke down into those things so it meant hats for men, summer hats, small hats, big hats, church hats, all the different sort of hats, breaking them down from that so that they all feed into that content. And it's something that we talked to Adam and Rebecca from the Wix blog a few episodes ago, and she talked about a sheet. That's something that they think about when they think about their content, but it also helps you to appeal to lots of different parts of the SERP, including featured snippets and other things like that as well. Mordy Oberstein: So yeah, usually head terms come about because let's say you go... Let's go through the pillar page again, pillars and clusters. So you have a pillar page that's sort of like the cornerstone page. Out of that, you have subpages that talk about all the subtopics. So hats. So you have a page about hats, great. And then you have a page about baseball hats, page about trucker hats, page about... Don't know, summer hats, winter hats, kids hats, all these other pages that come out of that. You get the head term not by targeting the head term, you get the head term by over time building up all these other subpages where Google goes, "Hey, you know what? You're really good at hats." And then one day you wake up and you're ranking for hat. Crystal Carter: Precisely. So then this is an example of Lids, right? So Lids is a business that is entirely hats. That is what they do. All they do is hats. And so Google wants to be able to satisfy the query of hats and they know that chances are Lids is probably going to have a hat for this person because that's all they do and they've been doing it for years. And so all of information they have around that, and all the content is in some way a little bit optimized for a hat. So yeah, it's something that you build up over time and keep it in the back of your mind in everything you do. But you probably won't use the hats at the front. I had a client who was trying to rank for ballet shoes and they sold ballet shoes, but they needed to add more content to their site in order to rank for just ballet shoes because mostly they just have product pages. So one of the things that SEOs will advise you is to add different kinds of content around those terms in order to give Google more rich information about those terms in order for you to rank for... To give signals to Google that you have good content around those head terms in lots of different ways. Treat it more as a topic than as a sort of explicit term that you're going for. Mordy Oberstein: It's the way we all learn. When I always... I used to teach fourth grade, and one of the ways you teach kids new words is that you, they're called context clues. We have a sentence and there's a very big word in the sentence. And you ask based on the context of the sentence, you have the kids figure out, "What does that word mean?" People learn through context. Search engines learn the same way. And if they're trying to figure out, do you talk about hats? They're going to contextualize all the other content on the website. And if you sell ballet shoes and not hats, you'll be like, wait a second, you don't have anything to do with hats, even though you say you're a hat's website because you're selling ballet, you're talking about a whole blog of ballet shoes. So contextualization is what helps you get that head term and it's contextualization across the board. It's Google understanding from other websites linking to you as an entity to say on Wikipedia or a LinkedIn or Crunch Base, whatever it is. All these things where Google understands about you as a company, it's very holistic for Google to... Google goes about it very holistically looking at determining who you are and what you're relevant for so that you can rank for those super duper head terms. By the way, totally separate thing, aren't always the best thing to rank for anyway, because those aren't always the terms that bring in the money. They might bring in traffic. And unless you're selling, you're running ads and the traffic is super important to you, the long tail keywords, meaning the very specific keyword might actually earn you more money. Crystal Carter: It can do. And also I think there's some challenges that you get around some of those head terms, because we were talking about some of the different search features that you see when you look up something like hats. And what we find over time, there's an article from Dr. Pete, I think you mentioned him earlier in the thing, but he talks a lot about featured snippets and he talks a lot about what's happening in the SERP. And I remember there's an article that I referenced a few times where he's talking about featured snippets dropping to historical lows. It's from a few years ago. But one of the things he does in that article is he breaks down how long the query is, for instance. So when he saw on this particular example, he was saying that for queries that were one word long, which again tend to be head terms. If you look up in the dictionary, if you look up, "Run," in the dictionary, the entry for run, it's going to be very, very long. Whereas if you look up the entry for... I don't know, hippopotamus, it's going to be shorter for instance. But for instance, they were saying in this particular thing that there was a 73% drop in featured snippets for keywords with one word. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That for keywords where there were nine words, there was a 6% drop. For keywords with 10 words, there was a 0% drop. So what I'm saying is that Google works on the head terms because head terms aren't great for Google, really. They give you those auto completes because they don't even want you to just search for hats. They want you to tell them exactly what you need. Do you want that hat that you saw somebody wear in a movie? Are you looking for promotional hats? Are you looking for... Whatever it is. They want you to give them more information so that they can give you better information. And so if you're just going for head terms, sometimes it means that your rankings can be a little bit more volatile if you're not working on making sure that you're building that out across lots of different related terms across your site. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings up a good point that the entire ecosystem is steering away from head terms, which I... When you ask me who do I think is going to win an election? I always look at the momentum. Where's the momentum? Forget the poll, whatever. I always go by momentum. It's the same thing with strategy around these things. Where's the momentum? Momentum is very much away from head terms. I've seen multiple cases where Google, you would write an ultimate guide to whatever, you're trying to rank with these really short tail, very much head terms and a whole bunch of them at one time. And Google's like, "You're too broad. We want something way more specific instead." So something to definitely think about. Not to say, by the way, that there aren't cases where using head terms could make sense or going after head terms could make sense, which is why our dear friend Daniel K Chung is here to tell you how to get the most value out of head term keywords. Daniel Cheung: I guess there's no polite way to say this, but head term keywords are useless. And I know that's supposed to sound like a controversial take, but it's not. So bear with me. So a head term keyword, yes, it gets a lot of search volume, but they convert really poorly. In fact, I'll be surprised to find a head term keyword across any vertical that converts better than 1%. Usually it's a lot less than 1%. However, again, it comes down to demand and volume. If you have 50,000 monthly searches that come from that one keyword, then even at a half a percent conversion rate, that's still a lot of conversions and that's why head terms are so lucrative and so sought after. But let's be honest here, ranking for a head term keyword is difficult and it'll take a long time. And unless you are working on a website that has a very established link profile, is very well known, then yeah, it's going to be almost impossible for you to rank for a head term keyword unless you're doing a lot of high quality PBN links. Otherwise, if you do the usual route of having clean tech SEO, having really good content that's interlinked with each other, even doing semantic SEO, ranking for a head term keyword, yeah, it's going to take a long time. But here's the thing, when it does come to head term keywords, they're useful for brands who do a lot of advertising, brands who invest in television, in radio, in let's say Super Bowl commercials, things that are traditionally offline and very difficult to measure and track, but yet they bring in the eyeballs. Because when you Google something or search any search engine for that matter, a head term keyword, and you look at the first 10 results. In any tool, let's say Ahrefs or Semrush or SE Ranking, and you look at the estimated traffic that those pages, the ranking pages get, there's no linear correlation between page one to page 10 or result one to result 10. And the difference between these clicks and estimated traffic is brand, it's brand awareness. So even if you were to rank for a head term, ranking for it doesn't automatically guarantee you the lion's share of that estimated monthly search volume. It's actually the above the line, below the line and all the other paid activities that is considered within marketing that contributes to the success of that head term. And so that's why I have this love-hate relationship because yes, you should have a particular page that targets a head term, but it doesn't really bring in any tangible business benefit until you start doing a lot of other marketing activities. That's how you really leverage ranking or getting that coveted position on SERP one. And my recommendation is, instead of the head term, is break it down into long tail keywords, break it down into individual queries or concerns that people have about the overarching umbrella head term. And when you get really specific and you have a target audience in mind and you produce content that is really, really, really targeted and helpful for that person and is different to what already exists on the internet... And by different, I also mean better, but what is better? That's subjective. I mean giving something to the reader that isn't covered as in detail or in depth or providing a different perspective on that same subject matter that no other ranking webpage has bothered to do. And that's how you start ranking for those long-term queries. And when you again do that tech SEO, when you do that internal linking and you connect these interrelated subtopics together and then ensure that they pass a link juice via internal links to that head term target page, then that's how you will eventually rank for a head term keyword. But again, without other marketing activities, it's really difficult to actualize any real world benefit in terms of a business, in terms of revenue from just ranking for a head term keyword. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like great minds think alike, hearing that. Crystal Carter: Honestly, and I... But I think one thing that he brought up that was a really good point, the correlation to brand and the correlation to the brand understanding. And you touched on this a bit where Google understanding your entity overall and Google understanding the core of your business. And I think that the relationship between the head terms and the chances that Google put you in front of people for a head term around a large, broad-reaching topic does correlate particularly to brand and I think that that's a good point. So again, on the hats thing, as I was saying, Lids is all about hats. That's all they do and that's all they've ever done. So that's something that Google knows, that that's what they do and they'll also know the kinds of traffic that they get and that sort of thing. So I think that the brand correlation is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love this overlap between brand and SEO. It's a whole separate topic for another time. Rhode Island, neither a road nor an island, discuss. Anyway, since we're talking about head terms, wouldn't it be cool to see how different searches engines handle different head terms? You know it would be. Crystal Carter: It would. Mordy Oberstein: It would definitely be. So that's why we're going to look at how different search engines handle the head term, "Long tail," because it's not a long tail keyword. It's a short tail keyword. But how do they handle long tail? Oh my gosh, so many walls have been broken with that. Crystal Carter: Who loves long tail? Long tail... No, it's short insurance, isn't it? Mordy Oberstein: It's short. It's all good. So we're breaking the fourth wall with this one as we explore so many search engines. Speaker 5: Google's latest update. Popular search engine Bing. Duck Duck Go. Yahoo. Alta Vista. Mordy Oberstein: There's so many of them. They're all beautiful. It's like the stars in the sky. There's so many. Crystal Carter: So many. Mordy Oberstein: But most of them don't burn bright. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not sure. I think I missed that reference. I'm not sure about that. Mordy Oberstein: We got another meeting after this, we don't have time to understand my references. So we took the keyword, "Long tail," and we plugged into a whole bunch of search news like Neva, like Google, TikTok, like Bing. And they're very, very, very, very different. For example, TikTok. TikTok shows you videos about animals with long tails. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Which is pretty... Makes sense. Whereas Google does, there's nothing about actual long tail. It's all about long tail data, long tail keywords. There are no animals involved on Google. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that makes sense for TikTok though, because I mainly spend my time on TikTok looking at animal videos. It's one of my favorite pastimes on TikTok. And I think also for media, for visual media, particularly for video, that's a perfect space for it. You want to see... I don't know, someone doing something cool with that. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder how much content there is about long tail keywords. Again, if I don't want to Google the whole, why are they called long tail keywords? You could Google, "Why are they call long tail keywords?" You'll see a nice little chart there. It looks like a long tail. It'll explain all of it for you. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: But I don't think anyone's even going to TikTok for something like that. It's not what you go to TikTok for. So TikTok is matching up their intent, whereas Google's matching up the intent to their users. For most people typing in long tail, they're probably not looking for animals. They're looking for the long tail, "The future of business is selling," whatever, whatever. Or, "Should you invest in the long tail?" It's all these things about investment in data and all those more mature topics, not animal tails. Crystal Carter: I'll tell you what's also interesting on YouTube, and this is another one. So the first result I'm getting on YouTube is around knitting and crochet, actually. So it's around, knitting help. There's a video about long tail cast for beginners. It's got 2 million views and that's showing up as the main thing there. So this is something that... So long tail is a head term here in this case, but there's a lot of different users who are thinking about that particular topic in lots of different ways. You've got people who are interested in animals with long tails, people who are interested in data, long tail, people who are interested in knitting as well. So it's very important to understand. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really, really great point. Because you take a term like pizza or shoes or hats. So you think there's no way not to understand what you mean. But a lot of times when you go with a head term, it's very unclear what you mean. So for example, Bing has a whole bunch of mixed results. Something about data and keywords and long tail whatever, whatever. And some results about animals with long tails. Crystal Carter: They're just throwing everything at it. They're like, "What do you want? Which thing do you want?" Mordy Oberstein: We don't know what you want. So here, what do you mean? What kind of keyword is long tail, buddy? Why don't you be a little more specific here? We don't know what the hell to show you. Crystal Carter: And they've also got some knitting stuff there as well. I think it's very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: One interesting thing that Neva did, by the way, when you type in long tail into Neva.com, everything is all about long tail key... "What is Longtail marketing? The best long tail keyword planner tool." And so forth. But they have a little box about pulling in... What do they call your Reddit, Quora, what are those things called? Crystal Carter: Forum. Mordy Oberstein: Forums, thank you. I should've known the F word forums. They have a box showing information from all the different forums and in there everything is about animals. So they have discussions. Reddit, "My kitten has an extremely long tail," or Reddit, "Fat tail versus short... Long tail." That's actually a data thing. Actually anyone else's rabbit have an extra long tail? Crystal Carter: Right. This is very interesting. I think also it's really important, so you mentioned about the different sort of variations. We didn't talk about this in the other section, but one of the other tricky things with head terms, this is sort of identifying this, you said, "People don't think about the other." I've done PPC stuff with, we're going after a head term, we went after, "Goggles," and we were using some machine learning to help the ads. And the places where the ads were showing were all sorts of stuff. We were spending loads of money on things that were not relevant because goggles is a head term. And when I said goggles, I was thinking swimming goggles. But the results that it was showing on was beer goggles, safety goggles, steam goggles, all these different things. And I was like, I had what? So you have to remember that there's lots of different variations on all of these things. Mordy Oberstein: Because I think beer goggles, automatically. Who doesn't? Crystal Carter: Steampunk goggles. There were all sorts. So yeah, it's important. Mordy Oberstein: But that's the point. They're very shiny. All these head terms, short tail keywords, top level keyword, we're going to call them very, very, very shiny. Not very effective. But you know what else is shiny? Crystal Carter: What's shiny? Mordy Oberstein: And is effective, is the SEO news. So here's the shiniest and snappiest SEO news. Crystal Carter: And now let's discuss some snappy news for this week in search. This week, I saw Google make an announcement on the Google Search Central blog explaining that you should not use 403s or 404s for rate limiting or to reduce Google's crawl rate in any way. So they've said they've seen an uptick in site owners and some CDNs trying to use 404s and other 400 client errors to reduce Google's crawl rate. And they're saying that that's not a good idea. So in a blog from Gary Elish, he explained that this is not the best thing to do and actually there are other ways that you can manage this crawl rate. So there are some extensive documentation on how to reduce Google's crawl rate if you need to. And they link to that in the blog. They explain that there are other ways that you can temporarily reduce the crawl rate with 500 or 429 status codes in order to help Google crawl at the rate that's most useful for you. So this is quite a useful piece of documentation for those with larger sites who need to manage their crawl rate. This week also saw Google update their best practices for how you can make your links most crawlable by Google's spiders and bots. And they've said, in case you want a TLDR, that the best way is to use an HREF link in your HTML. And they've also explained and laid out a few really good details and examples of how you can format other links and which other links are more challenging for Google. So this is really, really useful for everyone who's using links on Google. And if you are interested, there was some great conversation on Twitter that was also talking about some of the information that they shared around external links. There was some discussion with John Mueller about a cheese example, for instance, with the anchor text for a cheese example. But they were saying in particular, one of the things that they pointed out was that linking to other sites isn't something to be scared of. And that using internal links can help establish trustworthiness, for example, by citing your sources. So this is something that's useful. And there was a little bit of discussion around the no follow update that they said. So they said, "Use no follow only when you don't trust the source and not for every external link on your site." For example, if you're a cheese enthusiast and someone published a story badmouthing your favorite cheese, so you want to write an article to the response, however you don't want to give some of your reputation to that link, then you would use a no follow. And that's the example they gave. So this is something that people are very particularly interested in with regards to link equity and passing on link value and page rank. And this is something that you might want to check out on the Google search central documentation. Local SEOs will be interested to know that Google has also announced that they will be deprecating the Google My Business Insights API as of Monday the 20th of February, 2023. So this is something that a lot of people will have been prepared for, but if you have not prepared for it, then you should know that it will be completely offline as of Monday the 20th of February. So if you want to get some more insights, then you should probably switch over to the Google business profile performance API, where there is more support for Google Business profile users and you can monitor your site accordingly. And finally, in newsroom Bing, lots of people are continuing to try out the new Bing AI beta. So Barry Schwartz, Glenn Gabe and Brody Clark in particular have been demonstrating some of the capabilities of this new feature. So it's worth following along with them. But also lots of people are now starting to pay a lot more attention to some of the difference search features on Bing. So one of the things that they noticed this week, as reported on Search Engine Roundtable, was that Bing is now using a featured snippet expansion button, which means that they are showing a lot of the content from a particular article. So this is something that people find interesting. So there's been a lot of discussion around that particular feature and whether or not this is something that gives too much away with regards to a publisher's page or whether or not this is all fair play. So this is something that you might want to check out on Twitter and also on Search Engine Roundtable. Speaker 6: And that's it for the snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Lord, that was shiny and snappy, wasn't it? Crystal Carter: Star shining, I'm blinded by the light. Mordy Oberstein: All the stars are so shiny. I don't want to keep going back to stars. I have no idea what that reference is either. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: No clue. But you know who is a shining star in SEO? As we get into our follow of the week. Suganthan Mohanadasan is a shining star in the SEO community. Crystal Carter: He is fantastic. He's a cornerstone of the SEO community, super clever, super giving with his knowledge and also with his ability to just build cool stuff for SEOs. So he's got- Mordy Oberstein: Around keywords. Crystal Carter: Around keywords. So he's got a fantastic tool that he's built and I think it's got a free name model where you can sort of get some tokens and have a go and see how it works. And his tool helps you to manage some of those head terms and break them down into more manageable terms, like Daniel was talking about, like we were talking about, like they talk about in the Pillar Post Clusters article on the Wix SEO Hub. And so it's a really great tool and Suganthan is a fantastic fount of knowledge in regards to SEO. So he's a great person to follow. He's also a big fan of lots of tech so he's got a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Lot of cool posts, good food posts. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's got some good food posts. This is true. Mordy Oberstein: He's a good follow. He has a solid follow right there, Suganthan who you can find on Twitter at S-U-G-A-N-T-H-A-N. And if you don't want to have to remember how to spell that just by listening to this, head over to the show notes and we'll have a link to his Twitter profile right there for you. How convenient is that? So thoughtful. So thoughtful. Crystal Carter: It's just the kind kind of service we like to give our listeners. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Speedy, convenient service for you all the time. We rank for best service, head term. Crystal Carter: Best SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Best SEO service. That's a great head term because that means something totally different the way we're phrasing it, right? There we go. Well, that's it for us this week. 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 C-Suite SEO or Does SEO Belong in the Boardroom? Check it out wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO or check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guess wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, folks, peace, love at SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Daniel K. Cheung Dr. Pete Meyers Suganthan Mohanadasan Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Daniel K Cheung SEO Consulting Featured Snippets Drop to Historic Lows Keyword Insights News: Google: Don't use 403s or 404s for rate limiting Google: Link best practices for Google Google: Deprecating the legacy Google My Business Insights API on February 20, 2023 Microsoft Bing's New AI Features Are Really Impressive & Thought Out Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Daniel K. Cheung Dr. Pete Meyers Suganthan Mohanadasan Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Daniel K Cheung SEO Consulting Featured Snippets Drop to Historic Lows Keyword Insights News: Google: Don't use 403s or 404s for rate limiting Google: Link best practices for Google Google: Deprecating the legacy Google My Business Insights API on February 20, 2023 Microsoft Bing's New AI Features Are Really Impressive & Thought Out Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the incredible, the fantastic, the "I'm going to Beyonce" head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I am indeed. I got Beyonce tickets and I think I could cry. Mordy Oberstein: Oh my God. Crystal Carter: I mean it's pretty amazing. I've never thought that I would be there, but there I am. I'm going to be there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so happy for you. When is the concert? Crystal Carter: I'll be going to the concert in the spring. I can't remember exactly the date, but I'm basically dropping everything so you won't be hearing from me on that day. I will- Mordy Oberstein: This is your Super Bowl. Crystal Carter: Yeah, this is my Super Bowl, although, but to be honest, for people who are fans of Beyonce, Rihanna, this is a pretty mega year. So Rihanna's performing at the Super Bowl. Beyonce is on tour. Taylor Swift is on tour. This is a big year for big shows, doing cool things. Also, it's my understanding that Rihanna's about to drop a Ventee kids fashion line, which is amazing as well. So- Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking forward to that. Crystal Carter: I know, but I'm just saying there's a whole... For my beehive SEO crew, of which I know there are many, because I did a Beyonce themed deck at Brighton in April, and literally everyone from the beehive amongst the SEO crew was like, "I loved it. It was amazing." And I was like, I knew there were some people like that here. I was chatting with Joy Sejaku about this. I'm chatting with them... And Brittany Muller was talking about this online and also there's a few other folks. I'm just saying there's overlap. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Crystal Carter: Shout out to the whole beehive. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out to all the Beyonce people. Well, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can now move on past head terms and get a keyword that will actually help your site grow by using Sam Rush's keyword integration inside of Wix. It's a free keyword research tool right inside of Wix, which brings us to today's show, is the Chase for Head Terms Doomed to Fail? Alternatively, we can call us episode, It's a Trap as going after short tell keywords, aka head terms, aka keywords like "best vacation" or "pizza" might not be the best idea if you want to drive not just traffic, but actual revenue to the website. We'll dive into why do clients and even some SEOs find head terms so attractive? When is it and when is it not worth it to go after a head term? And how does Google treat head terms and what does that mean for you and your clients' websites? Also, Daniel K Chung stops by to share the value of head terms within a very specific context. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO News for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness, go now, listen podcast as episode number 26 of the SERP's Up podcast is here to get into your head all about SEO and head terms. Get it? I said, "Go now, listen podcast." Get it? Head terms. Crystal Carter: I feel like we're heading in the right direction, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Mordy Oberstein: Go direction podcast. Also, when you speak in head terms it is the weirdest language. Dr. P has this thing to go into... He doesn't actually do this, but Dr. Pirmaz would like to do this, to go into a store like Best Buy or whatever electronics store and start yelling, "Buy laptop," as if you're searching on Google. Leaving Dr. Pete and his shenanigans aside. What exactly are head keywords? Let's dive into that quickly before we dive into whether or not you should be using them or not. So there are all sorts of keywords. There are things called long tail keywords and short tail keywords. We can get into why they are called long tail or short tail keywords, not because of the number of words in them by the way, that's a mess. But essentially a head keyword is something very, very top level. As opposed to "Shoe inserts for children between ages five and 11," it's, "Shoe inserts." Crystal Carter: And generally speaking you know you're looking at a head term if it falls into a few criteria. It doesn't always have to be one or two words, but they tend to be one or two words. Another one is that they have a large search volume, so something like over 10,000, and depending on the niche, but something like over 10,000 with search volume. I've seen some that'll just reference one shortly, but they can be hundreds of thousands of search volume per month. They also tend to have a very large number of search results. Something like in the billions. If you're looking at a keyword and it says that there are billions of search results, that's probably a head term. And the other thing you'll notice is that they have a large number of keyword variations and some of the tools will explain that for you. A good example, for instance is hats. That's a head term. If we think about, that one's got a keyword search volume globally of something like 500,000 for instance. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot. Crystal Carter: It's got 7 billion search results and the people ranking for that are people like Lids and Amazon. Mordy Oberstein: Hats.com, Crystal Carter: Hats.com, precisely. Then when we drill down a little bit into something like straw hats, that's still kind of a head term. It's better than hats, but that's coming in at 41 million keywords. And then if you get down further into something like, straw hats for women, that's giving you fewer on the search volume. But also we've gone down from a hundred thousand search volume down to sort of 13,000 search volume, and that's more niche. So that's the difference between a head term and as you get further into it. Mordy Oberstein: And usually the SERP tends to open up as you refine down. So again, a head term is very, very categorical and everyone is trying to arrange for those, we'll call them categories. Crystal Carter: Precisely. And clients love these because they are big and shiny. We were talking about Beyonce, but head terms are kind of the Beyonce of keywords. They're out in front and it looks really shiny and everybody's really interested in it, but sometimes clients are like, "Yeah, I want to rank for hats." And you're like, "You're not going to rank for hats because you're not Amazon, and I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to rank for hats, especially not with one piece of content and 15 pages or something." And Beyonce wasn't built in a day. Beyonce started off in a group and then she ended... And then she moved out in front. And no disrespect to Kelly and Michelle and the other people before, but she built up to that. And I think that that's something that clients don't always understand is that you don't dive straight in on the head terms. You use it, like you were saying, like a category, use it as sort of a topic and build your content around that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I always compare it to when you're recording somebody, it takes a long time for that person to feel comfortable with you to share their deepest, darkest, inner secrets with you. The same thing with rankings. It takes a while for Google to understand who you are, what you're all about, and blah blah, blah. So it's not going to rank you for hats, the one thing everybody's looking for right away. Crystal Carter: And I think also you have to remember that Google also steers people away from that. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: So Google has lots of ways that they sort of say, "Hats isn't enough guys, I need you to drill down. Are you talking fedoras? Are you talking baseball caps? Are you talking a top hat?" They manage this in lots of ways. So they give auto complete. There's those topic bubbles, there's disambiguation boxes, there's lots of those things. So one of the ways that people think about head terms is thinking about ways that they can connect with people on all of those different slits that come off of the head terms. And it's another reason why we always tell people to look at the SERP to better understand how Google's managing those head terms and other pieces of content. Mordy Oberstein: So they are these very shiny objects. First off, they're very simple. If I own a pizza store, so I will go after pizza, what else would I go after? Right? And so either it's really a lack of understanding of how search works. And you think, "Okay, I sell pizza, I'll go over after pizza." That's one part of the other is the, I know what's happening, I know what pizza represents on Google, I'm going to go after that. And it's almost like this shiny object that's not exactly... Not always relevant and to the point by the way, of the Google results themselves. If you search for hats, you get a carousel up top, unisex, kids, boys, cap, truckers, snapback, bucket, a door nearby, craft blank. I don't know what that means. New era, Nike, I can go on. Crystal Carter: They're giving you more options to filter your results to drill down. Mordy Oberstein: Which is Google telling you that when somebody searches for hats, they really don't just want hats. What they really want is either a trucker hat or they want a Nike hat or they want a kids hat. Crystal Carter: Whatever, boy hat, bucket hat. Mordy Oberstein: Yankees hat, all the things, except for Red Sox hats. Nobody wants those, don't even bother going after it. But you see how Google treats head terms as if you didn't really mean to search for that, which means that you as a content creator should take a lesson away from that, that your audience didn't really want... They wanted something much more specific. So give them that. Crystal Carter: We've had some really good articles on the Wix SEO Hub talking about this a little bit more. So we have someone talking about long tail keywords and they were explaining a few things around that. And they were saying that with that, that we should be thinking about them as part of creating your long tail keyword strategy. And Jon Stickler talks about how when you do a content cluster, that the head term should be the core of the content cluster. So for instance, if you were to talk about hats, you would say the core would be hats, that you make sure that there a cluster around the word hats and then it broke down into those things so it meant hats for men, summer hats, small hats, big hats, church hats, all the different sort of hats, breaking them down from that so that they all feed into that content. And it's something that we talked to Adam and Rebecca from the Wix blog a few episodes ago, and she talked about a sheet. That's something that they think about when they think about their content, but it also helps you to appeal to lots of different parts of the SERP, including featured snippets and other things like that as well. Mordy Oberstein: So yeah, usually head terms come about because let's say you go... Let's go through the pillar page again, pillars and clusters. So you have a pillar page that's sort of like the cornerstone page. Out of that, you have subpages that talk about all the subtopics. So hats. So you have a page about hats, great. And then you have a page about baseball hats, page about trucker hats, page about... Don't know, summer hats, winter hats, kids hats, all these other pages that come out of that. You get the head term not by targeting the head term, you get the head term by over time building up all these other subpages where Google goes, "Hey, you know what? You're really good at hats." And then one day you wake up and you're ranking for hat. Crystal Carter: Precisely. So then this is an example of Lids, right? So Lids is a business that is entirely hats. That is what they do. All they do is hats. And so Google wants to be able to satisfy the query of hats and they know that chances are Lids is probably going to have a hat for this person because that's all they do and they've been doing it for years. And so all of information they have around that, and all the content is in some way a little bit optimized for a hat. So yeah, it's something that you build up over time and keep it in the back of your mind in everything you do. But you probably won't use the hats at the front. I had a client who was trying to rank for ballet shoes and they sold ballet shoes, but they needed to add more content to their site in order to rank for just ballet shoes because mostly they just have product pages. So one of the things that SEOs will advise you is to add different kinds of content around those terms in order to give Google more rich information about those terms in order for you to rank for... To give signals to Google that you have good content around those head terms in lots of different ways. Treat it more as a topic than as a sort of explicit term that you're going for. Mordy Oberstein: It's the way we all learn. When I always... I used to teach fourth grade, and one of the ways you teach kids new words is that you, they're called context clues. We have a sentence and there's a very big word in the sentence. And you ask based on the context of the sentence, you have the kids figure out, "What does that word mean?" People learn through context. Search engines learn the same way. And if they're trying to figure out, do you talk about hats? They're going to contextualize all the other content on the website. And if you sell ballet shoes and not hats, you'll be like, wait a second, you don't have anything to do with hats, even though you say you're a hat's website because you're selling ballet, you're talking about a whole blog of ballet shoes. So contextualization is what helps you get that head term and it's contextualization across the board. It's Google understanding from other websites linking to you as an entity to say on Wikipedia or a LinkedIn or Crunch Base, whatever it is. All these things where Google understands about you as a company, it's very holistic for Google to... Google goes about it very holistically looking at determining who you are and what you're relevant for so that you can rank for those super duper head terms. By the way, totally separate thing, aren't always the best thing to rank for anyway, because those aren't always the terms that bring in the money. They might bring in traffic. And unless you're selling, you're running ads and the traffic is super important to you, the long tail keywords, meaning the very specific keyword might actually earn you more money. Crystal Carter: It can do. And also I think there's some challenges that you get around some of those head terms, because we were talking about some of the different search features that you see when you look up something like hats. And what we find over time, there's an article from Dr. Pete, I think you mentioned him earlier in the thing, but he talks a lot about featured snippets and he talks a lot about what's happening in the SERP. And I remember there's an article that I referenced a few times where he's talking about featured snippets dropping to historical lows. It's from a few years ago. But one of the things he does in that article is he breaks down how long the query is, for instance. So when he saw on this particular example, he was saying that for queries that were one word long, which again tend to be head terms. If you look up in the dictionary, if you look up, "Run," in the dictionary, the entry for run, it's going to be very, very long. Whereas if you look up the entry for... I don't know, hippopotamus, it's going to be shorter for instance. But for instance, they were saying in this particular thing that there was a 73% drop in featured snippets for keywords with one word. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That for keywords where there were nine words, there was a 6% drop. For keywords with 10 words, there was a 0% drop. So what I'm saying is that Google works on the head terms because head terms aren't great for Google, really. They give you those auto completes because they don't even want you to just search for hats. They want you to tell them exactly what you need. Do you want that hat that you saw somebody wear in a movie? Are you looking for promotional hats? Are you looking for... Whatever it is. They want you to give them more information so that they can give you better information. And so if you're just going for head terms, sometimes it means that your rankings can be a little bit more volatile if you're not working on making sure that you're building that out across lots of different related terms across your site. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings up a good point that the entire ecosystem is steering away from head terms, which I... When you ask me who do I think is going to win an election? I always look at the momentum. Where's the momentum? Forget the poll, whatever. I always go by momentum. It's the same thing with strategy around these things. Where's the momentum? Momentum is very much away from head terms. I've seen multiple cases where Google, you would write an ultimate guide to whatever, you're trying to rank with these really short tail, very much head terms and a whole bunch of them at one time. And Google's like, "You're too broad. We want something way more specific instead." So something to definitely think about. Not to say, by the way, that there aren't cases where using head terms could make sense or going after head terms could make sense, which is why our dear friend Daniel K Chung is here to tell you how to get the most value out of head term keywords. Daniel Cheung: I guess there's no polite way to say this, but head term keywords are useless. And I know that's supposed to sound like a controversial take, but it's not. So bear with me. So a head term keyword, yes, it gets a lot of search volume, but they convert really poorly. In fact, I'll be surprised to find a head term keyword across any vertical that converts better than 1%. Usually it's a lot less than 1%. However, again, it comes down to demand and volume. If you have 50,000 monthly searches that come from that one keyword, then even at a half a percent conversion rate, that's still a lot of conversions and that's why head terms are so lucrative and so sought after. But let's be honest here, ranking for a head term keyword is difficult and it'll take a long time. And unless you are working on a website that has a very established link profile, is very well known, then yeah, it's going to be almost impossible for you to rank for a head term keyword unless you're doing a lot of high quality PBN links. Otherwise, if you do the usual route of having clean tech SEO, having really good content that's interlinked with each other, even doing semantic SEO, ranking for a head term keyword, yeah, it's going to take a long time. But here's the thing, when it does come to head term keywords, they're useful for brands who do a lot of advertising, brands who invest in television, in radio, in let's say Super Bowl commercials, things that are traditionally offline and very difficult to measure and track, but yet they bring in the eyeballs. Because when you Google something or search any search engine for that matter, a head term keyword, and you look at the first 10 results. In any tool, let's say Ahrefs or Semrush or SE Ranking, and you look at the estimated traffic that those pages, the ranking pages get, there's no linear correlation between page one to page 10 or result one to result 10. And the difference between these clicks and estimated traffic is brand, it's brand awareness. So even if you were to rank for a head term, ranking for it doesn't automatically guarantee you the lion's share of that estimated monthly search volume. It's actually the above the line, below the line and all the other paid activities that is considered within marketing that contributes to the success of that head term. And so that's why I have this love-hate relationship because yes, you should have a particular page that targets a head term, but it doesn't really bring in any tangible business benefit until you start doing a lot of other marketing activities. That's how you really leverage ranking or getting that coveted position on SERP one. And my recommendation is, instead of the head term, is break it down into long tail keywords, break it down into individual queries or concerns that people have about the overarching umbrella head term. And when you get really specific and you have a target audience in mind and you produce content that is really, really, really targeted and helpful for that person and is different to what already exists on the internet... And by different, I also mean better, but what is better? That's subjective. I mean giving something to the reader that isn't covered as in detail or in depth or providing a different perspective on that same subject matter that no other ranking webpage has bothered to do. And that's how you start ranking for those long-term queries. And when you again do that tech SEO, when you do that internal linking and you connect these interrelated subtopics together and then ensure that they pass a link juice via internal links to that head term target page, then that's how you will eventually rank for a head term keyword. But again, without other marketing activities, it's really difficult to actualize any real world benefit in terms of a business, in terms of revenue from just ranking for a head term keyword. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like great minds think alike, hearing that. Crystal Carter: Honestly, and I... But I think one thing that he brought up that was a really good point, the correlation to brand and the correlation to the brand understanding. And you touched on this a bit where Google understanding your entity overall and Google understanding the core of your business. And I think that the relationship between the head terms and the chances that Google put you in front of people for a head term around a large, broad-reaching topic does correlate particularly to brand and I think that that's a good point. So again, on the hats thing, as I was saying, Lids is all about hats. That's all they do and that's all they've ever done. So that's something that Google knows, that that's what they do and they'll also know the kinds of traffic that they get and that sort of thing. So I think that the brand correlation is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love this overlap between brand and SEO. It's a whole separate topic for another time. Rhode Island, neither a road nor an island, discuss. Anyway, since we're talking about head terms, wouldn't it be cool to see how different searches engines handle different head terms? You know it would be. Crystal Carter: It would. Mordy Oberstein: It would definitely be. So that's why we're going to look at how different search engines handle the head term, "Long tail," because it's not a long tail keyword. It's a short tail keyword. But how do they handle long tail? Oh my gosh, so many walls have been broken with that. Crystal Carter: Who loves long tail? Long tail... No, it's short insurance, isn't it? Mordy Oberstein: It's short. It's all good. So we're breaking the fourth wall with this one as we explore so many search engines. Speaker 5: Google's latest update. Popular search engine Bing. Duck Duck Go. Yahoo. Alta Vista. Mordy Oberstein: There's so many of them. They're all beautiful. It's like the stars in the sky. There's so many. Crystal Carter: So many. Mordy Oberstein: But most of them don't burn bright. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not sure. I think I missed that reference. I'm not sure about that. Mordy Oberstein: We got another meeting after this, we don't have time to understand my references. So we took the keyword, "Long tail," and we plugged into a whole bunch of search news like Neva, like Google, TikTok, like Bing. And they're very, very, very, very different. For example, TikTok. TikTok shows you videos about animals with long tails. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Which is pretty... Makes sense. Whereas Google does, there's nothing about actual long tail. It's all about long tail data, long tail keywords. There are no animals involved on Google. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that makes sense for TikTok though, because I mainly spend my time on TikTok looking at animal videos. It's one of my favorite pastimes on TikTok. And I think also for media, for visual media, particularly for video, that's a perfect space for it. You want to see... I don't know, someone doing something cool with that. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder how much content there is about long tail keywords. Again, if I don't want to Google the whole, why are they called long tail keywords? You could Google, "Why are they call long tail keywords?" You'll see a nice little chart there. It looks like a long tail. It'll explain all of it for you. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: But I don't think anyone's even going to TikTok for something like that. It's not what you go to TikTok for. So TikTok is matching up their intent, whereas Google's matching up the intent to their users. For most people typing in long tail, they're probably not looking for animals. They're looking for the long tail, "The future of business is selling," whatever, whatever. Or, "Should you invest in the long tail?" It's all these things about investment in data and all those more mature topics, not animal tails. Crystal Carter: I'll tell you what's also interesting on YouTube, and this is another one. So the first result I'm getting on YouTube is around knitting and crochet, actually. So it's around, knitting help. There's a video about long tail cast for beginners. It's got 2 million views and that's showing up as the main thing there. So this is something that... So long tail is a head term here in this case, but there's a lot of different users who are thinking about that particular topic in lots of different ways. You've got people who are interested in animals with long tails, people who are interested in data, long tail, people who are interested in knitting as well. So it's very important to understand. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really, really great point. Because you take a term like pizza or shoes or hats. So you think there's no way not to understand what you mean. But a lot of times when you go with a head term, it's very unclear what you mean. So for example, Bing has a whole bunch of mixed results. Something about data and keywords and long tail whatever, whatever. And some results about animals with long tails. Crystal Carter: They're just throwing everything at it. They're like, "What do you want? Which thing do you want?" Mordy Oberstein: We don't know what you want. So here, what do you mean? What kind of keyword is long tail, buddy? Why don't you be a little more specific here? We don't know what the hell to show you. Crystal Carter: And they've also got some knitting stuff there as well. I think it's very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: One interesting thing that Neva did, by the way, when you type in long tail into Neva.com, everything is all about long tail key... "What is Longtail marketing? The best long tail keyword planner tool." And so forth. But they have a little box about pulling in... What do they call your Reddit, Quora, what are those things called? Crystal Carter: Forum. Mordy Oberstein: Forums, thank you. I should've known the F word forums. They have a box showing information from all the different forums and in there everything is about animals. So they have discussions. Reddit, "My kitten has an extremely long tail," or Reddit, "Fat tail versus short... Long tail." That's actually a data thing. Actually anyone else's rabbit have an extra long tail? Crystal Carter: Right. This is very interesting. I think also it's really important, so you mentioned about the different sort of variations. We didn't talk about this in the other section, but one of the other tricky things with head terms, this is sort of identifying this, you said, "People don't think about the other." I've done PPC stuff with, we're going after a head term, we went after, "Goggles," and we were using some machine learning to help the ads. And the places where the ads were showing were all sorts of stuff. We were spending loads of money on things that were not relevant because goggles is a head term. And when I said goggles, I was thinking swimming goggles. But the results that it was showing on was beer goggles, safety goggles, steam goggles, all these different things. And I was like, I had what? So you have to remember that there's lots of different variations on all of these things. Mordy Oberstein: Because I think beer goggles, automatically. Who doesn't? Crystal Carter: Steampunk goggles. There were all sorts. So yeah, it's important. Mordy Oberstein: But that's the point. They're very shiny. All these head terms, short tail keywords, top level keyword, we're going to call them very, very, very shiny. Not very effective. But you know what else is shiny? Crystal Carter: What's shiny? Mordy Oberstein: And is effective, is the SEO news. So here's the shiniest and snappiest SEO news. Crystal Carter: And now let's discuss some snappy news for this week in search. This week, I saw Google make an announcement on the Google Search Central blog explaining that you should not use 403s or 404s for rate limiting or to reduce Google's crawl rate in any way. So they've said they've seen an uptick in site owners and some CDNs trying to use 404s and other 400 client errors to reduce Google's crawl rate. And they're saying that that's not a good idea. So in a blog from Gary Elish, he explained that this is not the best thing to do and actually there are other ways that you can manage this crawl rate. So there are some extensive documentation on how to reduce Google's crawl rate if you need to. And they link to that in the blog. They explain that there are other ways that you can temporarily reduce the crawl rate with 500 or 429 status codes in order to help Google crawl at the rate that's most useful for you. So this is quite a useful piece of documentation for those with larger sites who need to manage their crawl rate. This week also saw Google update their best practices for how you can make your links most crawlable by Google's spiders and bots. And they've said, in case you want a TLDR, that the best way is to use an HREF link in your HTML. And they've also explained and laid out a few really good details and examples of how you can format other links and which other links are more challenging for Google. So this is really, really useful for everyone who's using links on Google. And if you are interested, there was some great conversation on Twitter that was also talking about some of the information that they shared around external links. There was some discussion with John Mueller about a cheese example, for instance, with the anchor text for a cheese example. But they were saying in particular, one of the things that they pointed out was that linking to other sites isn't something to be scared of. And that using internal links can help establish trustworthiness, for example, by citing your sources. So this is something that's useful. And there was a little bit of discussion around the no follow update that they said. So they said, "Use no follow only when you don't trust the source and not for every external link on your site." For example, if you're a cheese enthusiast and someone published a story badmouthing your favorite cheese, so you want to write an article to the response, however you don't want to give some of your reputation to that link, then you would use a no follow. And that's the example they gave. So this is something that people are very particularly interested in with regards to link equity and passing on link value and page rank. And this is something that you might want to check out on the Google search central documentation. Local SEOs will be interested to know that Google has also announced that they will be deprecating the Google My Business Insights API as of Monday the 20th of February, 2023. So this is something that a lot of people will have been prepared for, but if you have not prepared for it, then you should know that it will be completely offline as of Monday the 20th of February. So if you want to get some more insights, then you should probably switch over to the Google business profile performance API, where there is more support for Google Business profile users and you can monitor your site accordingly. And finally, in newsroom Bing, lots of people are continuing to try out the new Bing AI beta. So Barry Schwartz, Glenn Gabe and Brody Clark in particular have been demonstrating some of the capabilities of this new feature. So it's worth following along with them. But also lots of people are now starting to pay a lot more attention to some of the difference search features on Bing. So one of the things that they noticed this week, as reported on Search Engine Roundtable, was that Bing is now using a featured snippet expansion button, which means that they are showing a lot of the content from a particular article. So this is something that people find interesting. So there's been a lot of discussion around that particular feature and whether or not this is something that gives too much away with regards to a publisher's page or whether or not this is all fair play. So this is something that you might want to check out on Twitter and also on Search Engine Roundtable. Speaker 6: And that's it for the snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Lord, that was shiny and snappy, wasn't it? Crystal Carter: Star shining, I'm blinded by the light. Mordy Oberstein: All the stars are so shiny. I don't want to keep going back to stars. I have no idea what that reference is either. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: No clue. But you know who is a shining star in SEO? As we get into our follow of the week. Suganthan Mohanadasan is a shining star in the SEO community. Crystal Carter: He is fantastic. He's a cornerstone of the SEO community, super clever, super giving with his knowledge and also with his ability to just build cool stuff for SEOs. So he's got- Mordy Oberstein: Around keywords. Crystal Carter: Around keywords. So he's got a fantastic tool that he's built and I think it's got a free name model where you can sort of get some tokens and have a go and see how it works. And his tool helps you to manage some of those head terms and break them down into more manageable terms, like Daniel was talking about, like we were talking about, like they talk about in the Pillar Post Clusters article on the Wix SEO Hub. And so it's a really great tool and Suganthan is a fantastic fount of knowledge in regards to SEO. So he's a great person to follow. He's also a big fan of lots of tech so he's got a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Lot of cool posts, good food posts. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's got some good food posts. This is true. Mordy Oberstein: He's a good follow. He has a solid follow right there, Suganthan who you can find on Twitter at S-U-G-A-N-T-H-A-N. And if you don't want to have to remember how to spell that just by listening to this, head over to the show notes and we'll have a link to his Twitter profile right there for you. How convenient is that? So thoughtful. So thoughtful. Crystal Carter: It's just the kind kind of service we like to give our listeners. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Speedy, convenient service for you all the time. We rank for best service, head term. Crystal Carter: Best SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Best SEO service. That's a great head term because that means something totally different the way we're phrasing it, right? There we go. Well, that's it for us this week. 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 C-Suite SEO or Does SEO Belong in the Boardroom? Check it out wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO or check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guess wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, folks, peace, love at SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How can agencies effectively communicate the value of their SEO services while pitching to potential clients? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to lay out the art of a perfect client pitch for SEO services. From building initial trust to seamless execution, Jellyfish’s Eric Hoover joins to share each step of his pitching routine. Plus, discover how Google’s AI Overviews is paving a new age of pitching to clients. As Mariano Rivera once did best, we teach you how to close with the best pitch, as we’re turning potential clients into new clients this week on the SERP’s UP SEO podcast! Back Landing your next SEO client with the right pitch How can agencies effectively communicate the value of their SEO services while pitching to potential clients? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to lay out the art of a perfect client pitch for SEO services. From building initial trust to seamless execution, Jellyfish’s Eric Hoover joins to share each step of his pitching routine. Plus, discover how Google’s AI Overviews is paving a new age of pitching to clients. As Mariano Rivera once did best, we teach you how to close with the best pitch, as we’re turning potential clients into new clients this week on the SERP’s UP SEO podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 96 | July 17, 2024 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 49:01 This week’s guests Eric Hoover Eric Hoover has spent the better part of 16 years working in SEO and content development. In that time, he has utilized organic search data and tactics to build stronger website architecture, developed content strategy for various consumer-types, and has led teams that provided measurable organic growth opportunities. He is always looking to incorporate new strategies, including AI, into his processes. Eric has worked on a number of Enterprise-level clients within the pharmaceutical, consumer goods, eCommerce, and automotive verticals - including Johnson & Johnson, HOKA, UGG, LG, L’Oreal, and Subaru. When not working, Eric can be found reading or writing, hanging out with his cats, or on a long bike ride somewhere in Brooklyn, NY. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is fabulous, incredible, amazing in all and every way, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: That's a very nice introduction, Mordy. Thank you very much. I'm not sure if I'm wonderful and fabulous in every way. I have been known to snore, which is not fabulous. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: My wife started snoring, it's not fun. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's not a new thing for me, but lots of people snore, it's fine. I know people are... Like everybody's got CPAP machines these days. I've not ventured down that. Mordy Oberstein: Is that a thing? That's just trending, CPAP? Crystal Carter: Lots of people have them now because apparently it has to do with apnea. You get better sleep if you're not snoring. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, apnea, yeah, yeah. My stepfather had one, sure. Crystal Carter: It's like a whole thing, it's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I didn't know it was the latest trend. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. People, everybody's really prioritizing health and longevity these days. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone's got sleep apnea, huh? Crystal Carter: It's true. It's mean, it's happened. It's like gluten-free, they're the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh wow, wow. Okay, on that note, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by CPAP. No, just kidding. It's brought to you by Wix. Crystal Carter: No, it's that, it's that. Mordy Oberstein: You can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use Wix Studio to manage all that rev share you get from bringing on new clients onto Wix Studio, with our no hoops rev sharing models linked to learn more in the show note as today, our Wix Studio series continues with the dos and don'ts of pitching to new SEO clients, mistakes your agency should avoid when hunting for new SEO clients. What processes work to keep your agency's pitches within the strike zone and how to take your pitching from warm leads to straight heat. To help us get your pitch over the plate, don't bounce it, they'll boo you. Jellyfish's own Director of SEO, Eric Hoover will join us in just a jiffy. Plus, like spider tack we'll see how Google's AI overview will change the nature of pitching SEO to potential clients. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, join us as we get a better grip on the seams so your pitching to new clients won't throw you for a curveball. On this, the 96th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. I threw a lot of deep cut baseball references in there, Crystal, a lot. Crystal Carter: Put me in coach, like pass me some peanuts and crackerjacks. Apparently this is the thing to do. Mordy Oberstein: So before I revel in it all, welcome to the podcast, Eric Hoover. How are you? Eric Hoover: Good. Yeah, I was expecting about as many baseball references as you gave, given that we're talking about pitching. Mordy Oberstein: Right, see? Eric Hoover: So I was not disappointed at all, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: And are you- Mordy Oberstein: The don't bounce, they'll boo you, is Derek Jeter to President Bush when he came to pitch the first pitch in the World series. He asked- Eric Hoover: Deep cuts. Mordy Oberstein: ... Jeter, should I pitch from the mound? Should I pitch? No, no, no pitch from the mound. Don't pitch in front of the mound, but if you bounce it, they'll boo you. Eric Hoover: Apparently they tell celebrities now not to pitch from the mound, and if they do, it's like, okay, we warned you to not pitch from the mound because people don't realize how far and high up it is. Mordy Oberstein: It's far, it's really far. 50 Cent threw one, it looked like he was throwing it to, I don't know, Vermont. It was so far off the plate. Eric Hoover: But yeah, thanks for having me. This is about the, God, millionth time I'm talking to you Mordy, so I feel like... And the second or third time I'm talking to Crystal too, so I feel like this will be, this is very casual of a podcast experience for me. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's good, and we try to make you feel at home. Crystal Carter: Yeah. We're glad that you were able to find the time to join us. So yeah, thank you. Are you a baseball fan, by the way? Eric Hoover: I'm a baseball fan in the sense that I grew up in New York during the era when the Yankees were not great. So now it's almost like cliche if I like the Yankees, but yeah, I grew up when we had Don Mattingly and that was it. Everyone hated George Steinbrenner. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right, Roberto Kelly. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. Everyone was making fun of Steinbrenner on Seinfeld and all that, so, I grew up in the harder era. I don't follow baseball that much anymore. You can ask me anything about standup comedy or Star Trek, those are my two. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, we like Star Trek. Crystal Carter: Hey. Eric Hoover: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: We live long and prosper on this show. Eric Hoover: I do. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. That's right. Eric Hoover: Absolutely, great Mordy Oberstein: Trek over Star Wars any day of the week. Crystal Carter: All day. Eric Hoover: Absolutely, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Star Wars is for immature people who like the space thing, just pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, and Star Trek is the thinking person's sci-fi. Eric Hoover: It is, it absolutely is. Mordy Oberstein: We just lost half the audience, by the way. Eric Hoover: Discussion for another type of podcast, for one of the five Star Trek podcasts that I also listen to, aside from all the SEO ones I listen to. Crystal Carter: I mean, why are we talking about SEO? Let's just talk about Star Trek. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Eric Hoover: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: And every time anyone says enterprise SEO, all I can think is, beam me. That's literally every time, I'm not going to lie. Mordy Oberstein: We've gotten heavy in the Star Trek represented this podcast many, many a times. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. We probably will today as well. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Okay, so number one... Yeah, there we go. I want to say the reason why we're talking about pitching to clients now, it kind of feels like there's a whole new ecosystem out there. It feels like maybe it's the new ecosystem of the web and we'll get into that. Maybe it's just there's a lot of uneasiness or harder economic times, but it just, the more I talk and I think Crystal, I think you'll probably agree with me, the more we talk to agency side folks, it seems like it's getting harder and harder for clients to pull the trigger. And we wanted to dive in and see what the heck is going on and how do we get that pitch across the plate without bouncing it? Sorry to go back to the baseball and not continuing with the Trek. So first off, I guess, I always feel hesitant. I don't feel hesitant, that's not true. How do I put this nicely? I don't want you to feel uncomfortable that you have to reveal your secret sauce because I know some of your competitors might be listening to this podcast, Eric, but when you're pitching, what goes through your mind? What are you trying to do when you're pitching? Kind of walk us through it a little bit to get started, but again, I understand you have a secret sauce that you may not want to reveal, so I'm being respectful of that. Eric Hoover: I don't know if I have anything though that's out of the realm of what you're pitching, whether it's for SEO or anything else. But I think the biggest challenge is that with SEO is that a lot of people still don't fully understand what is involved and how many different sort of capabilities that it could really touch. So one of the things that I try to do is first and foremost, it's like an education session. It's helping them understand at a higher level what organic search does, what organic visibility does for their brand and what it doesn't do. And when I talk about what it doesn't do, it's more around like, well, it can supplement those things, SEO supplements grow, SEO and page search supplement each other, things like that. But I really try to stick to the education to let them know what visibility needs, not just those traditional results. Like, what are... I'll literally show a screenshot of the SERP with different areas called out. This is all what organic can impact. Everything from featured snippets to a knowledge graph, to local map listings, the traditional results, images, all that sort of stuff. And also the types of information that we look at as well. So we used to be, oh, here's our keyword research, this is our process. Now it's again, looking at the SERP. This is everything that we can play with and touch in the space of organic. So now it's taking a look at what people are saying about your brand or your product on Reddit. How can we speak to that? What reviews are people leaving on other sites or on Google? How can we speak to that? What can we talk to? What can't we talk to? And then again, align with some of our other capability partners. I'm pretty lucky both at Jellyfish and several of the other agencies I've worked at over many years, we've had either that all those capabilities together. So for several of my clients, it's paid search and SEO and display and social are all under us, so it's easier to connect. But I've also been lucky, and I think a lot of agencies have learned to play together well, where I've had partner agencies that do the paid search and we do the SEO. We're still trying to come together with our strategy and make sure we're not... Because we're all in it for the brand, we don't want to be competing with each other. And that's how I bring it all together to clients. And then of course at the end of the day, business goals. What are they looking for? How can organic impact that? That's really where you get their buy-in because you could talk theoretically about SEO, but when it comes down to, we do this plus this equals this business goal that you have, or getting us closer to this KPI. Throwing a lot of jargon out, but that's one of the best ways Crystal Carter: I think that's really coherent. To me, that's a great approach and it's one of the real benefits of working with an agency team is that you have people with lots of different disciplines who can, like you said, push what the brand needs, push what aligns with the business, because sometimes you look at it and it might be that, okay, SEO is not going to get us the big push just now. It will do in a few months, but just now that might not get us a big, big push, but PPC will right now or a social will right now, and we can build the SEO building blocks right now so that by in a couple of months time, then we can start to see the ROI and all of that sort of stuff further down. Or maybe it's that SEO is the play and maybe they already have PPC and maybe they need to work on that because they're actually losing money on PPC and maybe that's something they need to work on. And you as an agency can plug in which bits they need, as you said, to help with their overall visibility. And you talked about that client education piece because sometimes, certainly when I've been working with clients, sometimes they think they know what they want, but when you actually look at what they're doing online when you carry out the audit, it might seem like, actually, guys, I know you want to do this, but this is the thing that you need. So, how do you educate people when they come to you in that space? Eric Hoover: Yeah, I mean when it comes to those types of kind of visibility audits, again, throwing jargon around, but it's really about the brand will have their KPI so they'll have their competitors, but we'll also take a look at what the organic space says. So with some of the brands I work on are e-retail brands, they are selling apparel and things like that. So they have their direct brand competitors but one of the bigger challenges, especially for a non-brand, but we're talking to them about currently, is all of the other bigger e-retailers. REI, Amazon, Dicks Sporting Goods, all those kind of fitness and apparel competitors that they have, and having that discussion with them too, because some of those e-retailers they might have partnerships with and they're getting money. They don't care if their apparel is sold on one side or the other, but maybe there's other ones that they want to rank higher for for certain products or certain keywords. That's the way we always frame it is, what are the more non-brand or longer tail things that you're okay with this REI or whatever ranking for. What ones do you feel we should bring into the site? These are our recommendations and it's all, even with pitching, I feel like it could be very much like a working session. Obviously you need to have your big presentation ready and all of your data to back it up, but I think it's always good to have a discussion. You don't want to be ever talking at the client, you want them to be having a full... it's like always, I say it's like therapy. You want to go and you want to listen to their needs and maybe if they're disgruntled about something and then how you can help do that or ease that for them. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you also want an hour long pitch to only take 45 minutes, so. Eric Hoover: Well, that too. Well, you need time for questions at the end, so. And if there's no questions, you should be nervous because there's no pitch I've ever been on that's been that good where there's been no questions after and then we've won it. It just doesn't happen. Mordy Oberstein: Do you feel like those questions are getting harder and more, I don't know, aggressive because it just kind of feels like expectations might not be... Clients I've talked to, just like it seems like the clients are just not, the expectations are not aligned, I feel like with reality the same way as they used to be and I don't think they were before either, necessarily. Eric Hoover: I was going to say that. Yeah, I don't think when it comes to SEO, again, unless you have someone that already knows a bit about SEO or thinks they know a bit about SEO, which is sometimes worse, you've got a 45-minute pitch to educate them and if they don't get that within the 45 minutes, which I wouldn't expect anyone to understand this in 45 minutes, but that's fine. You still have to step back into some of the insights that you found for that pitch and speak to those how you would, again, can and can't impact. And again, with pitching, it's not, oh, we can't do that. It's, SEO plays this part in it but PPC does this, and then we would loop in our paid search partners and yada yada, all that, making sure it's as cohesive. I mean and also honestly, if you have 45 minutes for just an SEO pitch, you're really lucky. Typically you have about five minutes in a presentation where you've also got paid media, at home, everyone else's because you're at an agency so you're pitching multiple capabilities at once. But also, I've done some in-house work as well. It's not really, in my experience, very different from pitching to higher ups in-house. Whether I'm doing SEO for an agency client or I'm in-house saying, speaking to the content team or the marketing VPs saying, "Hey, we need to do... Here are our competitors, but here are our organic competitors and here's the data, the backup. We're seeing what we should do." At the end of the day, to me in my experience, maybe this is only specific for SEO, but it all feels very much the same kind of process because a VP of marketing in-house probably knows about as much as a VP of marketing at an agency. It's all education all over the place. So that's sort of the fun and frustration of SEO where it's like it's always a learning experience, but it's also always a learning experience. Crystal Carter: I definitely think that certainly when you're trying to pitch to the devs that I need you to do this for me. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, just do that. Crystal Carter: That you need to, and I think that that's a great point because anybody who's not used to pitching for new clients or not used to pitching for new project resources or anything like that, that you're right, you can practice these things internally on some of the internal things that you might need. Being able to make a case very succinctly, being able to provide evidence and things like that. I think one of the other things that stood out to me from what you were saying, you were saying you've got 45 minutes or even less sometimes. How do you build trust with the client in that time during the pitch? How do you help them to understand that you're somebody that they should trust and that they should listen to? Eric Hoover: I think as much as you can, it's all about proof. So it's about data, and if you can swing it, case studies. One of the things that's great about working at an agency is that you have no shortage typically of case studies to show, hey, I don't just say this, my team isn't just saying this. This is actually data that shows this is where you are in your organic space, this is where you should be, this is what you should be talking about based on our research. And also, here's a client X that we worked on last year for, here's the brand diagnostic blanked out brand name case study to show that we've actually done similar work and this is the proof and this is how long it took and all that sort of stuff. So any way you can show that to a potential client is only going to help. It's that evidence in the case, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That might actually be one of the subtle difference between pitching in-house or pitching to an external client. Whereas the internal and they have a lot of that context that you're already aware of, where you don't have to start building a whole narrative and a whole story. They kind of know where the situation is, where the problems fundamentally are, and you don't need to prove like, hey, this is... I'm thinking just the cases internally, even at Wix. You don't always have to prove to the same extent like, here's the problem that we think we have. Generally speaking, the VP of marketing, they kind of know the problems, you just need to make your case that here's my solution, that's why it makes sense for us. With an external client, you really are, it's cold. You're coming in saying we think this is a problem. You might know you want to do X, Y, and Z, want to get more organic traffic, want more organic visibility, but here are your problems and here's the solutions, and you really have to sell the problem sometimes. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, because they'll be in their own places, just like I said before about direct competitors versus organic competitors. They might not even know they're competing in the organic space for some of these other websites. So it's all about, I'll say it a million times, Mordy's heard me, I said it a million times, it's all about education. It's all about making sure that they have a good grasp within that 45 minutes or less of how we can really benefit them. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, which is super important because if you don't set those expectations right with the education in the beginning, you're just going to hurt yourself later, which you spoke about an earlier episode of this podcast. Crystal Carter: One of the other things that is worth thinking about for folks who are within the agency ecosystem looking after clients is that we talk about pitching new clients, and I know that's the core of this idea, but I think sometimes you're pitching to existing clients about new offerings. How is that different from pitching to a completely new client? Eric Hoover: I mean, well, for one, we have more data to back up our recommendation, which is always nice. Actual first party, whatever, we have their actual GA4 data and their actual GSE data and so on and so forth, so that's always nice. So it makes the selling in a little easier, but still, that goes back to what I was saying about whether you're pitching to another capability in-house. It's very similar where, okay, they've got that trust, but what other ways can we open their eyes to what new opportunities can bring? My team is having a lot of discussion currently about building out different types of content that not just speaks to, oh, we've got our keyword research and so on and so forth, but there's this whole new world of AI, not just AI overview, I mean just in general, people talking to GPT all the time. My spouse is an architect and she uses GPT all day to help craft quick email replies and project plans and things like that. But everyone is using AI now, so now we're trying to talk to our clients about how we should be wording certain things and structuring content to rank better within these LLMs and within these AI results. So this is a whole new world where we have these clients that we've had for years and we've done not the same thing, but we've had our strategies laid out over time, and they're pretty used to it now. It's like, okay, but we're seeing a lot of data where we need to, on your product pages, maybe start talking about this, and then we have to bring in a new team. The product team runs those pages so now we have to convince the product team that this is where people are going based on, here's the data showing. I saw something from Pew research. Almost 30% of Americans interact with AI multiple times a day. It's a large chunk of the population. So how do we get onto there from what we've seen? Here's the data that shows how people are interacting, what they're asking LLMs, things like that. This is the way we have to start talking about stuff. But also, I always back it up too by saying in the meantime, talking more naturally in your content is going to help your general organic presence overall, let alone this AI space, which is still this wild west area of who knows what's going to happen, aside from it taking all of our jobs. Which I'm fine with, for the record. I would love it if AI took my job, I need some time off. Sorry, Jellyfish, Jellyfish has a great PTO policy, let me say that, but AI can have my job for a bit. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to talk more. We're going to talk more about this in our next segment, but just to jump into the system for a second, because you mentioned AI. Okay, I can't resist now the golden topic. Eric Hoover: Yeah, you can't not mention it now, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, now that you've broken the seal, that's it, it's all coming out. Are clients now changing what they're looking for, what they're expecting or the nature of the conversations that they're having with you because of the great AI in the sky kind of thing? Eric Hoover: Yeah, they're all interested in it. And although clients have been interested in it for a while now, even when SGE, as we used to call, the good old days when we called the AI overview SGE, they've been asking about it for a year or so, ever since SGE really came out about what the impact would be. So yeah, it's being brought up a lot. I think it's, we've hit this sort of down to this quiet moment where at least with my clients, because things like AI overview have pulled back so much, no one's really talking about it right now. I'm trying to keep the conversation going because I know one day it's going to come back and it's going to be awful, and we've got AI organized pages coming out, which is going to be really crazy. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's interesting, by the way, but okay. Yeah, go ahead, sorry. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, but it is something that we're trying to keep top of mind because we don't want, oh, the AI overview, it was like two weeks and now it's not really showing up for anything anymore. Don't got to worry about it. No, we still need to worry about it. But yeah, that's my, it's not about the now with that, it's about... I've said this to people, I've said this on LinkedIn too. The AI overview doesn't concern me. Unless you run a healthcare website, it's pretty much like they've pulled back so much on so many different types of results. Granted now they're throwing three featured snippet blocks at the top, but that's a different discussion. What I'm concerned about for a lot of the clients I work on and a lot of brands in general, is that AI organized SERP that they're touting and apparently testing that's going to supposedly come out later this year, where it reorganizes the entire first page as a personalized experience for you as a searcher, and for organic I think that might be nice, or it might be a nightmare, but I think it's going to change things a lot, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Either is great for you because it's honed in on what you're doing. I feel it's going to be much more sub-topical than what's out there right now, which is what they tested. They had covered on it, it's new. They had a test of, it was a product search, they showed all the buying guides together and then they showed all the product reviews together, then they show all the pages together. I think that's super interesting. I think you're totally right, it's a ton of opportunity or a ton of absolute disaster depending upon what you're doing. Yeah. All right, sorry, I just had to get into that for a second. Eric Hoover: No, no worries. I'll talk about AI till AI takes over. Mordy Oberstein: That's all I read. I only read AI content, I only talk about AI, I only eat AI food. Yeah, that's all I do is AI. Eric Hoover: They say AI content doesn't rank but let me tell you, I've seen some AI content out there that's ranking and it should not be. I think we all have at this point, pizza with glue in it being the best example. Crystal Carter: There's LinkedIn articles, those LinkedIn advice articles, that advice for- Mordy Oberstein: Those are such crap, by the way. Well, I reply back once a week on one of them just to keep my little badge on LinkedIn, but also because it gives me ideas of what to write about. You know what's a stupid idea? This is a stupid idea, and I get the stupid ideas from the AI articles on LinkedIn. What were we talking about again, pitching clients, right? Eric Hoover: Pitching the clients. We got a little off course there, but no, I mean, to bring it back. Yes, clients are talking about AI, and it's funny too, to educate them again, education, but they've been using AI on so many things already. So many of the tools that we as SEOs and content marketers in the background at least have been powered in some part by AI. I mean, what is PMAX? PMAX is like papered AI. Crystal Carter: AI. Eric Hoover: Right. Crystal Carter: Yeah, well, and Meta's ads have been powered by AI for years. You'd launch an ad and then you'd sit there while it spent your money and it would say, machine learning is learning. And I'd be like, are you done yet? Because you just spent a bunch of my budget. And so yeah, and also a Google Translate and Google Lens and all of that stuff, it's been AI powered. Eric Hoover: Oh yeah, we've been with AI for years, it just wasn't labeled that because it wasn't a thing, and now it's the current, the brand. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, everything is AI. Eric Hoover: ... for lack of a better term, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: LLMs, machine learning, it's all AI. Just ignore the definition of AI altogether. Crystal Carter: So I think here's another question for you, in terms of pitching before we let you go. When you're thinking about pitching, a lot of times you're pitching to solve a problem, right? The client comes to you, they've got low visibility, they want to increase their visibility, they have low sales, they want to increase their sales, they've got low conversions, they want to increase their conversions, etc, etc. How often are you also trying to get them to prospect on future offerings? How often are you also saying, hey, have you considered AI, like this is really important, or something? And how important is that to a pitch? Eric Hoover: Yeah, I think it's highly important. We will always, we meaning the royal way of my team and I, always go in with not just the ask, but something extra. And I think that's how you end up winning a lot of pitches. It's not just showing what you can do in the current state, but what the other bigger possibilities are. So we're always going into pitching AI being the big thing right now, talking about that. For years we've been talking about not just at Jellyfish, but at some of my other agencies, like SEO, video SEO, SEO for YouTube. TikTok as a search engine has been a big topic. There's a couple of great agencies out there that I think really do it well. I won't throw any names out there because I'm on a Wix sponsored one, I don't know if I can say other agencies that aren't Jellyfish, but there's some out there that do really good social and TikTok search engine stuff that I think is really smart and forward-thinking. So yeah, we try to always bring that thought process in as well, because that we want, aside from solving the brand's problem in a pitch and proving that you can at least attempt to solve the problem, if not hopefully solve it, but it's showing that you are forward-thinking. You're not just trying to solve an issue for them for the next couple of months. You want to solve an issue for them for the next year plus because you want them to renew and you want them to go away with something. At the end of this you want them to say, oh, I remember this little thing, this little factoid, this little interesting idea that they had, so that, keep it top of mind. Crystal Carter: And show them that you're full of ideas and that the ideas will keep coming and that sort of thing. Eric Hoover: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: Super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about on another episode, we've done so many episodes already. This is like 96, right? I don't know where I'm at, but we talked about when you pitch having multiple phases in your pitch, like, hey, phase one's going to be this, then we're going to do that, and everyone can do that. Kind of showing like, hey, I'm not just thinking about what's happening for you right now, but I got you through the whole end of this whole process, kind of thing. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. We're not just looking at this quarter, here is the next three quarters after that. Yeah, exactly. Road maps and case studies, road maps and case studies. Sorry, Mordy, I didn't mean to cut you off. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, go ahead, please cut me off. I'm here. That's what I'm here to have done to me. Where can people find you? TikTok? Eric Hoover: Yeah, TikTok. Yeah, I'm all over TikTok. You could find me Erichooverdigital.com, it's a very low-maintenance website where you can see some of my work, and Eric Hoover on LinkedIn. There's a few Eric Hoovers on there, but I'm the one with facial hair and glasses if that narrows it down at all. Crystal Carter: Well, we hope you boldly go into the next pitch. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, well done. Crystal Carter: And it was a pleasure to have you along today. Eric Hoover: Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice talking to you guys as always. Mordy Oberstein: Catch you soon. AI has changed everything. Am I right? Well, not everything. I mean, not a lot. I mean, well, again, I'm not going to say anything salty here, but. But we've talked about how the artist formerly known as SGE has changed the SERP, but has it changed or will it change how we pitch to new prospective SEO clients? New prospective is redundant, because if they're prospective then they're new. But anyway, right? Yeah, that's redundant. Anyway, join us as we now peer into the future with Crystal's Ball. Crystal Carter: So the thing is, that I see in the future with SGE is that, and with LLMs, I'm going to throw it wider to LLMs as part of a daily search use, is that I think it's going to change the questions that users ask or that clients ask. So it's already changed the questions that users ask. Google at Google I/O shared that the keywords, or sorry, the words that people are entering into search queries have increased to, I think about 15 words per query or something is what they said, and that's significant. Similarly, people are starting to ask me, I'm starting to see this and I think that this is only going to become more prominent going forward. People are starting to ask, how do I rank in ChatGPT? How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and LLMs in Perplexity and Google's Gemini? Mordy Oberstein: AI. Crystal Carter: And AI Overviews, and also in Bing's Copilot, how can I get myself to show up there? I spoke to someone the other day and they were saying, what if they're not showing in ChatGPT? What can they do? And I think it's also going to change the name of the game. So speaking at MozCon, or, not when I was speaking at MozCon, but when I was listening to other speakers at MozCon, one of the common threads that was showing up was that people need to be thinking about users and user engagement and not necessarily about clicks, because clicks might be changing. Similarly, I was looking, I checked yesterday, so ChatGPT in the latest reiteration, I asked ChatGPT, I said, can you tell me about yourself? And I said, yes, I can tell you about myself, I'm an LLM and la, la, la, la, la... And I thought, great. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's a narcissist just like the rest of us. Crystal Carter: It's like, great, and what it was saying, it was like I'm now updating to, I now have data up to 2023, and previously I think it was going up to 2022. So I now have data up to 2023, and I have... or, I think it might've even been up to 2020. And so now it's says I have data up to 2023 and I have this and that and that, etc. And one of the things with that is that if in the future people are asking, how can I rank on ChatGPT? Instead of waiting for algorithm updates, you'll have to wait for GPT updates, for instance. So I asked ChatGPT, who is Crystal Carter in the first iteration of ChatGPT or the first big drop of ChatGPT? Obviously they had more iterations before that, but the first mainstream, and it was like that Mariah Carey meme, I don't know her. I was like, okay, all right, cool. My little ego can, okay, I'll just put that in a little... Okay, fine. And then I asked it again after it said it had an update, I said, who is Crystal Carter? And they said, Crystal Carter is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, cool. So then that means that you have to wait for that update. You have to wait for ChatGPT to update instead of waiting for an algorithm to update necessarily. So that's interesting, and I think that people will be checking that. The other thing is that in terms of how clients are going to think about this, is how traffic's going to be effected, how traffic tracking, etc is going to be effective because the free version of ChatGPT is, which is what most people have access to and most people are using, they have links in it now, but if you click on the links, they're direct. I checked this yesterday. I checked it a bunch of times. I checked it on Wix Analytics and they said, direct, I checked in on GA4 and they said direct. And I'm like, this will not do. So I think that as things go forward and we have more actual data from these tools, then I think that that will change the name of the game for how people are responding to it, and it will change what people expect from SEOs. One of the things I've been saying for years is that omnichannel is extremely important for SEO. I've been quoted a couple of times when I said that we should be optimizing for user discovery, not for search engines, but for user discovery. And as an SEO, this has been my practice the whole time. Basically wherever the users are, that's where we need to be. We need to be visible where they are. We need to know where they are. We need to be visible where they are, to as much as you can. And obviously, we don't all have a million hours in the day, we can't be on every single platform all of the time, it's exhausting. But to some extent, you need to have some presence if your users are there, and that's where you need to invest your time. And I think that people will be expecting in SEO pitches, people will be expecting people to be thinking about that, not just about clicks, not just about organic visibility, not just about one particular channel, but I think they're going to be expecting for SEOs to be optimizing for search generally. Not Google SEO, for people searching wherever in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, I think if the client is a little bit clued and they're asking something like, how do I get into the ChatGPT, they're going to realize that there's no shortcut to doing this. It's really a momentum issue. You have to be a recognizable entity. You have to have some kind of online cadence, online, digital light, whatever you want to call it. You have to be something and you have to be out there. And I think if the client does realize this, and I think in the beginning they won't. I think there's going to be a lot of people at clients asking for shortcuts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I hack the system? But I think eventually the narrative will emerge. You have to have an online presence, a significant online presence, and I think that SEOs are going to have to realize that. As you're saying, if the client comes in and they start asking you about these kinds of things and you give a very siloed kind of SEO answer, it's not going to sound right. We talked about this on our previous podcast about how clients, or I forgot, was it SEOs or clients? For whatever it was, and there's so many episodes we've done, almost 100, where we said, you're going to have to branch out, otherwise you're going to... Oh, that's what it was, in internal organizations. SEOs and internal organizations, if you don't consider wider marketing channels or wider marketing brand tactics, you're going to lose the room. So now it's the same thing with clients. You're going to lose that room a little bit, and that's why you have SEOs starting to talk about brand marketing and building up brands and how SEOs need to build up brands. I think SEOs run the risk of sounding extremely cliched and or uninformed when they talk about this because brand has been something SEOs have been pooping on, for a lack of a better expression for the last 20 years. Oh, branded keywords, those are so stupid, blah, blah, blah. We have a whole episode about that where it literally cost brands millions of dollars when you poo-poo on branded keywords. So I think it does mean if you want to meet client expectations, you do have to have a deeper knowledge of those other marketing areas, whether it be distribution, whether it be brand itself. I did a whole those Twitter carousel things about what SEOs should know about brand marketing. For example. Resets are way harder. Resets in SEO are hard. Okay? Yes, if you get hit by an algorithm update, you have to go back and re-evaluate quality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Okay, doing a reset to hit an algorithm is hard. Doing a reset when the consumer has a negative association to you now, is virtually impossible. So you have to get it right the first time. Crystal Carter: But also brand pivots take time. I mean, I don't think, one of the things... I don't think we're tooting our own horn if we don't say it, Wix, we have been, and people have talked to us about this, we have been a part of making sure people have a better, more accurate, more clear understanding of SEO on Wix, for instance. And that did not happen overnight. These things are super, super complex and they take a lot of investment and they take a lot of proof and you need to put in the work. Probably most recent example of this that's happening at the moment or whatever is Beyonce being like, "I do country music, by the way, and I like country music, by the way." And she has the receipts. When she first posted it, people were like, oh my God, this is ridiculous, because her brand is very R&B, it's a little bit hip-hop, that sort of stuff. But actually, if you go back through her catalog, she was at the rodeo in Texas in 2004 or something, riding a horse unaided with one hand, in a dress. That's not easy, and she did a song with the Dixie Chicks who are also country music. But anyway, so she has the receipts, and then on the album she also has Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, other people who are involved with that. And so she also has, she has things that help to help establish that actually she does know what she's talking about. She is invested in this, this is something that she knows how to do. And similarly with a brand, you can't just show up, and if she just showed up in a cowboy hat, people would be like, what are you talking about? That's not enough. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a separate rant of why I think all of this conversation the SEOs are having about brand and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Y'all, you're killing me here. But leaving that aside for a moment, I think one of the things that it means for clients is it's a reset of expectations, okay so, and it's problematic because the client at this stage of the evolution or this stage of the ecosystem might be coming in like, get me in there fast. How do I do this fast? And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's take a step back and think, what does it actually mean to do this and is that actually fast? I don't think so. Or, with SGE or AI overviews, it might mean saying you are looking to cast too wide of a net. The way that you're going to get pulled in to the AI overviews is as one of these sub links, there's a subtopic in the AI overview. Let's say, I always go to this example. I don't know why, I know why, but whatever. How do I deal with kidney stones? And they have the AI overview and now it no longer says drink urine. It has a whole bunch of other things in there. One of them is like diet, and there's a whole subcategory about how to revitalize your diet to avoid kidney stones. You might be the link for that subtopic. So it now might mean that you need to refine your entire approach to content to being a little bit more focused, which means you need to change the way you're thinking as a client, which means the SEO's got to sell you on that, and both of those things are hard Crystal Carter: And they take time and I think that people need to, SEOs and their pitches need to be able to set those expectations and need to be able to say, we are not going to get you... in the six months or three months or whatever, we're going to get you green shoots, but you are going to be able to see progress. But in terms of the output, in terms of the ROI, the ROI might take a little longer, it'll be worth it, but it might take a little bit longer. We need to be able to show the proof of that. So for instance, when I enter in, I'm on Perplexity and I enter like, who is Crystal Carter or whatever. The links that come back, they've got five different links there. It's not just one page. They reference my website twice, they also reference my Wix profile. They also reference my LinkedIn, they also reference an interview that I did with something. That takes time, that's time built up over all of those things. That's not a one-shot deal. And I'm using myself because it's easy for me to do an example of myself, but there are tons of other examples of that as well. And if I go across, if I'm looking on Bing, for instance, if I do the same query, they're also looking at a few different ones there as well. So there's three different links that they're pulling out there as well. And this is something that takes time to build up. And the way that these AI tools are working, they're going to have to understand not only their web presence, but also the entities that are related to them. And that can be a little bit more complex than keywords, right? It's more complex than keywords. Thinking about the way that you were positioned on the knowledge graph, the way that you were associated with that sort of stuff, that's more complex than keywords. And so we need to be able to educate clients, and I think we're going to have to think about that, about what tools we have to educate clients on the more complex, less instantaneous result, particularly for visibility building, which I think might be way more... The way we're thinking about it is more about visibility and less about search engine optimization because- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's visibility and presence and all that good stuff. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and we've talked about this, this is a hot topic, which I'm just going to drop it here and then we're going to pivot. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Is SEO dead or is SEO as we've known it, dead? You know who's not dead? Barry's not dead. So, you know how I know? Because he wrote like 500 articles this morning. So since Barry is not dead, thank God, we love Barry and may he live to be 120, as my grandmother would say, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, Snappy News, Snappy News. Move over Barry Schwartz, here comes Danny Goodwin with two articles this week. First up from Danny on Search Engine Land, OpenAI is going to build a search product. The Atlantic actually confirmed that it granted permission for its content to be used as part of OpenAI's search product. It's not well-defined what exactly the search product is, yada, yada, yada, but it does seem like OpenAI is going to build some sort of competitor to Google, perhaps. I don't know. Personally, if they are, I see this thing being way out from being actually functionable to where people will say, "I'm not going to Google, I'm going to go to ChatGPT." The things that you're going to need for this to happen are incredible. I think we're a good five, maybe 10 years out from something like this saying, hey, wow, OpenAI is a real competitor to Google. That's my personal opinion. That is my personal opinion, but it happens to be the truth. Also from Danny Goodwin on Search Engine Land, and also about AI, of course. Danny writes, "Google AI overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low." That number is from BrightEdge. Different tool sets like seoClarity and Semrush, whatever, they showed different numbers. The actual percentage I think is highly skeptical, like this is the exact number, 7%, that's the number, because each tool set does show a different number. The trend is what's important, and all of the Bright Edge trends have aligned to other tools, so I'm assuming this one does as well. So it seems that AI overviews are being used even less. Google has been live since May already, I'm recording this in the middle of July. I think there's been plenty of time to work out the kinks and let's get going with this thing. I just think the product's a dud. I have nothing more to say. I just think it's a dud. I do have more to say. Since when do I have less to say? I don't think from a... think about it from a user point of view. Does the AI overview really give you something different in the current format? I'm not saying that you couldn't have an AI overview that would do this. I think in the current format, it's basically a glorified featured snippet. We already had this thing, I don't need this thing. It's nothing new, it's nothing novel. It doesn't exactly give me what I want anyway, so why would I use the thing and why would Google roll it out? Other than, hey, we have to do the whole AI overview, we said we're going to do it, we're going to do it, here it is. But they're rolling it back because it's really not differentiated from a product point of view. It doesn't differentiate from a brand point of view, really. I don't think there's anything that's uniquely unique about the AI overview to justify investing millions upon millions of dollars into this thing. If this were anybody else other than Google, you'd be like, yeah, okay, that's nice, but it's not really differentiated enough yet. I do see the possibility of, I talked about it many, many times, including on It's New, our Daily SEO news series with Barry Schwartz, why I do think that it's possible that it can be, but it currently is not. Dud. Moving on. From Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. New, it's new. Google's search console lets you add your shipping and return information. So if you are selling products online, but maybe you're not a Merchant Center savant or a Merchant Center maven that's more alliteration for you, a merchant center maven, you can now upload your shipping and return policies directly in Google Search Console. That's great. For example, again, if you're not super into using Merchant Center but you are familiar with Search Console, I guess that makes it a little bit easier, and it democratizes adding in your shipping and return information to or giving it to Google. There is a hierarchy of what Google will listen to, in terms of the return policy information that you add in. So for example, there are many ways to do it. Google said that it goes in this order according to Barry, product level feed submitted in Merchant Center, return setting in the content API for shopping, settings in Merchant Center or Search Console, organizational level markup, product level merchant listing markups. so markup, essentially in a markup being the lower on the hierarchy of what Google's going to be looking at to determine accurate return policy information. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Boy, the SEO news this week was really alive and kicking, wasn't it Crystal? Crystal Carter: It was full of joie de vivre. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, life, drink life. That's what Barry always says to me, drink life. It's good advice. Thanks for that advice, Barry, and thanks for all the news. Anyway, awkwardly pivoting with from all of that other awkwardly pivoting. Here's this week's follow the week. Joshua George over at _joshuaseo on Twitter, X. Sorry, I can't get that right, and Joshua George on LinkedIn. He's fabulous. Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub on multiple, multiple occasions. Former guests of this podcast himself. Crystal Carter: Yes, and one of the reasons why we put him forward as a follow of the week is that he has a fantastic article about pitching to clients. Sorry, he has a fantastic resource on the Wix SEO Hub about pitching to clients, and it's something that he's curated over a good few years and that he has mastered and honed and he's sharing it with you, and it's a great resource, and it's something that you can take and you can adopt, and you can use it to pitch to clients and to talk to them about how they should, why they should get on board. The other thing that Joshua's really, really great at is showing the value of SEO and showing case studies. He shares case studies on his LinkedIn all the time of, we did this, we got this result. The client came to us with this problem, and we solved it like that. And I think that that is something that if you're able to do that consistently across your digital output, then that can make it really easy when you're pitching to clients. So it can make it so that by the time they come to you, they say, I saw this case study and I want that. I have the same problem, and I would like you to help me with that. I think it's something that Glenn Gabe's really good at as well. Glenn is constantly saying, I had this client and then we did this, or I had this client that's struggling with that and I'm helping them with this. And I think that that's really, really useful. So I think that not only should you be thinking about how to pitch on the day, but how to sow the seeds, how to warm them up before they even get to you. Because anybody who's coming to you and you're doing a pitch for them, they're going to Google you, they're going to go to your LinkedIn, they're going to see what you're about before you walk in the door. And so if you've already got stuff on there that's going to get the conversation started, that's going to show them what you're about before you get there, that's going to help you land the pitch. Mordy Oberstein: Land the pitch. In baseball, we want to hit the pitch, but in SEO you want to land the pitch. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I have to full circle. I have to always come back with pitching and baseball. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into stories of success and failure from a digital marketing agency owner. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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 on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Eric Hoover Joshua George Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio Revenue Sharing Program Jellyfish Digital Marketing Agency Eric Hoover Digital News: Google AI Overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low OpenAI is ‘going to build a search product' New: Google Search Console Let's You Add Your Shipping & Return Information Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Eric Hoover Joshua George Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio Revenue Sharing Program Jellyfish Digital Marketing Agency Eric Hoover Digital News: Google AI Overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low OpenAI is ‘going to build a search product' New: Google Search Console Let's You Add Your Shipping & Return Information Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is fabulous, incredible, amazing in all and every way, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: That's a very nice introduction, Mordy. Thank you very much. I'm not sure if I'm wonderful and fabulous in every way. I have been known to snore, which is not fabulous. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: My wife started snoring, it's not fun. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's not a new thing for me, but lots of people snore, it's fine. I know people are... Like everybody's got CPAP machines these days. I've not ventured down that. Mordy Oberstein: Is that a thing? That's just trending, CPAP? Crystal Carter: Lots of people have them now because apparently it has to do with apnea. You get better sleep if you're not snoring. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, apnea, yeah, yeah. My stepfather had one, sure. Crystal Carter: It's like a whole thing, it's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I didn't know it was the latest trend. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. People, everybody's really prioritizing health and longevity these days. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone's got sleep apnea, huh? Crystal Carter: It's true. It's mean, it's happened. It's like gluten-free, they're the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh wow, wow. Okay, on that note, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by CPAP. No, just kidding. It's brought to you by Wix. Crystal Carter: No, it's that, it's that. Mordy Oberstein: You can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use Wix Studio to manage all that rev share you get from bringing on new clients onto Wix Studio, with our no hoops rev sharing models linked to learn more in the show note as today, our Wix Studio series continues with the dos and don'ts of pitching to new SEO clients, mistakes your agency should avoid when hunting for new SEO clients. What processes work to keep your agency's pitches within the strike zone and how to take your pitching from warm leads to straight heat. To help us get your pitch over the plate, don't bounce it, they'll boo you. Jellyfish's own Director of SEO, Eric Hoover will join us in just a jiffy. Plus, like spider tack we'll see how Google's AI overview will change the nature of pitching SEO to potential clients. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, join us as we get a better grip on the seams so your pitching to new clients won't throw you for a curveball. On this, the 96th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. I threw a lot of deep cut baseball references in there, Crystal, a lot. Crystal Carter: Put me in coach, like pass me some peanuts and crackerjacks. Apparently this is the thing to do. Mordy Oberstein: So before I revel in it all, welcome to the podcast, Eric Hoover. How are you? Eric Hoover: Good. Yeah, I was expecting about as many baseball references as you gave, given that we're talking about pitching. Mordy Oberstein: Right, see? Eric Hoover: So I was not disappointed at all, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: And are you- Mordy Oberstein: The don't bounce, they'll boo you, is Derek Jeter to President Bush when he came to pitch the first pitch in the World series. He asked- Eric Hoover: Deep cuts. Mordy Oberstein: ... Jeter, should I pitch from the mound? Should I pitch? No, no, no pitch from the mound. Don't pitch in front of the mound, but if you bounce it, they'll boo you. Eric Hoover: Apparently they tell celebrities now not to pitch from the mound, and if they do, it's like, okay, we warned you to not pitch from the mound because people don't realize how far and high up it is. Mordy Oberstein: It's far, it's really far. 50 Cent threw one, it looked like he was throwing it to, I don't know, Vermont. It was so far off the plate. Eric Hoover: But yeah, thanks for having me. This is about the, God, millionth time I'm talking to you Mordy, so I feel like... And the second or third time I'm talking to Crystal too, so I feel like this will be, this is very casual of a podcast experience for me. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's good, and we try to make you feel at home. Crystal Carter: Yeah. We're glad that you were able to find the time to join us. So yeah, thank you. Are you a baseball fan, by the way? Eric Hoover: I'm a baseball fan in the sense that I grew up in New York during the era when the Yankees were not great. So now it's almost like cliche if I like the Yankees, but yeah, I grew up when we had Don Mattingly and that was it. Everyone hated George Steinbrenner. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right, Roberto Kelly. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. Everyone was making fun of Steinbrenner on Seinfeld and all that, so, I grew up in the harder era. I don't follow baseball that much anymore. You can ask me anything about standup comedy or Star Trek, those are my two. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, we like Star Trek. Crystal Carter: Hey. Eric Hoover: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: We live long and prosper on this show. Eric Hoover: I do. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. That's right. Eric Hoover: Absolutely, great Mordy Oberstein: Trek over Star Wars any day of the week. Crystal Carter: All day. Eric Hoover: Absolutely, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Star Wars is for immature people who like the space thing, just pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, and Star Trek is the thinking person's sci-fi. Eric Hoover: It is, it absolutely is. Mordy Oberstein: We just lost half the audience, by the way. Eric Hoover: Discussion for another type of podcast, for one of the five Star Trek podcasts that I also listen to, aside from all the SEO ones I listen to. Crystal Carter: I mean, why are we talking about SEO? Let's just talk about Star Trek. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Eric Hoover: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: And every time anyone says enterprise SEO, all I can think is, beam me. That's literally every time, I'm not going to lie. Mordy Oberstein: We've gotten heavy in the Star Trek represented this podcast many, many a times. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. We probably will today as well. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Okay, so number one... Yeah, there we go. I want to say the reason why we're talking about pitching to clients now, it kind of feels like there's a whole new ecosystem out there. It feels like maybe it's the new ecosystem of the web and we'll get into that. Maybe it's just there's a lot of uneasiness or harder economic times, but it just, the more I talk and I think Crystal, I think you'll probably agree with me, the more we talk to agency side folks, it seems like it's getting harder and harder for clients to pull the trigger. And we wanted to dive in and see what the heck is going on and how do we get that pitch across the plate without bouncing it? Sorry to go back to the baseball and not continuing with the Trek. So first off, I guess, I always feel hesitant. I don't feel hesitant, that's not true. How do I put this nicely? I don't want you to feel uncomfortable that you have to reveal your secret sauce because I know some of your competitors might be listening to this podcast, Eric, but when you're pitching, what goes through your mind? What are you trying to do when you're pitching? Kind of walk us through it a little bit to get started, but again, I understand you have a secret sauce that you may not want to reveal, so I'm being respectful of that. Eric Hoover: I don't know if I have anything though that's out of the realm of what you're pitching, whether it's for SEO or anything else. But I think the biggest challenge is that with SEO is that a lot of people still don't fully understand what is involved and how many different sort of capabilities that it could really touch. So one of the things that I try to do is first and foremost, it's like an education session. It's helping them understand at a higher level what organic search does, what organic visibility does for their brand and what it doesn't do. And when I talk about what it doesn't do, it's more around like, well, it can supplement those things, SEO supplements grow, SEO and page search supplement each other, things like that. But I really try to stick to the education to let them know what visibility needs, not just those traditional results. Like, what are... I'll literally show a screenshot of the SERP with different areas called out. This is all what organic can impact. Everything from featured snippets to a knowledge graph, to local map listings, the traditional results, images, all that sort of stuff. And also the types of information that we look at as well. So we used to be, oh, here's our keyword research, this is our process. Now it's again, looking at the SERP. This is everything that we can play with and touch in the space of organic. So now it's taking a look at what people are saying about your brand or your product on Reddit. How can we speak to that? What reviews are people leaving on other sites or on Google? How can we speak to that? What can we talk to? What can't we talk to? And then again, align with some of our other capability partners. I'm pretty lucky both at Jellyfish and several of the other agencies I've worked at over many years, we've had either that all those capabilities together. So for several of my clients, it's paid search and SEO and display and social are all under us, so it's easier to connect. But I've also been lucky, and I think a lot of agencies have learned to play together well, where I've had partner agencies that do the paid search and we do the SEO. We're still trying to come together with our strategy and make sure we're not... Because we're all in it for the brand, we don't want to be competing with each other. And that's how I bring it all together to clients. And then of course at the end of the day, business goals. What are they looking for? How can organic impact that? That's really where you get their buy-in because you could talk theoretically about SEO, but when it comes down to, we do this plus this equals this business goal that you have, or getting us closer to this KPI. Throwing a lot of jargon out, but that's one of the best ways Crystal Carter: I think that's really coherent. To me, that's a great approach and it's one of the real benefits of working with an agency team is that you have people with lots of different disciplines who can, like you said, push what the brand needs, push what aligns with the business, because sometimes you look at it and it might be that, okay, SEO is not going to get us the big push just now. It will do in a few months, but just now that might not get us a big, big push, but PPC will right now or a social will right now, and we can build the SEO building blocks right now so that by in a couple of months time, then we can start to see the ROI and all of that sort of stuff further down. Or maybe it's that SEO is the play and maybe they already have PPC and maybe they need to work on that because they're actually losing money on PPC and maybe that's something they need to work on. And you as an agency can plug in which bits they need, as you said, to help with their overall visibility. And you talked about that client education piece because sometimes, certainly when I've been working with clients, sometimes they think they know what they want, but when you actually look at what they're doing online when you carry out the audit, it might seem like, actually, guys, I know you want to do this, but this is the thing that you need. So, how do you educate people when they come to you in that space? Eric Hoover: Yeah, I mean when it comes to those types of kind of visibility audits, again, throwing jargon around, but it's really about the brand will have their KPI so they'll have their competitors, but we'll also take a look at what the organic space says. So with some of the brands I work on are e-retail brands, they are selling apparel and things like that. So they have their direct brand competitors but one of the bigger challenges, especially for a non-brand, but we're talking to them about currently, is all of the other bigger e-retailers. REI, Amazon, Dicks Sporting Goods, all those kind of fitness and apparel competitors that they have, and having that discussion with them too, because some of those e-retailers they might have partnerships with and they're getting money. They don't care if their apparel is sold on one side or the other, but maybe there's other ones that they want to rank higher for for certain products or certain keywords. That's the way we always frame it is, what are the more non-brand or longer tail things that you're okay with this REI or whatever ranking for. What ones do you feel we should bring into the site? These are our recommendations and it's all, even with pitching, I feel like it could be very much like a working session. Obviously you need to have your big presentation ready and all of your data to back it up, but I think it's always good to have a discussion. You don't want to be ever talking at the client, you want them to be having a full... it's like always, I say it's like therapy. You want to go and you want to listen to their needs and maybe if they're disgruntled about something and then how you can help do that or ease that for them. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you also want an hour long pitch to only take 45 minutes, so. Eric Hoover: Well, that too. Well, you need time for questions at the end, so. And if there's no questions, you should be nervous because there's no pitch I've ever been on that's been that good where there's been no questions after and then we've won it. It just doesn't happen. Mordy Oberstein: Do you feel like those questions are getting harder and more, I don't know, aggressive because it just kind of feels like expectations might not be... Clients I've talked to, just like it seems like the clients are just not, the expectations are not aligned, I feel like with reality the same way as they used to be and I don't think they were before either, necessarily. Eric Hoover: I was going to say that. Yeah, I don't think when it comes to SEO, again, unless you have someone that already knows a bit about SEO or thinks they know a bit about SEO, which is sometimes worse, you've got a 45-minute pitch to educate them and if they don't get that within the 45 minutes, which I wouldn't expect anyone to understand this in 45 minutes, but that's fine. You still have to step back into some of the insights that you found for that pitch and speak to those how you would, again, can and can't impact. And again, with pitching, it's not, oh, we can't do that. It's, SEO plays this part in it but PPC does this, and then we would loop in our paid search partners and yada yada, all that, making sure it's as cohesive. I mean and also honestly, if you have 45 minutes for just an SEO pitch, you're really lucky. Typically you have about five minutes in a presentation where you've also got paid media, at home, everyone else's because you're at an agency so you're pitching multiple capabilities at once. But also, I've done some in-house work as well. It's not really, in my experience, very different from pitching to higher ups in-house. Whether I'm doing SEO for an agency client or I'm in-house saying, speaking to the content team or the marketing VPs saying, "Hey, we need to do... Here are our competitors, but here are our organic competitors and here's the data, the backup. We're seeing what we should do." At the end of the day, to me in my experience, maybe this is only specific for SEO, but it all feels very much the same kind of process because a VP of marketing in-house probably knows about as much as a VP of marketing at an agency. It's all education all over the place. So that's sort of the fun and frustration of SEO where it's like it's always a learning experience, but it's also always a learning experience. Crystal Carter: I definitely think that certainly when you're trying to pitch to the devs that I need you to do this for me. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, just do that. Crystal Carter: That you need to, and I think that that's a great point because anybody who's not used to pitching for new clients or not used to pitching for new project resources or anything like that, that you're right, you can practice these things internally on some of the internal things that you might need. Being able to make a case very succinctly, being able to provide evidence and things like that. I think one of the other things that stood out to me from what you were saying, you were saying you've got 45 minutes or even less sometimes. How do you build trust with the client in that time during the pitch? How do you help them to understand that you're somebody that they should trust and that they should listen to? Eric Hoover: I think as much as you can, it's all about proof. So it's about data, and if you can swing it, case studies. One of the things that's great about working at an agency is that you have no shortage typically of case studies to show, hey, I don't just say this, my team isn't just saying this. This is actually data that shows this is where you are in your organic space, this is where you should be, this is what you should be talking about based on our research. And also, here's a client X that we worked on last year for, here's the brand diagnostic blanked out brand name case study to show that we've actually done similar work and this is the proof and this is how long it took and all that sort of stuff. So any way you can show that to a potential client is only going to help. It's that evidence in the case, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That might actually be one of the subtle difference between pitching in-house or pitching to an external client. Whereas the internal and they have a lot of that context that you're already aware of, where you don't have to start building a whole narrative and a whole story. They kind of know where the situation is, where the problems fundamentally are, and you don't need to prove like, hey, this is... I'm thinking just the cases internally, even at Wix. You don't always have to prove to the same extent like, here's the problem that we think we have. Generally speaking, the VP of marketing, they kind of know the problems, you just need to make your case that here's my solution, that's why it makes sense for us. With an external client, you really are, it's cold. You're coming in saying we think this is a problem. You might know you want to do X, Y, and Z, want to get more organic traffic, want more organic visibility, but here are your problems and here's the solutions, and you really have to sell the problem sometimes. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, because they'll be in their own places, just like I said before about direct competitors versus organic competitors. They might not even know they're competing in the organic space for some of these other websites. So it's all about, I'll say it a million times, Mordy's heard me, I said it a million times, it's all about education. It's all about making sure that they have a good grasp within that 45 minutes or less of how we can really benefit them. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, which is super important because if you don't set those expectations right with the education in the beginning, you're just going to hurt yourself later, which you spoke about an earlier episode of this podcast. Crystal Carter: One of the other things that is worth thinking about for folks who are within the agency ecosystem looking after clients is that we talk about pitching new clients, and I know that's the core of this idea, but I think sometimes you're pitching to existing clients about new offerings. How is that different from pitching to a completely new client? Eric Hoover: I mean, well, for one, we have more data to back up our recommendation, which is always nice. Actual first party, whatever, we have their actual GA4 data and their actual GSE data and so on and so forth, so that's always nice. So it makes the selling in a little easier, but still, that goes back to what I was saying about whether you're pitching to another capability in-house. It's very similar where, okay, they've got that trust, but what other ways can we open their eyes to what new opportunities can bring? My team is having a lot of discussion currently about building out different types of content that not just speaks to, oh, we've got our keyword research and so on and so forth, but there's this whole new world of AI, not just AI overview, I mean just in general, people talking to GPT all the time. My spouse is an architect and she uses GPT all day to help craft quick email replies and project plans and things like that. But everyone is using AI now, so now we're trying to talk to our clients about how we should be wording certain things and structuring content to rank better within these LLMs and within these AI results. So this is a whole new world where we have these clients that we've had for years and we've done not the same thing, but we've had our strategies laid out over time, and they're pretty used to it now. It's like, okay, but we're seeing a lot of data where we need to, on your product pages, maybe start talking about this, and then we have to bring in a new team. The product team runs those pages so now we have to convince the product team that this is where people are going based on, here's the data showing. I saw something from Pew research. Almost 30% of Americans interact with AI multiple times a day. It's a large chunk of the population. So how do we get onto there from what we've seen? Here's the data that shows how people are interacting, what they're asking LLMs, things like that. This is the way we have to start talking about stuff. But also, I always back it up too by saying in the meantime, talking more naturally in your content is going to help your general organic presence overall, let alone this AI space, which is still this wild west area of who knows what's going to happen, aside from it taking all of our jobs. Which I'm fine with, for the record. I would love it if AI took my job, I need some time off. Sorry, Jellyfish, Jellyfish has a great PTO policy, let me say that, but AI can have my job for a bit. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to talk more. We're going to talk more about this in our next segment, but just to jump into the system for a second, because you mentioned AI. Okay, I can't resist now the golden topic. Eric Hoover: Yeah, you can't not mention it now, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, now that you've broken the seal, that's it, it's all coming out. Are clients now changing what they're looking for, what they're expecting or the nature of the conversations that they're having with you because of the great AI in the sky kind of thing? Eric Hoover: Yeah, they're all interested in it. And although clients have been interested in it for a while now, even when SGE, as we used to call, the good old days when we called the AI overview SGE, they've been asking about it for a year or so, ever since SGE really came out about what the impact would be. So yeah, it's being brought up a lot. I think it's, we've hit this sort of down to this quiet moment where at least with my clients, because things like AI overview have pulled back so much, no one's really talking about it right now. I'm trying to keep the conversation going because I know one day it's going to come back and it's going to be awful, and we've got AI organized pages coming out, which is going to be really crazy. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's interesting, by the way, but okay. Yeah, go ahead, sorry. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah, but it is something that we're trying to keep top of mind because we don't want, oh, the AI overview, it was like two weeks and now it's not really showing up for anything anymore. Don't got to worry about it. No, we still need to worry about it. But yeah, that's my, it's not about the now with that, it's about... I've said this to people, I've said this on LinkedIn too. The AI overview doesn't concern me. Unless you run a healthcare website, it's pretty much like they've pulled back so much on so many different types of results. Granted now they're throwing three featured snippet blocks at the top, but that's a different discussion. What I'm concerned about for a lot of the clients I work on and a lot of brands in general, is that AI organized SERP that they're touting and apparently testing that's going to supposedly come out later this year, where it reorganizes the entire first page as a personalized experience for you as a searcher, and for organic I think that might be nice, or it might be a nightmare, but I think it's going to change things a lot, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Either is great for you because it's honed in on what you're doing. I feel it's going to be much more sub-topical than what's out there right now, which is what they tested. They had covered on it, it's new. They had a test of, it was a product search, they showed all the buying guides together and then they showed all the product reviews together, then they show all the pages together. I think that's super interesting. I think you're totally right, it's a ton of opportunity or a ton of absolute disaster depending upon what you're doing. Yeah. All right, sorry, I just had to get into that for a second. Eric Hoover: No, no worries. I'll talk about AI till AI takes over. Mordy Oberstein: That's all I read. I only read AI content, I only talk about AI, I only eat AI food. Yeah, that's all I do is AI. Eric Hoover: They say AI content doesn't rank but let me tell you, I've seen some AI content out there that's ranking and it should not be. I think we all have at this point, pizza with glue in it being the best example. Crystal Carter: There's LinkedIn articles, those LinkedIn advice articles, that advice for- Mordy Oberstein: Those are such crap, by the way. Well, I reply back once a week on one of them just to keep my little badge on LinkedIn, but also because it gives me ideas of what to write about. You know what's a stupid idea? This is a stupid idea, and I get the stupid ideas from the AI articles on LinkedIn. What were we talking about again, pitching clients, right? Eric Hoover: Pitching the clients. We got a little off course there, but no, I mean, to bring it back. Yes, clients are talking about AI, and it's funny too, to educate them again, education, but they've been using AI on so many things already. So many of the tools that we as SEOs and content marketers in the background at least have been powered in some part by AI. I mean, what is PMAX? PMAX is like papered AI. Crystal Carter: AI. Eric Hoover: Right. Crystal Carter: Yeah, well, and Meta's ads have been powered by AI for years. You'd launch an ad and then you'd sit there while it spent your money and it would say, machine learning is learning. And I'd be like, are you done yet? Because you just spent a bunch of my budget. And so yeah, and also a Google Translate and Google Lens and all of that stuff, it's been AI powered. Eric Hoover: Oh yeah, we've been with AI for years, it just wasn't labeled that because it wasn't a thing, and now it's the current, the brand. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, everything is AI. Eric Hoover: ... for lack of a better term, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: LLMs, machine learning, it's all AI. Just ignore the definition of AI altogether. Crystal Carter: So I think here's another question for you, in terms of pitching before we let you go. When you're thinking about pitching, a lot of times you're pitching to solve a problem, right? The client comes to you, they've got low visibility, they want to increase their visibility, they have low sales, they want to increase their sales, they've got low conversions, they want to increase their conversions, etc, etc. How often are you also trying to get them to prospect on future offerings? How often are you also saying, hey, have you considered AI, like this is really important, or something? And how important is that to a pitch? Eric Hoover: Yeah, I think it's highly important. We will always, we meaning the royal way of my team and I, always go in with not just the ask, but something extra. And I think that's how you end up winning a lot of pitches. It's not just showing what you can do in the current state, but what the other bigger possibilities are. So we're always going into pitching AI being the big thing right now, talking about that. For years we've been talking about not just at Jellyfish, but at some of my other agencies, like SEO, video SEO, SEO for YouTube. TikTok as a search engine has been a big topic. There's a couple of great agencies out there that I think really do it well. I won't throw any names out there because I'm on a Wix sponsored one, I don't know if I can say other agencies that aren't Jellyfish, but there's some out there that do really good social and TikTok search engine stuff that I think is really smart and forward-thinking. So yeah, we try to always bring that thought process in as well, because that we want, aside from solving the brand's problem in a pitch and proving that you can at least attempt to solve the problem, if not hopefully solve it, but it's showing that you are forward-thinking. You're not just trying to solve an issue for them for the next couple of months. You want to solve an issue for them for the next year plus because you want them to renew and you want them to go away with something. At the end of this you want them to say, oh, I remember this little thing, this little factoid, this little interesting idea that they had, so that, keep it top of mind. Crystal Carter: And show them that you're full of ideas and that the ideas will keep coming and that sort of thing. Eric Hoover: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: Super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about on another episode, we've done so many episodes already. This is like 96, right? I don't know where I'm at, but we talked about when you pitch having multiple phases in your pitch, like, hey, phase one's going to be this, then we're going to do that, and everyone can do that. Kind of showing like, hey, I'm not just thinking about what's happening for you right now, but I got you through the whole end of this whole process, kind of thing. Eric Hoover: Yeah, yeah. We're not just looking at this quarter, here is the next three quarters after that. Yeah, exactly. Road maps and case studies, road maps and case studies. Sorry, Mordy, I didn't mean to cut you off. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, go ahead, please cut me off. I'm here. That's what I'm here to have done to me. Where can people find you? TikTok? Eric Hoover: Yeah, TikTok. Yeah, I'm all over TikTok. You could find me Erichooverdigital.com, it's a very low-maintenance website where you can see some of my work, and Eric Hoover on LinkedIn. There's a few Eric Hoovers on there, but I'm the one with facial hair and glasses if that narrows it down at all. Crystal Carter: Well, we hope you boldly go into the next pitch. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, well done. Crystal Carter: And it was a pleasure to have you along today. Eric Hoover: Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice talking to you guys as always. Mordy Oberstein: Catch you soon. AI has changed everything. Am I right? Well, not everything. I mean, not a lot. I mean, well, again, I'm not going to say anything salty here, but. But we've talked about how the artist formerly known as SGE has changed the SERP, but has it changed or will it change how we pitch to new prospective SEO clients? New prospective is redundant, because if they're prospective then they're new. But anyway, right? Yeah, that's redundant. Anyway, join us as we now peer into the future with Crystal's Ball. Crystal Carter: So the thing is, that I see in the future with SGE is that, and with LLMs, I'm going to throw it wider to LLMs as part of a daily search use, is that I think it's going to change the questions that users ask or that clients ask. So it's already changed the questions that users ask. Google at Google I/O shared that the keywords, or sorry, the words that people are entering into search queries have increased to, I think about 15 words per query or something is what they said, and that's significant. Similarly, people are starting to ask me, I'm starting to see this and I think that this is only going to become more prominent going forward. People are starting to ask, how do I rank in ChatGPT? How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and LLMs in Perplexity and Google's Gemini? Mordy Oberstein: AI. Crystal Carter: And AI Overviews, and also in Bing's Copilot, how can I get myself to show up there? I spoke to someone the other day and they were saying, what if they're not showing in ChatGPT? What can they do? And I think it's also going to change the name of the game. So speaking at MozCon, or, not when I was speaking at MozCon, but when I was listening to other speakers at MozCon, one of the common threads that was showing up was that people need to be thinking about users and user engagement and not necessarily about clicks, because clicks might be changing. Similarly, I was looking, I checked yesterday, so ChatGPT in the latest reiteration, I asked ChatGPT, I said, can you tell me about yourself? And I said, yes, I can tell you about myself, I'm an LLM and la, la, la, la, la... And I thought, great. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's a narcissist just like the rest of us. Crystal Carter: It's like, great, and what it was saying, it was like I'm now updating to, I now have data up to 2023, and previously I think it was going up to 2022. So I now have data up to 2023, and I have... or, I think it might've even been up to 2020. And so now it's says I have data up to 2023 and I have this and that and that, etc. And one of the things with that is that if in the future people are asking, how can I rank on ChatGPT? Instead of waiting for algorithm updates, you'll have to wait for GPT updates, for instance. So I asked ChatGPT, who is Crystal Carter in the first iteration of ChatGPT or the first big drop of ChatGPT? Obviously they had more iterations before that, but the first mainstream, and it was like that Mariah Carey meme, I don't know her. I was like, okay, all right, cool. My little ego can, okay, I'll just put that in a little... Okay, fine. And then I asked it again after it said it had an update, I said, who is Crystal Carter? And they said, Crystal Carter is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, cool. So then that means that you have to wait for that update. You have to wait for ChatGPT to update instead of waiting for an algorithm to update necessarily. So that's interesting, and I think that people will be checking that. The other thing is that in terms of how clients are going to think about this, is how traffic's going to be effected, how traffic tracking, etc is going to be effective because the free version of ChatGPT is, which is what most people have access to and most people are using, they have links in it now, but if you click on the links, they're direct. I checked this yesterday. I checked it a bunch of times. I checked it on Wix Analytics and they said, direct, I checked in on GA4 and they said direct. And I'm like, this will not do. So I think that as things go forward and we have more actual data from these tools, then I think that that will change the name of the game for how people are responding to it, and it will change what people expect from SEOs. One of the things I've been saying for years is that omnichannel is extremely important for SEO. I've been quoted a couple of times when I said that we should be optimizing for user discovery, not for search engines, but for user discovery. And as an SEO, this has been my practice the whole time. Basically wherever the users are, that's where we need to be. We need to be visible where they are. We need to know where they are. We need to be visible where they are, to as much as you can. And obviously, we don't all have a million hours in the day, we can't be on every single platform all of the time, it's exhausting. But to some extent, you need to have some presence if your users are there, and that's where you need to invest your time. And I think that people will be expecting in SEO pitches, people will be expecting people to be thinking about that, not just about clicks, not just about organic visibility, not just about one particular channel, but I think they're going to be expecting for SEOs to be optimizing for search generally. Not Google SEO, for people searching wherever in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, I think if the client is a little bit clued and they're asking something like, how do I get into the ChatGPT, they're going to realize that there's no shortcut to doing this. It's really a momentum issue. You have to be a recognizable entity. You have to have some kind of online cadence, online, digital light, whatever you want to call it. You have to be something and you have to be out there. And I think if the client does realize this, and I think in the beginning they won't. I think there's going to be a lot of people at clients asking for shortcuts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I hack the system? But I think eventually the narrative will emerge. You have to have an online presence, a significant online presence, and I think that SEOs are going to have to realize that. As you're saying, if the client comes in and they start asking you about these kinds of things and you give a very siloed kind of SEO answer, it's not going to sound right. We talked about this on our previous podcast about how clients, or I forgot, was it SEOs or clients? For whatever it was, and there's so many episodes we've done, almost 100, where we said, you're going to have to branch out, otherwise you're going to... Oh, that's what it was, in internal organizations. SEOs and internal organizations, if you don't consider wider marketing channels or wider marketing brand tactics, you're going to lose the room. So now it's the same thing with clients. You're going to lose that room a little bit, and that's why you have SEOs starting to talk about brand marketing and building up brands and how SEOs need to build up brands. I think SEOs run the risk of sounding extremely cliched and or uninformed when they talk about this because brand has been something SEOs have been pooping on, for a lack of a better expression for the last 20 years. Oh, branded keywords, those are so stupid, blah, blah, blah. We have a whole episode about that where it literally cost brands millions of dollars when you poo-poo on branded keywords. So I think it does mean if you want to meet client expectations, you do have to have a deeper knowledge of those other marketing areas, whether it be distribution, whether it be brand itself. I did a whole those Twitter carousel things about what SEOs should know about brand marketing. For example. Resets are way harder. Resets in SEO are hard. Okay? Yes, if you get hit by an algorithm update, you have to go back and re-evaluate quality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Okay, doing a reset to hit an algorithm is hard. Doing a reset when the consumer has a negative association to you now, is virtually impossible. So you have to get it right the first time. Crystal Carter: But also brand pivots take time. I mean, I don't think, one of the things... I don't think we're tooting our own horn if we don't say it, Wix, we have been, and people have talked to us about this, we have been a part of making sure people have a better, more accurate, more clear understanding of SEO on Wix, for instance. And that did not happen overnight. These things are super, super complex and they take a lot of investment and they take a lot of proof and you need to put in the work. Probably most recent example of this that's happening at the moment or whatever is Beyonce being like, "I do country music, by the way, and I like country music, by the way." And she has the receipts. When she first posted it, people were like, oh my God, this is ridiculous, because her brand is very R&B, it's a little bit hip-hop, that sort of stuff. But actually, if you go back through her catalog, she was at the rodeo in Texas in 2004 or something, riding a horse unaided with one hand, in a dress. That's not easy, and she did a song with the Dixie Chicks who are also country music. But anyway, so she has the receipts, and then on the album she also has Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, other people who are involved with that. And so she also has, she has things that help to help establish that actually she does know what she's talking about. She is invested in this, this is something that she knows how to do. And similarly with a brand, you can't just show up, and if she just showed up in a cowboy hat, people would be like, what are you talking about? That's not enough. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a separate rant of why I think all of this conversation the SEOs are having about brand and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Y'all, you're killing me here. But leaving that aside for a moment, I think one of the things that it means for clients is it's a reset of expectations, okay so, and it's problematic because the client at this stage of the evolution or this stage of the ecosystem might be coming in like, get me in there fast. How do I do this fast? And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's take a step back and think, what does it actually mean to do this and is that actually fast? I don't think so. Or, with SGE or AI overviews, it might mean saying you are looking to cast too wide of a net. The way that you're going to get pulled in to the AI overviews is as one of these sub links, there's a subtopic in the AI overview. Let's say, I always go to this example. I don't know why, I know why, but whatever. How do I deal with kidney stones? And they have the AI overview and now it no longer says drink urine. It has a whole bunch of other things in there. One of them is like diet, and there's a whole subcategory about how to revitalize your diet to avoid kidney stones. You might be the link for that subtopic. So it now might mean that you need to refine your entire approach to content to being a little bit more focused, which means you need to change the way you're thinking as a client, which means the SEO's got to sell you on that, and both of those things are hard Crystal Carter: And they take time and I think that people need to, SEOs and their pitches need to be able to set those expectations and need to be able to say, we are not going to get you... in the six months or three months or whatever, we're going to get you green shoots, but you are going to be able to see progress. But in terms of the output, in terms of the ROI, the ROI might take a little longer, it'll be worth it, but it might take a little bit longer. We need to be able to show the proof of that. So for instance, when I enter in, I'm on Perplexity and I enter like, who is Crystal Carter or whatever. The links that come back, they've got five different links there. It's not just one page. They reference my website twice, they also reference my Wix profile. They also reference my LinkedIn, they also reference an interview that I did with something. That takes time, that's time built up over all of those things. That's not a one-shot deal. And I'm using myself because it's easy for me to do an example of myself, but there are tons of other examples of that as well. And if I go across, if I'm looking on Bing, for instance, if I do the same query, they're also looking at a few different ones there as well. So there's three different links that they're pulling out there as well. And this is something that takes time to build up. And the way that these AI tools are working, they're going to have to understand not only their web presence, but also the entities that are related to them. And that can be a little bit more complex than keywords, right? It's more complex than keywords. Thinking about the way that you were positioned on the knowledge graph, the way that you were associated with that sort of stuff, that's more complex than keywords. And so we need to be able to educate clients, and I think we're going to have to think about that, about what tools we have to educate clients on the more complex, less instantaneous result, particularly for visibility building, which I think might be way more... The way we're thinking about it is more about visibility and less about search engine optimization because- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's visibility and presence and all that good stuff. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and we've talked about this, this is a hot topic, which I'm just going to drop it here and then we're going to pivot. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Is SEO dead or is SEO as we've known it, dead? You know who's not dead? Barry's not dead. So, you know how I know? Because he wrote like 500 articles this morning. So since Barry is not dead, thank God, we love Barry and may he live to be 120, as my grandmother would say, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, Snappy News, Snappy News. Move over Barry Schwartz, here comes Danny Goodwin with two articles this week. First up from Danny on Search Engine Land, OpenAI is going to build a search product. The Atlantic actually confirmed that it granted permission for its content to be used as part of OpenAI's search product. It's not well-defined what exactly the search product is, yada, yada, yada, but it does seem like OpenAI is going to build some sort of competitor to Google, perhaps. I don't know. Personally, if they are, I see this thing being way out from being actually functionable to where people will say, "I'm not going to Google, I'm going to go to ChatGPT." The things that you're going to need for this to happen are incredible. I think we're a good five, maybe 10 years out from something like this saying, hey, wow, OpenAI is a real competitor to Google. That's my personal opinion. That is my personal opinion, but it happens to be the truth. Also from Danny Goodwin on Search Engine Land, and also about AI, of course. Danny writes, "Google AI overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low." That number is from BrightEdge. Different tool sets like seoClarity and Semrush, whatever, they showed different numbers. The actual percentage I think is highly skeptical, like this is the exact number, 7%, that's the number, because each tool set does show a different number. The trend is what's important, and all of the Bright Edge trends have aligned to other tools, so I'm assuming this one does as well. So it seems that AI overviews are being used even less. Google has been live since May already, I'm recording this in the middle of July. I think there's been plenty of time to work out the kinks and let's get going with this thing. I just think the product's a dud. I have nothing more to say. I just think it's a dud. I do have more to say. Since when do I have less to say? I don't think from a... think about it from a user point of view. Does the AI overview really give you something different in the current format? I'm not saying that you couldn't have an AI overview that would do this. I think in the current format, it's basically a glorified featured snippet. We already had this thing, I don't need this thing. It's nothing new, it's nothing novel. It doesn't exactly give me what I want anyway, so why would I use the thing and why would Google roll it out? Other than, hey, we have to do the whole AI overview, we said we're going to do it, we're going to do it, here it is. But they're rolling it back because it's really not differentiated from a product point of view. It doesn't differentiate from a brand point of view, really. I don't think there's anything that's uniquely unique about the AI overview to justify investing millions upon millions of dollars into this thing. If this were anybody else other than Google, you'd be like, yeah, okay, that's nice, but it's not really differentiated enough yet. I do see the possibility of, I talked about it many, many times, including on It's New, our Daily SEO news series with Barry Schwartz, why I do think that it's possible that it can be, but it currently is not. Dud. Moving on. From Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. New, it's new. Google's search console lets you add your shipping and return information. So if you are selling products online, but maybe you're not a Merchant Center savant or a Merchant Center maven that's more alliteration for you, a merchant center maven, you can now upload your shipping and return policies directly in Google Search Console. That's great. For example, again, if you're not super into using Merchant Center but you are familiar with Search Console, I guess that makes it a little bit easier, and it democratizes adding in your shipping and return information to or giving it to Google. There is a hierarchy of what Google will listen to, in terms of the return policy information that you add in. So for example, there are many ways to do it. Google said that it goes in this order according to Barry, product level feed submitted in Merchant Center, return setting in the content API for shopping, settings in Merchant Center or Search Console, organizational level markup, product level merchant listing markups. so markup, essentially in a markup being the lower on the hierarchy of what Google's going to be looking at to determine accurate return policy information. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Boy, the SEO news this week was really alive and kicking, wasn't it Crystal? Crystal Carter: It was full of joie de vivre. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, life, drink life. That's what Barry always says to me, drink life. It's good advice. Thanks for that advice, Barry, and thanks for all the news. Anyway, awkwardly pivoting with from all of that other awkwardly pivoting. Here's this week's follow the week. Joshua George over at _joshuaseo on Twitter, X. Sorry, I can't get that right, and Joshua George on LinkedIn. He's fabulous. Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub on multiple, multiple occasions. Former guests of this podcast himself. Crystal Carter: Yes, and one of the reasons why we put him forward as a follow of the week is that he has a fantastic article about pitching to clients. Sorry, he has a fantastic resource on the Wix SEO Hub about pitching to clients, and it's something that he's curated over a good few years and that he has mastered and honed and he's sharing it with you, and it's a great resource, and it's something that you can take and you can adopt, and you can use it to pitch to clients and to talk to them about how they should, why they should get on board. The other thing that Joshua's really, really great at is showing the value of SEO and showing case studies. He shares case studies on his LinkedIn all the time of, we did this, we got this result. The client came to us with this problem, and we solved it like that. And I think that that is something that if you're able to do that consistently across your digital output, then that can make it really easy when you're pitching to clients. So it can make it so that by the time they come to you, they say, I saw this case study and I want that. I have the same problem, and I would like you to help me with that. I think it's something that Glenn Gabe's really good at as well. Glenn is constantly saying, I had this client and then we did this, or I had this client that's struggling with that and I'm helping them with this. And I think that that's really, really useful. So I think that not only should you be thinking about how to pitch on the day, but how to sow the seeds, how to warm them up before they even get to you. Because anybody who's coming to you and you're doing a pitch for them, they're going to Google you, they're going to go to your LinkedIn, they're going to see what you're about before you walk in the door. And so if you've already got stuff on there that's going to get the conversation started, that's going to show them what you're about before you get there, that's going to help you land the pitch. Mordy Oberstein: Land the pitch. In baseball, we want to hit the pitch, but in SEO you want to land the pitch. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I have to full circle. I have to always come back with pitching and baseball. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into stories of success and failure from a digital marketing agency owner. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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 on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. 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Is it time to expand your SEO outlook? See why taking a holistic approach to SEO works. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter bake up some high-quality holistic SEO goodies with both tactical and strategic advice. Manick Bhan joins to cover the four main holistic SEO pillars: authority, content, technicals, and UX. We explore how SEO involves not only on-page elements and technical aspects but also how these factors integrate into the overall practice of your business and brand in this week's episode of the SERP's Up SEO podcast. Back Holistic SEO: Fact or Fiction? Is it time to expand your SEO outlook? See why taking a holistic approach to SEO works. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter bake up some high-quality holistic SEO goodies with both tactical and strategic advice. Manick Bhan joins to cover the four main holistic SEO pillars: authority, content, technicals, and UX. We explore how SEO involves not only on-page elements and technical aspects but also how these factors integrate into the overall practice of your business and brand in this week's episode of the SERP's Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 88 | May 22, 2024 | 46 MIN 00:00 / 46:17 This week’s guests Manick Bhan Manick Bhan is the Founder and CTO of LinkGraph – a digital marketing firm that helps agencies and enterprise brands scale through data-driven SEO, a member of the INC 5000 Awards and winner of the Drum Search Awards. He is also the creator of Search Atlas, an SEO automation platform used by thousands of brands and agencies, ProductHunt product of the day and week, and nominated for the Best SEO Platform by the Global Search Awards. With 10+ years of experience in SEO from the in-house and agency side, Bhan has taught both startups and Fortune 500 companies how to scale their brands with a data-driven SEO strategy that can break into any market with ease and outrank even the biggest of competitors. Bhan’s innovative approach to SEO has helped LinkGraph become a fast-growing digital agency that now works with over 200 clients across all sectors. His thought leadership has appeared in leading publications like Forbes, Search Engine Journal, and VentureBeat and he has spoken at events like TechCrunch Disrupt, Traffic & Conversion Summit, and Ad World. Bhan enjoys writing and speaking on topics that range from digital marketing to artificial intelligence and machine learning to socially conscious brand building. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining us on the SERPs' Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the quite well-rounded head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: You are like a liberal arts degree. First like a, yes. Your enthusiasm is contagious. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. I wanted to mention something because a day before we're recording this episode, we recorded a version of It's New with Barry Schwartz. If you haven't checked that out, check that out on the Wix SEO Hub. It's right there at the top. It's our daily or mostly daily, daily news dive with Barry Schwartz. We kind of spend, you know, 5, 6, 7 minutes going through that day's SEO news. So if you want to catch up on the SEO News, catch up with that each and every day. Except for Fridays, we don't do it on Fridays. And Barry's like-- Crystal Carter: Oh, he has a whole roundup. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, because he has a whole full roundup on Fridays, so you could check that out on Fridays if you really like Jonesing for SEO news. But Barry said, "Every week you guys say it's the new wave of SEO," but you've been doing the podcast for a year and a half. How new is it? Crystal Carter: It's pretty new. Mordy Oberstein: And apparently for Barry, unless it's immediately new, it's not new. Crystal Carter: But these are the standards we've come to expect from Barry. He tells me all the time. I'm like, "Hey, I saw this. This is new." And he's like, "Not new." Mordy Oberstein: Could you imagine his wife gives him a gift for his birthday and says, "Oh, Barry, where's that new shirt I gave you yesterday?" "What new shirt? That's not new, you gave to me yesterday." Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Crystal Carter: Not new, not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Crystal Carter: I've seen this before. I've seen shirts with buttons. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Got completely off the rails. We're barely into the podcast. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to your monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter. But where you can also track rank on Google, Bing, and YouTube, and even Amazon without ever leaving the Wix platform with RankiX. Look for the RankiX app inside of the Wix App Market and start tracking your rank performance a bit more holistically. As today we're taking a holistic look at SEO or a look at holistic SEO by covering topics such as, what the heck is holistic SEO? And why does having a holistic approach to SEO even matter? We're understanding the ecosystem comes into quote-unquote, "Holistic SEO," and is holistic SEO more tactical or is it more strategic? To help us make the holistic connection, Manick Bhan of LinkGraph joins us to answer if you can focus on ranking factors and be holistic in your SEO all at the same time, plus Crystal and I will take a holistic look at how users use Google and what that might mean for the search engine. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news, and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Because SEO is like bread. Sure, you can have a slice, but why have a slice when you can have the entire loaf as episode 88 of the Serp's Up podcast helps you bake up a broad bakery of holistic SEO goodies. Crystal Carter: With whole meal SEO grains. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You can focus on one slice of the SEO loaf or you can look at the entire loaf when you're doing your SEO and just eat the loaf. Crystal Carter: I have eaten a whole loaf of bread before. This is why I don't have a bread maker. Basically bread maker cooks all night, smells delicious, and then in the morning you're like, "I want the bread." And then you eat it all. And then you still have to go and buy bread even though you had a bread maker make the bread. Mordy Oberstein: Some people will take a bottle of beer put it into a bag and go on the street corner, have a beer? I've eaten loaves of bread on the street corner before. Crystal Carter: Do you know I did that with Yana from our team, from the SEO team? Shout out to Yana. And some delicious rye with caraway seeds bread. Absolutely gorgeous. Also had dill in it. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Holistic SEO. Crystal Carter: Enough about carbs. So yeah, holistic SEO is interesting. It's something that people don't always quantify, but a lot of people do. A lot of people who are very good SEOs will do. And essentially, holistic SEO is what it sounds like. It's thinking about SEO, not from just the tactical point of view, but from a holistic perspective. So you will of course think about your on-page stuff. You'll also think about your technical SEO. You'll also think about your content SEO, but you'll also think about how all of that SEO feeds into the overall practice of your business, the overall practice for your brand and the overall way that people discover your content. One of the things that I'm finding really interesting when I was speaking to people, I was speaking to Jay Cowell from Launch, and she's an agency owner and she was talking about from a paid perspective, they do paid media, but one of the things she was saying is she was saying, "We are platform-agnostic. We are looking to help people to accelerate their discovery whatever platform they need, in whichever way is most advantageous for them to connect with customers." And I think that there's a lot of people who are moving towards that in terms of search as well. I'm going to quote Arish quoting myself, which is basically like we should be optimizing for user discovery, not just on Google, not just on Bing, but if your users are on TikTok, if your users are on Instagram, if your users are on some forum somewhere, then we should be thinking about SEO that supports all of that from a holistic point of view, both with the strategies that we have, but also with which KPIs we're tracking and how we understand how it fits into the wider ecosystem of the site. Because the way that users use the internet is holistically, users aren't on a single platform when they're looking for information, users are bouncing around from different things. So if you get a topic that you're interested in, and I certainly do this, if I decide that I'm going to update my garden, for instance, I'm going to look at some videos on Instagram, I'm going to check out some pictures on Pinterest, I'm going to go and get some top tips from YouTube, I'm going to read some blogs that talk about how to do composting or whatever it may be. So I'm going to go around to lots of different channels. And if you have holistic approach to SEO, then you're going to be better prepared for users who are using the web in that way, and you are going to become much more of an authority. Because if they see you in all of those platforms for instance, then that's going to really solidify your brand for them. And if you were able to back that up with solid SEO, that's going to get you some great results. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to talk more about that brand point, but I want to talk about more on the dynamic segment. So I have many thoughts about that and I want to talk about that later so I'm not ignoring that. But the way you're describing it where people will look at other channels and they'll think about their SEO more holistically, I think that's one of the things that makes it a little more complicated to define holistic SEO because you can look at holistic SEO from that point of view. You can look at a holistic SEO from, okay, I'm going to think about the algorithm more holistically, which is where I think you get a lot of the EAT conversation coming into it and where Google's headed directionally and SEO concepts. That's what makes this a little bit tricky, because holistic SEO can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. But I a million percent agree with what you said before, that a lot of the better SEOs are the ones who are thinking more holistically, whether it be about growth from a platform point of view of how SEO ties into other platforms, or how SEO or how rather growth is tied to thinking about Google a little bit more conceptually and having more SEO concepts that are driving you versus pure SEO checklist things that are driving you. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that's really interesting that you bring up the algorithm because I think the algorithm is more holistic. So when we're talking about the helpful content, when we're talking about EEAT, when we're talking about Google understanding and connecting entities, the algorithm is more holistic than it used to be. It used to be that you could update certain parts of your metadata and you could add the keywords and on all of that sort of stuff, but Google is understanding more the richness of the network of information that you are creating online, including the people who are creating it, including the content you're creating. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's such a great point because even on the social side, you’re saying, okay, I want to talk about the overlap and I'll think holistically about the overlap of SEO and social media. So a lot of the times we'll talk about, oh, social media will help you get links and that'll help you do SEO. Even on that side, you could think a little bit more holistically about it. I like to talk about it in terms of your digital light. Google's a moth, Google goes to whoever's the biggest digital light. And if people are talking about your brand either through branded searches or talking about your brand on social media, I feel like all of that factors into your digital light without the direct link factor. And at the same time, in terms of the algorithm, agree with that also a gazillion percent. If you think about the algorithm in terms of, okay, I see Google doing X and Google doing Y, and I'm going to try to optimize for X and for Y, that's one approach. A more holistic approach would be like I saw Google doing X, conceptually speaking or thematically speaking, what does that mean about the algorithm? What is the algorithm trying to achieve there? What concept is it trying to drive at? Because you're right, and we talked about this before, which podcasts, many podcasts, that Google's trying to really understand and simulate a quality experience for the user with a machine. So yes, Google is a machine, but trying to simulate what a quality experience might actually look like for the user. So it's going to naturally be a little bit more holistic in how it's approaching quality, relevant results on the SERP. And what a holistic SEO will do is say, "I saw Google try to do X with it. It demoted this webpage, it promoted that webpage. I can maybe see why it might have done that. What can I extrapolate out of that?" Crystal Carter: Right, right. And you're essentially looking at overall content and information, understanding trends and how Google is getting better at understanding information and how Google is using its various different tools including machine learning systems like BERT, like MUM, like “ELMO” even, all of these different things. So how they're using all of those tools and how they're layering all those tools, I think it's... I've spoken a bit at a few different events about how people say, "Oh, AI is coming to Search." AI's been in Search, and Google layers all of those AI tools on top of each other. So they have Lens and Lens is also layered with Translate, which is also layered with Search, which is also layered with their weight of understanding natural language processing and things like that. So they're layering all of these things- Mordy Oberstein: It's like an onion. Crystal Carter: With lots of layers. And so they're layering all of this information. And they're also layering the information that they have about your website. We've talked on this podcast about how you can check learn more about this domain. So there's information on the SERP that will tell you what Google knows about the domain. How old it is, what people are saying about it on Wikipedia, what the brand says about themselves, things like that. Google is taking a very holistic approach to this. If you look at the way they approach Google Business Profile, for instance, they look at the reviews, they look at your attributes, they look at your website, look at your images, they're looking at all of these different things. So you can't just expect that you can just put keywords on a page and just update the technical SEO and you will get great results. You can't just expect to just do that, it's not... Doing one particular tactic at a time doesn't necessarily move the needle, you need to think about... And of course, I'm not saying don't do those tactics, but don't do them in a silo. They should be as part of your overall approach to being online. And if they're finding that your website is solid, but your Facebook is never updated or has this consistent, inconsistent information, or your Google Business Profile says opening hours that you haven't had since 1997 and lots of different... I don't know, lots of different things in you. They're finding lots of inconsistencies. Then what Google learns to find about you is that you're inconsistent. Right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And if you don't want that, then you need to think about all of the different touch points that Google has with your website because they will also reflect all the different touch points that you have with your customers overall. And that is a holistic approach. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's interesting about this because what you're basically saying, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, is like think... Take a look what Google's doing, all the things they're doing in Google Business Profile, all the things they doing over here, and all things over there. And directionally speaking, what does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? Which by the way, we've been doing on this podcast. Ever so subtly, we've been advocating for a more holistic approach. We have a segment, which I think we're doing later, we called Going Going Google, where we're trying to offer directional approach to where Google is directionally heading because we are big advocates for holistic SEO. And that's one of the reasons why some people will say when someone goes on X or whatever and says, "Hey Barry, I found a new line on the SERP. Is it new that?" That's SEO voyeurism? I say no. I say you can learn a lot about that. Especially back in the day, there was a point in time of the good old days where Google was making tons of endless changes. Most of Barry's stories... That's hyperbolic. A lot of Barry's stories on seoroundtable.com were about, "Someone spotted this, someone spotted that" way more than it even is now. And you could really see like, wow, there's a real focus on local at that time. And then you could see the switch. Now all of the changes Google's making are e-comm side, all the testing. It's all e-comm. What does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? You can learn a lot by seeing what Google is doing, the products they're releasing, the changes that they're making, the things that they're testing. You can learn a lot about where they're trying to head. And that as an SEO is invaluable information. Crystal Carter: Right. Another great place to look at is schema markup. So if you are seeing that Google is... Google in the last year or so has released a lot more rich results schema markup guidance, and that can tell you a lot about what they're doing. Similarly, in Google Search Console, they've added some more dedicated features for certain things. So for instance, they added in video pages, which tells you that they're interested in video. They added in discussion forums schema markup, and profile page markup for instance, which also tells you that they're interested in that. Additionally, when you look at that, you can also see some of the designations. So for instance, if you look in your schema markup, and if you need to know what schema markup is, I have a fantastic article in the Wix SEO Hub, please go and look it up. Essentially when you look at that, you can see they have properties and they have different properties and elements and things that you can add into your schema markup, and they will have recommendations. They'll say, "You should say who made this picture. You should say who the author is. You should say the reviews. So if this has reviews." And that's telling you if you don't have reviews on your page, guess what? Guess what? That's your hint. That this product should have reviews. That's your hint that Google's interested in reviews for this product. If you're seeing that, "Oh, they've offered profile pages" and you don't have profile pages on your site, then maybe you should consider profile pages for your site. So there's things that you can see from there. And also schemamarkup.org or Schema.org has a great collection of all the different schema types, and sometimes people find it overwhelming because it's a very ugly website. I find it delightfully ugly, personally. I just love how simple it is. It's pretty much just a spreadsheet, I love that. And basically what it will say... For instance, if you look up a amusement park markup, it will give you lots of the different elements that you could possibly include in amusement park markup. If you were making a page about amusement parks, that would give you a lot of guidance of what should be on their page. It's essentially like a content brief. And I think that that... And that also schema for instance, as a template for a holistic approach, also has all of the connections and all the different things that it's connected to. So is part of this, is related to that, has an alumni of this, is blah blah blah, has all of those sorts of things. And can guide you with some of these elements. So I think with holistic SEO, particularly if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed maybe, and you're like, "I don't know where to start," what I generally find it's... My general approach to lots of things is lean into the thing you're most comfortable with first and use that to guide how you build on other things. So I really like schema for instance, so Schema.org would be a really good place for me to lean into what are the holistic things that I could think about around that topic? Google Business Profile, if you're in the local space is another good one to tell you the kinds of things that Google expects to know about a local business, whether it's... You can say that it's female-led or you can say that it has wheelchair access or you can say that your opening hours, you can have your menu. This is guiding you for the kinds of things that Google is expecting to see from you from a lot of different angles. And it can also guide where you should expect to see yourself on different websites. Maybe you should have yourself on other websites and have similar attributes, so where TripAdvisor or things like that, but in places where they have reviews. So lean into something that you feel comfortable with, and you said, as the springboard to guide you on your holistic SEO journey. Mordy Oberstein: Just sum this up before we get to our esteemed guest. If you want to sum up, you’re talking about structured markup and looking where Google's going. Directionally, you just want a concrete example of what this might actually look like. When Google announced they are supporting new structured data markup for forums, Aleyda Solís said, "I take that as a signal of Google looking to reward forum content." So she created chat.seofomo.co, forum for SEO. Lo and behold, what did Google start doing soon thereafter? Started ranking Reddit all over the place. That's somebody who saw what's happening, saw what Google announced, looked at the ecosystem and made an SEO strategy decision based off of that. Crystal Carter: Right. And that builds on her brand, builds on the relationship with her audience, includes... And has lots and lots and multiple benefits. It has a tactical approach, but it also has an overall strategic approach, which is great. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was absolutely, absolutely brilliant on Aleyda's part because Aleyda is absolutely brilliant. Crystal Carter: Just brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Okay, with this, let's take a step back and see how SEO is getting started or SEO enthusiast trying to up their game can holistically look at Google ranking factors. Here's Manick Bhan, the founder of LinkGraph on just that. Manick Bhan: What does taking a holistic approach to SEO mean when considering ranking factors? Google's ranking factors use thousands of signals when promoting web pages. If you really want to conquer SEO and deliver results for your business, the best thing to do is to memorize those thousands of signals, track them all as they change, and then improve every single one of those signals on your website as soon as possible. Just kidding, who's got time for that? Nobody. SEOs don't have time for that. Plus Google updates its algorithm something like 500 to 600 times per year, so by the time we list out every ranking factor, we have to start over. But as an SEO, I have actually spent a lot of time studying algorithm updates, reading Google's patents, running correlation analyses, and building SEO software. Google's search factors are very sophisticated, but they're also very predictable. SEO is math, not magic. It's built on computer algorithms. All of those thousands of signals really come down to just four main pillars or what I call holistic SEO. The first pillar of SEO is authority. How authoritative is your website? Google determines authority through factors like backlinks, citations, and what those backlinks say about the websites they're pointing to through anchor text and annotation text. Authority is also communicated through signals like branded searches and brand mentions. Factors like this, what some people call off-page SEO, all constitute a website's authority. The second pillar is content, both the depth of your website's content and the relevance of your content to the searcher's intent. And even how your content speaks to other information the searcher may not have even realized that they were looking for. Years ago, adding keywords to content was enough to rank in Google, but now Google looks for content depth, breadth, and topical authority when ranking web pages. It wants to rank websites that really think about what the user is looking for and that create original high quality content and have experience and expertise in their respective industries. For Google Business Profiles on Google Maps, this also includes the contents of your profile such as reviews, Q&As, posts, as well as the landing page linked to from your GBP. The third pillar is technicals. This has to do with your website's meta tags, the internal linking profile of your website distributing your page rank, your HTML code, and things like that. Search engine bots crawl all of those backend elements of our websites and use them to understand what our content is about. The fourth and final pillar is UX or user behavior factors. That's what happens when people land on the page. How long do they spend on the website? Do they scroll, do they click? Do they go back to find other search results? What are they doing while they're on your page? Every Google ranking factor can fit into one of these four pillars. It's that simple. Even as Google's algorithms have evolved and become more sophisticated over the years, they've always pointed to these four pillars as a north star. So although SEO is very complex and can be intimidating at times for beginners, it can be simplified in this way. Holistic SEO is the process of improving websites in those four core areas, and as long as you focus on those four pillars simultaneously, you're going to see your web traffic and organic visibility increase. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Manick. Make sure to follow him on social media links in the show notes. And it is, again, there's so many different ways you can define Holistic SEO. From a foundational fundamental way, those four pillars, those are definitely the four pillars that you want to focus on if you're getting started and trying to learn how to optimize web pages and websites. And it is interesting to see how as you grow that outlook of how you would define holistic SEO will probably change and adopt and become more sophisticated over time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think that that's partially because Google's evolved over time and they'll keep changing as well. So I think that you have to pay attention to what the state of play is and how things are evolving across the board. And if you aren't keeping pace then you’ll fall behind. But I think that if your overall goal is to connect with users who are interested in what you do, then I think that you should be pretty rock solid. I think that folks who are connecting with their audience and whose focus is their audience will be able to weather... Whatever algorithmic updates, whatever technological updates there are, because at the core of it, your audience is what? Is your focus. And I think that that will help you leaps and bounds. Mordy Oberstein: And it's also Google's focus. They're going and looking at what users want and trying to steer it that way. Now, speaking of user satisfaction and now that you know all about holistic SEO and whatnot, what would happen if people, or as we as marketers call them, users, also known as my extended family, users. What would happen if these users started taking a more holistic approach to Google in how they'd run queries? Oh my, it would be interesting. Which means it's time to take a holistic and directional look and approach with a little segment we call Going Going Google. And it's going going, Google. It's out of here. So I have this whole thing, I'm on a soap box. I am on a soap box. People do not want to be sold to the way that they used to be. In fact, they don't want to be sold to. That's the change. It used to be you could sell, it's okay. Now people are far less willing to be sold to. They don't want to feel like they're being sold to. There's a need for greater consumer autonomy and so forth and so forth and so forth. And that puts performance marketers in a little bit of a corner because if you're going to be overly focused on the conversion and pushing that conversion, you're out of tune just a bit I think with what users are looking for. We talked about as a bit with Glenn Gabe about affiliate marketers taking the foot off the gas, and it's very similar to that. If users or people are going to be looking at a more autonomous approach to buying things and therefore searching things or consuming things and therefore searching things, I personally think it forces a little bit of a change in approach to how we optimize for those folks. So for example, in that particular case, being present at all of the various user touch points becomes much more important. So for example, if someone says, "I'm going to buy a new microwave." As opposed to going, "Okay, I'll go to Google, I'll look at one or two things and I'll buy from one of those two options," I'm oversimplifying that. Sure, they'll do a lot more research, they'll run a lot more nuanced queries. And they may not click on your result, but they may see your result show up there for each one of their queries. And that's very telling to that user, "Oh, I keep seeing that website over... No matter what I'm searching for for microwaves, that website keeps popping up. That is so interesting." And then eventually when they do run the query where they want to convert, they may see you there and click on you or they may say, "Let me check them out because they keep showing up for the microwaves." That's a different approach to what I would call a traditional SEO. It's a little bit more of an holistic SEO strategy approach to SEO because you're trying to align in that case with the user looking to convert based on the brand being top of mind. So you're less interested in ranking for the keyword and getting the conversion on that keyword, and you'd be more interested in this scenario in ranking for all of the keywords and having a brand presence for all of the keywords so that the user knows who the hell you are when they're ready to convert. Crystal Carter: I think the top-of-the-funnel stuff and the bottom-of-the-funnel stuff should have a different approach. So I think that when you're at the top of the funnel, if I'm thinking about buying a car, I bought a car like in the last year. And when I was thinking about that, there are brands that I know that I will not bother with because they're just not on my radar. I'm not a fan of them, of them as a brand. There's other brands that are like... They're on the short list. And in the top-of-the-funnel area, things like sponsorships and influencer engagement, lifestyle blogs of, "This is how I spend my time in my minivan, that sort of thing." And you'd be like, "Oh, okay, that's a cool minivan. They went on a road trip." And I think that for that kind of content, you want it to be brand. You want brand vibes. You want people to be able to understand what your brand is about. You want people to understand the kind of emotive things that people will get from that brand. You want people to be entertained, engaged, educated. You want people to be able to... To educate them on what kinds of things might you need on a road trip, for instance. And that's just good information. If you're taking a family of four on a road trip, you will want information on how to do that without losing your mind, and that's something- Mordy Oberstein: Not possible, but, yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: And if it so happens that... I'm trying to think of a minivan van, like the Picasso. That's a van, isn't it? Or something. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: That's seems very European. I don't know. The Ford Windstar to go back to our childhood. Crystal Carter: Right. Or like a VW van or whatever. I don't know. So you're trying to think of opening doors or sliding doors, which sliding doors are, ooh, very nice. Or how many cup holders need. Anyway, that's something that you can get from a educational, an engaging, entertaining, edutainment kind of piece of content. But thinking about holistically, you also need to think about when people get to the point where they're like, "I would like to buy this minivan." Don't waste their time. Okay. This is something that Amazon is very, very good at. By the time I get to the point where I'm like, "I would like to purchase this item," I want to see nuts and bolts things. I want to see is there a warranty? How many cup holders, how big is the door? How many doors are there? How many rearview mirrors? Does it have a rearview mirror defrosting? If you're looking at clothes, I want to see the sizes and I want to see the size comparisons, and I want to see all of that sort of stuff. I want to see all of the details on that page. Don't waste my time with fluff on the page where I'm going to actually buy the thing. And I think that the way that we think about the funnel should be very distinct. And they should support each other. Still keep some of the stylized photos or whatever, that sort of thing, still give me the vibes, but I want the nuts and bolts stuff by the time I get down to the funnel. So I think it's important to think about when you think about the holistic thing, make sure that you cover every stage that you need to cover, but do it at the right time. I don't need to necessarily see the sizing details when you're showing me the lifestyle stuff. I don't need that stuff at the top of the funnel. But when I get down to it, I do need to know. Because for some people, those are deal-breakers like, "Oh, they don't have the inseam that I need, just not going to buy those pants." Mordy Oberstein: I think what happens is now we're in an era where your consumer trust is at the forefront, especially on digital for so many different reasons, including the influx of AI content, looking for more human experience. The value of what you would traditionally call that brand content leading up to the performance content or the conversion content is there's such a greater overlap. It used to be, and I'm saying this anecdotally, I saw a product, I would investigate it, if I got to one of those pages where there was really great information about the product that would be enough to convince me, "Okay, buy." Now, I feel like I really want to know who you are, what you're all about, what's going on with you? Can I really trust you? Imagine you're on some website and it turns out that that person is really not a great company. They've said a lot of horrible things, whatever it is, you would want to know now. Whereas back in the day, I feel like those questions didn't come up quite the same way with the quite amount of substance to them. So understanding who you are as a brand and what you are and what you represent and all the things about you, it's just more in focus and consumer trust is so much more important. And I think as an SEO or a performance marketer, it's really important to realize that you need that setup to get to those conversions more than ever, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that it's important to understand that that is definitely part of it that's even going to put you in the conversation. I don't think you want to be sold to necessarily. As you were saying, people don't necessarily want to be sold to. I think people want information to make intelligent choices. So this is the information that you need in order to make the decision as to whether you want to buy it. The branding piece should be like... It's more of a like, can you engage with us? Is this a product, is this a brand, is this a company, is this an idea that you want to engage with? And there'll be lots of signals that you can give to people to tell them that like, "Yeah, we can engage with you. We can understand you. We literally speak your language." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, like, "We're alive, we're available, we're here. We're not going to run away." All the things. Crystal Carter: Right. So people, for instance, on social or something, somebody will post a video, post a picture or whatever, and people that... And accounts that are really well engaged with, for instance, the person, if you check the comments, the person who posted is commenting all the time. I was on YouTube the other day and I saw a short, and it was one of those little heartwarming ones, and I was like, "Aw, cute." And literally within a half an hour, the person who posted it was like, "Thanks." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I didn't think you'd reply to this at all." And I think that when you reply to your reviews, when you are creating content that's interesting that people are going to respond to, that's showing people that that's not selling the item, that's not even necessarily selling the brand, but it's demonstrating. And I think going back to... You talked about liberal arts, going back to my liberal arts college degree, shout out Kenyon College. Mordy Oberstein: Very holistic. Crystal Carter: Right. Going back to that... Totally holistic, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's the whole point of it. Crystal Carter: So going back to that, and one of the things that was really not necessarily drilled into us, but one of the things that we came up a lot was show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. And I've taken that to heart so much. I could tell you how great the microwave is a million times, but if I show you that I can make really good mac and cheese, or I can make this great stuff in it or that it cleans up really easily after I splattered mac and cheese all over the inside of the microwave or whatever it may be, or that it makes a great sound when it goes ping or that I can also use it as... If I can show you, that's completely different from if I tell you. If I show you, then you again can also see and make the decision. So I show you what I can do and you can make your decisions as to whether or not you think that's good or bad or whatever with your own intelligence... And that I think is really important. Show, don't tell. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. This is why we show you who's great for the SEO news by not just telling you, "Oh, Barry's great for the SEO news," but showing you with our new series It's New where you can... Yeah, show, don't tell. Or both, tell and show. Show and tell. That's why- Show and tell, which is just telling you it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. So much news this week because Google ran their Google I/O event for 2024, which means all sorts of innovation in AI. Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, and Gemini and more Gemini. But there are some things that relate to Search, per Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land. New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research, and learn. So Google did make some big announcements related to Search itself. The biggest one being that the SGE, now known as AI Overviews, will be going live in the US and other countries around the world. What does that mean for rankings? Well, we talked about that on a special episode of this episode podcast specifically about the implications of Google I/O. Look forward in the show notes of this podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Crystal and I went extensively through it. In a nutshell, no, this is not the end of content as we know it. I still think people will click and try to explore topics in greater depth that the AI Overview can't do fundamentally. It does mean that Google needs to provide citations properly to help facilitate that. I think we are going to see that. I think there are some issues with it as it is now just a bit, but I think it will evolve, and I think Google does realize that there is a need for exploration. Part of what makes me think that is Google has what Barry has termed AI organized search results, and what it's doing there is it's not offering an AI Overview per se. What it's offering is a breakdown of the topic, a custom structured SERP based on an AI output. So in the example that Google gave, there was something around was searching for a place to go for your 20th anniversary, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and it breaks down the results according to, I don't know, romantic places to go, steak houses, places with patios or rooftop restaurants. It just breaks down the SERP and organizes the information way differently. We actually spoke about that, little pat on my back to myself, during the episode we spoke to Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land about Google's Gemini release. And I said, "They're going to take the custom output format results that they announced with Gemini and bring that to the SERP." This is that, I believe. So you do see a balance between Google offering the AI Overview and using the AI Overview to offer an exploration of the actual results that are possible to show on the SERP. So I do think there will be a balance. I don't think it's the end of content. I do think, a little bit of a hot take, it might be the end of super top level content that everyone's done before a gazillion times over. But again, check out the episode that Crystal and I did. There were a whole bunch of other parts of the announcement. For example, Google announced multistep reasoning capabilities. So let's say you search find the best yoga or whatever studio in 50 mile radius of where I am right now with pizza place next door and a half hour walk from so-and-so place, and Google breaks down the results by telling you the walking time between the two places, and it gives you maps you can see between the various places. So it's multistep reasoning. I'll be honest with you. It feels that Google has announced multistep reasoning with other names before or has talked about this before and just didn't call it multistep reasoning, things around MUM and so forth. But okay, that's an official announcement that Google made at Google I/O that related to Search. There's planning capabilities, which we've talked about on this new section before. So if we search for plan me a three-day trip in Philadelphia, the AI Overview will produce an itinerary for you. Or now we're talking about create a three-day meal plan for me that's easy to prepare and it'll prepare a meal plan for you. Again, my personal take is that it'll be helpful if I was spending one day in Philadelphia, I wasn't even expecting to be there, I got a couple hours to kill, plan me a day. If I'm dropping 20 grand to fly my family around the world to Paris or whatever it is, I'm not asking the AI Overview to plan out a whole itinerary for me. Maybe I'll get started with the AI, but I would definitely investigate myself there. The same thing with a meal plan. If I'm a casual dieter, make me a meal plan that's low-carb whatever. If I have a real dietary restrictions and needs, I'm going to do the actual research myself. The AI Overview might be a good place to start, but certainly not finish. So again, I don't think it's the end of content. I do think it'll help perhaps refine the targeting of how we think about who we're writing for and what we're writing about just a bit. And there might be some, I'll call it, constriction of the web because of that. And yes, that might hurt a bunch of websites. I'm not saying no. With that, Google also is rolling out a web filter. So again, for Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land, "Google adds a web filter to only show text-based links in Google Search results. So it's a tab at the top of the SERP, or if you click on the More section, you'll see there the More on the menu section above the actual search results, and it'll say web and all you'll get are the 10 blue links," quote-unquote. By the way, friend of the show, friend of a lot of things, friend of everybody, because this is a great guy overall, Andrew Optimisey, he has a Chrome extension where you can automatically default to that web tab. A link to it in the show notes if that's your thing, then check out Andrew's helpful Chrome extension that he has for you there. Lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable. Remove Your Content from Google's AI Overviews. This came from Glenn Gabe who actually linked to both Barry's article and to Glenn's original article that goes into in greater depth in the show notes. But Glenn showed how if you want to take your content out of the AI Overview, you can with the no snippet robots meta tag. If you're using Wix by the way, you can have easy access to the robots meta tag controls in the SEO panel. Just click on no snippet and you're done. Glenn tested it. He said after a few hours he saw that the AI Overview no longer contained a link to his results and the actual overview itself changed because they removed his content altogether from it. So the no snippet does seem to work. I will say, caution. Lots of people are talking about, "Oh, get me out of here. I didn't know. Google never asked me if I wanted to be in their AI Overview." If you are not there, your competitor will be. So unless you have a very good reason for doing this, I don't recommend you do it. Yes, it might be angering. You might feel like Google's taking away your traffic and so forth and so forth, but don't let your anger blind you because you might actually get clicks if your card shows up in the AI Overview. You definitely will not get clicks if your card doesn't because you added the no snippet robots meta tag. So caution, word to the wise I guess. And that is this week's snappy news. Barry, by the way, is really good at replying to comments. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he is, actually agree. Mordy Oberstein: I don't mean it's like a simple thing like, "Oh, Barry's good at replying to comments." I didn't mean it like that. It's nice that he takes the time to reply to comments. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's got like 200,000 followers on Twitter, but when people attack him and he's like, "Yeah, cool, thanks." Mordy Oberstein: Everywhere, YouTube. Crystal Carter: It's really good. And also he shouts out when people are like, "Hey, I saw this thing." He's like, "Oh yeah, so-and-so saw this thing and it's really good." Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Many of SEOs, including myself, owe a lot to Barry for their careers. I also owe a lot to some great information I've read throughout the years, our follow of the week, the one, the only, the absolutely brilliant Dawn Anderson. Crystal Carter: Shout out to Dawn Anderson. Dawn Anderson is like hashtag goals in terms of SEO SEO fantasticness, I think she's a great follow for holistic SEO because she approaches it from a really holistic perspective. Not only is she super smart in terms of lots of technical things, but she studies not just SEO, but she also studies information retrieval. But yeah, I've spoken to her and she's saying like, "I study information retrieval. I go to information retrieval conferences." She's not just thinking about necessarily SEO, exactly what's going on with Google, she's thinking about the whole of how information is disseminated across the web, and that is super, super fantastic. And it's a really, really interesting way to approach it because I think sometimes that can put you ahead of the curve in terms of understanding where Search is going and understanding how information will flow through. Also, Dawn is incredibly nice and lovely. Yeah, the last time I saw her was at the UK Search Awards, and she was easily the best dressed. Super smart and yeah, do follow her. Mordy Oberstein: Honestly, some of the best articles I've ever read in SEO come from Dawn. You go to Search Engine Land and type in her name and you'll find a collection of really... Just take a cup of tea, cup of coffee, have a beer, sit down with it kind of thing. So definitely give Dawn a follow, a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. The connection's there, it was quite holistic. Crystal Carter: I think we covered everything. Mordy Oberstein: It's the whole picture, all of it. A whole loaf of bread. One sitting on the street corner. Me and a couple of drunk hanging out. They're drinking the beer, I’m in the middle of a bread. Crystal Carter: It's all wheat, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I guess, yeah. Makes sense. Just one giant carb fest. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we're doing it. So good. I highly recommend just eat plain bread. Get like, a good loaf of bread. Oh, delicious. Crystal Carter: What about with Marmite? I had some bread with Marmite today. It was delicious. Mordy Oberstein: I have a bottle here, on site. "What do I have to do with this thing?" Crystal Carter: You can give it to me- Mordy Oberstein: Some of you don't know someone gave me some Marmite to try and I know some people like this stuff. It's not even food. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. It's full of B vitamins. Mordy Oberstein: It's yeast-smelling glue. Crystal Carter: It's full of B vitamins. It's very umami. That's what it is. Mordy Oberstein: If I want some B vitamins, I'll take a B vitamin. Crystal Carter: To each their own, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, it's subjective, but it's also objective. Anyway, thanks for listening to the SERP's US podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into SEO as a team sport live from brightonSEO UK. Look forward ever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning app at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more? Let me try that again. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning App at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Manick Bhan Areej Abuali Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center LinkGraph What does Google I/O 2024 mean for SEOs? Web Results Filter Chrome Extension News: New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research and learn Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon Remove Your Content From Google's AI Overviews How to remove content and links from Google’s AI Overviews by using ‘preview controls’ like nosnippet, data-nosnippet, and max-snippet [Case Study] Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Manick Bhan Areej Abuali Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center LinkGraph What does Google I/O 2024 mean for SEOs? Web Results Filter Chrome Extension News: New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research and learn Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon Remove Your Content From Google's AI Overviews How to remove content and links from Google’s AI Overviews by using ‘preview controls’ like nosnippet, data-nosnippet, and max-snippet [Case Study] Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining us on the SERPs' Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the quite well-rounded head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: You are like a liberal arts degree. First like a, yes. Your enthusiasm is contagious. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. I wanted to mention something because a day before we're recording this episode, we recorded a version of It's New with Barry Schwartz. If you haven't checked that out, check that out on the Wix SEO Hub. It's right there at the top. It's our daily or mostly daily, daily news dive with Barry Schwartz. We kind of spend, you know, 5, 6, 7 minutes going through that day's SEO news. So if you want to catch up on the SEO News, catch up with that each and every day. Except for Fridays, we don't do it on Fridays. And Barry's like-- Crystal Carter: Oh, he has a whole roundup. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, because he has a whole full roundup on Fridays, so you could check that out on Fridays if you really like Jonesing for SEO news. But Barry said, "Every week you guys say it's the new wave of SEO," but you've been doing the podcast for a year and a half. How new is it? Crystal Carter: It's pretty new. Mordy Oberstein: And apparently for Barry, unless it's immediately new, it's not new. Crystal Carter: But these are the standards we've come to expect from Barry. He tells me all the time. I'm like, "Hey, I saw this. This is new." And he's like, "Not new." Mordy Oberstein: Could you imagine his wife gives him a gift for his birthday and says, "Oh, Barry, where's that new shirt I gave you yesterday?" "What new shirt? That's not new, you gave to me yesterday." Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Crystal Carter: Not new, not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Crystal Carter: I've seen this before. I've seen shirts with buttons. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Got completely off the rails. We're barely into the podcast. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to your monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter. But where you can also track rank on Google, Bing, and YouTube, and even Amazon without ever leaving the Wix platform with RankiX. Look for the RankiX app inside of the Wix App Market and start tracking your rank performance a bit more holistically. As today we're taking a holistic look at SEO or a look at holistic SEO by covering topics such as, what the heck is holistic SEO? And why does having a holistic approach to SEO even matter? We're understanding the ecosystem comes into quote-unquote, "Holistic SEO," and is holistic SEO more tactical or is it more strategic? To help us make the holistic connection, Manick Bhan of LinkGraph joins us to answer if you can focus on ranking factors and be holistic in your SEO all at the same time, plus Crystal and I will take a holistic look at how users use Google and what that might mean for the search engine. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news, and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Because SEO is like bread. Sure, you can have a slice, but why have a slice when you can have the entire loaf as episode 88 of the Serp's Up podcast helps you bake up a broad bakery of holistic SEO goodies. Crystal Carter: With whole meal SEO grains. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You can focus on one slice of the SEO loaf or you can look at the entire loaf when you're doing your SEO and just eat the loaf. Crystal Carter: I have eaten a whole loaf of bread before. This is why I don't have a bread maker. Basically bread maker cooks all night, smells delicious, and then in the morning you're like, "I want the bread." And then you eat it all. And then you still have to go and buy bread even though you had a bread maker make the bread. Mordy Oberstein: Some people will take a bottle of beer put it into a bag and go on the street corner, have a beer? I've eaten loaves of bread on the street corner before. Crystal Carter: Do you know I did that with Yana from our team, from the SEO team? Shout out to Yana. And some delicious rye with caraway seeds bread. Absolutely gorgeous. Also had dill in it. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Holistic SEO. Crystal Carter: Enough about carbs. So yeah, holistic SEO is interesting. It's something that people don't always quantify, but a lot of people do. A lot of people who are very good SEOs will do. And essentially, holistic SEO is what it sounds like. It's thinking about SEO, not from just the tactical point of view, but from a holistic perspective. So you will of course think about your on-page stuff. You'll also think about your technical SEO. You'll also think about your content SEO, but you'll also think about how all of that SEO feeds into the overall practice of your business, the overall practice for your brand and the overall way that people discover your content. One of the things that I'm finding really interesting when I was speaking to people, I was speaking to Jay Cowell from Launch, and she's an agency owner and she was talking about from a paid perspective, they do paid media, but one of the things she was saying is she was saying, "We are platform-agnostic. We are looking to help people to accelerate their discovery whatever platform they need, in whichever way is most advantageous for them to connect with customers." And I think that there's a lot of people who are moving towards that in terms of search as well. I'm going to quote Arish quoting myself, which is basically like we should be optimizing for user discovery, not just on Google, not just on Bing, but if your users are on TikTok, if your users are on Instagram, if your users are on some forum somewhere, then we should be thinking about SEO that supports all of that from a holistic point of view, both with the strategies that we have, but also with which KPIs we're tracking and how we understand how it fits into the wider ecosystem of the site. Because the way that users use the internet is holistically, users aren't on a single platform when they're looking for information, users are bouncing around from different things. So if you get a topic that you're interested in, and I certainly do this, if I decide that I'm going to update my garden, for instance, I'm going to look at some videos on Instagram, I'm going to check out some pictures on Pinterest, I'm going to go and get some top tips from YouTube, I'm going to read some blogs that talk about how to do composting or whatever it may be. So I'm going to go around to lots of different channels. And if you have holistic approach to SEO, then you're going to be better prepared for users who are using the web in that way, and you are going to become much more of an authority. Because if they see you in all of those platforms for instance, then that's going to really solidify your brand for them. And if you were able to back that up with solid SEO, that's going to get you some great results. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to talk more about that brand point, but I want to talk about more on the dynamic segment. So I have many thoughts about that and I want to talk about that later so I'm not ignoring that. But the way you're describing it where people will look at other channels and they'll think about their SEO more holistically, I think that's one of the things that makes it a little more complicated to define holistic SEO because you can look at holistic SEO from that point of view. You can look at a holistic SEO from, okay, I'm going to think about the algorithm more holistically, which is where I think you get a lot of the EAT conversation coming into it and where Google's headed directionally and SEO concepts. That's what makes this a little bit tricky, because holistic SEO can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. But I a million percent agree with what you said before, that a lot of the better SEOs are the ones who are thinking more holistically, whether it be about growth from a platform point of view of how SEO ties into other platforms, or how SEO or how rather growth is tied to thinking about Google a little bit more conceptually and having more SEO concepts that are driving you versus pure SEO checklist things that are driving you. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that's really interesting that you bring up the algorithm because I think the algorithm is more holistic. So when we're talking about the helpful content, when we're talking about EEAT, when we're talking about Google understanding and connecting entities, the algorithm is more holistic than it used to be. It used to be that you could update certain parts of your metadata and you could add the keywords and on all of that sort of stuff, but Google is understanding more the richness of the network of information that you are creating online, including the people who are creating it, including the content you're creating. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's such a great point because even on the social side, you’re saying, okay, I want to talk about the overlap and I'll think holistically about the overlap of SEO and social media. So a lot of the times we'll talk about, oh, social media will help you get links and that'll help you do SEO. Even on that side, you could think a little bit more holistically about it. I like to talk about it in terms of your digital light. Google's a moth, Google goes to whoever's the biggest digital light. And if people are talking about your brand either through branded searches or talking about your brand on social media, I feel like all of that factors into your digital light without the direct link factor. And at the same time, in terms of the algorithm, agree with that also a gazillion percent. If you think about the algorithm in terms of, okay, I see Google doing X and Google doing Y, and I'm going to try to optimize for X and for Y, that's one approach. A more holistic approach would be like I saw Google doing X, conceptually speaking or thematically speaking, what does that mean about the algorithm? What is the algorithm trying to achieve there? What concept is it trying to drive at? Because you're right, and we talked about this before, which podcasts, many podcasts, that Google's trying to really understand and simulate a quality experience for the user with a machine. So yes, Google is a machine, but trying to simulate what a quality experience might actually look like for the user. So it's going to naturally be a little bit more holistic in how it's approaching quality, relevant results on the SERP. And what a holistic SEO will do is say, "I saw Google try to do X with it. It demoted this webpage, it promoted that webpage. I can maybe see why it might have done that. What can I extrapolate out of that?" Crystal Carter: Right, right. And you're essentially looking at overall content and information, understanding trends and how Google is getting better at understanding information and how Google is using its various different tools including machine learning systems like BERT, like MUM, like “ELMO” even, all of these different things. So how they're using all of those tools and how they're layering all those tools, I think it's... I've spoken a bit at a few different events about how people say, "Oh, AI is coming to Search." AI's been in Search, and Google layers all of those AI tools on top of each other. So they have Lens and Lens is also layered with Translate, which is also layered with Search, which is also layered with their weight of understanding natural language processing and things like that. So they're layering all of these things- Mordy Oberstein: It's like an onion. Crystal Carter: With lots of layers. And so they're layering all of this information. And they're also layering the information that they have about your website. We've talked on this podcast about how you can check learn more about this domain. So there's information on the SERP that will tell you what Google knows about the domain. How old it is, what people are saying about it on Wikipedia, what the brand says about themselves, things like that. Google is taking a very holistic approach to this. If you look at the way they approach Google Business Profile, for instance, they look at the reviews, they look at your attributes, they look at your website, look at your images, they're looking at all of these different things. So you can't just expect that you can just put keywords on a page and just update the technical SEO and you will get great results. You can't just expect to just do that, it's not... Doing one particular tactic at a time doesn't necessarily move the needle, you need to think about... And of course, I'm not saying don't do those tactics, but don't do them in a silo. They should be as part of your overall approach to being online. And if they're finding that your website is solid, but your Facebook is never updated or has this consistent, inconsistent information, or your Google Business Profile says opening hours that you haven't had since 1997 and lots of different... I don't know, lots of different things in you. They're finding lots of inconsistencies. Then what Google learns to find about you is that you're inconsistent. Right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And if you don't want that, then you need to think about all of the different touch points that Google has with your website because they will also reflect all the different touch points that you have with your customers overall. And that is a holistic approach. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's interesting about this because what you're basically saying, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, is like think... Take a look what Google's doing, all the things they're doing in Google Business Profile, all the things they doing over here, and all things over there. And directionally speaking, what does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? Which by the way, we've been doing on this podcast. Ever so subtly, we've been advocating for a more holistic approach. We have a segment, which I think we're doing later, we called Going Going Google, where we're trying to offer directional approach to where Google is directionally heading because we are big advocates for holistic SEO. And that's one of the reasons why some people will say when someone goes on X or whatever and says, "Hey Barry, I found a new line on the SERP. Is it new that?" That's SEO voyeurism? I say no. I say you can learn a lot about that. Especially back in the day, there was a point in time of the good old days where Google was making tons of endless changes. Most of Barry's stories... That's hyperbolic. A lot of Barry's stories on seoroundtable.com were about, "Someone spotted this, someone spotted that" way more than it even is now. And you could really see like, wow, there's a real focus on local at that time. And then you could see the switch. Now all of the changes Google's making are e-comm side, all the testing. It's all e-comm. What does that tell you about what Google's trying to do? You can learn a lot by seeing what Google is doing, the products they're releasing, the changes that they're making, the things that they're testing. You can learn a lot about where they're trying to head. And that as an SEO is invaluable information. Crystal Carter: Right. Another great place to look at is schema markup. So if you are seeing that Google is... Google in the last year or so has released a lot more rich results schema markup guidance, and that can tell you a lot about what they're doing. Similarly, in Google Search Console, they've added some more dedicated features for certain things. So for instance, they added in video pages, which tells you that they're interested in video. They added in discussion forums schema markup, and profile page markup for instance, which also tells you that they're interested in that. Additionally, when you look at that, you can also see some of the designations. So for instance, if you look in your schema markup, and if you need to know what schema markup is, I have a fantastic article in the Wix SEO Hub, please go and look it up. Essentially when you look at that, you can see they have properties and they have different properties and elements and things that you can add into your schema markup, and they will have recommendations. They'll say, "You should say who made this picture. You should say who the author is. You should say the reviews. So if this has reviews." And that's telling you if you don't have reviews on your page, guess what? Guess what? That's your hint. That this product should have reviews. That's your hint that Google's interested in reviews for this product. If you're seeing that, "Oh, they've offered profile pages" and you don't have profile pages on your site, then maybe you should consider profile pages for your site. So there's things that you can see from there. And also schemamarkup.org or Schema.org has a great collection of all the different schema types, and sometimes people find it overwhelming because it's a very ugly website. I find it delightfully ugly, personally. I just love how simple it is. It's pretty much just a spreadsheet, I love that. And basically what it will say... For instance, if you look up a amusement park markup, it will give you lots of the different elements that you could possibly include in amusement park markup. If you were making a page about amusement parks, that would give you a lot of guidance of what should be on their page. It's essentially like a content brief. And I think that that... And that also schema for instance, as a template for a holistic approach, also has all of the connections and all the different things that it's connected to. So is part of this, is related to that, has an alumni of this, is blah blah blah, has all of those sorts of things. And can guide you with some of these elements. So I think with holistic SEO, particularly if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed maybe, and you're like, "I don't know where to start," what I generally find it's... My general approach to lots of things is lean into the thing you're most comfortable with first and use that to guide how you build on other things. So I really like schema for instance, so Schema.org would be a really good place for me to lean into what are the holistic things that I could think about around that topic? Google Business Profile, if you're in the local space is another good one to tell you the kinds of things that Google expects to know about a local business, whether it's... You can say that it's female-led or you can say that it has wheelchair access or you can say that your opening hours, you can have your menu. This is guiding you for the kinds of things that Google is expecting to see from you from a lot of different angles. And it can also guide where you should expect to see yourself on different websites. Maybe you should have yourself on other websites and have similar attributes, so where TripAdvisor or things like that, but in places where they have reviews. So lean into something that you feel comfortable with, and you said, as the springboard to guide you on your holistic SEO journey. Mordy Oberstein: Just sum this up before we get to our esteemed guest. If you want to sum up, you’re talking about structured markup and looking where Google's going. Directionally, you just want a concrete example of what this might actually look like. When Google announced they are supporting new structured data markup for forums, Aleyda Solís said, "I take that as a signal of Google looking to reward forum content." So she created chat.seofomo.co, forum for SEO. Lo and behold, what did Google start doing soon thereafter? Started ranking Reddit all over the place. That's somebody who saw what's happening, saw what Google announced, looked at the ecosystem and made an SEO strategy decision based off of that. Crystal Carter: Right. And that builds on her brand, builds on the relationship with her audience, includes... And has lots and lots and multiple benefits. It has a tactical approach, but it also has an overall strategic approach, which is great. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was absolutely, absolutely brilliant on Aleyda's part because Aleyda is absolutely brilliant. Crystal Carter: Just brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Okay, with this, let's take a step back and see how SEO is getting started or SEO enthusiast trying to up their game can holistically look at Google ranking factors. Here's Manick Bhan, the founder of LinkGraph on just that. Manick Bhan: What does taking a holistic approach to SEO mean when considering ranking factors? Google's ranking factors use thousands of signals when promoting web pages. If you really want to conquer SEO and deliver results for your business, the best thing to do is to memorize those thousands of signals, track them all as they change, and then improve every single one of those signals on your website as soon as possible. Just kidding, who's got time for that? Nobody. SEOs don't have time for that. Plus Google updates its algorithm something like 500 to 600 times per year, so by the time we list out every ranking factor, we have to start over. But as an SEO, I have actually spent a lot of time studying algorithm updates, reading Google's patents, running correlation analyses, and building SEO software. Google's search factors are very sophisticated, but they're also very predictable. SEO is math, not magic. It's built on computer algorithms. All of those thousands of signals really come down to just four main pillars or what I call holistic SEO. The first pillar of SEO is authority. How authoritative is your website? Google determines authority through factors like backlinks, citations, and what those backlinks say about the websites they're pointing to through anchor text and annotation text. Authority is also communicated through signals like branded searches and brand mentions. Factors like this, what some people call off-page SEO, all constitute a website's authority. The second pillar is content, both the depth of your website's content and the relevance of your content to the searcher's intent. And even how your content speaks to other information the searcher may not have even realized that they were looking for. Years ago, adding keywords to content was enough to rank in Google, but now Google looks for content depth, breadth, and topical authority when ranking web pages. It wants to rank websites that really think about what the user is looking for and that create original high quality content and have experience and expertise in their respective industries. For Google Business Profiles on Google Maps, this also includes the contents of your profile such as reviews, Q&As, posts, as well as the landing page linked to from your GBP. The third pillar is technicals. This has to do with your website's meta tags, the internal linking profile of your website distributing your page rank, your HTML code, and things like that. Search engine bots crawl all of those backend elements of our websites and use them to understand what our content is about. The fourth and final pillar is UX or user behavior factors. That's what happens when people land on the page. How long do they spend on the website? Do they scroll, do they click? Do they go back to find other search results? What are they doing while they're on your page? Every Google ranking factor can fit into one of these four pillars. It's that simple. Even as Google's algorithms have evolved and become more sophisticated over the years, they've always pointed to these four pillars as a north star. So although SEO is very complex and can be intimidating at times for beginners, it can be simplified in this way. Holistic SEO is the process of improving websites in those four core areas, and as long as you focus on those four pillars simultaneously, you're going to see your web traffic and organic visibility increase. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Manick. Make sure to follow him on social media links in the show notes. And it is, again, there's so many different ways you can define Holistic SEO. From a foundational fundamental way, those four pillars, those are definitely the four pillars that you want to focus on if you're getting started and trying to learn how to optimize web pages and websites. And it is interesting to see how as you grow that outlook of how you would define holistic SEO will probably change and adopt and become more sophisticated over time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think that that's partially because Google's evolved over time and they'll keep changing as well. So I think that you have to pay attention to what the state of play is and how things are evolving across the board. And if you aren't keeping pace then you’ll fall behind. But I think that if your overall goal is to connect with users who are interested in what you do, then I think that you should be pretty rock solid. I think that folks who are connecting with their audience and whose focus is their audience will be able to weather... Whatever algorithmic updates, whatever technological updates there are, because at the core of it, your audience is what? Is your focus. And I think that that will help you leaps and bounds. Mordy Oberstein: And it's also Google's focus. They're going and looking at what users want and trying to steer it that way. Now, speaking of user satisfaction and now that you know all about holistic SEO and whatnot, what would happen if people, or as we as marketers call them, users, also known as my extended family, users. What would happen if these users started taking a more holistic approach to Google in how they'd run queries? Oh my, it would be interesting. Which means it's time to take a holistic and directional look and approach with a little segment we call Going Going Google. And it's going going, Google. It's out of here. So I have this whole thing, I'm on a soap box. I am on a soap box. People do not want to be sold to the way that they used to be. In fact, they don't want to be sold to. That's the change. It used to be you could sell, it's okay. Now people are far less willing to be sold to. They don't want to feel like they're being sold to. There's a need for greater consumer autonomy and so forth and so forth and so forth. And that puts performance marketers in a little bit of a corner because if you're going to be overly focused on the conversion and pushing that conversion, you're out of tune just a bit I think with what users are looking for. We talked about as a bit with Glenn Gabe about affiliate marketers taking the foot off the gas, and it's very similar to that. If users or people are going to be looking at a more autonomous approach to buying things and therefore searching things or consuming things and therefore searching things, I personally think it forces a little bit of a change in approach to how we optimize for those folks. So for example, in that particular case, being present at all of the various user touch points becomes much more important. So for example, if someone says, "I'm going to buy a new microwave." As opposed to going, "Okay, I'll go to Google, I'll look at one or two things and I'll buy from one of those two options," I'm oversimplifying that. Sure, they'll do a lot more research, they'll run a lot more nuanced queries. And they may not click on your result, but they may see your result show up there for each one of their queries. And that's very telling to that user, "Oh, I keep seeing that website over... No matter what I'm searching for for microwaves, that website keeps popping up. That is so interesting." And then eventually when they do run the query where they want to convert, they may see you there and click on you or they may say, "Let me check them out because they keep showing up for the microwaves." That's a different approach to what I would call a traditional SEO. It's a little bit more of an holistic SEO strategy approach to SEO because you're trying to align in that case with the user looking to convert based on the brand being top of mind. So you're less interested in ranking for the keyword and getting the conversion on that keyword, and you'd be more interested in this scenario in ranking for all of the keywords and having a brand presence for all of the keywords so that the user knows who the hell you are when they're ready to convert. Crystal Carter: I think the top-of-the-funnel stuff and the bottom-of-the-funnel stuff should have a different approach. So I think that when you're at the top of the funnel, if I'm thinking about buying a car, I bought a car like in the last year. And when I was thinking about that, there are brands that I know that I will not bother with because they're just not on my radar. I'm not a fan of them, of them as a brand. There's other brands that are like... They're on the short list. And in the top-of-the-funnel area, things like sponsorships and influencer engagement, lifestyle blogs of, "This is how I spend my time in my minivan, that sort of thing." And you'd be like, "Oh, okay, that's a cool minivan. They went on a road trip." And I think that for that kind of content, you want it to be brand. You want brand vibes. You want people to be able to understand what your brand is about. You want people to understand the kind of emotive things that people will get from that brand. You want people to be entertained, engaged, educated. You want people to be able to... To educate them on what kinds of things might you need on a road trip, for instance. And that's just good information. If you're taking a family of four on a road trip, you will want information on how to do that without losing your mind, and that's something- Mordy Oberstein: Not possible, but, yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: And if it so happens that... I'm trying to think of a minivan van, like the Picasso. That's a van, isn't it? Or something. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: That's seems very European. I don't know. The Ford Windstar to go back to our childhood. Crystal Carter: Right. Or like a VW van or whatever. I don't know. So you're trying to think of opening doors or sliding doors, which sliding doors are, ooh, very nice. Or how many cup holders need. Anyway, that's something that you can get from a educational, an engaging, entertaining, edutainment kind of piece of content. But thinking about holistically, you also need to think about when people get to the point where they're like, "I would like to buy this minivan." Don't waste their time. Okay. This is something that Amazon is very, very good at. By the time I get to the point where I'm like, "I would like to purchase this item," I want to see nuts and bolts things. I want to see is there a warranty? How many cup holders, how big is the door? How many doors are there? How many rearview mirrors? Does it have a rearview mirror defrosting? If you're looking at clothes, I want to see the sizes and I want to see the size comparisons, and I want to see all of that sort of stuff. I want to see all of the details on that page. Don't waste my time with fluff on the page where I'm going to actually buy the thing. And I think that the way that we think about the funnel should be very distinct. And they should support each other. Still keep some of the stylized photos or whatever, that sort of thing, still give me the vibes, but I want the nuts and bolts stuff by the time I get down to the funnel. So I think it's important to think about when you think about the holistic thing, make sure that you cover every stage that you need to cover, but do it at the right time. I don't need to necessarily see the sizing details when you're showing me the lifestyle stuff. I don't need that stuff at the top of the funnel. But when I get down to it, I do need to know. Because for some people, those are deal-breakers like, "Oh, they don't have the inseam that I need, just not going to buy those pants." Mordy Oberstein: I think what happens is now we're in an era where your consumer trust is at the forefront, especially on digital for so many different reasons, including the influx of AI content, looking for more human experience. The value of what you would traditionally call that brand content leading up to the performance content or the conversion content is there's such a greater overlap. It used to be, and I'm saying this anecdotally, I saw a product, I would investigate it, if I got to one of those pages where there was really great information about the product that would be enough to convince me, "Okay, buy." Now, I feel like I really want to know who you are, what you're all about, what's going on with you? Can I really trust you? Imagine you're on some website and it turns out that that person is really not a great company. They've said a lot of horrible things, whatever it is, you would want to know now. Whereas back in the day, I feel like those questions didn't come up quite the same way with the quite amount of substance to them. So understanding who you are as a brand and what you are and what you represent and all the things about you, it's just more in focus and consumer trust is so much more important. And I think as an SEO or a performance marketer, it's really important to realize that you need that setup to get to those conversions more than ever, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that it's important to understand that that is definitely part of it that's even going to put you in the conversation. I don't think you want to be sold to necessarily. As you were saying, people don't necessarily want to be sold to. I think people want information to make intelligent choices. So this is the information that you need in order to make the decision as to whether you want to buy it. The branding piece should be like... It's more of a like, can you engage with us? Is this a product, is this a brand, is this a company, is this an idea that you want to engage with? And there'll be lots of signals that you can give to people to tell them that like, "Yeah, we can engage with you. We can understand you. We literally speak your language." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, like, "We're alive, we're available, we're here. We're not going to run away." All the things. Crystal Carter: Right. So people, for instance, on social or something, somebody will post a video, post a picture or whatever, and people that... And accounts that are really well engaged with, for instance, the person, if you check the comments, the person who posted is commenting all the time. I was on YouTube the other day and I saw a short, and it was one of those little heartwarming ones, and I was like, "Aw, cute." And literally within a half an hour, the person who posted it was like, "Thanks." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I didn't think you'd reply to this at all." And I think that when you reply to your reviews, when you are creating content that's interesting that people are going to respond to, that's showing people that that's not selling the item, that's not even necessarily selling the brand, but it's demonstrating. And I think going back to... You talked about liberal arts, going back to my liberal arts college degree, shout out Kenyon College. Mordy Oberstein: Very holistic. Crystal Carter: Right. Going back to that... Totally holistic, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's the whole point of it. Crystal Carter: So going back to that, and one of the things that was really not necessarily drilled into us, but one of the things that we came up a lot was show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. And I've taken that to heart so much. I could tell you how great the microwave is a million times, but if I show you that I can make really good mac and cheese, or I can make this great stuff in it or that it cleans up really easily after I splattered mac and cheese all over the inside of the microwave or whatever it may be, or that it makes a great sound when it goes ping or that I can also use it as... If I can show you, that's completely different from if I tell you. If I show you, then you again can also see and make the decision. So I show you what I can do and you can make your decisions as to whether or not you think that's good or bad or whatever with your own intelligence... And that I think is really important. Show, don't tell. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. This is why we show you who's great for the SEO news by not just telling you, "Oh, Barry's great for the SEO news," but showing you with our new series It's New where you can... Yeah, show, don't tell. Or both, tell and show. Show and tell. That's why- Show and tell, which is just telling you it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. So much news this week because Google ran their Google I/O event for 2024, which means all sorts of innovation in AI. Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, and Gemini and more Gemini. But there are some things that relate to Search, per Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land. New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research, and learn. So Google did make some big announcements related to Search itself. The biggest one being that the SGE, now known as AI Overviews, will be going live in the US and other countries around the world. What does that mean for rankings? Well, we talked about that on a special episode of this episode podcast specifically about the implications of Google I/O. Look forward in the show notes of this podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Crystal and I went extensively through it. In a nutshell, no, this is not the end of content as we know it. I still think people will click and try to explore topics in greater depth that the AI Overview can't do fundamentally. It does mean that Google needs to provide citations properly to help facilitate that. I think we are going to see that. I think there are some issues with it as it is now just a bit, but I think it will evolve, and I think Google does realize that there is a need for exploration. Part of what makes me think that is Google has what Barry has termed AI organized search results, and what it's doing there is it's not offering an AI Overview per se. What it's offering is a breakdown of the topic, a custom structured SERP based on an AI output. So in the example that Google gave, there was something around was searching for a place to go for your 20th anniversary, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and it breaks down the results according to, I don't know, romantic places to go, steak houses, places with patios or rooftop restaurants. It just breaks down the SERP and organizes the information way differently. We actually spoke about that, little pat on my back to myself, during the episode we spoke to Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land about Google's Gemini release. And I said, "They're going to take the custom output format results that they announced with Gemini and bring that to the SERP." This is that, I believe. So you do see a balance between Google offering the AI Overview and using the AI Overview to offer an exploration of the actual results that are possible to show on the SERP. So I do think there will be a balance. I don't think it's the end of content. I do think, a little bit of a hot take, it might be the end of super top level content that everyone's done before a gazillion times over. But again, check out the episode that Crystal and I did. There were a whole bunch of other parts of the announcement. For example, Google announced multistep reasoning capabilities. So let's say you search find the best yoga or whatever studio in 50 mile radius of where I am right now with pizza place next door and a half hour walk from so-and-so place, and Google breaks down the results by telling you the walking time between the two places, and it gives you maps you can see between the various places. So it's multistep reasoning. I'll be honest with you. It feels that Google has announced multistep reasoning with other names before or has talked about this before and just didn't call it multistep reasoning, things around MUM and so forth. But okay, that's an official announcement that Google made at Google I/O that related to Search. There's planning capabilities, which we've talked about on this new section before. So if we search for plan me a three-day trip in Philadelphia, the AI Overview will produce an itinerary for you. Or now we're talking about create a three-day meal plan for me that's easy to prepare and it'll prepare a meal plan for you. Again, my personal take is that it'll be helpful if I was spending one day in Philadelphia, I wasn't even expecting to be there, I got a couple hours to kill, plan me a day. If I'm dropping 20 grand to fly my family around the world to Paris or whatever it is, I'm not asking the AI Overview to plan out a whole itinerary for me. Maybe I'll get started with the AI, but I would definitely investigate myself there. The same thing with a meal plan. If I'm a casual dieter, make me a meal plan that's low-carb whatever. If I have a real dietary restrictions and needs, I'm going to do the actual research myself. The AI Overview might be a good place to start, but certainly not finish. So again, I don't think it's the end of content. I do think it'll help perhaps refine the targeting of how we think about who we're writing for and what we're writing about just a bit. And there might be some, I'll call it, constriction of the web because of that. And yes, that might hurt a bunch of websites. I'm not saying no. With that, Google also is rolling out a web filter. So again, for Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land, "Google adds a web filter to only show text-based links in Google Search results. So it's a tab at the top of the SERP, or if you click on the More section, you'll see there the More on the menu section above the actual search results, and it'll say web and all you'll get are the 10 blue links," quote-unquote. By the way, friend of the show, friend of a lot of things, friend of everybody, because this is a great guy overall, Andrew Optimisey, he has a Chrome extension where you can automatically default to that web tab. A link to it in the show notes if that's your thing, then check out Andrew's helpful Chrome extension that he has for you there. Lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable. Remove Your Content from Google's AI Overviews. This came from Glenn Gabe who actually linked to both Barry's article and to Glenn's original article that goes into in greater depth in the show notes. But Glenn showed how if you want to take your content out of the AI Overview, you can with the no snippet robots meta tag. If you're using Wix by the way, you can have easy access to the robots meta tag controls in the SEO panel. Just click on no snippet and you're done. Glenn tested it. He said after a few hours he saw that the AI Overview no longer contained a link to his results and the actual overview itself changed because they removed his content altogether from it. So the no snippet does seem to work. I will say, caution. Lots of people are talking about, "Oh, get me out of here. I didn't know. Google never asked me if I wanted to be in their AI Overview." If you are not there, your competitor will be. So unless you have a very good reason for doing this, I don't recommend you do it. Yes, it might be angering. You might feel like Google's taking away your traffic and so forth and so forth, but don't let your anger blind you because you might actually get clicks if your card shows up in the AI Overview. You definitely will not get clicks if your card doesn't because you added the no snippet robots meta tag. So caution, word to the wise I guess. And that is this week's snappy news. Barry, by the way, is really good at replying to comments. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he is, actually agree. Mordy Oberstein: I don't mean it's like a simple thing like, "Oh, Barry's good at replying to comments." I didn't mean it like that. It's nice that he takes the time to reply to comments. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's got like 200,000 followers on Twitter, but when people attack him and he's like, "Yeah, cool, thanks." Mordy Oberstein: Everywhere, YouTube. Crystal Carter: It's really good. And also he shouts out when people are like, "Hey, I saw this thing." He's like, "Oh yeah, so-and-so saw this thing and it's really good." Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Many of SEOs, including myself, owe a lot to Barry for their careers. I also owe a lot to some great information I've read throughout the years, our follow of the week, the one, the only, the absolutely brilliant Dawn Anderson. Crystal Carter: Shout out to Dawn Anderson. Dawn Anderson is like hashtag goals in terms of SEO SEO fantasticness, I think she's a great follow for holistic SEO because she approaches it from a really holistic perspective. Not only is she super smart in terms of lots of technical things, but she studies not just SEO, but she also studies information retrieval. But yeah, I've spoken to her and she's saying like, "I study information retrieval. I go to information retrieval conferences." She's not just thinking about necessarily SEO, exactly what's going on with Google, she's thinking about the whole of how information is disseminated across the web, and that is super, super fantastic. And it's a really, really interesting way to approach it because I think sometimes that can put you ahead of the curve in terms of understanding where Search is going and understanding how information will flow through. Also, Dawn is incredibly nice and lovely. Yeah, the last time I saw her was at the UK Search Awards, and she was easily the best dressed. Super smart and yeah, do follow her. Mordy Oberstein: Honestly, some of the best articles I've ever read in SEO come from Dawn. You go to Search Engine Land and type in her name and you'll find a collection of really... Just take a cup of tea, cup of coffee, have a beer, sit down with it kind of thing. So definitely give Dawn a follow, a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. The connection's there, it was quite holistic. Crystal Carter: I think we covered everything. Mordy Oberstein: It's the whole picture, all of it. A whole loaf of bread. One sitting on the street corner. Me and a couple of drunk hanging out. They're drinking the beer, I’m in the middle of a bread. Crystal Carter: It's all wheat, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I guess, yeah. Makes sense. Just one giant carb fest. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we're doing it. So good. I highly recommend just eat plain bread. Get like, a good loaf of bread. Oh, delicious. Crystal Carter: What about with Marmite? I had some bread with Marmite today. It was delicious. Mordy Oberstein: I have a bottle here, on site. "What do I have to do with this thing?" Crystal Carter: You can give it to me- Mordy Oberstein: Some of you don't know someone gave me some Marmite to try and I know some people like this stuff. It's not even food. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. It's full of B vitamins. Mordy Oberstein: It's yeast-smelling glue. Crystal Carter: It's full of B vitamins. It's very umami. That's what it is. Mordy Oberstein: If I want some B vitamins, I'll take a B vitamin. Crystal Carter: To each their own, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, it's subjective, but it's also objective. Anyway, thanks for listening to the SERP's US podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into SEO as a team sport live from brightonSEO UK. Look forward ever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning app at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more? Let me try that again. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning App at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us 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

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Olga Zarr is the founder and CEO of SEOSLY, where she shares her knowledge in the form of in-depth articles, tutorials, and videos. As an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience working at agencies and in-house, she specializes in technical SEO and in-depth audits. Olga Zarr SEO Consultant and CEO, SEOSLY Olga Zarr is the founder and CEO of SEOSLY , where she shares her knowledge in the form of in-depth articles, tutorials, and videos. As an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience working at agencies and in-house, she specializes in technical SEO and in-depth audits . Articles & Resources 14 Mar 2023 How to get started with an SEO site audit Resources Olga Zarr SEO keyword performance tracker Google Sheet Drill down into keyword tracking & positions, branded & non-branded traffic and CTRs with this SEO worksheet. 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

Don’t gloss over the basics, they yield much SEO power! What SEO basics are you overlooking? What SEO fundamentals can have a huge impact? Can overcomplicating SEO hurt your performance? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter get into easy ways to add additional value to your pages with the often overlooked fundamentals of SEO. SEO Consultant extraordinaire Joshua George chimes in on why the biggest SEO hack is that there IS NO hack… there’s no need to overcomplicate your SEO. Plus, we share some real-life scenarios where handling fundamentals heavily changed SEO performance. Don’t get in over your head; we dive down to the basics on how to achieve fundamentally sound pages on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Behold! The power of SEO fundamentals Don’t gloss over the basics, they yield much SEO power! What SEO basics are you overlooking? What SEO fundamentals can have a huge impact? Can overcomplicating SEO hurt your performance? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter get into easy ways to add additional value to your pages with the often overlooked fundamentals of SEO. SEO Consultant extraordinaire Joshua George chimes in on why the biggest SEO hack is that there IS NO hack… there’s no need to overcomplicate your SEO. Plus, we share some real-life scenarios where handling fundamentals heavily changed SEO performance. Don’t get in over your head; we dive down to the basics on how to achieve fundamentally sound pages on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 54 | September 6, 2023 | 32 MIN 00:00 / 32:09 This week’s guests Joshua George Joshua is the founder of ClickSlice, a results driven SEO agency in London. He has almost a decade of experience as an SEO consultant and has provided SEO training for the British government. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Surf's Up podcast where we've got some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix joined by the amazing, fantastic, the incredible, the bonafide SEO expert guru person, our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter, guru. Crystal Carter: I did go on TikTok at some point and say I was, I'm an SEO expert, which I think is always such a strange term because SEO is changing all the time and so sometimes I feel like I know things and sometimes I feel like a complete newb, but I think that that's one of the beauties of the industry personally. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of feel like when someone writes Guru, I always think of Goro from Mortal Kombat. I'm an SEO Goro and I think of them having six arms and fighting other players. Crystal Carter: Was that Jocelyn? Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. That's Goro. Mortal Kombat. Crystal Carter: I'm thinking Street Fighter. Mordy Oberstein: You're thinking of Street Fighter. Crystal Carter: I'm thinking of Street Fighter. Mordy Oberstein: Very similar. Crystal Carter: Very similar. I was much better as Street Fighter though. I was a big fan of E. Honda because he was really good. I'm a bit of a one move Barry and E. Honda has a big arm. I'd just be like, wall of arm, just eat this fist. Mordy Oberstein: I was a Vega person in Street Fighter and a Scorpion person in Mortal Kombat and I was terrible at both. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can optimize all your metadata just the way you want to. Oh, but Mordy, metatags, that's so fundamental, but behold the power of SEO fundamentals. Yep. We're talking about the unexpected power of getting the SEO basics right. Sometimes little SEO things can do big SEO things or all big SEO things are built on the shoulders of smaller SEO things or getting the basics right says a lot about your site to search engines and to prove it all Joshua George chimes in with how focusing on the SEO fundamentals has actually paid off in real scenarios. Since we're talking about fundamentals, we'll share some sites and scenarios with you, who are handling the basics right and how that changed the course of their SEO performance and of course we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, so buckle up because even though those Deloreans aren't going back in time, it is going back to basics. It's episode number 54 of the SERP's Up podcast. I want to hop in a DeLorean and go back to basics. 88 miles per hour Marty, 88 miles per hour. Crystal Carter: Wait, we need another flux capacitor or something. I feel like that will help us to do that. Mordy Oberstein: I recently rescheduled a meeting with somebody and I put it back to the previous week instead of ahead to the previous week and they're like oh, Mordy, I think you scheduled for last week. I'm like, 88 miles per hour. Flux capacitors, DeLoreans and time machines aside, if you're new to SEO and you see all sorts of SEO scoff at the basics of SEO, ignore that because if you've been in SEO for a long time, then you should know how impactful some of the most basic SEO tasks can be and why you shouldn't ignore them or gloss over them for the fancier shinier SEO things. I've had so many cases where nailing down things like basic pay structure, help pay to stay in the index or changing a title tag, made a ranking difference. They might seem like small things, but their impact can be big. Leaving all that aside, you never know what will make the difference. Let me just harp on that for a second. You never really do know what will actually make the difference and Glenn Davis talked about where you throw the kitchen sink at it because you never know what's going to pay off and what's actually going to make the difference between you ranking versus a competitor ranking. As much as SEOs may not want to omit it, sometimes it actually is a crapshoot. You want to be one of the three to five pages, let's say, in the world, who rank for a keyword. A top three or top five, let's say top three. Three pages in the whole world who rank in those positions. That can kind of be a crapshoot sometimes and you never know what's actually going to pay off for you, what's actually going to be the needle mover. More than that, getting the fundamentals right is being aligned with best practices and that is a statement to users, it's a statement to your potential clients and consumers and it is a statement to search engines that you understand what it means to create healthy web content, healthy functioning web content on the web and that's seriously important. Whether it's tweaking an H1 or H2 or formatting a text into a table or a list or update a title tag or adding all text to an image or even adding a caption, don't underestimate the power behind those simple SEO actions and if anyone tells you otherwise, you send them to me. Mic drop. End broadcast. Crystal Carter: I mean, I agree. This goes back to something my mom always said, which was, common sense ain't that common. I think that people will scoff at the basics like, oh, we did some internal linking, we did some this and it's tricky because the clients they were like, "I heard about this and I heard about that and I want to do this and I want to do that" and we're like, but you haven't done title tax, you haven't done your H1s. You haven't added any pictures to this. You have a wall of text my friend. Clients will be like, "I wanted to do something super exciting." It's like, you'll get that stuff after you do the basic stuff and I think that it's something that as an SEO, you have to hold your nerve and go, yeah, we're going to do this. It's going to be a little bit boring for a minute. Hang in there because we'll see some good results. I think again because it's not super exciting, like I said, common sense ain't that common. A lot of people ain't doing it, so a lot of people aren't hitting their basic SEO things. A lot of people aren't hitting those things. If you are covering those bases then you are going to see some benefit because you are going to be doing more than most people are doing because most people are cutting corners. Most people are trying to jump the queue and if you are actually covering those bases, then it's really, really important. It's like, you have to learn- Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. Crystal Carter: Everybody wants to be Michael Jordan or whatever, but Michael Jordan spent a lot of time doing layups, doing regular layups just like everybody else and there's going to be a lot of people... If you look at great musicians, they spend a lot of time practicing scales over and over and over and over and over again. You'll see people, I think I've seen footage of Jimi Hendrix or whatever, just practicing scales for hours, just always with a guitar in his hand practicing scales. Scales might seem basic. You're like, I've learned how to do scales. It's like, do it again. Do it again. I think with the basics, not only is it just to hit it the first time, but also to just go back over it and make sure that people aren't slipping, that your team isn't slipping on those things because it might be that you trained up everybody on the basic things and then maybe you got some new folks or maybe you go to new CMS or maybe you got other things that came through that have changed how you approach things and it's really easy to slack on some of the things that seem core, but they're core for a reason because they're effective. Mordy Oberstein: So many times I've seen a well optimized page, but the headers are just not explicit and it's not good for readers either when it happens, by the way. Half of these things are beneficial for SEO, also beneficial for users and they're really simple and really ignored. I've had a case where on a podcast website that I have, where a bunch of my pages weren't indexed. I'm like, you know what? The headers are not very explicit. I wrote this months ago. I don't know what I'm talking about here. Let me go back and let me change that and it's a basic thing and now the pages are indexed. Going back to the music example or going back to the Michael Jordan, there'd be no Michael Jordan if there wasn't a Dr. J. Right? Things build upon themselves. You don't just have a Michael Jordan. You have an entire history of basketball that leads to a Michael Jordan and a history of basketball because everything afterwards doesn't matter, but leaving that aside, that's a hot take. Music is the same thing, right? You don't have a Nirvana, unless you have a Buddy Holly. Those things don't happen. The same thing with your website. If you're not getting the basic structure of your pages down, the basic format of your pages down, the basic elements of your pages down, even the basic content that you need on your website, an about page or whatever it is. You're not going to be able to do things like advanced keyword content clusters. That's not happening. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. I saw this thing and it really stuck with me. It was just a little thing on TikTok and they were saying, I'm high maintenance so I can be low maintenance. It's like, you spend loads of time on your keyword research. You spend a lot of time on your keyword research. You spend a lot of time on your site architecture. You spend a lot of time making sure that your URLs are optimized, that you got title tags, meta descriptions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All your H1s, your H2s... Crystal Carter: ... descriptions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All your H1s or H2s et cetera, really hitting the marks on those. You spend a lot of time on that so that you just need to tweak a little bit as you go forward. You spend a lot of time on the fundamentals. You spend a lot of time on the things that will set you up for success down the line. So for instance, in the Wix SEO tools, we have the SEO settings that allows you to set the syntax for lots of parts of some of your SEO tags and even your structured data and things like that. Spending the time, making sure that that works, making sure that that's good for you, that you've covered those bases, will allow you to grow and it will allow you to grow quickly if you need to, because you will have the syntax set up for all of that sort of stuff going forward. People are like, "Oh, I don't want to do the SEO set of checklists." I'm like, "But you should, because it covers lots of things that it's really easy to forget, and it's a checklist that covers this, this, this, this, and this." And people are like, "Oh, it's really simple." I'm like, "Is it? Because not everybody's- Mordy Oberstein: You gloss over it all the time. Crystal Carter: People gloss over it, and there's lots of times where people just don't do the things, and you should do them because it will help you. It will fundamentally help you. Mordy Oberstein: Same thing with, let's say a blog post. We have the SEO Assistant. It helps you optimize title tag, header, body, whatever. The basic SEO task you should be doing for a blog post. And I'll tell you something, there's been many, many times where you optimize a title tag or the headers or whatever foundational element that we're talking about, and you see us say a ranking boost. So Google sees you a little bit more relevant for a certain keyword and you're like, "You know what?" Let's take a title tag. Let's go with a particular example. I wrote a good title tag. I see there's a ranking for whatever, whatever I see that I'm also ranking for, say, another ancillary keyword. Maybe now refine my title tag to try to target that secondary keyword at the same time. And I go up from, let's say, 20 to 10. Now I say, "You know what? Now I can refine that. I can refine the headers. I can refine all these small things," and now I've gone from 10 to eight. You can't get to that point of refining and refining it, refining it from zero to 60 in three seconds. I've literally done this a gazillion times. It's months. I create the title tag, I have the headers, I have this. I see that there's room for improvement. I tweak. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I see this data says something different now. Great. I tweak again. Crystal Carter: I had a client who was doing e-commerce stuff and they had the same H1. My favorite thing is when you do an audit on a site, and particularly the blog post and the H1 will be unique, and the H2 will be, "Read these related blogs," or something, and you're just like, "That's not-" Mordy Oberstein: Stacks? Crystal Carter: Right. No, it'll just be the thing that's the recommended box. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I got you. All the way at the bottom of the page, H2 articles. Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. And if I see that, I'm just like, "Y'all need H2. You'll need H2." And the thing is, people are like, "oh, does that really matter?" I'm like, "Yes." I've done it a million times where you add that in. And what it is it's giving Google priority. It's giving Google information about the priority of the page, and it's telling them which things are important. It's giving them more context to what is on your page, and it is important. And I know that it's maybe takes a little bit of time, but it's super important and really valuable. Mordy Oberstein: There's no way in my mind... Imagine you had a scenario like that. You have a hundred blog posts, and the H1 is great. The content, everything is great. The title tag, everything is great. And the H2 in all of them, the second H2 is related articles. There's no way in my mind that Google looks at that website and says, "In terms of quality and helpfulness, this site gets a great score." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because those basic things mean that you are dealing with your site in a quality way. Crystal Carter: Right. If you go to a hotel or something like that, everyone's going to have towels, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: I love towels. They're always itchy and scratchy though with the- Crystal Carter: I love hotel towels. I just love- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, they're stiff. No. Crystal Carter: No, they're my favorite. I love them. They've just been bleached. I just love it. I just love them. Anyway, so everybody's got towels, and that's basic. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, have you ever stolen a towel before from a hotel? Crystal Carter: No, I've never done that. I'm a good person. Mordy Oberstein: They once asked Yogi Berra, "Do you ever stay at a fine hotel on the road?" Yogi was a baseball player in the 1950s. And he said, "Oh, yeah. Yeah. We once stayed at this fancy hotel in Chicago. It was great. There was only one problem." They said, "Oh, what, Yogi?" He's like, "The towels were so thick." "What's the problem with that, Yogi?" "I couldn't close the suitcase." Sorry. But a great story, right? Crystal Carter: That's a great story. So yeah, so every place is going to have a towel or every hotel is going to have a towel, and you expect that. And there's ways that you can add care to that experience. You can be like, "Oh, well, we also have some lovely soaps to go with it," or, "We also have a bathrobe or something to go with that experience as well." And you're like, "Oh, okay, so this is somebody who's more than just the normal thing," but you expect every hotel to have towels. Mordy Oberstein: Imagine they only had a bathrobe and they had no towel. Crystal Carter: What? Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: I'm out of here. Crystal Carter: What is this? Mordy Oberstein: There's a mint on the pillow, but there's no blanket. Crystal Carter: But there's no towel? What am I doing here? So it's very important, but these are signals, and you see these signals when you're in a nice restaurant, there are signals. They'll have cloth tablecloths and you're like, "Oh, okay, this is a nice restaurant," as opposed to one where people eat out of buckets. Mordy Oberstein: Wendy's. Crystal Carter: I like Wendy's, but whatever. Anyway, I'm just saying there are signs, there are signals that you give. And similarly, Google will see signals that somebody spent some time on this content and somebody has invested time making this content good and it doesn't need to cost the earth. Making H1s and H2s doesn't cost a lot of money. Fixing your links so that you don't have a bunch of redirects all over your page, a broken link so that you don't have pages that have no links on them. One of my bugbears is when I'm reading content and they're like, "Oh, there's this great thing. It's so great. You should learn really about..." And there's no link. And I'm like, "Where's the link? Where's the link? You're telling me all about it. I want to see it. Where's the link?" So, those sorts of things don't cost a lot of money. You don't need an extra tool to do that. You can just get in there and you can update that stuff, but it shows care. So even if we're talking about the fancy restaurant, for instance, they're the people who have beautiful silverware and fancy table settings and all of that sort of stuff. And maybe you're a smaller restaurant or whatever, and maybe you do have little baskets and stuff like that, but there's ways that you can show care with it. There's ways that you can show care and ways that you can add value. You might have a really nice playlist or maybe you made the things by hand. Maybe they're homemade things, maybe they're whatever, but use the tools that you have to make the most out of what you have. Mordy Oberstein: It'd be like serving a great dish at a restaurant with no cutlery. Where's the spoon? You don't want to put out a great dish without the cutlery. And speaking of people who put out great dishes and also put out the cutlery, let's talk to Joshua George about how focusing on the SEO fundamentals has actually paid off for him. Joshua George: Hey, so I'm a big believer of focusing on the SEO fundamentals and really not trying to over-complicate things. It's quite interesting because whenever you speak to someone who is new in the SEO space, they always have this false misconception that to rank number one on Google, you need to be doing some SEO mystery tactics behind the scenes, or there must be some sort of SEO hack that no one speaks about in public. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the biggest SEO hack is that there is no SEO hack. And the sooner you understand that and focus on the core SEO fundamentals, the sooner you're going to rank your website and rank your client sites too. I'm a big believer of fancy fails and simple scales, and if you take it one step back and just look at what is Google's core goal when it comes to Google search, well, Google's goal is to return the best search results to the users so the users are happy with what they see, and come back and use Google again in the future. If you focus on the fundamentals, which is increasing your site's relevancy and increasing your site's authority, you are going to rank number one. To increase your relevancy, you need to publish as many publicly relevant blogs on your website as possible. For example, if you are a plumber, then you should be publishing blogs on your website, such as the pros and cons of hiring a plumber, how much does a plumber charge? The evolution of the plumbing industry. All things to do with the service you offer plumbing. That's how you increase your relevancy. You increase your authority by acquiring high quality backlinks. We follow these two processes on ClickSlice, and ClickSlice actually ranks number one for the keyword, "SEO agency London," and we also ranked number one for, "SEO consultant London." There were two very, very, very competitive terms, and we've done it by focusing on the core SSEO fundamentals and not overcomplicating things. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Joshua. It's a great point. You don't want to overcomplicate SEO when you don't have to overcomplicate SEO. You don't win a medal for overcomplicating SEO for the sake of overcomplicating SEO. Now make sure you give Joshua follow over on Twitter at _Josh- Mordy Oberstein: Now, make sure you give Joshua follow over on Twitter at _JoshuaSEO. That's under J-O-S-H-U-A, SEO over on Twitter. Super valuable follow. Super nice guy. Actually, really, really appreciate Joshua, and thank you again for sharing your insights with us. And again, we'll link to Joshua's Twitter bio in the show notes. Now, let's put our money where our mouths are and have a look at some real cases where getting the basics right does actually, or did actually have an impact as we justify the focus on fundamentals by going to the top of the SERP. So what I did here is I basically crowdsourced. I'm like, hey y'all, I have my own example as well, but hey, y'all give me some cases where you did some basic thing that was not shiny or sexy at all, but it paid off big for you. And I got a flood of responses. But let's start off, Crystal, with one that we actually worked on together with Fox Fudge. They're a great Wix website. They sell fudge online. It looks delicious. I will not lie to you, it looks fabulous. So check out foxfudge.com, little plug for them. They go to a lot of local events and they sell their fudge at these local events as well as they should. And one of the things that we noticed was, "Hey, wait a second. In many cases or some cases, they're actually outranking the event itself." Because what they do on the Fox Fudge website at the direction of Crystal, if I'm not mistaken, was... And by the way, big shout out to James Core, great Wix partner designing their website. Fabulous guy. So big shout out to him and the all work he's doing with Fox Fudge. But what they're doing is they're putting in the title tag, the name of the event. So for example, the keyword 2023 hot town summer salute, Fox Fudge is ranking over basically everything but the Facebook page for the event itself because it's in the title tag. Crystal Carter: Right, they're adding in that information. And this is a prime example as well. Again, high maintenance, so you can be low maintenance. This particular page is also using a Wix event page, which has a lot of technical things built into it. So for instance, it's also got the event schema built into it. And this is something that you can think about when you're thinking about which basics you need to cover, is that if you have a lot of bases that are covered within your CMS, within your build and things like that, then you can add onto them really simply, really simply, really easily, and it will make sure that it looks good. For instance, if you got a really good lead on a place where you can get potato salads and whenever there's a potluck or something like that, you can go and purchase your potato salad from your favorite delicatessen, and then you just need to put a little bit of parsley on top and you can showcase to all your friends about how great you're doing. So they're able to get some of these great things by doing some of these seemingly basic implementation on their side because they got a good technical foundation from the Wix product. And I think that that's something that you should also think about when you're thinking about where you can get the most impact from fairly simple, fairly straightforward SEO activity. Mordy Oberstein: So let's run through a bunch of cases. They've got a bunch of cases or a bunch of different people all about the things that they've done and small little things here. And then what they've done in terms of impact, let's start with our own Rebecca Tomasis who manages a lot of the SEO on the Wix blog. She said one of the things that they've done is a couple of cases was when trying to get traffic from images is they're using the keyword in the alt text anyway, so it's not like they're going to just stuff a keyword in, but when they're using it anyway, try to put the keyword earlier on in the alt text to sort of give Google the content like this is what we're focusing on, this is the intent here. And they saw a bunch of more traffic coming from images from the SERP just because of that small little change. So that's a nice little one. Let's take this one from Jack Chambers-Ward. He's got a whole thing on how they changed a title. So Google had the title tag for a page as home, brand name. That was a title tag. So let's say your brand name is Bob's Furniture, it was homepage Bob's Furniture. And what they did was they changed the title to Wholesale Dried Flowers and Preserved Flowers UK, plus the brand name, and boom, all of a sudden tons more clicks and went to ranking from nothing for 554 keywords. Crystal Carter: That's what I'm saying. This is unbelievable. Mordy Oberstein: It's insane. Crystal Carter: Honestly, people overlook the homepage and think, "Oh yeah, we did that. It's done." But between your homepage page being - Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about this. Crystal Carter: We talked about the homepage a few different times. We did a podcast on it, we've done a webinar on it. I wrote an article on it. Y'all pay attention to your homepage because there are so many good wins that you can make on that. It gets linked to almost more than any other page, and you can see incredible, incredible gains from some pretty simple implementations on that. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So in that case, since the homepage is like the representative of the entire website, so now the entire website became relevant and they started ranking for 500 keywords because of that one simple change. This one comes from Jessica Maloney, who's a digital strategy lead over at Rise at Seven. She writes, "The simple example I've got is changing mass anchor tax on a site for an old client who did tax refunds. They had loads of mix-match anchors saying tax refund or tax rebate. We changed it all to tax refunds. So not tax rebate and tax refund, but just tax refund and the ranking for that term jumped to position three and maintained, whereas previously it was extremely volatile on page two." So a simple change of the anchor text. Crystal Carter: This is what I'm saying. This is what- Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. Let's take another one. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see one from Anajitay Amari who's saying, "Submitting your site map to Google Search Console, major boom." And I cannot say that I've not seen that happen. Normally it's for websites that don't have a site map. Sometimes self-builds don't have a site map, but the people who are on Wix, anybody who's listening who is a Wix user, you have a site map, you're welcome. But people who don't have their site map there. But also for instance, on Wix, we allow you to submit your site map to Google Search Console when you connect to Wix. And the reason why is because it's really useful. It means that Google can see that the information that they need, and they can see which pages are the best, and they don't have to guess or try to figure it out based on traffic that they see in other places, and they can get exactly what they need in exactly the way that you want them to see it. So I absolutely agree that spending some time on your site map and getting it to Google the way that best suits you is super important and can be really straightforward and simple. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's crazy to hear. This one is from Ryan Jones over SEO Testing. He goes, "We took a blog post that had been finished, and all we did was create a video on the same topic using the blog post as the base. It uploaded the video to YouTube. We then embedded the YouTube video to the blog post and requested Google the index the page again." They saw 106% increase in clicks per day, a 21% increase in impressions per day, and the average position jump up to 57, just by adding the video into the page. Crystal Carter: So much, so much. Mordy Oberstein: It's crazy. All in a video. The point is, I think we could take away that sometimes really simple things have a really big impact. Crystal Carter: You just need to find the thing that is the core change and build on it. Like you said, build on your skills and build on the work that you're doing to make sure that yeah, you're getting the best results. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why, by the way, I like to read seroundtable.com by Barry Schwartz. Sometimes the articles are about little small changes that Google's making. You think, "Oh, this is so basic. Google changed the favicon to be this instead of that." But sometimes when you put it all together, you get a real directional understanding of where Google's going just by tracking the small things that Barry's covering over at SE Roundtable. Which brings us to this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. More opportunity on the search for all of y'all authoritative sites as spotted by our very own Crystal Carter and as covered by our very beloved Battery Schwarz over on search engine land. Google Search testing mentioned in Search Snippet. It's basically a carousel that appears within certain organic results that gives you other websites that mentioned the site shown in the organic result. So for example, Crystal's search for car advice and the website Car Talk appears on the results page and underneath it, or within it is a little carousel that says mentioned in that also shows the page from the New York Times that mentions the Car Talk website. All of the results that I've seen have a link back to the website shown in the organic results, but I don't think it's just links. I mean, for one, the feature is called mentioned in not linked in. Well, that wouldn't work anyway now that I say that, but it's called mentioned in and in some cases the set is mentioned very prominently in the headers, the title and so forth. So I think it's a little bit more than just the link. I think it's actually that they can tell, Google can tell if there's an actual mention there. Anyway, onto AI business, Barry Schwarz over at Search Engine Roundtable this time, official Google's search generative experience gets links. So aside from the cards that show in the... I call it the AI box, but it's called the Search Generative Experience, Google now has links within- Mordy Oberstein: ... with experience Google now has links within the actual text summary itself. So it's a little dropdown icon that brings up a little carousel of results or a little couple of cards of results depending upon where Google got the information from. So it could be a combination of Google's own knowledge panel or knowledge graph rather, or it could be from a website or a combination of the two and so forth. It's a great addition to the search generative experience and it helps you really see where the information comes from and it could help you get more clicks to your website. Okay. Also on SGE and also again from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google shares early feedback on SGE expands to Japan and India. There's a whole heap of information here. Barry links to the actual Google page that talks about this, and I do recommend that you go read that and we will link to that in the show notes. But one thing that stuck out to me and to quote the article itself, "The highest satisfaction scores among younger users, 18 and 24 year olds who say they enjoy being able to ask follow-up questions conversationally." My take, it's not just the interactive ability to ask a follow-up question. I think younger people in general, as a general content preference and as a general content trend prefer more conversational type of content, both in tone, both in format, and both in the actual way that the functionality is structured. In this case, you can ask a follow-up question because it's SGE. But I do think it speaks to a wider trend of younger people looking for more conversational type of content. And that's not just a specific SGE AI thing. That's just a content thing. And with that, that's this week's snappy news. You know, I regret not basking in the glory of what that pivot was before the onset of it. So now that we're back from the news, I just want to bask in the glory of that pivot. That was ... You didn't know it was even coming, it was so good. Crystal Carter: It was very pivotalicious. Mordy Oberstein: Pivotalicious. How do you like your sandwich? Pivotalicious, that's how I like my sandwiches. Crystal Carter: Swirling around. Mordy Oberstein: Swirling around. You know what's always swirling around with some great SEO insights? Ola King. Ola King is our follow of the week is at @justolaking on Twitter. That's J-U-S-T-O-L-A-K-I-N-G over on Twitter. He's an SEO nerd. Previously the product person over at Moz. Super nice. I've never met a nicer fellow before. He's incredibly nice. Crystal Carter: And you guys have matching dress then. You guys, I got a picture of the two of you at MozCon in a matching cream-colored turtleneck. Mordy Oberstein: Oh nice. I totally forgot about that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. It was good. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if anybody's got style inclinations like myself, I mean clearly they're ... Crystal Carter: Obviously, but I think also he's got some really good ... So he's a Notion ambassador and I'm such a big fan of Notion in my days. So he's also got some really good Notion toolkits that he offers to help people learn the basics and to help people get to use some of their sort of new products. And he's behind this sort of SEO growth kit, which talks about how to get going with your SEO goals. So setting goals, SEO checklists and link building checklists, all of that sort of stuff. And there's tons of different guides in there that are helping you to cover the basics. I think somebody was saying that the thing about SEO is that it's a lot of small things that add up to a big thing, and you just sort of have to be able to organize them and he's got some great tools for helping people to organize them and to use some of the tasks that individually aren't that complicated. But if you put them together just strategically, can help you get some really complex but great results. Mordy Oberstein: So follow Ola King over on Twitter. We'll link to his profile in the show notes, but also on LinkedIn I believe, so you can look for him there as well. Give Ola a follow and tell him that we sent you. And that's it. That's all I got. And no pivot. I almost made it through the entire show with awesome pivots until I just blew it. It's so me. Crystal Carter: Maybe we could go back in time with the DeLorean. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just going to run in place 88 miles per hour. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'll try right now. Crystal Carter: Right. We'll play some Chuck Berry and it will be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah. And also, if you want to go back in time and check out some previous episodes that you missed, head over to the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. So a little pivot there. 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 as we dive into a audience request in debunking SEO myths. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guest 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 Joshua George Rebecca Tomasis Jack Chambers-Ward Ryan Jones Ola King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter ClickSlice SEO Agency News: Google Search testing “Mentioned in” search snippet Official: Google Search Generative Experience Gets Links Google Shares Early Feedback On SGE, Expands To Japan & India Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Joshua George Rebecca Tomasis Jack Chambers-Ward Ryan Jones Ola King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter ClickSlice SEO Agency News: Google Search testing “Mentioned in” search snippet Official: Google Search Generative Experience Gets Links Google Shares Early Feedback On SGE, Expands To Japan & India Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Surf's Up podcast where we've got some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix joined by the amazing, fantastic, the incredible, the bonafide SEO expert guru person, our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter, guru. Crystal Carter: I did go on TikTok at some point and say I was, I'm an SEO expert, which I think is always such a strange term because SEO is changing all the time and so sometimes I feel like I know things and sometimes I feel like a complete newb, but I think that that's one of the beauties of the industry personally. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of feel like when someone writes Guru, I always think of Goro from Mortal Kombat. I'm an SEO Goro and I think of them having six arms and fighting other players. Crystal Carter: Was that Jocelyn? Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. That's Goro. Mortal Kombat. Crystal Carter: I'm thinking Street Fighter. Mordy Oberstein: You're thinking of Street Fighter. Crystal Carter: I'm thinking of Street Fighter. Mordy Oberstein: Very similar. Crystal Carter: Very similar. I was much better as Street Fighter though. I was a big fan of E. Honda because he was really good. I'm a bit of a one move Barry and E. Honda has a big arm. I'd just be like, wall of arm, just eat this fist. Mordy Oberstein: I was a Vega person in Street Fighter and a Scorpion person in Mortal Kombat and I was terrible at both. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can optimize all your metadata just the way you want to. Oh, but Mordy, metatags, that's so fundamental, but behold the power of SEO fundamentals. Yep. We're talking about the unexpected power of getting the SEO basics right. Sometimes little SEO things can do big SEO things or all big SEO things are built on the shoulders of smaller SEO things or getting the basics right says a lot about your site to search engines and to prove it all Joshua George chimes in with how focusing on the SEO fundamentals has actually paid off in real scenarios. Since we're talking about fundamentals, we'll share some sites and scenarios with you, who are handling the basics right and how that changed the course of their SEO performance and of course we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, so buckle up because even though those Deloreans aren't going back in time, it is going back to basics. It's episode number 54 of the SERP's Up podcast. I want to hop in a DeLorean and go back to basics. 88 miles per hour Marty, 88 miles per hour. Crystal Carter: Wait, we need another flux capacitor or something. I feel like that will help us to do that. Mordy Oberstein: I recently rescheduled a meeting with somebody and I put it back to the previous week instead of ahead to the previous week and they're like oh, Mordy, I think you scheduled for last week. I'm like, 88 miles per hour. Flux capacitors, DeLoreans and time machines aside, if you're new to SEO and you see all sorts of SEO scoff at the basics of SEO, ignore that because if you've been in SEO for a long time, then you should know how impactful some of the most basic SEO tasks can be and why you shouldn't ignore them or gloss over them for the fancier shinier SEO things. I've had so many cases where nailing down things like basic pay structure, help pay to stay in the index or changing a title tag, made a ranking difference. They might seem like small things, but their impact can be big. Leaving all that aside, you never know what will make the difference. Let me just harp on that for a second. You never really do know what will actually make the difference and Glenn Davis talked about where you throw the kitchen sink at it because you never know what's going to pay off and what's actually going to make the difference between you ranking versus a competitor ranking. As much as SEOs may not want to omit it, sometimes it actually is a crapshoot. You want to be one of the three to five pages, let's say, in the world, who rank for a keyword. A top three or top five, let's say top three. Three pages in the whole world who rank in those positions. That can kind of be a crapshoot sometimes and you never know what's actually going to pay off for you, what's actually going to be the needle mover. More than that, getting the fundamentals right is being aligned with best practices and that is a statement to users, it's a statement to your potential clients and consumers and it is a statement to search engines that you understand what it means to create healthy web content, healthy functioning web content on the web and that's seriously important. Whether it's tweaking an H1 or H2 or formatting a text into a table or a list or update a title tag or adding all text to an image or even adding a caption, don't underestimate the power behind those simple SEO actions and if anyone tells you otherwise, you send them to me. Mic drop. End broadcast. Crystal Carter: I mean, I agree. This goes back to something my mom always said, which was, common sense ain't that common. I think that people will scoff at the basics like, oh, we did some internal linking, we did some this and it's tricky because the clients they were like, "I heard about this and I heard about that and I want to do this and I want to do that" and we're like, but you haven't done title tax, you haven't done your H1s. You haven't added any pictures to this. You have a wall of text my friend. Clients will be like, "I wanted to do something super exciting." It's like, you'll get that stuff after you do the basic stuff and I think that it's something that as an SEO, you have to hold your nerve and go, yeah, we're going to do this. It's going to be a little bit boring for a minute. Hang in there because we'll see some good results. I think again because it's not super exciting, like I said, common sense ain't that common. A lot of people ain't doing it, so a lot of people aren't hitting their basic SEO things. A lot of people aren't hitting those things. If you are covering those bases then you are going to see some benefit because you are going to be doing more than most people are doing because most people are cutting corners. Most people are trying to jump the queue and if you are actually covering those bases, then it's really, really important. It's like, you have to learn- Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. Crystal Carter: Everybody wants to be Michael Jordan or whatever, but Michael Jordan spent a lot of time doing layups, doing regular layups just like everybody else and there's going to be a lot of people... If you look at great musicians, they spend a lot of time practicing scales over and over and over and over and over again. You'll see people, I think I've seen footage of Jimi Hendrix or whatever, just practicing scales for hours, just always with a guitar in his hand practicing scales. Scales might seem basic. You're like, I've learned how to do scales. It's like, do it again. Do it again. I think with the basics, not only is it just to hit it the first time, but also to just go back over it and make sure that people aren't slipping, that your team isn't slipping on those things because it might be that you trained up everybody on the basic things and then maybe you got some new folks or maybe you go to new CMS or maybe you got other things that came through that have changed how you approach things and it's really easy to slack on some of the things that seem core, but they're core for a reason because they're effective. Mordy Oberstein: So many times I've seen a well optimized page, but the headers are just not explicit and it's not good for readers either when it happens, by the way. Half of these things are beneficial for SEO, also beneficial for users and they're really simple and really ignored. I've had a case where on a podcast website that I have, where a bunch of my pages weren't indexed. I'm like, you know what? The headers are not very explicit. I wrote this months ago. I don't know what I'm talking about here. Let me go back and let me change that and it's a basic thing and now the pages are indexed. Going back to the music example or going back to the Michael Jordan, there'd be no Michael Jordan if there wasn't a Dr. J. Right? Things build upon themselves. You don't just have a Michael Jordan. You have an entire history of basketball that leads to a Michael Jordan and a history of basketball because everything afterwards doesn't matter, but leaving that aside, that's a hot take. Music is the same thing, right? You don't have a Nirvana, unless you have a Buddy Holly. Those things don't happen. The same thing with your website. If you're not getting the basic structure of your pages down, the basic format of your pages down, the basic elements of your pages down, even the basic content that you need on your website, an about page or whatever it is. You're not going to be able to do things like advanced keyword content clusters. That's not happening. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. I saw this thing and it really stuck with me. It was just a little thing on TikTok and they were saying, I'm high maintenance so I can be low maintenance. It's like, you spend loads of time on your keyword research. You spend a lot of time on your keyword research. You spend a lot of time on your site architecture. You spend a lot of time making sure that your URLs are optimized, that you got title tags, meta descriptions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All your H1s, your H2s... Crystal Carter: ... descriptions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All your H1s or H2s et cetera, really hitting the marks on those. You spend a lot of time on that so that you just need to tweak a little bit as you go forward. You spend a lot of time on the fundamentals. You spend a lot of time on the things that will set you up for success down the line. So for instance, in the Wix SEO tools, we have the SEO settings that allows you to set the syntax for lots of parts of some of your SEO tags and even your structured data and things like that. Spending the time, making sure that that works, making sure that that's good for you, that you've covered those bases, will allow you to grow and it will allow you to grow quickly if you need to, because you will have the syntax set up for all of that sort of stuff going forward. People are like, "Oh, I don't want to do the SEO set of checklists." I'm like, "But you should, because it covers lots of things that it's really easy to forget, and it's a checklist that covers this, this, this, this, and this." And people are like, "Oh, it's really simple." I'm like, "Is it? Because not everybody's- Mordy Oberstein: You gloss over it all the time. Crystal Carter: People gloss over it, and there's lots of times where people just don't do the things, and you should do them because it will help you. It will fundamentally help you. Mordy Oberstein: Same thing with, let's say a blog post. We have the SEO Assistant. It helps you optimize title tag, header, body, whatever. The basic SEO task you should be doing for a blog post. And I'll tell you something, there's been many, many times where you optimize a title tag or the headers or whatever foundational element that we're talking about, and you see us say a ranking boost. So Google sees you a little bit more relevant for a certain keyword and you're like, "You know what?" Let's take a title tag. Let's go with a particular example. I wrote a good title tag. I see there's a ranking for whatever, whatever I see that I'm also ranking for, say, another ancillary keyword. Maybe now refine my title tag to try to target that secondary keyword at the same time. And I go up from, let's say, 20 to 10. Now I say, "You know what? Now I can refine that. I can refine the headers. I can refine all these small things," and now I've gone from 10 to eight. You can't get to that point of refining and refining it, refining it from zero to 60 in three seconds. I've literally done this a gazillion times. It's months. I create the title tag, I have the headers, I have this. I see that there's room for improvement. I tweak. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I see this data says something different now. Great. I tweak again. Crystal Carter: I had a client who was doing e-commerce stuff and they had the same H1. My favorite thing is when you do an audit on a site, and particularly the blog post and the H1 will be unique, and the H2 will be, "Read these related blogs," or something, and you're just like, "That's not-" Mordy Oberstein: Stacks? Crystal Carter: Right. No, it'll just be the thing that's the recommended box. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I got you. All the way at the bottom of the page, H2 articles. Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. And if I see that, I'm just like, "Y'all need H2. You'll need H2." And the thing is, people are like, "oh, does that really matter?" I'm like, "Yes." I've done it a million times where you add that in. And what it is it's giving Google priority. It's giving Google information about the priority of the page, and it's telling them which things are important. It's giving them more context to what is on your page, and it is important. And I know that it's maybe takes a little bit of time, but it's super important and really valuable. Mordy Oberstein: There's no way in my mind... Imagine you had a scenario like that. You have a hundred blog posts, and the H1 is great. The content, everything is great. The title tag, everything is great. And the H2 in all of them, the second H2 is related articles. There's no way in my mind that Google looks at that website and says, "In terms of quality and helpfulness, this site gets a great score." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because those basic things mean that you are dealing with your site in a quality way. Crystal Carter: Right. If you go to a hotel or something like that, everyone's going to have towels, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: I love towels. They're always itchy and scratchy though with the- Crystal Carter: I love hotel towels. I just love- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, they're stiff. No. Crystal Carter: No, they're my favorite. I love them. They've just been bleached. I just love it. I just love them. Anyway, so everybody's got towels, and that's basic. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, have you ever stolen a towel before from a hotel? Crystal Carter: No, I've never done that. I'm a good person. Mordy Oberstein: They once asked Yogi Berra, "Do you ever stay at a fine hotel on the road?" Yogi was a baseball player in the 1950s. And he said, "Oh, yeah. Yeah. We once stayed at this fancy hotel in Chicago. It was great. There was only one problem." They said, "Oh, what, Yogi?" He's like, "The towels were so thick." "What's the problem with that, Yogi?" "I couldn't close the suitcase." Sorry. But a great story, right? Crystal Carter: That's a great story. So yeah, so every place is going to have a towel or every hotel is going to have a towel, and you expect that. And there's ways that you can add care to that experience. You can be like, "Oh, well, we also have some lovely soaps to go with it," or, "We also have a bathrobe or something to go with that experience as well." And you're like, "Oh, okay, so this is somebody who's more than just the normal thing," but you expect every hotel to have towels. Mordy Oberstein: Imagine they only had a bathrobe and they had no towel. Crystal Carter: What? Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: I'm out of here. Crystal Carter: What is this? Mordy Oberstein: There's a mint on the pillow, but there's no blanket. Crystal Carter: But there's no towel? What am I doing here? So it's very important, but these are signals, and you see these signals when you're in a nice restaurant, there are signals. They'll have cloth tablecloths and you're like, "Oh, okay, this is a nice restaurant," as opposed to one where people eat out of buckets. Mordy Oberstein: Wendy's. Crystal Carter: I like Wendy's, but whatever. Anyway, I'm just saying there are signs, there are signals that you give. And similarly, Google will see signals that somebody spent some time on this content and somebody has invested time making this content good and it doesn't need to cost the earth. Making H1s and H2s doesn't cost a lot of money. Fixing your links so that you don't have a bunch of redirects all over your page, a broken link so that you don't have pages that have no links on them. One of my bugbears is when I'm reading content and they're like, "Oh, there's this great thing. It's so great. You should learn really about..." And there's no link. And I'm like, "Where's the link? Where's the link? You're telling me all about it. I want to see it. Where's the link?" So, those sorts of things don't cost a lot of money. You don't need an extra tool to do that. You can just get in there and you can update that stuff, but it shows care. So even if we're talking about the fancy restaurant, for instance, they're the people who have beautiful silverware and fancy table settings and all of that sort of stuff. And maybe you're a smaller restaurant or whatever, and maybe you do have little baskets and stuff like that, but there's ways that you can show care with it. There's ways that you can show care and ways that you can add value. You might have a really nice playlist or maybe you made the things by hand. Maybe they're homemade things, maybe they're whatever, but use the tools that you have to make the most out of what you have. Mordy Oberstein: It'd be like serving a great dish at a restaurant with no cutlery. Where's the spoon? You don't want to put out a great dish without the cutlery. And speaking of people who put out great dishes and also put out the cutlery, let's talk to Joshua George about how focusing on the SEO fundamentals has actually paid off for him. Joshua George: Hey, so I'm a big believer of focusing on the SEO fundamentals and really not trying to over-complicate things. It's quite interesting because whenever you speak to someone who is new in the SEO space, they always have this false misconception that to rank number one on Google, you need to be doing some SEO mystery tactics behind the scenes, or there must be some sort of SEO hack that no one speaks about in public. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the biggest SEO hack is that there is no SEO hack. And the sooner you understand that and focus on the core SEO fundamentals, the sooner you're going to rank your website and rank your client sites too. I'm a big believer of fancy fails and simple scales, and if you take it one step back and just look at what is Google's core goal when it comes to Google search, well, Google's goal is to return the best search results to the users so the users are happy with what they see, and come back and use Google again in the future. If you focus on the fundamentals, which is increasing your site's relevancy and increasing your site's authority, you are going to rank number one. To increase your relevancy, you need to publish as many publicly relevant blogs on your website as possible. For example, if you are a plumber, then you should be publishing blogs on your website, such as the pros and cons of hiring a plumber, how much does a plumber charge? The evolution of the plumbing industry. All things to do with the service you offer plumbing. That's how you increase your relevancy. You increase your authority by acquiring high quality backlinks. We follow these two processes on ClickSlice, and ClickSlice actually ranks number one for the keyword, "SEO agency London," and we also ranked number one for, "SEO consultant London." There were two very, very, very competitive terms, and we've done it by focusing on the core SSEO fundamentals and not overcomplicating things. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Joshua. It's a great point. You don't want to overcomplicate SEO when you don't have to overcomplicate SEO. You don't win a medal for overcomplicating SEO for the sake of overcomplicating SEO. Now make sure you give Joshua follow over on Twitter at _Josh- Mordy Oberstein: Now, make sure you give Joshua follow over on Twitter at _JoshuaSEO. That's under J-O-S-H-U-A, SEO over on Twitter. Super valuable follow. Super nice guy. Actually, really, really appreciate Joshua, and thank you again for sharing your insights with us. And again, we'll link to Joshua's Twitter bio in the show notes. Now, let's put our money where our mouths are and have a look at some real cases where getting the basics right does actually, or did actually have an impact as we justify the focus on fundamentals by going to the top of the SERP. So what I did here is I basically crowdsourced. I'm like, hey y'all, I have my own example as well, but hey, y'all give me some cases where you did some basic thing that was not shiny or sexy at all, but it paid off big for you. And I got a flood of responses. But let's start off, Crystal, with one that we actually worked on together with Fox Fudge. They're a great Wix website. They sell fudge online. It looks delicious. I will not lie to you, it looks fabulous. So check out foxfudge.com, little plug for them. They go to a lot of local events and they sell their fudge at these local events as well as they should. And one of the things that we noticed was, "Hey, wait a second. In many cases or some cases, they're actually outranking the event itself." Because what they do on the Fox Fudge website at the direction of Crystal, if I'm not mistaken, was... And by the way, big shout out to James Core, great Wix partner designing their website. Fabulous guy. So big shout out to him and the all work he's doing with Fox Fudge. But what they're doing is they're putting in the title tag, the name of the event. So for example, the keyword 2023 hot town summer salute, Fox Fudge is ranking over basically everything but the Facebook page for the event itself because it's in the title tag. Crystal Carter: Right, they're adding in that information. And this is a prime example as well. Again, high maintenance, so you can be low maintenance. This particular page is also using a Wix event page, which has a lot of technical things built into it. So for instance, it's also got the event schema built into it. And this is something that you can think about when you're thinking about which basics you need to cover, is that if you have a lot of bases that are covered within your CMS, within your build and things like that, then you can add onto them really simply, really simply, really easily, and it will make sure that it looks good. For instance, if you got a really good lead on a place where you can get potato salads and whenever there's a potluck or something like that, you can go and purchase your potato salad from your favorite delicatessen, and then you just need to put a little bit of parsley on top and you can showcase to all your friends about how great you're doing. So they're able to get some of these great things by doing some of these seemingly basic implementation on their side because they got a good technical foundation from the Wix product. And I think that that's something that you should also think about when you're thinking about where you can get the most impact from fairly simple, fairly straightforward SEO activity. Mordy Oberstein: So let's run through a bunch of cases. They've got a bunch of cases or a bunch of different people all about the things that they've done and small little things here. And then what they've done in terms of impact, let's start with our own Rebecca Tomasis who manages a lot of the SEO on the Wix blog. She said one of the things that they've done is a couple of cases was when trying to get traffic from images is they're using the keyword in the alt text anyway, so it's not like they're going to just stuff a keyword in, but when they're using it anyway, try to put the keyword earlier on in the alt text to sort of give Google the content like this is what we're focusing on, this is the intent here. And they saw a bunch of more traffic coming from images from the SERP just because of that small little change. So that's a nice little one. Let's take this one from Jack Chambers-Ward. He's got a whole thing on how they changed a title. So Google had the title tag for a page as home, brand name. That was a title tag. So let's say your brand name is Bob's Furniture, it was homepage Bob's Furniture. And what they did was they changed the title to Wholesale Dried Flowers and Preserved Flowers UK, plus the brand name, and boom, all of a sudden tons more clicks and went to ranking from nothing for 554 keywords. Crystal Carter: That's what I'm saying. This is unbelievable. Mordy Oberstein: It's insane. Crystal Carter: Honestly, people overlook the homepage and think, "Oh yeah, we did that. It's done." But between your homepage page being - Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about this. Crystal Carter: We talked about the homepage a few different times. We did a podcast on it, we've done a webinar on it. I wrote an article on it. Y'all pay attention to your homepage because there are so many good wins that you can make on that. It gets linked to almost more than any other page, and you can see incredible, incredible gains from some pretty simple implementations on that. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So in that case, since the homepage is like the representative of the entire website, so now the entire website became relevant and they started ranking for 500 keywords because of that one simple change. This one comes from Jessica Maloney, who's a digital strategy lead over at Rise at Seven. She writes, "The simple example I've got is changing mass anchor tax on a site for an old client who did tax refunds. They had loads of mix-match anchors saying tax refund or tax rebate. We changed it all to tax refunds. So not tax rebate and tax refund, but just tax refund and the ranking for that term jumped to position three and maintained, whereas previously it was extremely volatile on page two." So a simple change of the anchor text. Crystal Carter: This is what I'm saying. This is what- Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. Let's take another one. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see one from Anajitay Amari who's saying, "Submitting your site map to Google Search Console, major boom." And I cannot say that I've not seen that happen. Normally it's for websites that don't have a site map. Sometimes self-builds don't have a site map, but the people who are on Wix, anybody who's listening who is a Wix user, you have a site map, you're welcome. But people who don't have their site map there. But also for instance, on Wix, we allow you to submit your site map to Google Search Console when you connect to Wix. And the reason why is because it's really useful. It means that Google can see that the information that they need, and they can see which pages are the best, and they don't have to guess or try to figure it out based on traffic that they see in other places, and they can get exactly what they need in exactly the way that you want them to see it. So I absolutely agree that spending some time on your site map and getting it to Google the way that best suits you is super important and can be really straightforward and simple. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's crazy to hear. This one is from Ryan Jones over SEO Testing. He goes, "We took a blog post that had been finished, and all we did was create a video on the same topic using the blog post as the base. It uploaded the video to YouTube. We then embedded the YouTube video to the blog post and requested Google the index the page again." They saw 106% increase in clicks per day, a 21% increase in impressions per day, and the average position jump up to 57, just by adding the video into the page. Crystal Carter: So much, so much. Mordy Oberstein: It's crazy. All in a video. The point is, I think we could take away that sometimes really simple things have a really big impact. Crystal Carter: You just need to find the thing that is the core change and build on it. Like you said, build on your skills and build on the work that you're doing to make sure that yeah, you're getting the best results. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why, by the way, I like to read seroundtable.com by Barry Schwartz. Sometimes the articles are about little small changes that Google's making. You think, "Oh, this is so basic. Google changed the favicon to be this instead of that." But sometimes when you put it all together, you get a real directional understanding of where Google's going just by tracking the small things that Barry's covering over at SE Roundtable. Which brings us to this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. More opportunity on the search for all of y'all authoritative sites as spotted by our very own Crystal Carter and as covered by our very beloved Battery Schwarz over on search engine land. Google Search testing mentioned in Search Snippet. It's basically a carousel that appears within certain organic results that gives you other websites that mentioned the site shown in the organic result. So for example, Crystal's search for car advice and the website Car Talk appears on the results page and underneath it, or within it is a little carousel that says mentioned in that also shows the page from the New York Times that mentions the Car Talk website. All of the results that I've seen have a link back to the website shown in the organic results, but I don't think it's just links. I mean, for one, the feature is called mentioned in not linked in. Well, that wouldn't work anyway now that I say that, but it's called mentioned in and in some cases the set is mentioned very prominently in the headers, the title and so forth. So I think it's a little bit more than just the link. I think it's actually that they can tell, Google can tell if there's an actual mention there. Anyway, onto AI business, Barry Schwarz over at Search Engine Roundtable this time, official Google's search generative experience gets links. So aside from the cards that show in the... I call it the AI box, but it's called the Search Generative Experience, Google now has links within- Mordy Oberstein: ... with experience Google now has links within the actual text summary itself. So it's a little dropdown icon that brings up a little carousel of results or a little couple of cards of results depending upon where Google got the information from. So it could be a combination of Google's own knowledge panel or knowledge graph rather, or it could be from a website or a combination of the two and so forth. It's a great addition to the search generative experience and it helps you really see where the information comes from and it could help you get more clicks to your website. Okay. Also on SGE and also again from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google shares early feedback on SGE expands to Japan and India. There's a whole heap of information here. Barry links to the actual Google page that talks about this, and I do recommend that you go read that and we will link to that in the show notes. But one thing that stuck out to me and to quote the article itself, "The highest satisfaction scores among younger users, 18 and 24 year olds who say they enjoy being able to ask follow-up questions conversationally." My take, it's not just the interactive ability to ask a follow-up question. I think younger people in general, as a general content preference and as a general content trend prefer more conversational type of content, both in tone, both in format, and both in the actual way that the functionality is structured. In this case, you can ask a follow-up question because it's SGE. But I do think it speaks to a wider trend of younger people looking for more conversational type of content. And that's not just a specific SGE AI thing. That's just a content thing. And with that, that's this week's snappy news. You know, I regret not basking in the glory of what that pivot was before the onset of it. So now that we're back from the news, I just want to bask in the glory of that pivot. That was ... You didn't know it was even coming, it was so good. Crystal Carter: It was very pivotalicious. Mordy Oberstein: Pivotalicious. How do you like your sandwich? Pivotalicious, that's how I like my sandwiches. Crystal Carter: Swirling around. Mordy Oberstein: Swirling around. You know what's always swirling around with some great SEO insights? Ola King. Ola King is our follow of the week is at @justolaking on Twitter. That's J-U-S-T-O-L-A-K-I-N-G over on Twitter. He's an SEO nerd. Previously the product person over at Moz. Super nice. I've never met a nicer fellow before. He's incredibly nice. Crystal Carter: And you guys have matching dress then. You guys, I got a picture of the two of you at MozCon in a matching cream-colored turtleneck. Mordy Oberstein: Oh nice. I totally forgot about that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. It was good. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if anybody's got style inclinations like myself, I mean clearly they're ... Crystal Carter: Obviously, but I think also he's got some really good ... So he's a Notion ambassador and I'm such a big fan of Notion in my days. So he's also got some really good Notion toolkits that he offers to help people learn the basics and to help people get to use some of their sort of new products. And he's behind this sort of SEO growth kit, which talks about how to get going with your SEO goals. So setting goals, SEO checklists and link building checklists, all of that sort of stuff. And there's tons of different guides in there that are helping you to cover the basics. I think somebody was saying that the thing about SEO is that it's a lot of small things that add up to a big thing, and you just sort of have to be able to organize them and he's got some great tools for helping people to organize them and to use some of the tasks that individually aren't that complicated. But if you put them together just strategically, can help you get some really complex but great results. Mordy Oberstein: So follow Ola King over on Twitter. We'll link to his profile in the show notes, but also on LinkedIn I believe, so you can look for him there as well. Give Ola a follow and tell him that we sent you. And that's it. That's all I got. And no pivot. I almost made it through the entire show with awesome pivots until I just blew it. It's so me. Crystal Carter: Maybe we could go back in time with the DeLorean. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just going to run in place 88 miles per hour. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'll try right now. Crystal Carter: Right. We'll play some Chuck Berry and it will be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah. And also, if you want to go back in time and check out some previous episodes that you missed, head over to the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. So a little pivot there. 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 as we dive into a audience request in debunking SEO myths. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guest 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