How does Amazon integrate AI? How will the ‘AI race’ impact Amazon? How do you tie in Amazon and other E-commerce sites to your overall marketing strategy? Wix’s very own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter unveil SERP’s Up+, a monthly bonus episode that focuses on the wider digital marketing world. In this episode go for a deep dive into Amazon and E-commerce, to see how Amazon works with your website across a wide marketing spectrum. Joining the show are Tinuiti’s President of Commerce Strategic Services, Elizabeth Marsden, and Senior Director of Amazon, Joe O’Connor to tell us how AI plays a role in Amazon’s success and where Amazon and ecommerce are heading. This is the SERP’s Up+ Podcast, here to deliver you all the prime marketing knowledge in this inaugural bonus episode! Back Amazon marketing strategies: AI & beyond How does Amazon integrate AI? How will the ‘AI race’ impact Amazon? How do you tie in Amazon and other E-commerce sites to your overall marketing strategy? Wix’s very own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter unveil SERP’s Up+, a monthly bonus episode that focuses on the wider digital marketing world. In this episode go for a deep dive into Amazon and E-commerce, to see how Amazon works with your website across a wide marketing spectrum. Joining the show are Tinuiti’s President of Commerce Strategic Services, Elizabeth Marsden, and Senior Director of Amazon, Joe O’Connor to tell us how AI plays a role in Amazon’s success and where Amazon and ecommerce are heading. This is the SERP’s Up+ Podcast, here to deliver you all the prime marketing knowledge in this inaugural bonus episode! Previous Episode Next Episode SERP's Up+ 01 | August 21, 2023 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 51:13 This week’s guests Joe O'Connor Joe O'Connor is the Senior Director of Marketplace Strategy at Tinuiti, with over a decade of experience in helping brands harness the power of advertising technology to grow their business. Prior to Tinuiti, Joe worked for over seven years at Amazon Advertising - working with prominent advertisers across the CPG, video game consumer electronic and media verticals. Joe is based in Seattle with his wife and daughter. Elizabeth Marsten Elizabeth is the Vice President, Commerce Media Strategic Services at Tinuiti, where she works with teams in advancing cross-functional strategic enterprise services through partner development, advertising and sales support on retail media channels, such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, Kroger, Criteo Retail Media and more. With more than 15 years of ecommerce and digital marketing experience, Elizabeth is a noted industry expert and has spoken at many of the leading marketing conferences in North America and is also a regular contributor to AdWeek on retail media. 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, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the very marketing minded head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Hey, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello, internet marketers, digital Marketers, PPC executives, social media managers, people who are doing CMO stuff and whatnot. Mordy Oberstein: CMO stuff. Crystal Carter: They do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They have a little room they sit in and they all like the CMO stuff. That's where they smoke a cigar. Crystal Carter: They do stuff. They show up and they're like, hey, what's this? Do this better? It's good. It's important. Mordy Oberstein: More digital. We're do more digital. Crystal Carter: But better. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. The SERP's Up+ podcast is brought to you by Wix, where our Amazon apps help you showcase your products on your site, connect to an affiliate account and automate fulfillment of orders on your site using our Amazon multichannel fulfillment app. Best off, we built these both directly with Amazon, so it works out all of the jankiness, as Crystal likes to call it. I stole your word, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Do you know what that word is? Something that is from Northern California, and then I saw it in the page speed Insights report, and it was like, use this tactic to reduce jank. And I was like, jank is a tech term now. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, that's amazing. Not like janky. Jank. I've never heard of that in singular. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, it's a verb. Mordy Oberstein: Oh I like that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, reduce jank. It'll be janky. Mordy Oberstein: Thank Google. A little bit about this podcast. You might've heard of the SERP's Up podcast. We go deep into SEO, but SEO, as our head of SEO, Nati Elimelech, likes to say, touches everything. So we felt that our podcast should also touch everything everywhere all the time, which is why we decided to run a monthly bonus episode that focuses on the wider digital marketing world strategy, tactics, and whatnot. So if you're a digital marketing pro, this podcast is for you. If you're an SEO, this podcast will expand your mind, because we're not just talking about just SEO, but the wider internet that exists beyond or part of or connected to or that touches upon SEO. And that's kind of important. For our inaugural episode, we're kind of covering rankings, but from a different point of view and not just rankings, but strategy around Amazon and e-commerce and how it all kind of works together. It's a deep dive into Amazon and e-commerce. We cut through the thicket of the Amazon on this, our first ever episode of SERP's Up+. Crystal, you can't see her, but she's dying laughing at that pun. Crystal Carter: No, I'm just dying at that pun. I mean, honestly, cutting through the thicket. Wow, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's fair. No. Crystal Carter: Okay. I don't know. I feel like now I want to do references to FernGully or something. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, great movie. Good poll. Crystal Carter: As soon as I saw Avatar, the first avatar, I was like, that was just FernGully. And people were like, what? I was like, have you all not seen FernGully? That was literally FernGully, even with the Twisty Tree. I was not impressed. Mordy Oberstein: I remember seeing it in the theater. That's how strong of an impression FernGully left with me. Crystal Carter: Yeah, FernGully is a good movie. Mordy Oberstein: So for an inaugural episode, we're taking an Amazon point of view as we deep dive into Amazon and e-comm as we look at how Amazon works hand-in-hand with your website and wider marketing strategy. And we're going to take a look at AI and Amazon to help us wade through the waters of the Amazon, sorry, Crystal, I did it again. We'll be joined by Tinuiti Vice president of Commerce Strategic Services, Elizabeth Marsten, and we're also going to hear from the Senior Director of Amazon Joe O'Connor, who's going to tell us where AI fits into succeeding on Amazon. So get ready to sell online like you've got somebody to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, as the SERP's Up podcast is primed and ready to go. Crystal Carter: Man. Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: How many puns? Crystal Carter: I mean, how many? Mordy Oberstein: How many puns? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. Okay, so, a little bit of background. What made me think about this episode was actually Amazon released a few AI updates, and I'm like, okay, it'd be great to talk about that, but wait, let's not do the whole AI thing and focus solely on the AI. Let's take a step back and let's take a look at where Amazon fits into a wider e-commerce strategy. So I figured who better to help us? And thank you, George Nguyen, who's the Head of SEO Editorial at Wix, for making this connection. We figured, hey, let's have Elizabeth and Joe to help us figure out the Amazon. Here now, live, is Elizabeth Marsten. How are you? Elizabeth Marsten: Hello. Thanks for having me, and thanks for all the prime jokes. That's pretty much what we're living and breathing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I mean, they were delivered well. And on time. Elizabeth Marsten: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that home. Mordy Oberstein: For Crystal, it's every day. By the way, yeah, that was a good pun, but it's every day. The same kind of jokes endlessly. So I feel you, Crystal. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: It's all good. It's all good. It's what we're here for. It's what we're here for. It's very important. It's all part of the process, but thank you, Elizabeth, for joining us and helping us to decipher this fantastic topic. Mordy Oberstein: So before we dive into the topic, per se, maybe you could share a little bit what Tinuiti does and a little bit of your backstory. Elizabeth Marsten: Absolutely. So Tinuiti is the largest independent digital marketing agency in, I think, it's North America, United States in particular. So that means that right behind the whole codes, you'll find us. And what makes that interesting is we get to do all of the things. So whether or not that's SEO or paid search or social or shopping, e-commerce, like marketplaces, I also work on, besides Amazon, Walmart, target, Instacart, Kroger, and about 20 other retailers. But we have all of the things, but it all allows me to do a lot of the flexibility as well. So I started in 2006 in paid search. I thought it was called paperclip Marketing. Absolutely not. I had to Google it. I got that correction. I was like, cool, figured it out. I read the descriptions. In 2006, you'd look at anything like that. You're like, yeah, I'll probably figure this out. And I started at Portland Interactive under Ian Lurie. And so I worked there for eight years before moving on to Commerce Hub, which is one of the largest product feed management, catalog management, syndication, catalog feeds, everything that there is. And who recently bought Channel Advisor last year, to give you an idea how big they are. So that's just the demand side, but they also did order stream management. So they worked with about 65 different retailers across 8,000 partners across the US doing a drop-ship network. So I got to learn all of that piece, fulfillment marketplaces, plus what I already knew about Google and Microsoft. And then I come to Tinuiti and I go into what they call the Amazon group at the time. But that was because that's what there was, and that's how I got handed the first Walmart client and said, what should we do with this? So I built out the Walmart, Instacart, Target, and Kroger business lines. Crystal Carter: Amazing. Elizabeth Marsten: That's literally what I do now. I find ways to sell things online. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's so fantastic, and it's such a fantastic example of some of the variations that you can have in a digital marketing career and the iterations. I think one of the things that's great about digital marketing is you can build on your skills. So they're all sort of transferable, but you can build wherever you go. You'll take whatever you knew before and add to it. Elizabeth Marsten: And we're not particularly reinventing the wheel, either. Each time I took a pivot, it was like, oh, you already did this. So when Amazon, in 2015 came to our offices, at Commerce Hub, and we're showing off this thing called sponsored products, I looked at it and was like, what is this? What are they trying to do? They just ripped off Google from 2010. That's really what it looked like. In fact, they borrowed one of our guys. Mordy Oberstein: And Google rips them off because now Google writes sponsored and not ads. Elizabeth Marsten: I mean, yeah, we're not particularly inventive from one to each other. So when the first Amazon sponsored product came out, I remember one Black Friday, I was talking to the team, and they said, oh, we put our bids in. I'm like, when did you put your bids in, they're like, two days ago. I'm like, wait, what? It takes two days to proliferate to see how that went. And they're like, yeah. I went, well, geez. And then here we are today. So if you'd have told me in 2015 that we'd be sitting here with Amazon at how many billions of dollars in advertising revenues. Mordy Oberstein: Insane. Elizabeth Marsten: Maybe they followed a certain playbook. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I think it seems to have worked. I think. Elizabeth Marsten: That and AWS, man, that's it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I mean, the recent stats that I found, I think, people think like, oh, Google's the king of the syrup. Google runs everything like Google, Google, Google. But actually, if you look at the stats for where consumers start shopping online, 61% of Americans start on Amazon before they go to Google. Elizabeth Marsten: And break that down into generations too, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Elizabeth Marsten: The rise of the TikTok search. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, I don't even want to know. Crystal Carter: I think also these things will vary, but by geo as well, because I know that there are people who are in New York who are like, oh yeah, I put something in Prime and I can get it the same day by the end of the day sort of thing. Whereas if I put something in Prime, it'll come to me tomorrow, probably in a hedge. Mordy Oberstein: It'll take me two weeks. They still do it. Crystal Carter: When the service varies, you're going to get different activity on it as well and stuff. But yeah, I think it's also really interesting. You talked about your agency, how you do all of the things, which I think is one of the greatest things about working with an agency is that if a business wants to work with you, then they want to add something to it. If they say, oh, we want to do some social now, you can say, oh yeah, we've got a social person. Or, oh, we want to do some different kinds of ads. You can say, oh yeah, we've got somebody who does that as well. Is that something that you find that customers are looking for more these days? Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, it is. Well, it's a holistic thing. So what they're trying to discern right now, which makes total sense, is this idea of media mix modeling and not just media mix modeling among how much did Google search spend and how much did Amazon search spend. But if I activate something on social, and I push that coupon code via BOTA through Walmart, what did that do? Is there actual incrementality that happened? Were these new to the brand? Were these customers I was going to get? Anyway, so that's the bigger question that a lot of brands are trying to answer right now. It's gnarly and it's difficult. And there's a lot of back of the napkin math right now, because I question at times if we should be trying that hard to pinpoint shopper A, because shopper A is also the Amazon customers, also the target customer is also the Best Buy customer. Because you don't just go to one store, and you go to commercials, and you see bus stops, and you have social, and you're like, okay, well how do you really give weight to all of those touch points? Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I do a lot of brand marketing. It's the same sort of problem, because you're trying to build sentiment, you're trying to build trust, and you're trying to build a certain reputation, and it's a very thorough process. You can't say, this is what did that, it's all kind of together. But I was wondering if we could take a step back first, because I mean, listen, we're Wix. So one of the things that I wanted to focus on is your website. And what I've seen on the SEO side we're hyper focused on your website, and in a lot of Amazon marketers who are focused on that particular website, which is just Amazon. But I'm wondering how do you sync it all together? And it doesn't have to be a particular Amazon. If you're selling on eBay, whatever it is you're selling, how do you sort of combine Amazon or whatever other platform that it is with what you're doing overall into your wider marketing strategy? Which, again, touches on your initial point of it's all kind of together. Elizabeth Marsten: It's all kind of together. I would say, what are your differentiators? So the number one thing I always roll it back to is why are you selling on Amazon? Why are you selling on eBay? Is it a different user you're trying to reach? Are you reaching them with the same assortment? And then I would also flip that to why should they buy from your.com? What is it that you're particularly offering there that's any better or worse. If it's just simply to collect user data, because if they buy it through Amazon, they become Amazon's customer, and the big differentiator and then Amazon's cheaper, it usually is because that's kind of their thing. Why do they buy from you? What have you provided either from a.com experience is a brand or hype essentially that you couldn't do on Amazon? So I always start kind of there, and then from there you'll know whether or not you're supposed to be proliferating across other marketplaces, or you're supposed to be staying to your.com. Because there are some brands that just say, you know what? I'm going to be very tightly controlled and my Amazon strategy is to not be on Amazon. And that's okay, but you've got to say that's what it is, and then you've got to stick to it. Crystal Carter: Now, the thing that I- Elizabeth Marsten: You got to say, that's what it is, and then you got to stick to it. Crystal Carter: Now, the thing that I've seen when people talk about variations between Amazon searches and Google searches is that Google searches tend to lean more towards branded searches, and the Amazon searches tend to lean more towards generic searches. So someone would say, "I would like a Starter baseball cap." They would tend to go to Google and they'd find a Starter baseball cap from the Starter website, for instance. And if somebody was like, I just want a baseball cap, I don't care what color, I just want something to cover my head, they're more likely to go to Amazon. Do you find with clients who are choosing about their websites, how to position their website and how to position their Amazon, do you find that brands that are more established brands are more likely to lean into a less Amazon, more owned commerce sort of space? Or do you find that it's sort of fairly fluid? Elizabeth Marsten: It's fairly fluid. So I would take the example of Nike most recently. So Nike was the one that cut back, in favor of their D2C and providing a user experience, stores, all that kind of stuff, cut back on a lot of their wholesale relationships two years ago, let's say. They've now started to roll some of those back on. So whether or not that was through Foot Locker or DSW, it's a little more selective than it was before. But it goes to tell you in terms of from a brand perspective, what your reach is. You assume the dot-com reaches everyone, and it does, but think about the level of effort that it takes to reach them, whether or not it's through social, there's newsletters. That constant, continuous expense, honestly. But you also have to have a brand that goes with that. And not every brand can be a Nike, let's face it. I always look at it this way. If they got tired, in a sense, of that exercise or that capability or that cost, and they became... It just makes sense to me. Sometimes you just need to be where people are shopping. To your point about the baseball cap, sometimes they're just there and they're in the Foot Locker and they go, "I know Nike, I like Nike. I buy this Nike. Because I'm here now, and this lovely person in a striped shirt is helping me." Mordy Oberstein: First off, the striped shirt is an amazing branding thing. I love the striped shirt of Foot Locker. The SEO in me looks at it like, okay, I want to be everywhere. I want to be on the informational search. Someone's searching for, "What are the best sneakers?" And I'm going to show up and funnel them from my blog post into my product page. The brand marketer in me is looking at it like Nike will look at it. If I'm going to have a strong brand presence, then if someone's going to Foot Locker and they're faced with Reebok or Nike, they're going to know my brand, which is Nike, and decide, you know what? These shoes are exactly the same. They're made out of the exact same thing. They look pretty much exactly the same except I like the Nike brand way better, so I'm going to buy the Nike. Is that kind of what it is? Elizabeth Marsten: A little bit. And then here's the other thing you got to add in that I don't think a lot of SEOs think of from an e-commerce perspective, there's always the bonuses to it. So what if Foot Locker has a loyalty program where I've already bought two pairs of shoes and I add a third and I get another one half off? What if it's a buy one get one kind of thing? What if I am gathering points for my next whatever? What if I've got five kids? There's some- Mordy Oberstein: Now you're speaking my language. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. The dot-com experience is a planned experience in a lot of ways, and the retailer experience is a little less. So to your point around the SEO exposure, when we talk about those digital touch points, highly, highly important. You got to be there. That inception. I call it inception. I want you to have experienced the brand and have a positive outlook and have a, "Yeah, okay." Wherever that is. Whether or not that's on amazon.com, whether or not it's in the Foot Locker store, or whether or not it is on eBay, which has a fantastic sneaker outlet. Again, those pieces all connect, but it has to do more with, what are your differentiators? What are you providing from an experience that you want? Do you care? Do you care where they really buy it from in the end? Crystal Carter: So I'm wondering what your opinion is on this. My hypothesis is that in a space like this, if you're a brand like that where there's a lot of high volume and Amazon is absolutely a player in your marketing strategy, my hypothesis is that one of the things that's most important about your website is the trust factor. And Google leans a lot into E-E-A-T. And that when you have spaces that are like Wish, or this new one's Temu that I keep seeing everywhere. Right? Elizabeth Marsten: I have many questions. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And these people have big budgets and they're right in your face. And if you think about something like Pink Sauce that came out. Or there's all these folks who are just... Anybody can spin up a whatever and start marketing on TikTok or marketing on wherever and stick it on Amazon. On Amazon, everyone pretty much has the same page. Some people have a little bit more branding, some people might have their own channel or something like that, but the Amazon listing's fairly the same. When I'm looking at these things, if I'm on Wish or something, or even if I'm on eBay, if a person has a website, I'm clicking on the website before I purchase. I'm clicking on the website before I give them my details. And also because I don't want to have to wait for this thing because it's not going to show up. I don't want it to be broken. I don't want it to be the wrong thing, that sort of stuff. So I'm going to go to their website and I'm going to get that sort of thing. I mean, what important elements do you think a website needs in order to provide that kind of trust? That kind of- Elizabeth Marsten: You just hit it on the head. It's that customer service thing. What was it, three-ish years ago I want to say, there was a survey, and I can't remember if it was eMarketer. It was a reputable numerator, somebody who was big enough. And they did a consumer satisfaction survey. And Amazon came in number two. Number one was L.L.Bean. And it makes total sense, because when you think about L.L.Bean and you think about customer satisfaction, end to end, I call them and I'm going to get help. My problem will be solved. That trust over the last 100 years, whatever it is. Fun story, I think it was Leon himself there, the first hundred pairs of the Bean Boot that he made, I think 80 of them or something came apart, essentially. He just took them all back, fixed them, and sent them back. Customer service from the get go. That's their go-to. So when it comes to the website, so it says trust factors is like, can you call us and somebody picks it up? Am I going to get a response? Are there multiple ways to contact you? Review aggregation is a big one, because if you can use your dot-com to do the review aggregation, one, obviously it gets crawled and indexed in those other places. But also you can take those and use a third party vendor like a Bazaarvoice, and syndicate those out to your Walmarts and your Targets and whatnot. Now, you can't do that necessarily on Amazon. They want the unique collection. It's theirs, hold it in their box. But your dot-com as it relates to other retailers outside of Amazon can be incredibly impactful because you can reuse a lot of that content or a lot of that brand sentiment. Mordy Oberstein: So let me ask you the reverse then. So on Amazon for example, I am not going to look at the website. It's Amazon. Whoever the seller is, I'm just buying it. I'm really looking more at reviews. Elizabeth Marsten: It's coming out of an Amazon FBA warehouse anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It doesn't really matter. So at what point does the site say, "You know what? Let's give up on all of the sentiment that we're going to build by having the person on the website, and let's be on Amazon." When do you make that decision and how do you make that decision? Elizabeth Marsten: I think it really comes down to what you sell. So if the items that you sell are under say $10 or something like that, it's shipping. It's all about shipping and logistics at that point, because you have a math problem. Can you afford to ship it yourself? If you were selling cases of water, probably not. You need that to come out of a pickup from a store or from an Amazon warehouse. Bags of dog food. So things that you really have to... It's the business math of logistics. Can I conceptually even get it there? That would be like point one. Then point two has to do with categories. So if your item requires refrigeration, what they call the chill chain. If it's chocolate, is it going to melt? Are there any kind of chemicals? Does it have to be wrapped seven times? So sometimes the brand is actually better off shipping those things because of those unique things, because they just know how to do the thing. And Amazon has a lot of rules when it comes to those things because they don't like all the returns. So they have a lot a lot of rules that you have to follow, and if you don't follow it, they charge you. They punish you monetarily for being wrong. Crystal Carter: They also want it easy to ship. Because I always get these things that are in these giant boxes with twelve pieces of paper. Mordy Oberstein: Giant boxes in another giant box with giant bubble wrap. Crystal Carter: And then they just throw them in. Elizabeth Marsten: It's well known within the marketplace industry, but not outside, they have a well-known, it's not factually a metric, but it's called CRAP. It's called can't realize any profit. So those are items that are under five bucks or weigh 10 pounds and are under five bucks or something like that and it's hard to see. They're not realizing any profit by maintaining it, and so that's obviously where the membership fees come into play, but also total basket build, getting out of the same warehouse. But if it's this weird item that you only have in three warehouses throughout the country, but for some reason, I don't know, Oklahoma really wants it and they have to keep shipping inside it, the margins just melt off. And so you get punished, algorithmically really, on Amazon for those items. So they just kind of don't go anywhere because they don't want to sell them, because they can't realize any profit. Crystal Carter: Well, I think also that business math thing is something that comes into play for everyone. Working with clients, I've had it before where they were like, "Let's spend PPC money." And I was like, "Cool. Okay." We were doing this campaign and we had... I think cost per conversion or something was £5 or something. And that was okay for the stuff that was, I don't know, £100 or something. We were working in the UK. So the things that cost over £100, that's not a big deal, or maybe doing good volume. But for the socks that were costing £2.35, I was like, "We're not putting those on the ad." They were like, "Oh, blah, blah." I'm like, "Nope. Nope. The juice ain't worth the squeeze." And I think it's one of those things that I think a lot of people overlook when they're getting started with e-commerce and with dropshipping and all of that sort of stuff, is doing all of the math that goes into the entire supply chain, the entire from start to finish. And I'm sure that must come into play when you're devising marketing strategies. Elizabeth Marsten: I mean, the number one question from a D2C website typically is versus Amazon free shipping. Because we all know the cost, quote unquote, of free shipping. And so it's like, okay, well in order to make it free, you have to bake it in, which means that you have to either eat some of the margin or increase the price. And then it's like, okay, so versus Amazon, what's the differential? And then why buy it again? Why buy it from the dot-com versus an Amazon? Because okay, Amazon's going to get to me faster probably, depending on my assortment and where I've put it. And then, again, is it a unique product or not? Especially right now in the economic times that we're in, you're going to comparison shop. Do I have to have it now? If I don't have to have it now, is the dot-com cheaper or close enough? Or do I just say, "Screw it, go with Amazon"? Crystal Carter: Then there's also the in-between where you have... Because I've had it before where I went to the main website and I've clicked on the thing and went through everything, and when then I got the package it came from Amazon. And we have a multichannel fulfillment app on Wish. So you have your website and you can do all of the branding stuff, but you don't deal with the fulfillment. They handle the fulfillment. And so that gives you the best of both worlds. Have you seen that work well for clients? Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. Yes and no. From a marketplaces standpoint, it's... I look at it this way, again, it's that business math. If the product is already sitting somewhere and it makes sense to let the customer buy it via Prime, and from a fees perspective, how does that shake out? Because you're not paying the listing fee necessarily on that so much as you're paying the FBA costs and the pass through costs. So the payment processing essentially. So again, it really depends on what it is and what you put in on. What we've counseled is, be selective. You can test it. So they really wanted it to work, Amazon really wanted it to work. And when you think about it, it makes total sense. It's like, why let PayPal get all of the fees that they could have? So test it out, and we did. It's okay. I think, again, it comes down to... I looked at it this way, it's a little bit desperate from a D2C perspective if you do. It's like, "I don't care, I just want to sell it." That's what I interpreted the feature as. Just for the love of God, let's go, let's go, let's go. Crystal Carter: Throw everything at it and see what sticks. Elizabeth Marsten: It doesn't hurt. I mean, when- Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes that's just what it is. Elizabeth Marsten: When Buy with Google came out... Because they just announced that they're going to subset that marketplace, right? Mordy Oberstein: Well, they just got rid of it. Elizabeth Marsten: So I was there for the 2013, was that when that... '15? '15 when they first came out with the buy button. And they didn't want us to call it that, but that's what it was. And then we said, "Is it the Google marketplace?" And they said, "Don't call it that. It's Buy with Google." Whatever. It went through four name iterations. I thought it was interesting because it was kind of like Google's attempt to collect e-commerce information. Because you always wondered, so you would do paid search, it would go to the website, or you do SEO, go to the website. And unless they had Google Analytics or something, you don't necessarily know what they searched for is what they bought. Especially with paid search. Or which variation did they... Maybe they clicked on the black one, but they buy the red one. Or maybe they did and then they leave for 30 days and they come back. Whatever it was. That was Google's way of actually definitive... Elizabeth Marsten: ... days and the come back, whatever it was. That was Google's way of actually definitively knowing what you searched for and what you bought. If they were the payment processor, then they knew 100% what it was, how many, what color, where it went, when you bought it, all that kind of information that Amazon has so much of. Then yes, you should be jelly of, but that was what I anticipated the buy button or that marketplace to be. We had a client that took part in it. One of the promos the first week it came out, they had some stellar promos with it. This client beat their Amazon sales for two days. They were thrilled. I was disappointed to see where it went as a product overall because it did have potential, but it wasn't sustainable, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: It is interesting now. I'm curious what's going to happen with this whole thing because now what Google is going to do with their testing and merchant centers sending you right to the checkout on the website. It is an interesting little balance, because as Crystal mentioned before, the website offers you context except the checkout page. This offers you nothing. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, that's nothing. Mordy Oberstein: It's a weird little bounce out. Elizabeth Marsten: I wondered when they started it, if they were like, because at the time there were so many sites that were still pretty janky, to use that word, or the checkout experience. Are you required to check out as a... You had to register for an account. Well, people love doing that, right? Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes when they do that, they're just like, "Oh, can we also have your middle name and your mother's maiden name and-" Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love my mother's maiden name. Crystal Carter: ... and the name of your dog?" I'm just like, oh my days. Elizabeth Marsten: Then they would make you make a password and then you didn't do it right the first two times and you're like, Jesus Christ, just let me give you money. Crystal Carter: And the password is all like, oh, it has to have a caps and a number and a symbol. And I'm just like, I can't. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. Elizabeth Marsten: It should have frictionless, right? So that's what Amazon does incredibly well. They do better than anyone else. Frictionless. Mordy Oberstein: So as time sort of ebbs away here, and I hate to be asked this generic question, but I'm going to do I going to say two generic questions. One is, where do you feel Amazon is heading going forward? And a year from now, what's going to be different? And we like to offer our audience on the SEO podcast that we do the regular service up, I guess. So it's not regular. Some other people they can follow across social media to get more insights. So one, where's Amazon heading in a year from now? And two, who are some people that our audience might want to check out to learn more about e-comm? Elizabeth Marsten: Okay, so Amazon heading, they are headed for, you're going to love this, lead gen. That's where I'm putting them, non-endemic. So it's outside of e-commerce and it should be because they're so dominant in e-commerce. Where do you go next? So they have a DSP, which has... Think about how much information they have about you alone over the last 10 years, and that's all first party audience data. What if they were to take that and sell that to Geico, Liberty Mutual, T-Mobile, whatever. So conceptually, and this is where your D2C comes in a good way. So not necessarily an SEO perspective, but ideally over these last few years, you've curated an amazing experience or checkout or lead generation process or landing page testing or whatever. You've got decades of information, you know how people go through your process, how many days it might take, all that kind of stuff. So if I knew that kind of persona information or that kind of audience information and I were to go to Amazon's DSP and start looking for audiences that could match up, show them the advertisement for your D2C website. So let's say it's Legion. Let's say it's real estate attorneys for whatever reason, take that information, run it through Amazon's DSP with your beautiful ad and drive it back to your D2C. What kind of quality lead gen do you think you might get? Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Very interesting. I think also- Elizabeth Marsten: You could do with e-comm too, but yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think the other thing that's interesting is that Amazon is very happy to couple their tech together. So it could easily be something that was coupled with say Amazon Echo, so that you were like, hey Alexa, my refrigerator is broken. Who can help me with this, for instance? And then Alexa gives you recommendations for, I don't know, refrigerator repair people. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, that's a service they have, right? The biz dev directory. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that could be linked with that as well. So that's very interesting. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. If I know that for example, you've purchased lawn care subscription or lawn care items from amazon.com and a certain amount of time has passed, or I know that there's a drought or something like that, I can find you and sell you my lawn care services for fixing whatever it is that you broke or didn't have time to do, and you were totally pretending that you're going to get around to, but you didn't. Crystal Carter: I decided to concrete my patio and concrete is actually being really difficult and it took us months and it's still terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you should probably hire a professional concrete. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. But it's like sunk cost fallacy. We put so much effort into it. I'm like- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. You can't give up all the way. So basically what you're telling me is the way that Facebook retargets me when I even talk in WhatsApp about, I don't know, buying a new chair is going to be like a million times more powerful. Elizabeth Marsten: But less creepy and probably cheaper. One of the things with the Amazon DSPs, I don't think most people realize what a bargain it is in terms of CPMs and stuff versus some of the other DSPs that are out there. And then relative to their knowledge, it's their first party data. So with Facebook, it's captured in other ways. With Amazon, you straight up told them because you bought things and you sent them certain places. Mordy Oberstein: That is less creepy. You're right. Elizabeth Marsten: So they don't need to listen to you the same way. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see. So it's not like they're not against being creepy, they just don't need to be creepy. Elizabeth Marsten: Exactly. So when you're going to stand in front of the Department of Justice someday, you got to make sure that your house is in order. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's a good note to say, hey, who should our audience follow on social media to check out some more e-commerce insights before we go down that worm hole? Elizabeth Marsten: One thing in particular, if you are interested more in retail media, I would follow Andrew Lipson on either LinkedIn. I don't think he tweets as much, but puts a lot of good research out there from an analyst perspective, forecasting that kind of thing. So that's both Amazon and anything retail media. There's also Russ Derringer who is on LinkedIn and Twitter just a little little bit. His company's called Stratably and he writes on all things Amazon and retail media these days. A pretty kick ass. You could follow me. I write about this stuff once in a while. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to get that next. I was going to get that. Elizabeth Marsten: I have a week article that is pending on endemic audiences. My next one is going to be on what I just talked about where Amazon's head of next year around non-endemic. So I tend to get out there and be pointy as I've been told. I'm trying to think if there was another human I would follow. In particular, Kiri Masters, of Bobsled or Arcadia. So she does a lot. It's mostly around Amazon. She does write for Forbes as well, but they have a lot of Instacart information as well. So she and another colleague of hers wrote a book on Instacart. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And where on social can people follow you? Elizabeth Marsten: I am at EB Kendo, so I'm on Twitter and I tend to cross post pretty much that exactly on LinkedIn and better at maintaining LinkedIn than I am at Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And we'll make sure to link to all of those social media profiles in the show notes. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. This is a lot of fun and really insightful. Elizabeth Marsten: Feel free to reach out. I love questions. I love nerding out. I love my job. I love what I do. So yeah, please. Crystal Carter: It's really, really clear that you love what you do and you're really passionate about it. Thank you so much for sharing today. Elizabeth Marsten: Oh, thanks for having me. It was a blast. Mordy Oberstein: As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, one of the reasons why I got stuck on doing an episode with Amazon and e-comm was I saw Amazon do a couple of new things around AI. So Elizabeth said, "Hey, why don't you talk to Joe O'Connor, who is the senior director of Amazon at Annuity because he actually used to work at Amazon, knows all about this." So that's exactly what we did. We sent a few questions over to Joe all about Amazon and AI. So let's dive in. So one of the things that Amazon has been doing has been using AI to create product summaries. And what they're doing is they're leveraging review content. They're looking at the reviews for the product and using AI to create a product summary from that review content, which is super interesting. I think it might be a little bit concerning to some marketers because let's say you integrate some of the negative comments or negative reviews into the summary. But leaving that aside, it is interesting to see Amazon develop that way. So we asked Joe, what are some useful ways Amazon could go about integrating AI into its product going forward? Obviously, aside from the product summary we're talking about here. Here's Joe. Joe O'Connor: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll answer this from two perspectives. First, from looking through the lens of a marketer, one area I think would greatly benefit from the use of AI is operating within Amazon's marketing cloud product. That's the data clean room they have where a brand could go in and pull a bunch of different data points about their advertising campaign and sales and actions consumers are taking through the campaign across Amazon's various touchpoint, amazon.com, IMDB, Prime Video, et cetera, and also upload their own first party data. But right now, to pull that data out of the marketing cloud infrastructure, you need to know how to write SQL, you need to know how to code, which is not a skill that's very common among marketing managers of brands or account managers at most advertising agency. So it would be amazing for those kind of functions who would get the most use out of the insights that the tool provides, had some sort of AI assistant that they can speak to and explain this is the business challenge I'm trying to solve. I want to gain insights into and have that AI generate the query, deliver the results, and maybe note a couple of interesting trends within the data. That would be really powerful from a marketing perspective. Now, on the consumer side of things, as an Amazon shopper, I think what would be really, really interesting and just make a lot of sense is Amazon's the biggest retailer in the world in terms of the assortment of products they carry. So I can't think of a better place to have a really efficient shopping assistant who becomes more familiar with the types of products you like, what your size of clothes you wear when you're shopping for apparel. All different brands, they have sizes that fit a little differently. Who can help predict when you want to buy headphones based on other headphones you've bought in the past, what other electronics you've bought, what features are important to you, and can then populate those suggestions within your feed. I think that as a consumer would be really powerful and help shoppers more efficiently and effectively browse and shop around Amazon's website. So I think that as a consumer would be a really powerful use of AI. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good point. One is about the insights that you get as a marketer itself. I think using AI to sort of tap into that data source that Amazon has in order to leverage that was super interesting. On the consumer side for sure, one of the issues that I have with Amazon when I shop is really trying to figure out how to get what I want. When I know I have something specific in mind, sometimes I find I have a hard time getting at exactly what I want to get at, and some kind of shopping assistant built upon AI would probably be very, very helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is something that we are very likely to see I think in the future for a few different sites. And I would be very, very surprised if Amazon wasn't leading the charge, considering that they have so many products and so many different types of products within their catalog that it would be very easy for them to say, are you planning a barbecue? And you go, yeah, I am planning a barbecue. They're like, great, we got plates, we got cups. Here's a barbecue, here's some tiki torches, here's some fairy lights, here's some citronella candles. You're probably going to need some sunscreen, you might need... Do you know what I mean? To give you all of those things. And you can say, my budget for the whole barbecue, for instance, is $300 bucks or something. That's all I'm spending on this. I'm not spending anymore. I want it to be nice, but work with me here or something. And then there's 15 people and all of that sort of stuff. And if they're able to pull through all of the different data sets, that would be something that would make it amazing shopping experience. And maybe it's a pipe dream, but that kind of thing is- Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Crystal Carter: That would be amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Wonderful. I would love that actually. Crystal Carter: Right? So for instance, the last time I had this kind of wild goose chase thing on Amazon was I was looking for... Because I went to the Beyonce concert, I went to the Renaissance tour. I don't know if I told you about that. Mordy Oberstein: You mentioned this before. Crystal Carter: Possibly. So I wore an outfit that was based on one of her looks from one of her music videos, and I had to use the Amazon visual search to find something. And then I was just trawling around for ages trying to find something very similar. Whereas if you had a shopping assistant, they'd say, "I want to look like this." And they would just go through all of the things and find me something. Crystal Carter: We would just go through all of the things and find me something, find me all of the things that were relevant. The gloves, the hat, the sunglasses, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of tool I think also would work, and would work really well for marketers as well, because then you would be able to see gaps. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And what you're offering. Exactly. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, the barbecue example. Let's say you sell grills, but you don't sell aprons, you don't sell the brush thing that people use to get the gack off the little... You know what I'm talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the metal part. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: The metal brush. And then if you touch it scrapes your hand. Anyway, those things. So maybe see you don't sell those things, but you could. You could brand them and sell them and buy a drop or whatever. So you can see where you have gaps in the thing so that you could potentially pull through the whole thing. Or somebody could say, "My preferred brand is this. I really, really love all of the stuff." I don't know any grill makers. Do you mean grill brands? Mordy Oberstein: Weber, Coleman. Crystal Carter: Weber! I was thinking of Weber. Okay, so let's say I'm a Weber person. That's my grill of choice. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: I only trust them to burn my hamburgers. And let's say that, no, I'm sure they don't burn their hamburgers, no shade to Weber grills. But you might say, I want that kind of stuff. Or I need new tech. I want everything Apple, because I'm on Apple. I don't want hear anything else that's not Apple. I just want Apple chargers and this and that and that and that, and that. That would be super useful. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's interesting also if you were able to use what the search engines do, which I always thought was interesting because the search engines kind of picked up on a gap that Amazon has, which is Amazon doesn't offer the user, let's say price averages or price trends, all that ancillary information. And what Google, and I think to an extent Bing has done is they've kind of filled that gap and said, "Hey, come to Google shopping, let's say, because we will give you price trends and price information." I think that if Amazon can leverage that by using AI, I think that'd be wonderful for the consumer, but also for marketers, because now you can go and see what the average price for the product that you're offering is, and you can undercut that, let's say. Oversimplify it, but something like that. Elizabeth Marsten: Right or add another value. It might be like maybe this price is slightly higher, but maybe we'll throw in some burger buns or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: We'll throw the brush. We'll throw the brush in with the grill. Crystal Carter: We'll throw the brush in with the grill, and you're like, "Oh, okay." Or we'll give you next day delivery, or we'll do worldwide shipping, or we'll do whatever. So people can balance out what they need that's most appropriate. Because sometimes cost ain't the only thing. Sometimes there's other stuff that comes into play when you're deciding to buy something. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm a pretty one dimensional shopper. Crystal Carter: Pretty straight down the line. It's like what does it cost. Mordy Oberstein: Makes things much easier. Crystal Carter: For the least price. Mordy Oberstein: Now, we wanted to ask Joe a more general question. There was an AI race going on, whether it's Google, whether it's Bing, whether it's Open AI. So we asked Joe, "Hey Joe, how do you think the great AI race will impact Amazon?" Let's cut back to Joe. Joe O'Connor: So two things I'm going to keep my eye on as AI continues to proliferate in relation to Amazon is I'm curious to see what happens with Alexa and how that evolves. I think in my own personal use of my own Echo Dot I have at home and how I anecdotally hear friends and family engage with Alexa, it's pretty simple and limited. Alexa, what time is it? Tell me the weather, turn on the light, set an alarm. There's not a ton of varied use cases I think that have become popular with Alexa. I think if Amazon was to integrate more generative AI within Alexa, how does that change how we engage with that product? And obviously with the popularity of it's in a lot of households that can be a really powerful tool. I think the other area that's always interesting with Amazon is how they bring this technology into industries they operate in that don't have a legacy foundation in tech. So for example, the kind of more obvious answer, just based on the industries that are already starting to invest a lot in tech, you expect there'll be impacts to their retail website within AWS, their advertising, tech products. Even Prime video, there's a lot of talk about how AI can impact both images and video and media. But what about within the in-store shopping experience with Whole Foods and Amazon brick and mortar stores? How does AI impact that world within delivery and logistics, within home security, through Ring? Amazon operates in so many industries that don't necessarily have a foundation in technology, whereas Amazon can really bring that into those industries. So I'm curious to see it as generative AI becomes more advanced and there's more and more applications for the use of it, how does Amazon bring those applications into those other categories? And what revolutions might those spark within some of those other categories? Crystal Carter: So I think this brings up a lot of interesting ideas around the additional spaces that Amazon operates in. Obviously we think a lot about how Amazon is working in the e-commerce space, but that is a single arm of their activity. So I think that he mentioned some of the delivery logistics things. He mentioned shopping, food shopping for instance in Alexa, and combining those abilities. For instance, if Amazon knows that you had a delivery from Kroger or wherever, and they know what food you got delivered and they know what appliances you have because you bought them from Amazon. Mordy Oberstein: No, too much. Crystal Carter: No, well, there's that. But there's also the case that they know all the things, and they may very well, you could set a set of skill for instance. I mean, again, this is big sky thinking or whatever. And Amazon, if you do this, please give me, I can send you my Venmo details, but if they know you have an air fryer and they know you bought a bunch of stuff, and Alexa could plan your meals for you and say, "In your air fryer, do this, this, and this with this food, do that, that and that from a generative space." And again, that's adding more value to the tools that you're already using, which I think is where AI really in all of these guises really works well where there's a tool that you're already using, there's a tool that you're already familiar with that has a number of data sets and data points that they're already referencing. And they're able to combine those two to offer you suggestions or to otherwise enhance the experience that you already have. So in the situation where, for instance, if you have a partner that's done the shopping, you might not know what's in the refrigerator because you weren't there in the shop. If you were in the shop and you're like, "Oh yeah, I picked up some grapes, then you might know, oh, okay, I could do a..." Does ambrosia salad have grapes in it? I never eat ambrosia salad. This is a terrible example. Mordy Oberstein: I don't even know what that is. Crystal Carter: Grapes is a terrible example. Mordy Oberstein: You lost me at salad. Crystal Carter: Okay, cheddar cheese, right? So let's say I didn't know that somebody picked up cheddar cheese, but somebody else bought some cheddar cheese. You say, "What do I cook for dinner, Alexa?" And they say, "Oh, make some macaroni and cheese." You have cheddar cheese, you have pasta, you have this, you have that. And you go, "Oh, yeah, I could." Mordy Oberstein: That's great. I would also like to say, don't buy that cheese because your other person in your account already bought the cheese. Crystal Carter: Wait, no, they don't need to buy it. But you can say, "Alexa, what can I make with it?" And they know what's in your refrigerator because you ordered it through them. And then do the thing. Or you can say, "What's a low fat meal that I can make?" They say, "Well, you could make this in your air fryer that I know that you have because you bought one from Amazon six months ago or something." Mordy Oberstein: You know what it'd be great for? I forgot to order peanut butter and I had to go buy peanut butter at the local corner store, but it's like double the price at the corner store. And I wish I didn't forget to buy peanut butter when I ordered my groceries online. What I would've like is for Amazon, whoever grocery store I choose to buy from to say, "Hey, wait a second. Usually you order peanut butter every week. Did you mean to leave it out?" And I would've said, "No, I didn't mean to leave it out. Thank you for saving me $2. I would've had to go buy it at the corner store, which is double the price." Crystal Carter: Right, precisely, precisely. So these are things that are useful. So again, with all of these AI things, what you want is something that adds to it, that adds to something that they already do well. Trying to branch out into something completely different can sometimes be a little bit of a minefield, but building on what you already have is going to make the real difference here. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. Plugging the holes. Use the AI to plug the holes. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Of my grocery shopping. Crystal Carter: Why do you have holes in your grocery shopping? Mordy Oberstein: Because I forget to order the peanut butter. Crystal Carter: It's very difficult to carry your groceries home when there's holes in the bag. Mordy Oberstein: You know why? I will tell you why. I forgot. Because I like the natural peanut butter, not like this chemical eugh that my kids like. And I saw we had a bottle of peanut butter. I'm like, "Oh, okay." It looked like the natural one, but it wasn't. It got confused. So I didn't order the good peanut butter. I thought we already had the good peanut butter. I went go eat a sandwich of peanut butter, and then I realized that I didn't have the real peanut butter. If Amazon would've told me, "Schmendrick, you didn't order the peanut butter," I would've been saved. Crystal Carter: Exactly. These are the things. So there's the other ones where you can think of potentially having your full inventory. You can say, "Amazon, do we have this kind of peanut butter?" Like, "Alexa, do we have this kind of peanut butter?" If they know what things you're ordering. Mordy Oberstein: That would be great. I would do that all the time. It'd be like if it was able, and it should be able to do this relatively easily, if it understands that you order, let's say a package of cheese every other week, and you order one last week and now you're ordering one this week, it would say, "Wait, do you really need that cheese?" Crystal Carter: Right, or for instance, a toothpaste, "Do we have toothpaste?" "You ordered toothpaste last Tuesday, so you probably do have toothpaste, because typically speaking, you ordered toothpaste every six." Mordy Oberstein: I do this all the time. I'm too lazy to get up and go check in the fridge while I'm doing the order online, whether or not I actually have cheese. So now I have tons of cheese, but no peanut butter. Crystal Carter: Right, or somebody else does your order. Mordy Oberstein: Teach me AI save me. Crystal Carter: Or you have people who buy things in bulk, which again is something that people do on Amazon loads. They'll buy things in bulk and then they will hide some of the stuff in a cupboard, or it'll be in the garage, or it'll be in the attic or something. And so then somebody else goes, "Oh, we didn't have any toilet paper." And it's like, "We have 700 rolls of toilet paper in my special toilet paper cupboard," and people might not know that. Mordy Oberstein: But also being able to track what you buy, how often you buy, and watching the trends graph of that. We're spending that much money on cheese every month? Yo, slow down here. That would also be really, really helpful. Crystal Carter: How can I reduce the cost of my weekly shop? Mordy Oberstein: I feel like if Amazon listens to this podcast, I would like a finder's fee for these ideas. Crystal Carter: This is what I'm saying, Jeff, call us up. We can hook you up. Mordy Oberstein: I'm on Twitter, you can find me. I'm on Threads, you can find me. I'm on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Now, if you're looking for more SERP's Up or SERP's Up+, where can you find that? Because this is the end of our episode. Crystal Carter: Now is the end. The end is near. Mordy Oberstein: If you forget, you can have an automatic notification of AI tell you when the next episode is coming out. Or you can just subscribe over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we had a bot write it for us. It's totally AI. The subscription. It's an AI subscription. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: No, it's not an AI. It's just regular I. It's just regular I. Mordy Oberstein: HI, human intelligence. Crystal Carter: Human intelligence with a little automation. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, automation's always a good thing. But legitimately, if you're looking for more SERP's Up, well, thank you for joining us first off for the first ever edition of the SERP's Up+ podcast. If you're going to miss us, don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode of Regular SERP's Up where we're diving into the wide world of SEO. And we're back next month with another SERP's Up+, as we dive into the power of being authentic in your marketing with Spark Toro's owned Ran Fishkin. Look for wherever you can consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO and marketing, check out all the great content and webinars and articles we have over the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and marketing. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Elizabeth Marsten Joe O'Conner Andrew Lipsman Russ Dieringer Kiri Masters Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Tinuiti Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Elizabeth Marsten Joe O'Conner Andrew Lipsman Russ Dieringer Kiri Masters Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Tinuiti 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, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the very marketing minded head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Hey, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello, internet marketers, digital Marketers, PPC executives, social media managers, people who are doing CMO stuff and whatnot. Mordy Oberstein: CMO stuff. Crystal Carter: They do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They have a little room they sit in and they all like the CMO stuff. That's where they smoke a cigar. Crystal Carter: They do stuff. They show up and they're like, hey, what's this? Do this better? It's good. It's important. Mordy Oberstein: More digital. We're do more digital. Crystal Carter: But better. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. The SERP's Up+ podcast is brought to you by Wix, where our Amazon apps help you showcase your products on your site, connect to an affiliate account and automate fulfillment of orders on your site using our Amazon multichannel fulfillment app. Best off, we built these both directly with Amazon, so it works out all of the jankiness, as Crystal likes to call it. I stole your word, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Do you know what that word is? Something that is from Northern California, and then I saw it in the page speed Insights report, and it was like, use this tactic to reduce jank. And I was like, jank is a tech term now. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, that's amazing. Not like janky. Jank. I've never heard of that in singular. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, it's a verb. Mordy Oberstein: Oh I like that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, reduce jank. It'll be janky. Mordy Oberstein: Thank Google. A little bit about this podcast. You might've heard of the SERP's Up podcast. We go deep into SEO, but SEO, as our head of SEO, Nati Elimelech, likes to say, touches everything. So we felt that our podcast should also touch everything everywhere all the time, which is why we decided to run a monthly bonus episode that focuses on the wider digital marketing world strategy, tactics, and whatnot. So if you're a digital marketing pro, this podcast is for you. If you're an SEO, this podcast will expand your mind, because we're not just talking about just SEO, but the wider internet that exists beyond or part of or connected to or that touches upon SEO. And that's kind of important. For our inaugural episode, we're kind of covering rankings, but from a different point of view and not just rankings, but strategy around Amazon and e-commerce and how it all kind of works together. It's a deep dive into Amazon and e-commerce. We cut through the thicket of the Amazon on this, our first ever episode of SERP's Up+. Crystal, you can't see her, but she's dying laughing at that pun. Crystal Carter: No, I'm just dying at that pun. I mean, honestly, cutting through the thicket. Wow, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's fair. No. Crystal Carter: Okay. I don't know. I feel like now I want to do references to FernGully or something. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, great movie. Good poll. Crystal Carter: As soon as I saw Avatar, the first avatar, I was like, that was just FernGully. And people were like, what? I was like, have you all not seen FernGully? That was literally FernGully, even with the Twisty Tree. I was not impressed. Mordy Oberstein: I remember seeing it in the theater. That's how strong of an impression FernGully left with me. Crystal Carter: Yeah, FernGully is a good movie. Mordy Oberstein: So for an inaugural episode, we're taking an Amazon point of view as we deep dive into Amazon and e-comm as we look at how Amazon works hand-in-hand with your website and wider marketing strategy. And we're going to take a look at AI and Amazon to help us wade through the waters of the Amazon, sorry, Crystal, I did it again. We'll be joined by Tinuiti Vice president of Commerce Strategic Services, Elizabeth Marsten, and we're also going to hear from the Senior Director of Amazon Joe O'Connor, who's going to tell us where AI fits into succeeding on Amazon. So get ready to sell online like you've got somebody to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, as the SERP's Up podcast is primed and ready to go. Crystal Carter: Man. Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: How many puns? Crystal Carter: I mean, how many? Mordy Oberstein: How many puns? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. Okay, so, a little bit of background. What made me think about this episode was actually Amazon released a few AI updates, and I'm like, okay, it'd be great to talk about that, but wait, let's not do the whole AI thing and focus solely on the AI. Let's take a step back and let's take a look at where Amazon fits into a wider e-commerce strategy. So I figured who better to help us? And thank you, George Nguyen, who's the Head of SEO Editorial at Wix, for making this connection. We figured, hey, let's have Elizabeth and Joe to help us figure out the Amazon. Here now, live, is Elizabeth Marsten. How are you? Elizabeth Marsten: Hello. Thanks for having me, and thanks for all the prime jokes. That's pretty much what we're living and breathing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I mean, they were delivered well. And on time. Elizabeth Marsten: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that home. Mordy Oberstein: For Crystal, it's every day. By the way, yeah, that was a good pun, but it's every day. The same kind of jokes endlessly. So I feel you, Crystal. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: It's all good. It's all good. It's what we're here for. It's what we're here for. It's very important. It's all part of the process, but thank you, Elizabeth, for joining us and helping us to decipher this fantastic topic. Mordy Oberstein: So before we dive into the topic, per se, maybe you could share a little bit what Tinuiti does and a little bit of your backstory. Elizabeth Marsten: Absolutely. So Tinuiti is the largest independent digital marketing agency in, I think, it's North America, United States in particular. So that means that right behind the whole codes, you'll find us. And what makes that interesting is we get to do all of the things. So whether or not that's SEO or paid search or social or shopping, e-commerce, like marketplaces, I also work on, besides Amazon, Walmart, target, Instacart, Kroger, and about 20 other retailers. But we have all of the things, but it all allows me to do a lot of the flexibility as well. So I started in 2006 in paid search. I thought it was called paperclip Marketing. Absolutely not. I had to Google it. I got that correction. I was like, cool, figured it out. I read the descriptions. In 2006, you'd look at anything like that. You're like, yeah, I'll probably figure this out. And I started at Portland Interactive under Ian Lurie. And so I worked there for eight years before moving on to Commerce Hub, which is one of the largest product feed management, catalog management, syndication, catalog feeds, everything that there is. And who recently bought Channel Advisor last year, to give you an idea how big they are. So that's just the demand side, but they also did order stream management. So they worked with about 65 different retailers across 8,000 partners across the US doing a drop-ship network. So I got to learn all of that piece, fulfillment marketplaces, plus what I already knew about Google and Microsoft. And then I come to Tinuiti and I go into what they call the Amazon group at the time. But that was because that's what there was, and that's how I got handed the first Walmart client and said, what should we do with this? So I built out the Walmart, Instacart, Target, and Kroger business lines. Crystal Carter: Amazing. Elizabeth Marsten: That's literally what I do now. I find ways to sell things online. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's so fantastic, and it's such a fantastic example of some of the variations that you can have in a digital marketing career and the iterations. I think one of the things that's great about digital marketing is you can build on your skills. So they're all sort of transferable, but you can build wherever you go. You'll take whatever you knew before and add to it. Elizabeth Marsten: And we're not particularly reinventing the wheel, either. Each time I took a pivot, it was like, oh, you already did this. So when Amazon, in 2015 came to our offices, at Commerce Hub, and we're showing off this thing called sponsored products, I looked at it and was like, what is this? What are they trying to do? They just ripped off Google from 2010. That's really what it looked like. In fact, they borrowed one of our guys. Mordy Oberstein: And Google rips them off because now Google writes sponsored and not ads. Elizabeth Marsten: I mean, yeah, we're not particularly inventive from one to each other. So when the first Amazon sponsored product came out, I remember one Black Friday, I was talking to the team, and they said, oh, we put our bids in. I'm like, when did you put your bids in, they're like, two days ago. I'm like, wait, what? It takes two days to proliferate to see how that went. And they're like, yeah. I went, well, geez. And then here we are today. So if you'd have told me in 2015 that we'd be sitting here with Amazon at how many billions of dollars in advertising revenues. Mordy Oberstein: Insane. Elizabeth Marsten: Maybe they followed a certain playbook. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I think it seems to have worked. I think. Elizabeth Marsten: That and AWS, man, that's it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I mean, the recent stats that I found, I think, people think like, oh, Google's the king of the syrup. Google runs everything like Google, Google, Google. But actually, if you look at the stats for where consumers start shopping online, 61% of Americans start on Amazon before they go to Google. Elizabeth Marsten: And break that down into generations too, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Elizabeth Marsten: The rise of the TikTok search. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, I don't even want to know. Crystal Carter: I think also these things will vary, but by geo as well, because I know that there are people who are in New York who are like, oh yeah, I put something in Prime and I can get it the same day by the end of the day sort of thing. Whereas if I put something in Prime, it'll come to me tomorrow, probably in a hedge. Mordy Oberstein: It'll take me two weeks. They still do it. Crystal Carter: When the service varies, you're going to get different activity on it as well and stuff. But yeah, I think it's also really interesting. You talked about your agency, how you do all of the things, which I think is one of the greatest things about working with an agency is that if a business wants to work with you, then they want to add something to it. If they say, oh, we want to do some social now, you can say, oh yeah, we've got a social person. Or, oh, we want to do some different kinds of ads. You can say, oh yeah, we've got somebody who does that as well. Is that something that you find that customers are looking for more these days? Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, it is. Well, it's a holistic thing. So what they're trying to discern right now, which makes total sense, is this idea of media mix modeling and not just media mix modeling among how much did Google search spend and how much did Amazon search spend. But if I activate something on social, and I push that coupon code via BOTA through Walmart, what did that do? Is there actual incrementality that happened? Were these new to the brand? Were these customers I was going to get? Anyway, so that's the bigger question that a lot of brands are trying to answer right now. It's gnarly and it's difficult. And there's a lot of back of the napkin math right now, because I question at times if we should be trying that hard to pinpoint shopper A, because shopper A is also the Amazon customers, also the target customer is also the Best Buy customer. Because you don't just go to one store, and you go to commercials, and you see bus stops, and you have social, and you're like, okay, well how do you really give weight to all of those touch points? Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I do a lot of brand marketing. It's the same sort of problem, because you're trying to build sentiment, you're trying to build trust, and you're trying to build a certain reputation, and it's a very thorough process. You can't say, this is what did that, it's all kind of together. But I was wondering if we could take a step back first, because I mean, listen, we're Wix. So one of the things that I wanted to focus on is your website. And what I've seen on the SEO side we're hyper focused on your website, and in a lot of Amazon marketers who are focused on that particular website, which is just Amazon. But I'm wondering how do you sync it all together? And it doesn't have to be a particular Amazon. If you're selling on eBay, whatever it is you're selling, how do you sort of combine Amazon or whatever other platform that it is with what you're doing overall into your wider marketing strategy? Which, again, touches on your initial point of it's all kind of together. Elizabeth Marsten: It's all kind of together. I would say, what are your differentiators? So the number one thing I always roll it back to is why are you selling on Amazon? Why are you selling on eBay? Is it a different user you're trying to reach? Are you reaching them with the same assortment? And then I would also flip that to why should they buy from your.com? What is it that you're particularly offering there that's any better or worse. If it's just simply to collect user data, because if they buy it through Amazon, they become Amazon's customer, and the big differentiator and then Amazon's cheaper, it usually is because that's kind of their thing. Why do they buy from you? What have you provided either from a.com experience is a brand or hype essentially that you couldn't do on Amazon? So I always start kind of there, and then from there you'll know whether or not you're supposed to be proliferating across other marketplaces, or you're supposed to be staying to your.com. Because there are some brands that just say, you know what? I'm going to be very tightly controlled and my Amazon strategy is to not be on Amazon. And that's okay, but you've got to say that's what it is, and then you've got to stick to it. Crystal Carter: Now, the thing that I- Elizabeth Marsten: You got to say, that's what it is, and then you got to stick to it. Crystal Carter: Now, the thing that I've seen when people talk about variations between Amazon searches and Google searches is that Google searches tend to lean more towards branded searches, and the Amazon searches tend to lean more towards generic searches. So someone would say, "I would like a Starter baseball cap." They would tend to go to Google and they'd find a Starter baseball cap from the Starter website, for instance. And if somebody was like, I just want a baseball cap, I don't care what color, I just want something to cover my head, they're more likely to go to Amazon. Do you find with clients who are choosing about their websites, how to position their website and how to position their Amazon, do you find that brands that are more established brands are more likely to lean into a less Amazon, more owned commerce sort of space? Or do you find that it's sort of fairly fluid? Elizabeth Marsten: It's fairly fluid. So I would take the example of Nike most recently. So Nike was the one that cut back, in favor of their D2C and providing a user experience, stores, all that kind of stuff, cut back on a lot of their wholesale relationships two years ago, let's say. They've now started to roll some of those back on. So whether or not that was through Foot Locker or DSW, it's a little more selective than it was before. But it goes to tell you in terms of from a brand perspective, what your reach is. You assume the dot-com reaches everyone, and it does, but think about the level of effort that it takes to reach them, whether or not it's through social, there's newsletters. That constant, continuous expense, honestly. But you also have to have a brand that goes with that. And not every brand can be a Nike, let's face it. I always look at it this way. If they got tired, in a sense, of that exercise or that capability or that cost, and they became... It just makes sense to me. Sometimes you just need to be where people are shopping. To your point about the baseball cap, sometimes they're just there and they're in the Foot Locker and they go, "I know Nike, I like Nike. I buy this Nike. Because I'm here now, and this lovely person in a striped shirt is helping me." Mordy Oberstein: First off, the striped shirt is an amazing branding thing. I love the striped shirt of Foot Locker. The SEO in me looks at it like, okay, I want to be everywhere. I want to be on the informational search. Someone's searching for, "What are the best sneakers?" And I'm going to show up and funnel them from my blog post into my product page. The brand marketer in me is looking at it like Nike will look at it. If I'm going to have a strong brand presence, then if someone's going to Foot Locker and they're faced with Reebok or Nike, they're going to know my brand, which is Nike, and decide, you know what? These shoes are exactly the same. They're made out of the exact same thing. They look pretty much exactly the same except I like the Nike brand way better, so I'm going to buy the Nike. Is that kind of what it is? Elizabeth Marsten: A little bit. And then here's the other thing you got to add in that I don't think a lot of SEOs think of from an e-commerce perspective, there's always the bonuses to it. So what if Foot Locker has a loyalty program where I've already bought two pairs of shoes and I add a third and I get another one half off? What if it's a buy one get one kind of thing? What if I am gathering points for my next whatever? What if I've got five kids? There's some- Mordy Oberstein: Now you're speaking my language. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. The dot-com experience is a planned experience in a lot of ways, and the retailer experience is a little less. So to your point around the SEO exposure, when we talk about those digital touch points, highly, highly important. You got to be there. That inception. I call it inception. I want you to have experienced the brand and have a positive outlook and have a, "Yeah, okay." Wherever that is. Whether or not that's on amazon.com, whether or not it's in the Foot Locker store, or whether or not it is on eBay, which has a fantastic sneaker outlet. Again, those pieces all connect, but it has to do more with, what are your differentiators? What are you providing from an experience that you want? Do you care? Do you care where they really buy it from in the end? Crystal Carter: So I'm wondering what your opinion is on this. My hypothesis is that in a space like this, if you're a brand like that where there's a lot of high volume and Amazon is absolutely a player in your marketing strategy, my hypothesis is that one of the things that's most important about your website is the trust factor. And Google leans a lot into E-E-A-T. And that when you have spaces that are like Wish, or this new one's Temu that I keep seeing everywhere. Right? Elizabeth Marsten: I have many questions. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And these people have big budgets and they're right in your face. And if you think about something like Pink Sauce that came out. Or there's all these folks who are just... Anybody can spin up a whatever and start marketing on TikTok or marketing on wherever and stick it on Amazon. On Amazon, everyone pretty much has the same page. Some people have a little bit more branding, some people might have their own channel or something like that, but the Amazon listing's fairly the same. When I'm looking at these things, if I'm on Wish or something, or even if I'm on eBay, if a person has a website, I'm clicking on the website before I purchase. I'm clicking on the website before I give them my details. And also because I don't want to have to wait for this thing because it's not going to show up. I don't want it to be broken. I don't want it to be the wrong thing, that sort of stuff. So I'm going to go to their website and I'm going to get that sort of thing. I mean, what important elements do you think a website needs in order to provide that kind of trust? That kind of- Elizabeth Marsten: You just hit it on the head. It's that customer service thing. What was it, three-ish years ago I want to say, there was a survey, and I can't remember if it was eMarketer. It was a reputable numerator, somebody who was big enough. And they did a consumer satisfaction survey. And Amazon came in number two. Number one was L.L.Bean. And it makes total sense, because when you think about L.L.Bean and you think about customer satisfaction, end to end, I call them and I'm going to get help. My problem will be solved. That trust over the last 100 years, whatever it is. Fun story, I think it was Leon himself there, the first hundred pairs of the Bean Boot that he made, I think 80 of them or something came apart, essentially. He just took them all back, fixed them, and sent them back. Customer service from the get go. That's their go-to. So when it comes to the website, so it says trust factors is like, can you call us and somebody picks it up? Am I going to get a response? Are there multiple ways to contact you? Review aggregation is a big one, because if you can use your dot-com to do the review aggregation, one, obviously it gets crawled and indexed in those other places. But also you can take those and use a third party vendor like a Bazaarvoice, and syndicate those out to your Walmarts and your Targets and whatnot. Now, you can't do that necessarily on Amazon. They want the unique collection. It's theirs, hold it in their box. But your dot-com as it relates to other retailers outside of Amazon can be incredibly impactful because you can reuse a lot of that content or a lot of that brand sentiment. Mordy Oberstein: So let me ask you the reverse then. So on Amazon for example, I am not going to look at the website. It's Amazon. Whoever the seller is, I'm just buying it. I'm really looking more at reviews. Elizabeth Marsten: It's coming out of an Amazon FBA warehouse anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It doesn't really matter. So at what point does the site say, "You know what? Let's give up on all of the sentiment that we're going to build by having the person on the website, and let's be on Amazon." When do you make that decision and how do you make that decision? Elizabeth Marsten: I think it really comes down to what you sell. So if the items that you sell are under say $10 or something like that, it's shipping. It's all about shipping and logistics at that point, because you have a math problem. Can you afford to ship it yourself? If you were selling cases of water, probably not. You need that to come out of a pickup from a store or from an Amazon warehouse. Bags of dog food. So things that you really have to... It's the business math of logistics. Can I conceptually even get it there? That would be like point one. Then point two has to do with categories. So if your item requires refrigeration, what they call the chill chain. If it's chocolate, is it going to melt? Are there any kind of chemicals? Does it have to be wrapped seven times? So sometimes the brand is actually better off shipping those things because of those unique things, because they just know how to do the thing. And Amazon has a lot of rules when it comes to those things because they don't like all the returns. So they have a lot a lot of rules that you have to follow, and if you don't follow it, they charge you. They punish you monetarily for being wrong. Crystal Carter: They also want it easy to ship. Because I always get these things that are in these giant boxes with twelve pieces of paper. Mordy Oberstein: Giant boxes in another giant box with giant bubble wrap. Crystal Carter: And then they just throw them in. Elizabeth Marsten: It's well known within the marketplace industry, but not outside, they have a well-known, it's not factually a metric, but it's called CRAP. It's called can't realize any profit. So those are items that are under five bucks or weigh 10 pounds and are under five bucks or something like that and it's hard to see. They're not realizing any profit by maintaining it, and so that's obviously where the membership fees come into play, but also total basket build, getting out of the same warehouse. But if it's this weird item that you only have in three warehouses throughout the country, but for some reason, I don't know, Oklahoma really wants it and they have to keep shipping inside it, the margins just melt off. And so you get punished, algorithmically really, on Amazon for those items. So they just kind of don't go anywhere because they don't want to sell them, because they can't realize any profit. Crystal Carter: Well, I think also that business math thing is something that comes into play for everyone. Working with clients, I've had it before where they were like, "Let's spend PPC money." And I was like, "Cool. Okay." We were doing this campaign and we had... I think cost per conversion or something was £5 or something. And that was okay for the stuff that was, I don't know, £100 or something. We were working in the UK. So the things that cost over £100, that's not a big deal, or maybe doing good volume. But for the socks that were costing £2.35, I was like, "We're not putting those on the ad." They were like, "Oh, blah, blah." I'm like, "Nope. Nope. The juice ain't worth the squeeze." And I think it's one of those things that I think a lot of people overlook when they're getting started with e-commerce and with dropshipping and all of that sort of stuff, is doing all of the math that goes into the entire supply chain, the entire from start to finish. And I'm sure that must come into play when you're devising marketing strategies. Elizabeth Marsten: I mean, the number one question from a D2C website typically is versus Amazon free shipping. Because we all know the cost, quote unquote, of free shipping. And so it's like, okay, well in order to make it free, you have to bake it in, which means that you have to either eat some of the margin or increase the price. And then it's like, okay, so versus Amazon, what's the differential? And then why buy it again? Why buy it from the dot-com versus an Amazon? Because okay, Amazon's going to get to me faster probably, depending on my assortment and where I've put it. And then, again, is it a unique product or not? Especially right now in the economic times that we're in, you're going to comparison shop. Do I have to have it now? If I don't have to have it now, is the dot-com cheaper or close enough? Or do I just say, "Screw it, go with Amazon"? Crystal Carter: Then there's also the in-between where you have... Because I've had it before where I went to the main website and I've clicked on the thing and went through everything, and when then I got the package it came from Amazon. And we have a multichannel fulfillment app on Wish. So you have your website and you can do all of the branding stuff, but you don't deal with the fulfillment. They handle the fulfillment. And so that gives you the best of both worlds. Have you seen that work well for clients? Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. Yes and no. From a marketplaces standpoint, it's... I look at it this way, again, it's that business math. If the product is already sitting somewhere and it makes sense to let the customer buy it via Prime, and from a fees perspective, how does that shake out? Because you're not paying the listing fee necessarily on that so much as you're paying the FBA costs and the pass through costs. So the payment processing essentially. So again, it really depends on what it is and what you put in on. What we've counseled is, be selective. You can test it. So they really wanted it to work, Amazon really wanted it to work. And when you think about it, it makes total sense. It's like, why let PayPal get all of the fees that they could have? So test it out, and we did. It's okay. I think, again, it comes down to... I looked at it this way, it's a little bit desperate from a D2C perspective if you do. It's like, "I don't care, I just want to sell it." That's what I interpreted the feature as. Just for the love of God, let's go, let's go, let's go. Crystal Carter: Throw everything at it and see what sticks. Elizabeth Marsten: It doesn't hurt. I mean, when- Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes that's just what it is. Elizabeth Marsten: When Buy with Google came out... Because they just announced that they're going to subset that marketplace, right? Mordy Oberstein: Well, they just got rid of it. Elizabeth Marsten: So I was there for the 2013, was that when that... '15? '15 when they first came out with the buy button. And they didn't want us to call it that, but that's what it was. And then we said, "Is it the Google marketplace?" And they said, "Don't call it that. It's Buy with Google." Whatever. It went through four name iterations. I thought it was interesting because it was kind of like Google's attempt to collect e-commerce information. Because you always wondered, so you would do paid search, it would go to the website, or you do SEO, go to the website. And unless they had Google Analytics or something, you don't necessarily know what they searched for is what they bought. Especially with paid search. Or which variation did they... Maybe they clicked on the black one, but they buy the red one. Or maybe they did and then they leave for 30 days and they come back. Whatever it was. That was Google's way of actually definitive... Elizabeth Marsten: ... days and the come back, whatever it was. That was Google's way of actually definitively knowing what you searched for and what you bought. If they were the payment processor, then they knew 100% what it was, how many, what color, where it went, when you bought it, all that kind of information that Amazon has so much of. Then yes, you should be jelly of, but that was what I anticipated the buy button or that marketplace to be. We had a client that took part in it. One of the promos the first week it came out, they had some stellar promos with it. This client beat their Amazon sales for two days. They were thrilled. I was disappointed to see where it went as a product overall because it did have potential, but it wasn't sustainable, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: It is interesting now. I'm curious what's going to happen with this whole thing because now what Google is going to do with their testing and merchant centers sending you right to the checkout on the website. It is an interesting little balance, because as Crystal mentioned before, the website offers you context except the checkout page. This offers you nothing. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, that's nothing. Mordy Oberstein: It's a weird little bounce out. Elizabeth Marsten: I wondered when they started it, if they were like, because at the time there were so many sites that were still pretty janky, to use that word, or the checkout experience. Are you required to check out as a... You had to register for an account. Well, people love doing that, right? Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes when they do that, they're just like, "Oh, can we also have your middle name and your mother's maiden name and-" Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love my mother's maiden name. Crystal Carter: ... and the name of your dog?" I'm just like, oh my days. Elizabeth Marsten: Then they would make you make a password and then you didn't do it right the first two times and you're like, Jesus Christ, just let me give you money. Crystal Carter: And the password is all like, oh, it has to have a caps and a number and a symbol. And I'm just like, I can't. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. Elizabeth Marsten: It should have frictionless, right? So that's what Amazon does incredibly well. They do better than anyone else. Frictionless. Mordy Oberstein: So as time sort of ebbs away here, and I hate to be asked this generic question, but I'm going to do I going to say two generic questions. One is, where do you feel Amazon is heading going forward? And a year from now, what's going to be different? And we like to offer our audience on the SEO podcast that we do the regular service up, I guess. So it's not regular. Some other people they can follow across social media to get more insights. So one, where's Amazon heading in a year from now? And two, who are some people that our audience might want to check out to learn more about e-comm? Elizabeth Marsten: Okay, so Amazon heading, they are headed for, you're going to love this, lead gen. That's where I'm putting them, non-endemic. So it's outside of e-commerce and it should be because they're so dominant in e-commerce. Where do you go next? So they have a DSP, which has... Think about how much information they have about you alone over the last 10 years, and that's all first party audience data. What if they were to take that and sell that to Geico, Liberty Mutual, T-Mobile, whatever. So conceptually, and this is where your D2C comes in a good way. So not necessarily an SEO perspective, but ideally over these last few years, you've curated an amazing experience or checkout or lead generation process or landing page testing or whatever. You've got decades of information, you know how people go through your process, how many days it might take, all that kind of stuff. So if I knew that kind of persona information or that kind of audience information and I were to go to Amazon's DSP and start looking for audiences that could match up, show them the advertisement for your D2C website. So let's say it's Legion. Let's say it's real estate attorneys for whatever reason, take that information, run it through Amazon's DSP with your beautiful ad and drive it back to your D2C. What kind of quality lead gen do you think you might get? Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Very interesting. I think also- Elizabeth Marsten: You could do with e-comm too, but yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think the other thing that's interesting is that Amazon is very happy to couple their tech together. So it could easily be something that was coupled with say Amazon Echo, so that you were like, hey Alexa, my refrigerator is broken. Who can help me with this, for instance? And then Alexa gives you recommendations for, I don't know, refrigerator repair people. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, that's a service they have, right? The biz dev directory. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that could be linked with that as well. So that's very interesting. Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. If I know that for example, you've purchased lawn care subscription or lawn care items from amazon.com and a certain amount of time has passed, or I know that there's a drought or something like that, I can find you and sell you my lawn care services for fixing whatever it is that you broke or didn't have time to do, and you were totally pretending that you're going to get around to, but you didn't. Crystal Carter: I decided to concrete my patio and concrete is actually being really difficult and it took us months and it's still terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you should probably hire a professional concrete. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. But it's like sunk cost fallacy. We put so much effort into it. I'm like- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. You can't give up all the way. So basically what you're telling me is the way that Facebook retargets me when I even talk in WhatsApp about, I don't know, buying a new chair is going to be like a million times more powerful. Elizabeth Marsten: But less creepy and probably cheaper. One of the things with the Amazon DSPs, I don't think most people realize what a bargain it is in terms of CPMs and stuff versus some of the other DSPs that are out there. And then relative to their knowledge, it's their first party data. So with Facebook, it's captured in other ways. With Amazon, you straight up told them because you bought things and you sent them certain places. Mordy Oberstein: That is less creepy. You're right. Elizabeth Marsten: So they don't need to listen to you the same way. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see. So it's not like they're not against being creepy, they just don't need to be creepy. Elizabeth Marsten: Exactly. So when you're going to stand in front of the Department of Justice someday, you got to make sure that your house is in order. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's a good note to say, hey, who should our audience follow on social media to check out some more e-commerce insights before we go down that worm hole? Elizabeth Marsten: One thing in particular, if you are interested more in retail media, I would follow Andrew Lipson on either LinkedIn. I don't think he tweets as much, but puts a lot of good research out there from an analyst perspective, forecasting that kind of thing. So that's both Amazon and anything retail media. There's also Russ Derringer who is on LinkedIn and Twitter just a little little bit. His company's called Stratably and he writes on all things Amazon and retail media these days. A pretty kick ass. You could follow me. I write about this stuff once in a while. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to get that next. I was going to get that. Elizabeth Marsten: I have a week article that is pending on endemic audiences. My next one is going to be on what I just talked about where Amazon's head of next year around non-endemic. So I tend to get out there and be pointy as I've been told. I'm trying to think if there was another human I would follow. In particular, Kiri Masters, of Bobsled or Arcadia. So she does a lot. It's mostly around Amazon. She does write for Forbes as well, but they have a lot of Instacart information as well. So she and another colleague of hers wrote a book on Instacart. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And where on social can people follow you? Elizabeth Marsten: I am at EB Kendo, so I'm on Twitter and I tend to cross post pretty much that exactly on LinkedIn and better at maintaining LinkedIn than I am at Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And we'll make sure to link to all of those social media profiles in the show notes. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. This is a lot of fun and really insightful. Elizabeth Marsten: Feel free to reach out. I love questions. I love nerding out. I love my job. I love what I do. So yeah, please. Crystal Carter: It's really, really clear that you love what you do and you're really passionate about it. Thank you so much for sharing today. Elizabeth Marsten: Oh, thanks for having me. It was a blast. Mordy Oberstein: As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, one of the reasons why I got stuck on doing an episode with Amazon and e-comm was I saw Amazon do a couple of new things around AI. So Elizabeth said, "Hey, why don't you talk to Joe O'Connor, who is the senior director of Amazon at Annuity because he actually used to work at Amazon, knows all about this." So that's exactly what we did. We sent a few questions over to Joe all about Amazon and AI. So let's dive in. So one of the things that Amazon has been doing has been using AI to create product summaries. And what they're doing is they're leveraging review content. They're looking at the reviews for the product and using AI to create a product summary from that review content, which is super interesting. I think it might be a little bit concerning to some marketers because let's say you integrate some of the negative comments or negative reviews into the summary. But leaving that aside, it is interesting to see Amazon develop that way. So we asked Joe, what are some useful ways Amazon could go about integrating AI into its product going forward? Obviously, aside from the product summary we're talking about here. Here's Joe. Joe O'Connor: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll answer this from two perspectives. First, from looking through the lens of a marketer, one area I think would greatly benefit from the use of AI is operating within Amazon's marketing cloud product. That's the data clean room they have where a brand could go in and pull a bunch of different data points about their advertising campaign and sales and actions consumers are taking through the campaign across Amazon's various touchpoint, amazon.com, IMDB, Prime Video, et cetera, and also upload their own first party data. But right now, to pull that data out of the marketing cloud infrastructure, you need to know how to write SQL, you need to know how to code, which is not a skill that's very common among marketing managers of brands or account managers at most advertising agency. So it would be amazing for those kind of functions who would get the most use out of the insights that the tool provides, had some sort of AI assistant that they can speak to and explain this is the business challenge I'm trying to solve. I want to gain insights into and have that AI generate the query, deliver the results, and maybe note a couple of interesting trends within the data. That would be really powerful from a marketing perspective. Now, on the consumer side of things, as an Amazon shopper, I think what would be really, really interesting and just make a lot of sense is Amazon's the biggest retailer in the world in terms of the assortment of products they carry. So I can't think of a better place to have a really efficient shopping assistant who becomes more familiar with the types of products you like, what your size of clothes you wear when you're shopping for apparel. All different brands, they have sizes that fit a little differently. Who can help predict when you want to buy headphones based on other headphones you've bought in the past, what other electronics you've bought, what features are important to you, and can then populate those suggestions within your feed. I think that as a consumer would be really powerful and help shoppers more efficiently and effectively browse and shop around Amazon's website. So I think that as a consumer would be a really powerful use of AI. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good point. One is about the insights that you get as a marketer itself. I think using AI to sort of tap into that data source that Amazon has in order to leverage that was super interesting. On the consumer side for sure, one of the issues that I have with Amazon when I shop is really trying to figure out how to get what I want. When I know I have something specific in mind, sometimes I find I have a hard time getting at exactly what I want to get at, and some kind of shopping assistant built upon AI would probably be very, very helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is something that we are very likely to see I think in the future for a few different sites. And I would be very, very surprised if Amazon wasn't leading the charge, considering that they have so many products and so many different types of products within their catalog that it would be very easy for them to say, are you planning a barbecue? And you go, yeah, I am planning a barbecue. They're like, great, we got plates, we got cups. Here's a barbecue, here's some tiki torches, here's some fairy lights, here's some citronella candles. You're probably going to need some sunscreen, you might need... Do you know what I mean? To give you all of those things. And you can say, my budget for the whole barbecue, for instance, is $300 bucks or something. That's all I'm spending on this. I'm not spending anymore. I want it to be nice, but work with me here or something. And then there's 15 people and all of that sort of stuff. And if they're able to pull through all of the different data sets, that would be something that would make it amazing shopping experience. And maybe it's a pipe dream, but that kind of thing is- Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Crystal Carter: That would be amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Wonderful. I would love that actually. Crystal Carter: Right? So for instance, the last time I had this kind of wild goose chase thing on Amazon was I was looking for... Because I went to the Beyonce concert, I went to the Renaissance tour. I don't know if I told you about that. Mordy Oberstein: You mentioned this before. Crystal Carter: Possibly. So I wore an outfit that was based on one of her looks from one of her music videos, and I had to use the Amazon visual search to find something. And then I was just trawling around for ages trying to find something very similar. Whereas if you had a shopping assistant, they'd say, "I want to look like this." And they would just go through all of the things and find me something. Crystal Carter: We would just go through all of the things and find me something, find me all of the things that were relevant. The gloves, the hat, the sunglasses, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of tool I think also would work, and would work really well for marketers as well, because then you would be able to see gaps. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And what you're offering. Exactly. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, the barbecue example. Let's say you sell grills, but you don't sell aprons, you don't sell the brush thing that people use to get the gack off the little... You know what I'm talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the metal part. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: The metal brush. And then if you touch it scrapes your hand. Anyway, those things. So maybe see you don't sell those things, but you could. You could brand them and sell them and buy a drop or whatever. So you can see where you have gaps in the thing so that you could potentially pull through the whole thing. Or somebody could say, "My preferred brand is this. I really, really love all of the stuff." I don't know any grill makers. Do you mean grill brands? Mordy Oberstein: Weber, Coleman. Crystal Carter: Weber! I was thinking of Weber. Okay, so let's say I'm a Weber person. That's my grill of choice. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: I only trust them to burn my hamburgers. And let's say that, no, I'm sure they don't burn their hamburgers, no shade to Weber grills. But you might say, I want that kind of stuff. Or I need new tech. I want everything Apple, because I'm on Apple. I don't want hear anything else that's not Apple. I just want Apple chargers and this and that and that and that, and that. That would be super useful. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's interesting also if you were able to use what the search engines do, which I always thought was interesting because the search engines kind of picked up on a gap that Amazon has, which is Amazon doesn't offer the user, let's say price averages or price trends, all that ancillary information. And what Google, and I think to an extent Bing has done is they've kind of filled that gap and said, "Hey, come to Google shopping, let's say, because we will give you price trends and price information." I think that if Amazon can leverage that by using AI, I think that'd be wonderful for the consumer, but also for marketers, because now you can go and see what the average price for the product that you're offering is, and you can undercut that, let's say. Oversimplify it, but something like that. Elizabeth Marsten: Right or add another value. It might be like maybe this price is slightly higher, but maybe we'll throw in some burger buns or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: We'll throw the brush. We'll throw the brush in with the grill. Crystal Carter: We'll throw the brush in with the grill, and you're like, "Oh, okay." Or we'll give you next day delivery, or we'll do worldwide shipping, or we'll do whatever. So people can balance out what they need that's most appropriate. Because sometimes cost ain't the only thing. Sometimes there's other stuff that comes into play when you're deciding to buy something. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm a pretty one dimensional shopper. Crystal Carter: Pretty straight down the line. It's like what does it cost. Mordy Oberstein: Makes things much easier. Crystal Carter: For the least price. Mordy Oberstein: Now, we wanted to ask Joe a more general question. There was an AI race going on, whether it's Google, whether it's Bing, whether it's Open AI. So we asked Joe, "Hey Joe, how do you think the great AI race will impact Amazon?" Let's cut back to Joe. Joe O'Connor: So two things I'm going to keep my eye on as AI continues to proliferate in relation to Amazon is I'm curious to see what happens with Alexa and how that evolves. I think in my own personal use of my own Echo Dot I have at home and how I anecdotally hear friends and family engage with Alexa, it's pretty simple and limited. Alexa, what time is it? Tell me the weather, turn on the light, set an alarm. There's not a ton of varied use cases I think that have become popular with Alexa. I think if Amazon was to integrate more generative AI within Alexa, how does that change how we engage with that product? And obviously with the popularity of it's in a lot of households that can be a really powerful tool. I think the other area that's always interesting with Amazon is how they bring this technology into industries they operate in that don't have a legacy foundation in tech. So for example, the kind of more obvious answer, just based on the industries that are already starting to invest a lot in tech, you expect there'll be impacts to their retail website within AWS, their advertising, tech products. Even Prime video, there's a lot of talk about how AI can impact both images and video and media. But what about within the in-store shopping experience with Whole Foods and Amazon brick and mortar stores? How does AI impact that world within delivery and logistics, within home security, through Ring? Amazon operates in so many industries that don't necessarily have a foundation in technology, whereas Amazon can really bring that into those industries. So I'm curious to see it as generative AI becomes more advanced and there's more and more applications for the use of it, how does Amazon bring those applications into those other categories? And what revolutions might those spark within some of those other categories? Crystal Carter: So I think this brings up a lot of interesting ideas around the additional spaces that Amazon operates in. Obviously we think a lot about how Amazon is working in the e-commerce space, but that is a single arm of their activity. So I think that he mentioned some of the delivery logistics things. He mentioned shopping, food shopping for instance in Alexa, and combining those abilities. For instance, if Amazon knows that you had a delivery from Kroger or wherever, and they know what food you got delivered and they know what appliances you have because you bought them from Amazon. Mordy Oberstein: No, too much. Crystal Carter: No, well, there's that. But there's also the case that they know all the things, and they may very well, you could set a set of skill for instance. I mean, again, this is big sky thinking or whatever. And Amazon, if you do this, please give me, I can send you my Venmo details, but if they know you have an air fryer and they know you bought a bunch of stuff, and Alexa could plan your meals for you and say, "In your air fryer, do this, this, and this with this food, do that, that and that from a generative space." And again, that's adding more value to the tools that you're already using, which I think is where AI really in all of these guises really works well where there's a tool that you're already using, there's a tool that you're already familiar with that has a number of data sets and data points that they're already referencing. And they're able to combine those two to offer you suggestions or to otherwise enhance the experience that you already have. So in the situation where, for instance, if you have a partner that's done the shopping, you might not know what's in the refrigerator because you weren't there in the shop. If you were in the shop and you're like, "Oh yeah, I picked up some grapes, then you might know, oh, okay, I could do a..." Does ambrosia salad have grapes in it? I never eat ambrosia salad. This is a terrible example. Mordy Oberstein: I don't even know what that is. Crystal Carter: Grapes is a terrible example. Mordy Oberstein: You lost me at salad. Crystal Carter: Okay, cheddar cheese, right? So let's say I didn't know that somebody picked up cheddar cheese, but somebody else bought some cheddar cheese. You say, "What do I cook for dinner, Alexa?" And they say, "Oh, make some macaroni and cheese." You have cheddar cheese, you have pasta, you have this, you have that. And you go, "Oh, yeah, I could." Mordy Oberstein: That's great. I would also like to say, don't buy that cheese because your other person in your account already bought the cheese. Crystal Carter: Wait, no, they don't need to buy it. But you can say, "Alexa, what can I make with it?" And they know what's in your refrigerator because you ordered it through them. And then do the thing. Or you can say, "What's a low fat meal that I can make?" They say, "Well, you could make this in your air fryer that I know that you have because you bought one from Amazon six months ago or something." Mordy Oberstein: You know what it'd be great for? I forgot to order peanut butter and I had to go buy peanut butter at the local corner store, but it's like double the price at the corner store. And I wish I didn't forget to buy peanut butter when I ordered my groceries online. What I would've like is for Amazon, whoever grocery store I choose to buy from to say, "Hey, wait a second. Usually you order peanut butter every week. Did you mean to leave it out?" And I would've said, "No, I didn't mean to leave it out. Thank you for saving me $2. I would've had to go buy it at the corner store, which is double the price." Crystal Carter: Right, precisely, precisely. So these are things that are useful. So again, with all of these AI things, what you want is something that adds to it, that adds to something that they already do well. Trying to branch out into something completely different can sometimes be a little bit of a minefield, but building on what you already have is going to make the real difference here. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. Plugging the holes. Use the AI to plug the holes. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Of my grocery shopping. Crystal Carter: Why do you have holes in your grocery shopping? Mordy Oberstein: Because I forget to order the peanut butter. Crystal Carter: It's very difficult to carry your groceries home when there's holes in the bag. Mordy Oberstein: You know why? I will tell you why. I forgot. Because I like the natural peanut butter, not like this chemical eugh that my kids like. And I saw we had a bottle of peanut butter. I'm like, "Oh, okay." It looked like the natural one, but it wasn't. It got confused. So I didn't order the good peanut butter. I thought we already had the good peanut butter. I went go eat a sandwich of peanut butter, and then I realized that I didn't have the real peanut butter. If Amazon would've told me, "Schmendrick, you didn't order the peanut butter," I would've been saved. Crystal Carter: Exactly. These are the things. So there's the other ones where you can think of potentially having your full inventory. You can say, "Amazon, do we have this kind of peanut butter?" Like, "Alexa, do we have this kind of peanut butter?" If they know what things you're ordering. Mordy Oberstein: That would be great. I would do that all the time. It'd be like if it was able, and it should be able to do this relatively easily, if it understands that you order, let's say a package of cheese every other week, and you order one last week and now you're ordering one this week, it would say, "Wait, do you really need that cheese?" Crystal Carter: Right, or for instance, a toothpaste, "Do we have toothpaste?" "You ordered toothpaste last Tuesday, so you probably do have toothpaste, because typically speaking, you ordered toothpaste every six." Mordy Oberstein: I do this all the time. I'm too lazy to get up and go check in the fridge while I'm doing the order online, whether or not I actually have cheese. So now I have tons of cheese, but no peanut butter. Crystal Carter: Right, or somebody else does your order. Mordy Oberstein: Teach me AI save me. Crystal Carter: Or you have people who buy things in bulk, which again is something that people do on Amazon loads. They'll buy things in bulk and then they will hide some of the stuff in a cupboard, or it'll be in the garage, or it'll be in the attic or something. And so then somebody else goes, "Oh, we didn't have any toilet paper." And it's like, "We have 700 rolls of toilet paper in my special toilet paper cupboard," and people might not know that. Mordy Oberstein: But also being able to track what you buy, how often you buy, and watching the trends graph of that. We're spending that much money on cheese every month? Yo, slow down here. That would also be really, really helpful. Crystal Carter: How can I reduce the cost of my weekly shop? Mordy Oberstein: I feel like if Amazon listens to this podcast, I would like a finder's fee for these ideas. Crystal Carter: This is what I'm saying, Jeff, call us up. We can hook you up. Mordy Oberstein: I'm on Twitter, you can find me. I'm on Threads, you can find me. I'm on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Now, if you're looking for more SERP's Up or SERP's Up+, where can you find that? Because this is the end of our episode. Crystal Carter: Now is the end. The end is near. Mordy Oberstein: If you forget, you can have an automatic notification of AI tell you when the next episode is coming out. Or you can just subscribe over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we had a bot write it for us. It's totally AI. The subscription. It's an AI subscription. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: No, it's not an AI. It's just regular I. It's just regular I. Mordy Oberstein: HI, human intelligence. Crystal Carter: Human intelligence with a little automation. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, automation's always a good thing. But legitimately, if you're looking for more SERP's Up, well, thank you for joining us first off for the first ever edition of the SERP's Up+ podcast. If you're going to miss us, don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode of Regular SERP's Up where we're diving into the wide world of SEO. And we're back next month with another SERP's Up+, as we dive into the power of being authentic in your marketing with Spark Toro's owned Ran Fishkin. Look for wherever you can consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO and marketing, check out all the great content and webinars and articles we have over the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and 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

Stéphane Durand is Senior Partner Manager at Uberall, where he manages and grows global strategic partnerships. A Gold and Silver LPO Certified practitioner and GEO Studio Certified, he helps partners unlock local visibility, reputation, and AI-driven discovery at scale. Stéphane Durand Senior Partner Manager at Uberall Stéphane Durand is Senior Partner Manager at Uberall, where he manages and grows global strategic partnerships. A Gold and Silver LPO Certified practitioner and GEO Studio Certified, he helps partners unlock local visibility, reputation, and AI-driven discovery at scale. Articles & Resources 15 May 2026 Local SEO 101: An introduction Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back SEO blog writing Google Doc template Craft blog articles that give search engines and users what they’re looking for with this SEO template. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this collaborative Google Doc to: Format blog articles that contain on-page SEO elements like meta data, URLs and headings Understand how to create a targeted brief for content writers See how to apply keyword research to blog content Learn how to summarize instructions about brand tone of voice, audience specifics and messaging Condense and apply research to a specific blog article Adriana Stein CEO & Founder, AS Marketing LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and Founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing. She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies in 30+ languages for global companies. More about this topic Watch this webinar on outranking the biggest brands with blogging , and read this article on using a blog template to streamline your content creation process for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Jonas Sickler is an accomplished author and SEO manager at Terakeet. He helps marketers unpack the customer journey to deliver more authentic brand experiences through the organic search channel. His advice has appeared in Forbes, CMI, and Search Engine Watch. Jonas Sickler Digital Marketing Analyst Jonas Sickler is an accomplished author and SEO manager at Terakeet. He helps marketers unpack the customer journey to deliver more authentic brand experiences through the organic search channel. His advice has appeared in Forbes, CMI, and Search Engine Watch. Articles & Resources 24 Jan 2023 How to use topic clusters and pillar pages for SEO 6 Sept 2022 Why brands need a full-funnel content marketing strategy 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

Geoff Kennedy is a UK based SEO consultant with over 15 years experience working with clients around the globe. He works with a wide variety of businesses, including well-known brands, specializing in SEO audits and providing strategic support. Geoff Kennedy SEO and Digital Marketing Consultant Geoff Kennedy is a UK based SEO consultant with over 15 years experience working with clients around the globe. He works with a wide variety of businesses, including well-known brands, specializing in SEO audits and providing strategic support. Articles & Resources 23 Mar 2023 Do you really need tools to do 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

Kyle Place "E-E-A-Ts," sleeps, and breathes SEO. As an in-house SEO at Wix.com he creates organic growth strategies that satisfy the users (and search engines). Kyle also worked in an agency, helping both local businesses and SaaS companies to expand their online presence. Kyle Place SEO Specialist, Wix.com Kyle Place "E-E-A-Ts," sleeps, and breathes SEO. As an in-house SEO at Wix.com he creates organic growth strategies that satisfy the users (and search engines). Kyle also worked in an agency, helping both local businesses and SaaS companies to expand their online presence. Articles & Resources 1 Jun 2023 8 signs that you need to invest in 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

They will try, but after this episode, they won't succeed in pulling the wool over your eyes. Mordy and George share how to know good SEO advice from bad. Learn how to pick out SEO advice that leads to poor practices with packaged, “wash, rinse and repeat” tactics. Listen in as our hosts deliver their rubric for knowing when you should or should not follow the SEO advice you come across! Himani Kankaria, the founder of Missive Digital, shares how some great SEO advice prevented her sites from being hit by Google’s Penguin algorithm updates. Want to know where you should look for good SEO advice? Mordy and George share their personal list of great sources of SEO advice and strategy! Back How to know good SEO advice from bad? They will try, but after this episode, they won't succeed in pulling the wool over your eyes. Mordy and George share how to know good SEO advice from bad. Learn how to pick out SEO advice that leads to poor practices with packaged, “wash, rinse and repeat” tactics. Listen in as our hosts deliver their rubric for knowing when you should or should not follow the SEO advice you come across! Himani Kankaria, the founder of Missive Digital, shares how some great SEO advice prevented her sites from being hit by Google’s Penguin algorithm updates. Want to know where you should look for good SEO advice? Mordy and George share their personal list of great sources of SEO advice and strategy! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 05 | September 21, 2022 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 36:53 This week’s guests Himani Kankaria Himani Kankaria is the Founder of Missive Digital, an organic marketing agency that focuses on enhancing the brand positioning of businesses to maximize ROI and brand loyalty through organic marketing channels. She specializes in strategizing, creating, and optimizing content for users and SERP features like Featured Snippets. Being in this industry for the past 12+ years, she has helped SaaS and Technology businesses multiply their organic presence and conversions through organic marketing channels. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding. Here at Wix and filling in for our head of SEO communications, crystal Carter, is Wix's own head of SEO editorial, George Nguyen. George Nguyen: How's it going, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was like the whole build-up, hey, Mahalo. And then, Hey Mordy. Hey George. How's it going? George Nguyen: I have big shoes to fill. Crystal, she brings her own energy and our listeners might not be used to me. So I hope I'm stepping into it, treading lightly. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I understand. I understand George. That's totally fine. George Nguyen: Yeah. Easing into it. Yeah. Crystal has fans. I don't want to upset those fans. You know how fans can get? Crystal's fans? Mordy Oberstein: Crystal has rabid fan base. George Nguyen: Yeah. It's like Crystal fans and then a little bit further down the list K-pop stans is what I'm really afraid of on the internet. And then way down there is the rest of the SEOs. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, don't worry George. Crystal's fans are going to love you. We all love you. There's one thing you should remember, George and that's the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we now automatically create image site maps for our product event and forum vertical pages with more page types coming soon. All right, we've got a jam-packed episode. You ready for this? I'm ready for this. George, are you ready for this? George Nguyen: I'm so ready. Because I actually have something to say. Sometimes I shy away from things, but I feel like I have a lot to say here. [00:01:31] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to try to dramatize the whole intro then. George Nguyen: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. They will try, but after this episode, they won't succeed in pulling the wools over your eyes. That's right. In this episode, we're covering how to know good SEO advice from bad as an inspiring SEO. This episode is a must listen, because I will personally tell you when I started in the SEO world, I took on some bad SEO advice. And I can see that other SEO vets they're nodding right along, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When you got into the industry there was some not-so-great SEO content that you thought was maybe true, possibly true. And then it wasn't. So we'll dive into how to sift through the noise with a bonus piece of SEO advice from the one and the only Himani Kankaria. Also, did you catch when Google doesn't show the number of results at the top of the SERP? If you didn't, well we'll tell you when it happens and more importantly, why that actually matters. Plus you always wanted some snappy SEO news so we're going to give you some snappy SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness. Sit back, relax, and take it all in because the SERP's Up podcast begins now with a look at how to know good SEO advice from bad. [00:02:50] Focus Topic of the Week: Good SEO Advice vs. Bad George Nguyen: Good advice results in positive outcomes, such as getting closer to your business goals, be a greater search visibility and traffic. Cha-ching. Bad advice though, it costs you, which may be more evident over the long run. It sets your visibility back and that hinders your business goals. Ultimately though, SEO miseducation analyst tactics are totally avoidable even in local SEO. And not being able to succeed just because you don't know the difference or you don't know what guidance to apply, that's the ultimate missed opportunity. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, George, I love the fact that you did your own sound effects like cha-ching. George Nguyen: I love that. Mordy Oberstein: You bring your own set. You're like the guy from Police Academy. George Nguyen: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Nice George. A nice addition to the SERP's Up podcast my friend. George Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So this is a topic that's really close to my heart. I really love SEO education, I'm a former teacher. So it really speaks to me. There's so many ways to know that the content that you're looking at is maybe not the greatest. So I'm going to start off by, here's my top, top piece of advice for you. If you're reading something and it's not nuanced, it's an absolute and to quote Star Wars only Siths speak in absolutes. That's probably not the best advice to listen to. So it's a good lesson by the way, for your own self, right? It's a difference between being authoritative and trustworthy and not being authoritative and trustworthy is being nuanced. Even if it's beginner content. So at a minimum, you need to let your users know the layers of information that are still left to be explored. Because you can't possibly cover everything. You can't possibly offer the ultimate advice about anything in just one piece of content. If you SEO advice, that's telling you 50% of the time you should be doing this, but doesn't put a caveat of it depends or as a general rule spend 50% of your time, might be a good way to allocate your resources. Then at most the take that you're reading or listening to or watching is overreaching because there is no yeah, X amount of time you should be doing this in the absolute sense. Any absolute, always needs to be qualified. And that's so true in SEO. So if you see something like that, that's not doing that maybe take pause for a minute and think into it a bit. George Nguyen: Absolutely Mordy. And if I could just piggyback on what you said there, building on a little bit. This is actually why, if you were venturing into the SEO space and you're running across the line, which is our unofficial slogan in the industry, “it depends”. It grates on you after a while to keep hearing a non-answer. It depends. But really “it depends” is not the answer. People are giving you, what they're telling you is it's a nuanced answer and that they're lacking the information that they need about you and your business and you and your goals to actually provide you with a relevant answer. So that's why “it depends” is kind of a thing. But this is great advice from you, Mordy, especially for the content creators among us who are trying to get out SEO best practices and how they create their content's a huge deal. Mordy Oberstein: This is so true George. By the way, I think that's kind of why you see so much because people don't want to get into that “it depends” all the time or that's not a way to really market yourself. And that is hard from a marketing point of view that I think it lends into this idea of lack of nuance and lack of accuracy in terms of growth expectations and over promising in SEO, right? I mean, you've probably seen tons of that. George Nguyen: Yeah. So this is just going to help you in general, identify when somebody's trying to pull the wool over your eyes I suppose. Think about what the underlying motivations are here. This is going to be a running theme. So we're going to bring it up again. But timelines, growth expectations, over promising is super easy in every field, but look at your competition. What is your goal here within not just your business goal, but even more specifically, if you're thinking about ranking for a specific keyword and you really think that this is what you want to build your content around, what's going to get you to that next stage of your business. Look at who is already ranking in those top positions for what you want to rank for. Was that competition built in a day? Was it built in the timeline that maybe you're reading on some blog or some consultant is telling you is reasonable? Does it look like it's reasonable? If it clearly took months to research and organize the content and you're seeing advice that guarantees it and all the effort that is required is your credit card to buy 8 trillion backlinks for $4.99. If it was that easy, the rankings would be absolute chaos. Every time you go to do a search, you would just see a totally different set of results. So even from that basis you know, well, things take time and we're going to get into a little bit more of how you can check for validity a bit later on, but I'm holding onto that. Mordy, do you have anything to add here? Mordy Oberstein: But what's funny about that is that you see so many cases of things like you go on YouTube, you type in how do I do SEO and you see something like rank number one. Let me tell you a little secret about SEO. There are certain cases where it's probably going to be impossible for you to rank number one. I always use the case of heart attack prevention. It's a really hard keyword to rank for. There's so much authority and nuance that goes into that keyword and Google tends to rank Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and Harvard health. Are you one of those three websites? No. Then you're not going to rank number one for that keyword. And that's fine. There are things you can do to get traffic around that topic without ranking number one for that. So this idea of over-promising is very rampant and it's something I totally agree, just steer away from. And to me, I think that spills over to a lot of the things you read around SEO studies. 'Cause they've come up very authoritative, but they also kind of oversell in a similar way sometimes where you'll see I did this or the study shows this and that means you will get this kind of growth and they show some kind of graph and this crazy amount of growth that happens after you implement the tactic that their study shows that was successful for them. But a lot of the times, again, you need to take context and nuance into that. Again, if they're doing a case study, well, is your site in the same situation as that site, like you mentioned before, possibly not? And even if it's a kind of study where we analyze 5 million URLs or 5 million result pages and here's the data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you know what's funny, and I have a bone to pick about that's with the SEO world a little bit. Have you ever read a thesis paper from a grad student or a Ph.D. student, George? George Nguyen: Yeah, a few times. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So after the abstract, what's the first thing they always start off with? George Nguyen: Table of contents. Mordy Oberstein: A great answer. That and the limitations of the study. George Nguyen: The methodologies. Mordy Oberstein: Right, methodology and limitations. George Nguyen: That's what I always look at. The sample size and things like that. Those are extremely important. Mordy Oberstein: All those kind of things. And they're telling you, we only looked at this, we didn't look at that. We looked at this many, but not that many. And that's really important information. Not because, oh, this study must not be good. There are limitations. That's a silly way to look at it. It's really important information because it tells you how to use the data in the study. Where are the limits of this data? Where is this data appropriate to apply it to? Where is it inappropriate to apply it to? George, let me ask you another question. What information do you never see in an SEO study? Would it be the limitations? George Nguyen: Yeah. Sometimes some people are good enough about pointing out that due to the way click stream behavior works, those kind of studies, they'll generally tell you, more reputable data providers will tell you how their data works. But oftentimes the methodology and stuff, sometimes it's there, but it's not something that they really want to tell you about. Oh, we interviewed 80 marketers. Mordy Oberstein: Right. We looked at a hundred million keywords, but what kind of keywords? Where'd you get the data from? What was the data period and how might that impact what you're looking at? So you could throw big numbers at something, it sounds impressive, but it may not actually be anything that you can apply to your particular situation. And again, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of great people doing great work and great studies and great data providers out there and you'll notice, and that's my point, is that they'll generally tell you what they did, how they did it and some of the really good ones will tell you the limit. I looked at these keywords, but that's a problem because. And that's a key indicator when you're looking at an SEO study of whether or not that's good SEO advice or bad SEO advice. George Nguyen: Sometimes it'll even tell you how to use that data or how not to use that data. They'll just be like, this is purely contextual and correlation doesn't mean causation. It could be these other factors. One classic example is oh, people say pages with low bounce rate rank well. Well it's probably the opposite. Pages that rank well for other reasons have low bounce rate. So just think about that. But while we're talking about this focus, right? We're not just focusing on the nitty-gritty details of a study. You really want to look at the other components of what the advice is really telling you. Does it take into account search intent. Does it take into account you're vertical because this goes back to the heart of “it depends”. Because my business selling, I don't know let's say action figures is going to be totally different from Mordy's... I'm really trying hard not to make a really cheap potshot joke here at Mordy. Mordy's business of selling designer sunglasses, right? I'm going to go with something classy. Mordy Oberstein: Great shot at me George. That's why you're my best friend because you take really bad shots at me. George Nguyen: It was disciplined here not to take a pot shot. But the goals, the audiences are different. Mordy's probably going to sell way more sunglasses in summer. As where for me, it's not going to be a seasonal thing. But let's get into this advice here. So I'm going to go through a more tangible example for you about search and 10, your vertical specifically. So my fiance, who's an online personal trainer and nutrition coach asked me if she should try to rank for the term vegan bodybuilding as she's building out her business plan. Mordy Oberstein: Is your fiance a bodybuilder? George Nguyen: She is a bikini competitor. So yes she is a bodybuilder. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Wow. George Nguyen: Yeah, I know I used to be super into it, but now I don't do anything. Mordy Oberstein: Now you SEO. We don't need exercise. George Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. SEO is all-consuming. Trying to reach some balance here just like you listeners. Trying to find it in myself. But she thought that because no services were listed on the first page of results that the competition would be low. And looking at the SERP, the top results are educational resources like about how to have a vegan lifestyle, listicles of prominent vegan bodybuilders. The related searches is even just a grid of vegan ingredients, which is literally just a grid of vegetables and fruits. It's not that fancy. Clearly not aligned with her objective of marketing her services though. And I'm not saying she got this advice from somewhere. It was just a thought that she had. So maybe you're having the same thought. Oh yeah, nobody... My business is ranked for that. Maybe Google doesn't think that your business should rank for this because if it did then possibly yeah. But it's different because if you're an established brand, you might be able to generate that kind of demand. But if you're not, you have to think, you have to know how your audience searches and you have to know what is the most effective shield against bad advice for this kind of thing. Which our objectives are. Take it a step further to reconcile how your audience searches as in what terms they use and how Google serves them the results. And we're talking about search intent here. To not only help you avoid inappropriate advice that you might be getting from people but also spot potential opportunities to gain more traffic. If there is an opportunity there and like, oh, your customers are definitely searching for this. Maybe it's a super long tail thing and there's no competition. That's an opportunity. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really good point because look, even in the best article or the best webinar or podcast, like this podcast, no matter what they do, no one can predict or understand exactly how it's going to apply to your situation. So as someone consuming this content, you need to think and stop for a second. This sounds wonderful. And it might be wonderful, but how is it applied to me and my site? And while it might be great advice for one site, because of the way you're saying intent is on the SERP right, on the Google results page, Google could be showing one thing and then you're really doing something else. And it may be great advice for the site doing something different than you, but for what you are doing for that keyword, it may not be applicable really at all. And that's up to you as someone consuming the advice to not get caught up in what they're saying, to be able to make that break, stop, drop, and think. Stop, drop, and think does this work for me even though it sounds really, really, really good? That's a good point, George. George Nguyen: You're in marketing. When we're talking here, you're obviously looking to market your business and you're trying to build hype here, but don't fall victim to somebody else's hype if it isn't specific enough to your business, if it doesn't ultimately tie back to that because otherwise, why are you doing this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. And something else about that, that just made me think about this, that sometimes, cause we're talking about market or sometimes when people are running SEO content, it's important to understand who they are and what they're doing and why they might be writing it. I'm not saying there's an ulterior motive. That's not what I'm trying to get at. But someone who's really into site audits. They just love site audits. They breeze... And there are people like this. And when you sometimes talk to them, they are so overzealous about site audits that the context of all the other things that are going on in that particular moment for you. And so while you are reading this article from them and they're saying site audits, like the most important thing ever for any website, you must do this, or everything else is completely worthless, And you start here and end here. Take it all with a grain of salt. That might not be the best outlook for you and where you're at with your business and with your website. So something to be careful of when you're reading something from an enthusiast around one particular strategy or one particular area of SEO is to realize that's their jam. But that doesn't mean that has to be your jam all the time, also. So much jam. George Nguyen: Everything is a nail to a hammer essentially is what we're saying here. Mordy Oberstein: Basically. George Nguyen: Yes. Mordy, let's take a pause here before we really think about the next thing. And what is your jam? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. George Nguyen: In terms of SEO. What is my jam? If I had to define myself in a space, I'd say definitely more education. SEO is the subject matter, but education is the jam across whatever that is for me. And so what does that really mean? It means content. Content creation, not necessarily the technical side. I don't do too much of that at all, but that's what my jam is. What is your jam? Mordy Oberstein: My jam. I love the algorithms. I love reverse engineering what Google's doing on the server, reverse engineering algorithms. I love content, and reverse engineering. I like reverse engineering. You can get that. I like reverse engineering. What's working, what's not working with content. So yeah, I have my jam. I spread out from my jam. I don't do link-building. I really don't like link-building. That's the only thing I really don't like. So when I do read advice around SEO, I do take it as, okay, that's a really great strategy but does that work for me? Because sometimes, it could be a great strategy, but does it work for you? And that's also a legitimate thing. You know, what's also legitimate? Getting more great SEO advice from other great SEO besides for George and myself. [00:17:32] Focus Topic Guest: Himani Kankaria So with that, here's Himani Kankaria talking about how she got advice before Google released its spam hunting algorithm beast known as Penguin, which would obviously penalize the heck out of your website if you were doing spamming link building practices. And here's how it saved her sites. Here's the best advice that Himani Kankaria has ever received. Himani Kankaria: Who remembers the time when we used to do, say 200 or 300 directory submissions in a day? So I'm talking about that pre-Panda and Penguin era. In 2010, I was responsible for link-building activities. And there were a lot of directory sites where I used to see two radio buttons, which said buy a link or exchange a link. And I asked my boss, "Why are we not selecting those radio buttons?" And honestly, I was blessed with one of the best SEO advices. He said, “Himani, If you want to play a long game, never think of exchanging links or buying them, see how you can earn them rather than owning them." It was my first boss and because I was very new to the industry, I blindly followed him. And within two years, I mean you won't believe I saw Panda and Penguin updates ruined the existence of those directory sites. And I'm very thankful to him for such a piece of gold advice he gave to me. I still believe in earning the assets of the website organically. And honestly, we are surely doing great there. But it's not easy and advisable to trust any SEO advice that gets your way. Especially today. These days, getting trapped into bad SEO advice is easier because any random post on any platform can get massive engagement. They talk about niche websites and then showcase how brilliantly they got great results without any solid proof of what strategy they used and how it was implemented. What you can do is verify if Google has any documentation around that advice, or even you can ask any Google Search employee. I mean, I have asked John Mueller a lot, many times, and he has helped me with a lot of great advice. And even you can ask any industry thought leader as well. They are very humble to reply, but it's just that we have to beware of asking stupid questions. So before you listen to any advice, please look at who is giving you that advice. I have my own bunch of people whom I know personally and follow on Twitter and LinkedIn for SEO advice. And they have gained my trust by sharing proof of what they have done, said over the years, and why. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Himani. There's definitely great advice. One is don't buy links, please. Don't buy links. Someone offers you it might sound enticing. Don't buy those links and always check out Google's documentation. Just today, the day of this recording, I found a gem that people were talking about something on Twitter. I looked at the documentation around it and there was something I didn't even realize like, wow, that is a gem that I didn't know, just by reading Google's own documentation in their own guidelines. Great places to get some great SEO advice other than of course our own SEO hub over at wix.com/seo/learn is learningseo.io from Aleyda Solis. Amazing resource. There's seoroundtable.com, which I start off my day reading that from Barry Schwartz. It's a great place to keep up to date with what's happening in the SEO world. And last but not least The Moz Blog. It's a great blog that really was a flourishing Moz community. This has kind of scaled back on that a bit, unfortunately, but the blog itself is absolutely phenomenal. Check out The Moz Blog as well. George any ones you want to add in real quick off the cuff? George Nguyen: Yeah. It depends on really what your jam is, right? You can't not mention Search Engine Land as a news publisher for both PPC and SEO and Barry Schwartz the owner of Search Engine Round Table works there as well. So they have a great format in terms of why marketers should care, especially if you're at agencies and you're not an SMB necessarily, but you're working at an agency. It's definitely written content for you. There's other places if you're looking for data for tracking, Semrush. But keep in mind who these publications serve, everybody's trying to sell you something, right? So think about that when you wade into it, but they are reputable. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. A hundred percent. And we can have a whole podcast episode just about who and what you should read, but we don't have time for that because [00:22:16] Is This New? on this podcast, we give full credit. We don't give partial credit, but we give full credit and full credit here goes to Amos Zimmerman over on our social media team who asked Mordy, George is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Is what new? George, you know when you Google something and way at the top, it says about 1 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. George Nguyen: Yeah, yeah. Impressive. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Which we don't really pay attention to. George Nguyen: 'Cause you can't verify it. Mordy Oberstein: It just looks cool. So many results so quickly. Well Amos, who we give full credit to, because again, on this podcast we give full credit, pointed out that when you search for something like best mystery books, depending upon what country you're in, you get a series of bubble filters. A series of filters at the very, very, very top of the SERP above everything else that lets you refine your search query with options like for teens. So mystery books for teens, for kids, for criminals. Guess what Google does? By the way, that's true, they actually had for criminals I'm pretty sure. George Nguyen: Mystery books for criminals. Educational resources for criminals. Mordy Oberstein: How could I plan my next scheme? By the way, when you click on one of these filters, you go to a whole new service. So if you're a criminal and you're looking for mystery books for criminals, you get taken to a whole new results page about just mystery books for criminals. Which must be a very niche set of authors. Anyway, guess what google doesn't show when it shows these series of filters, these bubble filters at the top of the results page? Did you guess it? That's right, it doesn't show the about 4 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. Amos saw that it's gone. Poof. George Nguyen: I know it's weird. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah it's weird. George Nguyen: It's weird because it's a classic at this point, right? Mordy Oberstein: And you also think- George Nguyen: But are you going to miss it? Mordy Oberstein: I'm putting words in your mouth, I was like who cares. George Nguyen: Yeah. It's just kind of a, who cares type thing. Mordy Oberstein: But by the way, not only is it gone with this particular instance that Amos found, but any time Google shows a carousel at the top of the results page, it's also gone. So Google Steelers roster, they're a football team, you Google their roster, you get a carousel of all the players on their team, little sliding carousel there. Or Google Tom Hanks movie, and you get a carousel, of all Tommy's movies. I call him Tommy we're on a first-name basis. So you get a whole carousel of all of Tommy's movies, but you don't get the about 4 trillion bazillion gazillion results in 0.52 seconds. George, Amos. I'm really sorry. The verdict is not new. This is not new. George Nguyen: Not new? Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was by the way, I ran it by Crystal and she's like, "No, no, I'm pretty sure that's old." So it's not new. But, it's still really important. George Nguyen: It is. Any changes, telling of a larger trend usually. Mordy Oberstein: And in this case, what is that larger trend? So I'm going to tell you, this is really important to know, because it's a great way to understand how the SERP works. I'm just going to run through this as quickly as I can. It's super complicated, but I'm going to try to make it as simple as I possibly can. Are you ready? George Nguyen: That preface helped. Mordy Oberstein: I try. I do try. Okay. This is a great way to understand how the SERP works because there are all sorts of features that can show up for any given search query. So you can have a feature snippet or a big old image pack also known as the image box show up, but there isn't room for all of these things on the actual results page, because you have to show actual results sometimes. So Google has a bidding system. In this case, carousels of Tom Hanks movies or whatever outbid that little line that says about four gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. That's all that happened here. Google has a bidding system and said, we can't fit all this information as one spot. What's more important? We think the carousel all of Tom Hanks movies, when you search for Tom Hanks movies, is more important than us telling you how many results we have in about how many seconds. George Nguyen: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So that's really interesting. Right? Right? Come on. George Nguyen: It is interesting. But then we're also losing an element of transparency. Are we ever going to really verify? Probably somebody could verify this with computer program, but it just seems like if you've been following Google for a long amount of time that every time something disappears or changes you end up wondering, do we know as much about how the company works, about how the search engine works as we used to? So in some ways we know more than ever because it is being transparent. In other ways, things are getting taken away or there are more features on the search results that mean that people don't have to click through. And so when you see even a minor thing taken away, there's that shadow of like, oh, is this not a trustworthy move? In this case, I'm like better results is better results. So I'm okay with it. Mordy Oberstein: In this case, yeah, essentially what's happening here is Google's saying, we like to be transparent about how many results we have and how quickly we have them. Also, it's nice to show how powerful the search engine is. It does show a level of transparency, but they're saying we don't have space for both the carousel of all of Tom Hanks movies and this thing. We think the better result for the more useful information for the user is Tom Hanks' movies and his carousel, not the how many results in how many seconds. But this idea of bidding and how SERP can just bid each other out can have real implications. And it can have a real impact on your organic traffic. I'll give you an example. Take the query, get New York City bagels. When I searched for this, the first thing I got was a featured snippet that lists the most iconic places in New York City to get a New York City bagel. And then Google showed me a local pack that gave me three listings, and three bagel shops, along with their reviews and addresses that I might be able to go and buy a bagel at. Which is weird, by the way, when you think about that. Because you would think the local pack with all of the listings where I can actually buy a bagel should show first for get New York City bagel. But what I think is happening here with this kind of weird query is that Google is bidding on the two features. There's the featured snippet telling me all the classic places to get this bagel. And then there's the feature that's telling me all the places near me right now where I can actually get a bagel that I'm most likely to go get the bagel from, and they're bidding each other out. Why do I think that the very first thing Google started off was not the actual place where I'm most likely to buy? Search intent. I think there's such a strong intent not to find whatever bagel store is right near you so you can actually buy the bagel. Which is what you would normally do. If I was buying pizza, I wouldn't want a whole information of the best pizza places in the entire New York state or the entire New York City. I would just want the places where I can buy a pizza right near me right now. But not so with New York City bagels, George. By the way, George, have you ever had a New York City bagel? George Nguyen: I have, but I've never bought it myself. It's been delivered to me. So I question the legitimacy because it was not special. Mordy Oberstein: But by the way, the fact that you would even do something like have it delivered to you is exactly what I'm talking about here. What am I talking about here? There's such a strong intent, not to find whatever bagel shop is in proximity to where you are searching from. But because New York bagels are such a thing which is why somebody like you in Rhode Island is going to have them ordered to you. Because they're such a thing, Google realized that the intent here is that people are looking to learn more about the iconic places to actually go out and seek that really genuine New York City bagel. Google [inaudible 00:30:06] people will actually travel and go far away to these iconic New York City bagel shops and ignore the local bagel shop, even though it's still in New York City, but it's not more in the iconic places. They'd rather have that information first. So Google's bidding system put the actual places near you second and the iconic places first. So if you're a local place, less visibility, less chance someone's going to find you and less chance of someone actually visiting your local bagel place from the local listings on the results page, because Google's bidding system put that SERP feature second, boom. That's why the about 4 million trillion results being taken away matters. George Nguyen: But I want to introduce a ripple here just for- Mordy Oberstein: Oh I love ripples. George Nguyen: ... listener engagement. Oh yeah. Ripples. Ripples are great. If you're in New York city and I really hope somebody in New York City is listening to this. Why don't you open up an incognito window and type in, Google it, get NYC bagels and hit us up on Twitter. Mordy, what's your handle? Mordy Oberstein: @MordyOberstein. George Nguyen: I'm geochingu, G-E-O-C-H-I-N-G-U. Let us know. Do you get that first, for me, it's a featured snippet from timeout.com about that list of best bagels, because maybe if you're actually in New York, the proximity will change and you'll just get the bagel shops. I'm curious. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. That is interesting. I like that. [00:31:24] Snappy News That is interesting. Speaking of interesting, you know what else is interesting? Some snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Big news from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Quote, Google expands enhanced product experiences to more e-commerce sites, releases new search console reports. So oi plain terms, you no longer, this is big, need to submit your products to Google via Google merchant center to be shown within Google shopping results. This is actually huge because all you need to do now, according to Google is have product structured data markup, and you'll be eligible for Google to pull in your products into Google shopping, which means all of those carousels on the main SERP that Google shows with products in them that come organically from Google shopping, well now you're theoretically eligible for those too, which is amazing. Google also added reporting in search console so you can more easily spot issues with your structured data for products. For Wix users, please note what you have to do in order to be eligible here. Nothing. Literally nothing. We create product structure data for you. So literally you have nothing that you have to do for all of your products to be eligible for Google shopping. How is that? Oh right. Article number two, a little PSA of sorts also from Barry Schwartz. But this time from Search Engine Round Table, because it's not enough for Barry to have one SEO news site, he needs two. Quote, Google review guidelines now prohibit incentivizing removal of negative reviews. Simply if you're offering a gift card or sorts to have folks remove their negative reviews from your Google business profile, this is now a violation of Google's guidelines. Proceed carefully, please. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. It's always snappy with that snappy news. Hey George? George Nguyen: So crisp. Mordy Oberstein: So crisp, so snappy. Before we leave, before we depart from this show, George, thank you for filling in for crystal this week. George Nguyen: No, yeah, I hope I did well. I hope come back. Mordy Oberstein: Well I'll grade you. George Nguyen: Can I come back? Mordy Oberstein: We'll send you a grading system later. George Nguyen: I'm coming back next week. Mordy Oberstein: I know, Crystal's still away next week. So George is coming back, but then we'll send you the grading system. [00:34:10] Follow of the Week But before we leave today, we of course want to leave you with some awesome person from the SEO industry who does awesome things and shares awesome things on Twitter that you could follow to gain more SEO awesomeness. This week of our follow the week is Lily Ray. You know Lily, George. George Nguyen: I do know Lily. She's a wonderful person. I'm [inaudible 00:34:31] seen as many of her speaking sessions and engagements as possible and let me tell you one of the highlights of following her beyond what she talks about in terms of SEO. And this is still kind of SEO related, but she does a lot of searches for queries that are related to her clients. And I'm just like these are off the wall queries. Some of them are kind of adult product type stuff. I remember there was something kind of in there, forgive me if I'm framing this incorrectly Lily, but some of those are just hilarious to me what the results are. And that's kind of one of my daily guilty pleasures, the distractions of SEO Twitter, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: She does put out a ton of information about what she's seeing on the results page. And it's really, really helpful information actually. And it is really funny too sometimes. Which is why you need to follow her on Twitter at @lilyraynyc, speak of NYC, @lilyraynyc on Twitter. And aside from all the webinars and podcasts and conferences she does, she shares so much of her thought process around SEO. And again, what she's seeing out there happening on the results page, she's always sharing and it's always good stuff. Make sure to give Lily a follow and learn from her yourself. George Nguyen: Yeah, I would say that her jam, like we talked about our jams earlier, I would say her jam is definitely expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, EAT and your money, your life content. So if you're working in those verticals where authority, trustworthiness are second to none, definitely worth the follow. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely worth the follow. And speaking of jams, she's also a DJ on the side. So jamming is so applicable to her. Check that out. 360 George. George Nguyen: Wow, that was so organic. It's so easy. Mordy Oberstein: That was organic. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Like what you heard? Well, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or rate us on Spotify. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all-new episode as we dive into more intents, and more problems. SEO for multiple user intents. Should you care? Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO learning up here at Wix at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, and all the webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein George Nguyen Himani Kankaria Lily Ray Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Missive Digital Learning SEO by Aleyda Solis Search Engine Roundtable Search Engine Land Semrush Blog Moz Blog News: Google expands enhanced product experiences to more ecommerce sites, releases new Search Console reports Google Review Guidelines Now Prohibit Incentivizing Removal Of Negative Reviews Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein George Nguyen Himani Kankaria Lily Ray Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Missive Digital Learning SEO by Aleyda Solis Search Engine Roundtable Search Engine Land Semrush Blog Moz Blog News: Google expands enhanced product experiences to more ecommerce sites, releases new Search Console reports Google Review Guidelines Now Prohibit Incentivizing Removal Of Negative Reviews Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding. Here at Wix and filling in for our head of SEO communications, crystal Carter, is Wix's own head of SEO editorial, George Nguyen. George Nguyen: How's it going, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was like the whole build-up, hey, Mahalo. And then, Hey Mordy. Hey George. How's it going? George Nguyen: I have big shoes to fill. Crystal, she brings her own energy and our listeners might not be used to me. So I hope I'm stepping into it, treading lightly. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I understand. I understand George. That's totally fine. George Nguyen: Yeah. Easing into it. Yeah. Crystal has fans. I don't want to upset those fans. You know how fans can get? Crystal's fans? Mordy Oberstein: Crystal has rabid fan base. George Nguyen: Yeah. It's like Crystal fans and then a little bit further down the list K-pop stans is what I'm really afraid of on the internet. And then way down there is the rest of the SEOs. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, don't worry George. Crystal's fans are going to love you. We all love you. There's one thing you should remember, George and that's the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we now automatically create image site maps for our product event and forum vertical pages with more page types coming soon. All right, we've got a jam-packed episode. You ready for this? I'm ready for this. George, are you ready for this? George Nguyen: I'm so ready. Because I actually have something to say. Sometimes I shy away from things, but I feel like I have a lot to say here. [00:01:31] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to try to dramatize the whole intro then. George Nguyen: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. They will try, but after this episode, they won't succeed in pulling the wools over your eyes. That's right. In this episode, we're covering how to know good SEO advice from bad as an inspiring SEO. This episode is a must listen, because I will personally tell you when I started in the SEO world, I took on some bad SEO advice. And I can see that other SEO vets they're nodding right along, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When you got into the industry there was some not-so-great SEO content that you thought was maybe true, possibly true. And then it wasn't. So we'll dive into how to sift through the noise with a bonus piece of SEO advice from the one and the only Himani Kankaria. Also, did you catch when Google doesn't show the number of results at the top of the SERP? If you didn't, well we'll tell you when it happens and more importantly, why that actually matters. Plus you always wanted some snappy SEO news so we're going to give you some snappy SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness. Sit back, relax, and take it all in because the SERP's Up podcast begins now with a look at how to know good SEO advice from bad. [00:02:50] Focus Topic of the Week: Good SEO Advice vs. Bad George Nguyen: Good advice results in positive outcomes, such as getting closer to your business goals, be a greater search visibility and traffic. Cha-ching. Bad advice though, it costs you, which may be more evident over the long run. It sets your visibility back and that hinders your business goals. Ultimately though, SEO miseducation analyst tactics are totally avoidable even in local SEO. And not being able to succeed just because you don't know the difference or you don't know what guidance to apply, that's the ultimate missed opportunity. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, George, I love the fact that you did your own sound effects like cha-ching. George Nguyen: I love that. Mordy Oberstein: You bring your own set. You're like the guy from Police Academy. George Nguyen: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Nice George. A nice addition to the SERP's Up podcast my friend. George Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So this is a topic that's really close to my heart. I really love SEO education, I'm a former teacher. So it really speaks to me. There's so many ways to know that the content that you're looking at is maybe not the greatest. So I'm going to start off by, here's my top, top piece of advice for you. If you're reading something and it's not nuanced, it's an absolute and to quote Star Wars only Siths speak in absolutes. That's probably not the best advice to listen to. So it's a good lesson by the way, for your own self, right? It's a difference between being authoritative and trustworthy and not being authoritative and trustworthy is being nuanced. Even if it's beginner content. So at a minimum, you need to let your users know the layers of information that are still left to be explored. Because you can't possibly cover everything. You can't possibly offer the ultimate advice about anything in just one piece of content. If you SEO advice, that's telling you 50% of the time you should be doing this, but doesn't put a caveat of it depends or as a general rule spend 50% of your time, might be a good way to allocate your resources. Then at most the take that you're reading or listening to or watching is overreaching because there is no yeah, X amount of time you should be doing this in the absolute sense. Any absolute, always needs to be qualified. And that's so true in SEO. So if you see something like that, that's not doing that maybe take pause for a minute and think into it a bit. George Nguyen: Absolutely Mordy. And if I could just piggyback on what you said there, building on a little bit. This is actually why, if you were venturing into the SEO space and you're running across the line, which is our unofficial slogan in the industry, “it depends”. It grates on you after a while to keep hearing a non-answer. It depends. But really “it depends” is not the answer. People are giving you, what they're telling you is it's a nuanced answer and that they're lacking the information that they need about you and your business and you and your goals to actually provide you with a relevant answer. So that's why “it depends” is kind of a thing. But this is great advice from you, Mordy, especially for the content creators among us who are trying to get out SEO best practices and how they create their content's a huge deal. Mordy Oberstein: This is so true George. By the way, I think that's kind of why you see so much because people don't want to get into that “it depends” all the time or that's not a way to really market yourself. And that is hard from a marketing point of view that I think it lends into this idea of lack of nuance and lack of accuracy in terms of growth expectations and over promising in SEO, right? I mean, you've probably seen tons of that. George Nguyen: Yeah. So this is just going to help you in general, identify when somebody's trying to pull the wool over your eyes I suppose. Think about what the underlying motivations are here. This is going to be a running theme. So we're going to bring it up again. But timelines, growth expectations, over promising is super easy in every field, but look at your competition. What is your goal here within not just your business goal, but even more specifically, if you're thinking about ranking for a specific keyword and you really think that this is what you want to build your content around, what's going to get you to that next stage of your business. Look at who is already ranking in those top positions for what you want to rank for. Was that competition built in a day? Was it built in the timeline that maybe you're reading on some blog or some consultant is telling you is reasonable? Does it look like it's reasonable? If it clearly took months to research and organize the content and you're seeing advice that guarantees it and all the effort that is required is your credit card to buy 8 trillion backlinks for $4.99. If it was that easy, the rankings would be absolute chaos. Every time you go to do a search, you would just see a totally different set of results. So even from that basis you know, well, things take time and we're going to get into a little bit more of how you can check for validity a bit later on, but I'm holding onto that. Mordy, do you have anything to add here? Mordy Oberstein: But what's funny about that is that you see so many cases of things like you go on YouTube, you type in how do I do SEO and you see something like rank number one. Let me tell you a little secret about SEO. There are certain cases where it's probably going to be impossible for you to rank number one. I always use the case of heart attack prevention. It's a really hard keyword to rank for. There's so much authority and nuance that goes into that keyword and Google tends to rank Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and Harvard health. Are you one of those three websites? No. Then you're not going to rank number one for that keyword. And that's fine. There are things you can do to get traffic around that topic without ranking number one for that. So this idea of over-promising is very rampant and it's something I totally agree, just steer away from. And to me, I think that spills over to a lot of the things you read around SEO studies. 'Cause they've come up very authoritative, but they also kind of oversell in a similar way sometimes where you'll see I did this or the study shows this and that means you will get this kind of growth and they show some kind of graph and this crazy amount of growth that happens after you implement the tactic that their study shows that was successful for them. But a lot of the times, again, you need to take context and nuance into that. Again, if they're doing a case study, well, is your site in the same situation as that site, like you mentioned before, possibly not? And even if it's a kind of study where we analyze 5 million URLs or 5 million result pages and here's the data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you know what's funny, and I have a bone to pick about that's with the SEO world a little bit. Have you ever read a thesis paper from a grad student or a Ph.D. student, George? George Nguyen: Yeah, a few times. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So after the abstract, what's the first thing they always start off with? George Nguyen: Table of contents. Mordy Oberstein: A great answer. That and the limitations of the study. George Nguyen: The methodologies. Mordy Oberstein: Right, methodology and limitations. George Nguyen: That's what I always look at. The sample size and things like that. Those are extremely important. Mordy Oberstein: All those kind of things. And they're telling you, we only looked at this, we didn't look at that. We looked at this many, but not that many. And that's really important information. Not because, oh, this study must not be good. There are limitations. That's a silly way to look at it. It's really important information because it tells you how to use the data in the study. Where are the limits of this data? Where is this data appropriate to apply it to? Where is it inappropriate to apply it to? George, let me ask you another question. What information do you never see in an SEO study? Would it be the limitations? George Nguyen: Yeah. Sometimes some people are good enough about pointing out that due to the way click stream behavior works, those kind of studies, they'll generally tell you, more reputable data providers will tell you how their data works. But oftentimes the methodology and stuff, sometimes it's there, but it's not something that they really want to tell you about. Oh, we interviewed 80 marketers. Mordy Oberstein: Right. We looked at a hundred million keywords, but what kind of keywords? Where'd you get the data from? What was the data period and how might that impact what you're looking at? So you could throw big numbers at something, it sounds impressive, but it may not actually be anything that you can apply to your particular situation. And again, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of great people doing great work and great studies and great data providers out there and you'll notice, and that's my point, is that they'll generally tell you what they did, how they did it and some of the really good ones will tell you the limit. I looked at these keywords, but that's a problem because. And that's a key indicator when you're looking at an SEO study of whether or not that's good SEO advice or bad SEO advice. George Nguyen: Sometimes it'll even tell you how to use that data or how not to use that data. They'll just be like, this is purely contextual and correlation doesn't mean causation. It could be these other factors. One classic example is oh, people say pages with low bounce rate rank well. Well it's probably the opposite. Pages that rank well for other reasons have low bounce rate. So just think about that. But while we're talking about this focus, right? We're not just focusing on the nitty-gritty details of a study. You really want to look at the other components of what the advice is really telling you. Does it take into account search intent. Does it take into account you're vertical because this goes back to the heart of “it depends”. Because my business selling, I don't know let's say action figures is going to be totally different from Mordy's... I'm really trying hard not to make a really cheap potshot joke here at Mordy. Mordy's business of selling designer sunglasses, right? I'm going to go with something classy. Mordy Oberstein: Great shot at me George. That's why you're my best friend because you take really bad shots at me. George Nguyen: It was disciplined here not to take a pot shot. But the goals, the audiences are different. Mordy's probably going to sell way more sunglasses in summer. As where for me, it's not going to be a seasonal thing. But let's get into this advice here. So I'm going to go through a more tangible example for you about search and 10, your vertical specifically. So my fiance, who's an online personal trainer and nutrition coach asked me if she should try to rank for the term vegan bodybuilding as she's building out her business plan. Mordy Oberstein: Is your fiance a bodybuilder? George Nguyen: She is a bikini competitor. So yes she is a bodybuilder. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Wow. George Nguyen: Yeah, I know I used to be super into it, but now I don't do anything. Mordy Oberstein: Now you SEO. We don't need exercise. George Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. SEO is all-consuming. Trying to reach some balance here just like you listeners. Trying to find it in myself. But she thought that because no services were listed on the first page of results that the competition would be low. And looking at the SERP, the top results are educational resources like about how to have a vegan lifestyle, listicles of prominent vegan bodybuilders. The related searches is even just a grid of vegan ingredients, which is literally just a grid of vegetables and fruits. It's not that fancy. Clearly not aligned with her objective of marketing her services though. And I'm not saying she got this advice from somewhere. It was just a thought that she had. So maybe you're having the same thought. Oh yeah, nobody... My business is ranked for that. Maybe Google doesn't think that your business should rank for this because if it did then possibly yeah. But it's different because if you're an established brand, you might be able to generate that kind of demand. But if you're not, you have to think, you have to know how your audience searches and you have to know what is the most effective shield against bad advice for this kind of thing. Which our objectives are. Take it a step further to reconcile how your audience searches as in what terms they use and how Google serves them the results. And we're talking about search intent here. To not only help you avoid inappropriate advice that you might be getting from people but also spot potential opportunities to gain more traffic. If there is an opportunity there and like, oh, your customers are definitely searching for this. Maybe it's a super long tail thing and there's no competition. That's an opportunity. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really good point because look, even in the best article or the best webinar or podcast, like this podcast, no matter what they do, no one can predict or understand exactly how it's going to apply to your situation. So as someone consuming this content, you need to think and stop for a second. This sounds wonderful. And it might be wonderful, but how is it applied to me and my site? And while it might be great advice for one site, because of the way you're saying intent is on the SERP right, on the Google results page, Google could be showing one thing and then you're really doing something else. And it may be great advice for the site doing something different than you, but for what you are doing for that keyword, it may not be applicable really at all. And that's up to you as someone consuming the advice to not get caught up in what they're saying, to be able to make that break, stop, drop, and think. Stop, drop, and think does this work for me even though it sounds really, really, really good? That's a good point, George. George Nguyen: You're in marketing. When we're talking here, you're obviously looking to market your business and you're trying to build hype here, but don't fall victim to somebody else's hype if it isn't specific enough to your business, if it doesn't ultimately tie back to that because otherwise, why are you doing this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. And something else about that, that just made me think about this, that sometimes, cause we're talking about market or sometimes when people are running SEO content, it's important to understand who they are and what they're doing and why they might be writing it. I'm not saying there's an ulterior motive. That's not what I'm trying to get at. But someone who's really into site audits. They just love site audits. They breeze... And there are people like this. And when you sometimes talk to them, they are so overzealous about site audits that the context of all the other things that are going on in that particular moment for you. And so while you are reading this article from them and they're saying site audits, like the most important thing ever for any website, you must do this, or everything else is completely worthless, And you start here and end here. Take it all with a grain of salt. That might not be the best outlook for you and where you're at with your business and with your website. So something to be careful of when you're reading something from an enthusiast around one particular strategy or one particular area of SEO is to realize that's their jam. But that doesn't mean that has to be your jam all the time, also. So much jam. George Nguyen: Everything is a nail to a hammer essentially is what we're saying here. Mordy Oberstein: Basically. George Nguyen: Yes. Mordy, let's take a pause here before we really think about the next thing. And what is your jam? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. George Nguyen: In terms of SEO. What is my jam? If I had to define myself in a space, I'd say definitely more education. SEO is the subject matter, but education is the jam across whatever that is for me. And so what does that really mean? It means content. Content creation, not necessarily the technical side. I don't do too much of that at all, but that's what my jam is. What is your jam? Mordy Oberstein: My jam. I love the algorithms. I love reverse engineering what Google's doing on the server, reverse engineering algorithms. I love content, and reverse engineering. I like reverse engineering. You can get that. I like reverse engineering. What's working, what's not working with content. So yeah, I have my jam. I spread out from my jam. I don't do link-building. I really don't like link-building. That's the only thing I really don't like. So when I do read advice around SEO, I do take it as, okay, that's a really great strategy but does that work for me? Because sometimes, it could be a great strategy, but does it work for you? And that's also a legitimate thing. You know, what's also legitimate? Getting more great SEO advice from other great SEO besides for George and myself. [00:17:32] Focus Topic Guest: Himani Kankaria So with that, here's Himani Kankaria talking about how she got advice before Google released its spam hunting algorithm beast known as Penguin, which would obviously penalize the heck out of your website if you were doing spamming link building practices. And here's how it saved her sites. Here's the best advice that Himani Kankaria has ever received. Himani Kankaria: Who remembers the time when we used to do, say 200 or 300 directory submissions in a day? So I'm talking about that pre-Panda and Penguin era. In 2010, I was responsible for link-building activities. And there were a lot of directory sites where I used to see two radio buttons, which said buy a link or exchange a link. And I asked my boss, "Why are we not selecting those radio buttons?" And honestly, I was blessed with one of the best SEO advices. He said, “Himani, If you want to play a long game, never think of exchanging links or buying them, see how you can earn them rather than owning them." It was my first boss and because I was very new to the industry, I blindly followed him. And within two years, I mean you won't believe I saw Panda and Penguin updates ruined the existence of those directory sites. And I'm very thankful to him for such a piece of gold advice he gave to me. I still believe in earning the assets of the website organically. And honestly, we are surely doing great there. But it's not easy and advisable to trust any SEO advice that gets your way. Especially today. These days, getting trapped into bad SEO advice is easier because any random post on any platform can get massive engagement. They talk about niche websites and then showcase how brilliantly they got great results without any solid proof of what strategy they used and how it was implemented. What you can do is verify if Google has any documentation around that advice, or even you can ask any Google Search employee. I mean, I have asked John Mueller a lot, many times, and he has helped me with a lot of great advice. And even you can ask any industry thought leader as well. They are very humble to reply, but it's just that we have to beware of asking stupid questions. So before you listen to any advice, please look at who is giving you that advice. I have my own bunch of people whom I know personally and follow on Twitter and LinkedIn for SEO advice. And they have gained my trust by sharing proof of what they have done, said over the years, and why. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Himani. There's definitely great advice. One is don't buy links, please. Don't buy links. Someone offers you it might sound enticing. Don't buy those links and always check out Google's documentation. Just today, the day of this recording, I found a gem that people were talking about something on Twitter. I looked at the documentation around it and there was something I didn't even realize like, wow, that is a gem that I didn't know, just by reading Google's own documentation in their own guidelines. Great places to get some great SEO advice other than of course our own SEO hub over at wix.com/seo/learn is learningseo.io from Aleyda Solis. Amazing resource. There's seoroundtable.com, which I start off my day reading that from Barry Schwartz. It's a great place to keep up to date with what's happening in the SEO world. And last but not least The Moz Blog. It's a great blog that really was a flourishing Moz community. This has kind of scaled back on that a bit, unfortunately, but the blog itself is absolutely phenomenal. Check out The Moz Blog as well. George any ones you want to add in real quick off the cuff? George Nguyen: Yeah. It depends on really what your jam is, right? You can't not mention Search Engine Land as a news publisher for both PPC and SEO and Barry Schwartz the owner of Search Engine Round Table works there as well. So they have a great format in terms of why marketers should care, especially if you're at agencies and you're not an SMB necessarily, but you're working at an agency. It's definitely written content for you. There's other places if you're looking for data for tracking, Semrush. But keep in mind who these publications serve, everybody's trying to sell you something, right? So think about that when you wade into it, but they are reputable. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. A hundred percent. And we can have a whole podcast episode just about who and what you should read, but we don't have time for that because [00:22:16] Is This New? on this podcast, we give full credit. We don't give partial credit, but we give full credit and full credit here goes to Amos Zimmerman over on our social media team who asked Mordy, George is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Is what new? George, you know when you Google something and way at the top, it says about 1 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. George Nguyen: Yeah, yeah. Impressive. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Which we don't really pay attention to. George Nguyen: 'Cause you can't verify it. Mordy Oberstein: It just looks cool. So many results so quickly. Well Amos, who we give full credit to, because again, on this podcast we give full credit, pointed out that when you search for something like best mystery books, depending upon what country you're in, you get a series of bubble filters. A series of filters at the very, very, very top of the SERP above everything else that lets you refine your search query with options like for teens. So mystery books for teens, for kids, for criminals. Guess what Google does? By the way, that's true, they actually had for criminals I'm pretty sure. George Nguyen: Mystery books for criminals. Educational resources for criminals. Mordy Oberstein: How could I plan my next scheme? By the way, when you click on one of these filters, you go to a whole new service. So if you're a criminal and you're looking for mystery books for criminals, you get taken to a whole new results page about just mystery books for criminals. Which must be a very niche set of authors. Anyway, guess what google doesn't show when it shows these series of filters, these bubble filters at the top of the results page? Did you guess it? That's right, it doesn't show the about 4 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. Amos saw that it's gone. Poof. George Nguyen: I know it's weird. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah it's weird. George Nguyen: It's weird because it's a classic at this point, right? Mordy Oberstein: And you also think- George Nguyen: But are you going to miss it? Mordy Oberstein: I'm putting words in your mouth, I was like who cares. George Nguyen: Yeah. It's just kind of a, who cares type thing. Mordy Oberstein: But by the way, not only is it gone with this particular instance that Amos found, but any time Google shows a carousel at the top of the results page, it's also gone. So Google Steelers roster, they're a football team, you Google their roster, you get a carousel of all the players on their team, little sliding carousel there. Or Google Tom Hanks movie, and you get a carousel, of all Tommy's movies. I call him Tommy we're on a first-name basis. So you get a whole carousel of all of Tommy's movies, but you don't get the about 4 trillion bazillion gazillion results in 0.52 seconds. George, Amos. I'm really sorry. The verdict is not new. This is not new. George Nguyen: Not new? Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was by the way, I ran it by Crystal and she's like, "No, no, I'm pretty sure that's old." So it's not new. But, it's still really important. George Nguyen: It is. Any changes, telling of a larger trend usually. Mordy Oberstein: And in this case, what is that larger trend? So I'm going to tell you, this is really important to know, because it's a great way to understand how the SERP works. I'm just going to run through this as quickly as I can. It's super complicated, but I'm going to try to make it as simple as I possibly can. Are you ready? George Nguyen: That preface helped. Mordy Oberstein: I try. I do try. Okay. This is a great way to understand how the SERP works because there are all sorts of features that can show up for any given search query. So you can have a feature snippet or a big old image pack also known as the image box show up, but there isn't room for all of these things on the actual results page, because you have to show actual results sometimes. So Google has a bidding system. In this case, carousels of Tom Hanks movies or whatever outbid that little line that says about four gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. That's all that happened here. Google has a bidding system and said, we can't fit all this information as one spot. What's more important? We think the carousel all of Tom Hanks movies, when you search for Tom Hanks movies, is more important than us telling you how many results we have in about how many seconds. George Nguyen: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So that's really interesting. Right? Right? Come on. George Nguyen: It is interesting. But then we're also losing an element of transparency. Are we ever going to really verify? Probably somebody could verify this with computer program, but it just seems like if you've been following Google for a long amount of time that every time something disappears or changes you end up wondering, do we know as much about how the company works, about how the search engine works as we used to? So in some ways we know more than ever because it is being transparent. In other ways, things are getting taken away or there are more features on the search results that mean that people don't have to click through. And so when you see even a minor thing taken away, there's that shadow of like, oh, is this not a trustworthy move? In this case, I'm like better results is better results. So I'm okay with it. Mordy Oberstein: In this case, yeah, essentially what's happening here is Google's saying, we like to be transparent about how many results we have and how quickly we have them. Also, it's nice to show how powerful the search engine is. It does show a level of transparency, but they're saying we don't have space for both the carousel of all of Tom Hanks movies and this thing. We think the better result for the more useful information for the user is Tom Hanks' movies and his carousel, not the how many results in how many seconds. But this idea of bidding and how SERP can just bid each other out can have real implications. And it can have a real impact on your organic traffic. I'll give you an example. Take the query, get New York City bagels. When I searched for this, the first thing I got was a featured snippet that lists the most iconic places in New York City to get a New York City bagel. And then Google showed me a local pack that gave me three listings, and three bagel shops, along with their reviews and addresses that I might be able to go and buy a bagel at. Which is weird, by the way, when you think about that. Because you would think the local pack with all of the listings where I can actually buy a bagel should show first for get New York City bagel. But what I think is happening here with this kind of weird query is that Google is bidding on the two features. There's the featured snippet telling me all the classic places to get this bagel. And then there's the feature that's telling me all the places near me right now where I can actually get a bagel that I'm most likely to go get the bagel from, and they're bidding each other out. Why do I think that the very first thing Google started off was not the actual place where I'm most likely to buy? Search intent. I think there's such a strong intent not to find whatever bagel store is right near you so you can actually buy the bagel. Which is what you would normally do. If I was buying pizza, I wouldn't want a whole information of the best pizza places in the entire New York state or the entire New York City. I would just want the places where I can buy a pizza right near me right now. But not so with New York City bagels, George. By the way, George, have you ever had a New York City bagel? George Nguyen: I have, but I've never bought it myself. It's been delivered to me. So I question the legitimacy because it was not special. Mordy Oberstein: But by the way, the fact that you would even do something like have it delivered to you is exactly what I'm talking about here. What am I talking about here? There's such a strong intent, not to find whatever bagel shop is in proximity to where you are searching from. But because New York bagels are such a thing which is why somebody like you in Rhode Island is going to have them ordered to you. Because they're such a thing, Google realized that the intent here is that people are looking to learn more about the iconic places to actually go out and seek that really genuine New York City bagel. Google [inaudible 00:30:06] people will actually travel and go far away to these iconic New York City bagel shops and ignore the local bagel shop, even though it's still in New York City, but it's not more in the iconic places. They'd rather have that information first. So Google's bidding system put the actual places near you second and the iconic places first. So if you're a local place, less visibility, less chance someone's going to find you and less chance of someone actually visiting your local bagel place from the local listings on the results page, because Google's bidding system put that SERP feature second, boom. That's why the about 4 million trillion results being taken away matters. George Nguyen: But I want to introduce a ripple here just for- Mordy Oberstein: Oh I love ripples. George Nguyen: ... listener engagement. Oh yeah. Ripples. Ripples are great. If you're in New York city and I really hope somebody in New York City is listening to this. Why don't you open up an incognito window and type in, Google it, get NYC bagels and hit us up on Twitter. Mordy, what's your handle? Mordy Oberstein: @MordyOberstein. George Nguyen: I'm geochingu, G-E-O-C-H-I-N-G-U. Let us know. Do you get that first, for me, it's a featured snippet from timeout.com about that list of best bagels, because maybe if you're actually in New York, the proximity will change and you'll just get the bagel shops. I'm curious. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. That is interesting. I like that. [00:31:24] Snappy News That is interesting. Speaking of interesting, you know what else is interesting? Some snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Big news from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Quote, Google expands enhanced product experiences to more e-commerce sites, releases new search console reports. So oi plain terms, you no longer, this is big, need to submit your products to Google via Google merchant center to be shown within Google shopping results. This is actually huge because all you need to do now, according to Google is have product structured data markup, and you'll be eligible for Google to pull in your products into Google shopping, which means all of those carousels on the main SERP that Google shows with products in them that come organically from Google shopping, well now you're theoretically eligible for those too, which is amazing. Google also added reporting in search console so you can more easily spot issues with your structured data for products. For Wix users, please note what you have to do in order to be eligible here. Nothing. Literally nothing. We create product structure data for you. So literally you have nothing that you have to do for all of your products to be eligible for Google shopping. How is that? Oh right. Article number two, a little PSA of sorts also from Barry Schwartz. But this time from Search Engine Round Table, because it's not enough for Barry to have one SEO news site, he needs two. Quote, Google review guidelines now prohibit incentivizing removal of negative reviews. Simply if you're offering a gift card or sorts to have folks remove their negative reviews from your Google business profile, this is now a violation of Google's guidelines. Proceed carefully, please. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. It's always snappy with that snappy news. Hey George? George Nguyen: So crisp. Mordy Oberstein: So crisp, so snappy. Before we leave, before we depart from this show, George, thank you for filling in for crystal this week. George Nguyen: No, yeah, I hope I did well. I hope come back. Mordy Oberstein: Well I'll grade you. George Nguyen: Can I come back? Mordy Oberstein: We'll send you a grading system later. George Nguyen: I'm coming back next week. Mordy Oberstein: I know, Crystal's still away next week. So George is coming back, but then we'll send you the grading system. [00:34:10] Follow of the Week But before we leave today, we of course want to leave you with some awesome person from the SEO industry who does awesome things and shares awesome things on Twitter that you could follow to gain more SEO awesomeness. This week of our follow the week is Lily Ray. You know Lily, George. George Nguyen: I do know Lily. She's a wonderful person. I'm [inaudible 00:34:31] seen as many of her speaking sessions and engagements as possible and let me tell you one of the highlights of following her beyond what she talks about in terms of SEO. And this is still kind of SEO related, but she does a lot of searches for queries that are related to her clients. And I'm just like these are off the wall queries. Some of them are kind of adult product type stuff. I remember there was something kind of in there, forgive me if I'm framing this incorrectly Lily, but some of those are just hilarious to me what the results are. And that's kind of one of my daily guilty pleasures, the distractions of SEO Twitter, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: She does put out a ton of information about what she's seeing on the results page. And it's really, really helpful information actually. And it is really funny too sometimes. Which is why you need to follow her on Twitter at @lilyraynyc, speak of NYC, @lilyraynyc on Twitter. And aside from all the webinars and podcasts and conferences she does, she shares so much of her thought process around SEO. And again, what she's seeing out there happening on the results page, she's always sharing and it's always good stuff. Make sure to give Lily a follow and learn from her yourself. George Nguyen: Yeah, I would say that her jam, like we talked about our jams earlier, I would say her jam is definitely expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, EAT and your money, your life content. So if you're working in those verticals where authority, trustworthiness are second to none, definitely worth the follow. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely worth the follow. And speaking of jams, she's also a DJ on the side. So jamming is so applicable to her. Check that out. 360 George. George Nguyen: Wow, that was so organic. It's so easy. Mordy Oberstein: That was organic. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Like what you heard? Well, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or rate us on Spotify. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all-new episode as we dive into more intents, and more problems. SEO for multiple user intents. Should you care? Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO learning up here at Wix at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, and all the webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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Krystal Taing is the Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions at Uberall. She is a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands at managing hybrid customer experiences. Krystal Taing Global Director of Pre-Sales Solutions, Uberall Krystal Taing is the Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions at Uberall. She is a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands at managing hybrid customer experiences. Articles & Resources 24 Feb 2026 How to use Uberall on your Wix & Wix Studio websites 1 May 2025 The Digital Markets Act (DMA): What agencies should know about its impact on search 17 Dec 2024 Tactical local SEO for service area businesses 18 Jun 2024 BOPUS: How local businesses can get started with buy online, pick up in-store 15 Aug 2023 How to get your business on Apple Maps 3 Jan 2023 How to select the perfect GBP category for your business Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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Back Blog optimization collaborative Google doc Use this collaborative document to streamline your blog publication process and improve on-page optimization. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this Google Doc to: Structure content in a format that search engines understand Collate vital on-page SEO factors like metatags, links and URLs Coordinate feedback from collaborators seamlessly Hand over content for uploading effectively Cover off content distribution considerations before publishing Manage hashtags, newsletter inclusion and CTAs so team members can access them easily Simon Cox Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co Creative LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram 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 . More about this topic Read this post about the benefits of using a template for content publication on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Whether you’re ready or not Google’s GA4 is rolling out this July and UA will be sunsetted. Jill Quick, an analytics consultant, and trainer for The Coloring In Department, joins us as a special guest host to help us get a better grasp of GA4. Join us as Jill sits down with hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to discuss what SEOs need to know about the new GA4. From how the data in GA4 differs from UA to the mindset GA4 demands - you don’t want to miss this one if you plan on continuing to use Google Analytics past July 2023. With all the talk of analytics, Crystal, and Mordy will help you explore how much “analytics” are actually useful so that you don’t overwhelm yourself out of the gate. Listen in to learn the differences between UA and GA4 and more in episode 30 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Get ready for GA4 Whether you’re ready or not Google’s GA4 is rolling out this July and UA will be sunsetted. Jill Quick, an analytics consultant, and trainer for The Coloring In Department, joins us as a special guest host to help us get a better grasp of GA4. Join us as Jill sits down with hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to discuss what SEOs need to know about the new GA4. From how the data in GA4 differs from UA to the mindset GA4 demands - you don’t want to miss this one if you plan on continuing to use Google Analytics past July 2023. With all the talk of analytics, Crystal, and Mordy will help you explore how much “analytics” are actually useful so that you don’t overwhelm yourself out of the gate. Listen in to learn the differences between UA and GA4 and more in episode 30 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 30 | March 22, 2023 | 52 MIN 00:00 / 51:44 This week’s guests Jill Quick Jill Quick is an analytics consultant and trainer and has been working in digital marketing for a very long time. She helps brands get the most out of their measurement strategy through training, reviews, and audits, to troubleshooting and consulting. She works with small startup founders, agencies, and brands you own in your home. She has a knack for creating guided, practical, step-by-step, paint-by-numbers style templates to get you where you need to be, faster. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us for SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix.com, joined by the fantastic, the amazing, the person without any musical references this week, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: How do you dooby-dooby-doo? Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I’m on Scooby Doo now. Hey Scooby. Crystal Carter: This show is not about scatting, it's about Google Analytics. That's what we're going to talk about. But thank you for that lovely introduction there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: It's my pleasure. And speaking of Google Analytics, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can easily create a connection to GA4 and have your site or even upgrade your site from UA to GA4 with the Google Analytics, Wix marketing integration right there inside of our marketing integrations where you can easily set your site up with Google Analytics, walks you right through the whole process. So isn't that great? Because today we're talking about GA4, which Crystal already said so redundant. Canonical backdoor, Crystal said it before, SEO jokes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so today we're talking about GA4. Why are we talking about GA4, Mordy? Why? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, because they're coming for your data, hide your kids. That's right. They're coming for your kids and there is no hiding because the boogeyman is coming for your data. Your UA data. Well, it's not a boogeyman, it's Google, and they're changing your analytics to conform to the new web. So they're moving over from Universal Analytics to GA4. Either way, scare mongering aside, just for a minute, we'll get back to scare mongering later. If you're used to Google Analytics as you know it now, you can kiss it goodbye as GA4 is just around the corner. We have analytics maven and consultant and trainer over at the Coloring in Department, Jill Quick will join us as a guest host to help us make sense of GA4. Thank God someone's going to be here to help us and make sense out of this thing. Also, crystal and I will take a little bit of a deep dive down the analytics rabbit hole. We have a deep thought moment about how many of those darn analytics data points do you really need? And of course we have the snappiest SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Let's get right to the point, the data point, as episode number 30 of the SERP's Up podcast enters the final analysis, or should I say the final analytics analysis or should I say the final UA analytics analysis? Either way, take it away, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Yes. So today we're talking about GA4, Google Analytics for the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. That's what we're talking about. And the reason why we're talking about it is because the end is nine, it's coming. It's coming whether we like it or not, it is coming. And a lot of people have said that they do not like it. However, it has improved since they said that it was coming. So basically if we think about the timeline, they launched the beta for GA4 in 2019. Then in 2020 they announced the official release. Then in 2022, they announced that there was a deprecation date for UA because until that point, everyone had been pretty much with the exception of fine analytics professionals like Jill had been sort of burying their heads in the sand around GA4. And then after that point people started going, "oh my gosh, yeah, maybe we actually should deal with this". And then deadline for deprecation in June 2022, and then they finally gave us the full deprecation date, which is the 1st of July 2023, which is not that long from right now. If you look at your calendar and if you look up and you haven't done anything with regards to GA4, that is one of the reasons why we are bringing this up because it is time to take your head out of the sand. It is time to step into the light, face the music as it were, and to get involved with GA4. There was a recent email that came around that said that Google was going to migrate it for you if you didn't do it yourself. And this is something that we think that you should probably do that yourself if you can. I'm sure Jill will get into that a little bit more. But that's why we're talking about it. It's super important. And whether you are really into your analytics or not, the team that runs your marketing is almost certainly relying on quality analytics from UA or from a tool that is using UA backed data. So this is something that you should be thinking about and something that you should definitely make sure that your team is covered by because they also announced that at a certain point, you won't even be able to see or get access to that data. So this is something that you should be thinking about and this is the reason why we have Jill here and we are so grateful for Jill to be here to shed some light. I've seen Jill speak on this topic and I found it incredibly illuminating. So we're pleased to have Jill here. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Jill. Jill Quick: Hi. I've never been called a maven before. I kind of like it. Crystal Carter: I feel like it suits you. Mordy Oberstein: I try to switch things up a little on people in the intros. I try to make it unique, although Crystal's is pretty much the same every week. Crystal Carter: He just throws compliments at me, which I'm not mad at. Mordy Oberstein: Like Rose is at your feet. Crystal Carter: It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: But first off, do you hear that sound? That's me slowly taking my head out of the sand, just so you know. I guess I want to know, Jill, just top level, what's the difference between Universal Analytics, the Google Analytics we're all very fond of and used to and GA4? Jill Quick: So I am going to use my little analogy of methods of transportation because I know Crystal seen it. Mordy, you've heard it. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Jill Quick: Listeners, you might be bored of me talking about this, but here we go. For those of you that are new with it, the way that I like to think of the journey that analytics has been on is that if analytics was a mode of transportation, then the first version that we got, GA1, if we're going to call it, that was Urchin around about 2005. And that was a bike. And I am old enough to remember hit counters and other weird and wonderful things from the very early days of the worldwide web marketing. So we were honestly delighted when we started to get Urchin and it was free and it was really popular. And actually... And we'll come back to this point about servers. I'm going to put a pin in that thought later. I don't think Google expected it to be as popular as it became and it swelled and we wanted more. And then we had an upgrade with Classic analytics around about 2007, and that was getting rid of the bike and giving you a moped, a scooter. So we had a little bit more with our data. We got a new user interface. And I'm saying this because we have gone through multiple interface changes. We've just forgotten because it was so long ago. Now, Universal Analytics, where Mordy's super comfortable at the moment... Mordy Oberstein: Very comfortable. Jill Quick: Yeah, this was 2011, 2012, and it is the equivalent of getting rid of the moped and the bike and giving us the keys to our very own universal analytics car. Now, majority of people, we've had this car for over 10 years and you've either been the driver, the passenger, the engineer, I have met people that don't even know where the car is parked or who has the key. We like the car, we know the car, it's comfortable. And again, it was free and you just kind of started a job. They gave you access and you drove away and got what you needed from it. With the transition to GA4, as Crystal mentioned, we had the very... Not necessarily best name of app and web, and then they rebranded it to GA4 is the fourth version of that analytics platform. And despite Google saying it's an upgrade and it is an upgrade, but it's not an upgrade as in get rid of my crappy old card that could do with a wash and some reupholstering and give me a new one. They're taking away the car, setting it on fire this year, so we can't have it anymore. And they've given us the keys to a helicopter. That is the equivalent shift that we have. And that's where I think, and I've been in the same bucket when they announced this, it was like, not now Google. It's the pandemic. I'm teaching my kids, we’re going to get the plague not now. Read the room. We don't want to be doing any of this. And there are lots of people that, and I'm sure some people are still in this bucket, they log into GA4 and they're like, what is going on? Where are the things? Because you are used to a car and the steering wheel and the dashboard and you've now got a gear stick and there's toggles that are above your head now, and it's just really not that familiar. And I know that there's a lot of people, as I said, they love the car, they're happy with the car, but with GA4, there are some similarities. Both of them have doors and seat belts and windows, but it is a completely different data model. And if you're trying to get GA4 to do what GA3 did, you're going to be disappointed. You can't make the helicopter a car. The car can't be a helicopter. They're similar, but they can't interlink with each other. So going into what the data models are, we'll think about this as the engines of these methods of analytics, transportation, the data model of universal analytics was a hit based model that ran on users and hopefully they had multiple sessions and anytime they did anything on that website, a hit was fired, A page view was loaded, PDF downloaded, bought a product, filled out a form, that kind of thing. When it comes to the data model of GA4, because it's an adaptation of Firebase, which was the product for app and web and rebranded to GA4, they have adopted that Firebase model. So they're moving away from this hit based model towards a user and event data model. And events are slightly different to events in GA3. And we can go through that unless there's a talking point on here what those different events are. Mordy Oberstein: If you gave me the keys to a helicopter right now, I will tell you exactly what I'll do with the helicopter. I'll crash that thing so hard into a cliff between a hot fiery mess, which is exactly what's happening to me in GA4, not because I don't think I understand... I think I understand what I'm looking at once I find it. I'm just having... On that car, you said, I know where all the buttons are, I feel like I'm in the cockpit. Forget a helicopter, of a 747 and there's all the switches and I don't even know where to go to find the data because GA3 or Universal Analytics, it was to me at least so simple, it's on the left-hand nav. When you go into the report, you see, okay, I can switch the medium, I can switch this metric, I can add a secondary metric. God, I can compare periods. God, it's all uniform across the board. But I feel like when I go into GA4, at one place that functions this way, at one place it functions that way. In one place that functions like this and it feels like it's a hot mess. Jill Quick: I would say that the data story is still pretty similar. So there are four different reporting areas in GA4. One of them is the reports, the standard aggregate. You have that data for as long as you're tracking reports. And in that life cycle you've still got acquisition. How do people find you? Behavior, what did they do? Conversions, monetization, am I still in a job? And on the right-hand side, you've still got the date range. And I would point out with the date range actually, there's the ability to do a comparison between different dates and match the day of the week, which is really useful when you've got certain cyclical cycles that move around and you can still add secondary dimensions. It's just the layout's different, the buttons are different. I mean Google if you're listening, I love you. I do work in this all the time, but I don't think usability was a big thing and I don't think you've done a great job in communicating how to do it. Selling the helicopter's great. Oh, you can fly around and get loads of stuff and BigQuery and all this. It's like, no, no. Can you just go through a crash course for a better word of how to do it. Crystal Carter: I think one of the tricky things is that with UA, essentially, so all the things are on the side, it's really easy to browse and there was very much as a marketer and doing audits on sites, it would be very easy to sort of go log into an analytics account and just have a look around at various things. And sometimes I'd find stuff I wasn't even expecting to see because there was so much data there and I could see and I could compare and things like that. And the thing that I find really tricky about analytics, and I said they say, oh, you can build this, you can build that, but I'm like, I don't want to build it. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. I want to go in there, I want to see what's there and have fun, look around and see... But I feel like in GA4 there is no looking around, unless I specifically said it, I do not see it. Crystal Carter: So what I'm asking is what's your advice for people who are used to browsing and to streamline the process of rebuilding or resetting some of the reports that they're used to or that they like or even that they see other people reporting on. Jill Quick: So GA4, the success of your GA4 implementation will come down to the quality of the events that you are tracking. And I think that's been the biggest flex that... You've still got dimensions and metrics. So that terminology and that language is still the same. However, pageview is now an event and pageview was an event in GA3. So if we do a couple of minutes on what is the difference between the data model. So Events in GA3, so if you heard the word events, you typically were thinking about the behavior reports and anything outside of a page view was loaded. If you wanted anything else to be tracked in GA3, in the car, you would have to send those as events in Google Tag Manager and you'd have. . . Crystal Carter: So you downloaded something or something like that. Jill Quick: Category was a big broad bouquet. Video, the action, the doing, play the video, pause the video, label gave context of the thing that they just did brings and repeat to all the things that you wanted to track for your measurement objectives. When it comes to GA4, everything is an event. They want it all lowercase and underscore like snake case because it's a computer program. So it likes things built that way so that everything works and you now have an event name, event parameters and then there'll be values assigned to those parameters. And the way that I have done training on this and the talks I've done and the audits that I do, I'd like to think of it as event DNA. So if you can picture in your mind now the old science lesson where you did that nice little helix string of a DNA sequence, imagine that's the events that you've got in your GA4 data stream. You would have an event name up to 25 parameters, so there's 25 nodes max, and the DNA is just going to dissolve and not work and there's a certain length that we can have with each of these parameters and the values. Now, out of these events in their DNA, they are grouped into what I like to call four parent categories. These parents are made up of event DNA and we've got the auto enhanced recommended and custom. So the automatic collected events are a bundle of events that you get when you say I'm going to have a GA4 instance and I'm going to put that configuration tag on and it's going to start collecting data that's going to give you information like the page location, session start, first visit, engagement, which is like time. Great. The enhanced measurement are additional events you get in your data stream so you can further tweak what you can get. That's going to have things like page view data. It's going to have files downloaded, site search, a really crappy named event called click. But that event click has a number of parameters like link URL, which is tracking all outbound links. And for most sites that's really useful because they're sending people to Glassdoor or TripAdvisor or review sites or Google Maps. It also tracks telephone numbers and email addresses because they're technically outbound links. So these were things that were actually quite hard to track in GA3 and I've done enough audits that there were always something wrong with somebody's account, but there's a lot that comes out of the box, but you just need to know these parent categories and what you get out of it. Recommended are a bunch of events that Google has given us a list basically. So sign up events, generate lead events or forms, purchase events, they've got some pre named ones and we want to use those so we can get more information into the reports because they're listening for these. And then you have custom, which is basically anything that doesn't fit in the previous three. So I did one recently which was a B2B company that had Calendly booking so that you could book an appointment with them. There isn't a recommended event for that, doesn't come out of the box in auto and enhance, so we'd have to track it. So we've got these four parent events and if you just look at the four parents when you log in to GA4, and I think this is where the frustration comes from, you go to events and you might have nine and an event count and it'll say like, "click, file download, scroll", and you are like, "but I want to know the page that they were on. I want to know the file that they downloaded". And you can add a secondary dimension and you can play around with that if you want. But there's another concept to get your head around, which is that you can create an event from an event. Now, if we go along with my little story here that we have our four parent categories all made up of event DNA, if I wanted to create a new event, I have to take the DNA from a parent. So I'm making a child. Now, for SEO listeners, you're familiar with this concept because you've got parent categories and subcategories, children that we like. You've got all that structure. So if I wanted to create a new event to make it easy for people to see that somebody clicked mordy@website.com , then I can go into the user interface, create a new event where I say, "please create me a child and I'd like to call this email_high and where the event name equals click and the parameter equals link_URL and the value of that is mordy@website.com . Please fire a new event called email_high" and then I've got that in my reports and I can report on it. So there's some tweaking we have to do within the user interface, but it's not obvious when you log in because there's no tool tip and Google just goes, "it's flexible, you can do anything". And people are like, "give me a fricking use case". And common ones are you'll probably want to create child events for the type of file that was downloaded, see the PDFs, the zips and the docs. You might want to break out those click events for outbound links to your review site, Google Maps, telephone numbers, email addresses. And when you start getting familiar with the events, the parameters, the parents and the children, it becomes easier to understand how do I go into the user interface and ask it? Because it's a different language, isn't it? It's like hieroglyphics almost when you first start because you are not familiar with what you need to do. And it reminds me, and I think I've had this conversation with both of you before, it reminds me when I remember people showing me WordPress websites and I was like, "oh wow, that's great". I'm like, "why does mine not look great? Why does mine go hello world and there's a crap at the site, like why?" And then somebody goes, "yeah, you got to think about your information architecture and your images and your placement". I was like, "I thought it was going to build it for me. I thought it was going to do the thing and I'm not..." and GA4 is a bit like that where you have to go, "oh, I've got to do some thinking". And that's the difference between getting the helicopter off the ground and driving away on the car that the car was pre-built. A lot of these things were already there and GA4 looks wonderful. There's some great things you could do, which we were talking about in a moment. But you've got to get your head around what is an event? What are they called? Because it's taken me some rewiring of my brain to go page_location when I'm like pages, all pages, why am I having to remember new things? So there's a lot of rewiring of the brain, I think, some neuroplasticity going on to make it a little bit easier. Crystal Carter: So on the plus side, I will say for Wix users who are listening, the team at Wix have worked with Google to create some preset events for certain Wix properties. So you should have a little bit of a headstart with regards to that. But I would also say what's interesting in the events thing is that I was following along while you were chatting and starts to make a lot more sense and there's two things that stood out to me was that I think a lot of people, I've seen a lot of people when they're talking about their reporting and how they set up their events and how they set up all of the different things using additional tools to help make it easier to understand. So I know a lot of people are using Looker Studio, I'd be interested to know what you think about that. The other thing that I think is interesting is that you talked about a few other third-party tools and you talked about people trying to square peg round hole, the old of universal analytics and I've definitely done cross domain tracking and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't make sense and I believe, and maybe you can shed some light on this as well, that cross domain tracking is a bit better. Jill Quick: Yeah, it's easier. Use the same measurement ID of your data stream. You've got to make sure you go in your admin settings and do the usual that you would have to do in things in Universal, configure your domains to say Google, it's this subdomain in this domain referral exclusions. Do not pat yourself on the back for traffic and they got all the credit for the conversions, the usual. But yeah, I have noticed that a bit like Mordy be like, "my head's out of the sand". I think I spoke to a lady last week and she went, "I'm in gone past the denial. I'm in the acceptance phase now. They're not changing the deadline. I'm going to have to do it". I'm like, "yeah, you are". And I think some of the other providers like there was... Had a client that's using Drift widget for their chat box and they just announced in February that they're now able to push those events with the measurement ID and I'm like, "yay, why have you done it so close to the deadline", Shopify, they're getting it done this month now in March. They're like, "yay, Shopify's going to be working". So I think maybe the slow adoption is because we've also been waiting for other tech stack support to help that migration because you're looking for the events and now Drift widget, if you've got the chat bot is going to push those events to you. I don't have to touch Google Tag Manager. If Shopify's doing it, great, I don't have to build loads of events for e-commerce if it's going to seamlessly push that in and going to your point on Looker, Looker's using the GA4 API, so it's only as good as your data collection. So yeah, use Looker, but if you haven't got the child events and the events and the other things you want to track that's useful to you, you are not going to get as much fun in those Looker reports because it's only as good as what you've got in that data collection. Mordy Oberstein: That's exactly the point. To me, that's exactly why one of the first things we did was automatically trigger those events in GA4. But it makes me wonder at the same time, from a business point of view, do you think that people like yourself are going to end up with a lot more clients who are... Let's say SEOs, whereas before in universal analytics, I never felt like, Hey, I need to go to an analytics expert. I have a general handle on this unless I come to a specific problem, which case I need to go to somebody one level up, but the way that Google construct this, are they... And I wonder if it's purposeful or not or whatever it is, are they creating a dynamic where professionals are now going to say, "you know what? Forget this. I am just going to sub this out to somebody else to handle". Jill Quick: Yeah. I think for people it might be for time they know enough to be dangerous but they haven't got the time to do it and they want to trust that somebody else is going to do that for them. I think that when it comes to why is Google doing this and I think there are a number of reasons. The way that GA3, the previous versions work don't really work with the way that it's going to be going in the future with cookies and consent mode and things like that. I think there's another part of me that I for fun was reading some of people's financial statements to see what they were doing and they were mentioning their servers and I'm like, "oh, I wonder why they're doing that?" And a hundred percent they're going to be taking all of the servers from the old Universal analytics when they've been it and they are going to be repurposed for service side tagging and BigQuery and all the other cloud stuff because that's really expensive. When it comes to putting investment into your analytics because it's been free for so long. I don't think people... And I've made a living out this for a decade, I've done hundreds of audits and there was always something wrong. There was always a... I've got a phrase I like to use, a confabulation of data, lies, you say, honestly because nobody goes, I'm going to tinker with my data and try and fake something for my boss. They think the data's solid because they didn't know how the data model worked and how the data got there. They just took it for granted and thought, "well, that's somebody else's problem". That leads into conversations of, well, who owns analytics? Is it dev? Is it your IT department? So it kind of just drifts around in a very ephemeral way and now people are having to put some time and money in some cases to get GA4 to work, but it's probably the first time they've had to really sit down and think, what are our measurement objectives? What is it that we're trying to do with this data? You don't want to have number soup and have reports for the sake of reporting. You want data so that it's going to give you an indication of what you should be doing with your strategy and tactics. And when you report to somebody, it's only really one or two people that get that report that can action it. Here's your purchase order, carry on, you are still in a job, that kind of thing. And when you narrow that down, it makes it a little bit better and more competitive in a way for that business owner because they've really considered what do they need and how are they going to get that data? I would say out of everybody using GA4, I reckon a good 10 million or so accounts will not move over to GA4, and that's not necessarily because they're not ready or they don't want it, they're just not going to use it. They're like, do you know what? I don't do a lot of marketing or we don't invest a lot, so I just want to know that the phone rings. People come into my shop kind of happy with that and they'll find as an analytics solution that fits those measurement objectives. The people I'm working with, they've got an SEO agency, a PPC agency, a CRO agency, 50 staff, a million pound of money to spend on marketing. They need more than what you can get from other data sources and that's why they're transitioning to GA4. So I think there's going to be a real mix and from us as marketeers as SEO people listening to this, we're going to need more analytics acumen. There's going to be more accounts that you're going to look after where it's not GA as the default. You'll have people that go, well, we use Piwik, we use Amplitude, we use another software. So we're all going to have to learn more because we're going to be seeing more people choosing a different provider. And that's quite exciting, but it's work either way, isn't it? But it feels like its analytics time to grow up a little bit, I think, because you are having to really think in a measured approach. What's a nice point though, isn't it a measured approach into what you should be doing doing and why you're doing it. Crystal Carter: And I think from the Wix side, and I'm sure there's other people who are thinking this way, we've been investing in our analytics stack, so the reports that we're able to provide people, we just added another Google Search Console one, Google Search Console has been investing a lot and improving a lot of the visibility there as well. So yeah, I think you're right. I think there's going to be people who maybe don't use it as a default. I think also a lot of people aren't going to port over to GA4 because they haven't touched that website in years. There's definitely a case where there's websites that were set up ages ago, nobody pays. It goes into that GA4, nobody's going to look at it. And I think a lot of, certainly if you have a CMS like Wix, then we have analytics built into the CMS, so if you are not doing, even if you are doing a super complex thing, we have a lot of filters and things within it, but if you just need a bird's eye view, for instance, you can absolutely see that from your... Jill Quick: I think what's really useful for that, you know you've got an alternative there. Questions you should be asking yourself because yes, if you want to continue to use Google Analytics, you're going to have to get a wiggle on and get it moved over, but go through some questions around, do you use the data because there are people that go, not really, or I log in or I get a report and it makes me feel comfortable, but I don't really do anything else. How are you currently reporting on your marketing performance? You've got to look at dashboard. Well, what's in that dashboard and is there stuff there that doesn't need to be there? Are you trying tangibelize the stuff that marketing does with a report because so much of what we do feels mystical, if that's the right word. Are you ready to invest in your data quality and collection? Because if they go, "yeah, no, I can't be asked or I have no money or there's no budget", how are you currently doing your data collection? Do you trust any of the points? These are all questions you need to ask yourself. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Jill Quick: And If you come out of it and go, "yeah, do you know what? I just need to know that the SEO stuff that we're doing is useful, that the content is engaging for my readers and that I'm building my database or the shop is busy with people because they've got other sources of truth for other marketing performance stats". Then just because people are saying you should move to GA4 doesn't mean that you actually should, if it's right for you with those measurement objectives and I've had many discovery calls with prospects where I've gone, "I don't think you are ready". Like the stage of your business, which is another important thing, how big is the business and what is your stage of growth? If you are in the mature phase, you're a market leader, yeah, you're going to be using GA or Adobe or Snowplow or so you're really investing in what you're doing. But there's a lot of people at the early phases of their business and they just want to grow. They're like, what am I doing to get that hockey stick of growth? What am I doing to improve the quality of the leads and business that I'm getting? Does that mean you should be learning about GA4, setting up BigQuery, building audiences with time? You're not going to use any of that information, get your information from somewhere else and when you are ready, you review the same questions. Are we using the data? Well, how are we reporting? Are we ready to invest? Oh yes, we are. Let's move to the next step then. And then you can always go back to another provider and if some of the people that are listening, if you viciously hate it and you're not going to... Well, don't use it. If you're a consultant, you might have clients that are like, yeah, tough, you're going to have to use GA and you're just going to have to get used to it. But there's a lot of people listening that just because... I mean I do it for my job, but you don't have to do it if it's not right for you. So it's getting the right fit so that you get a dashboard that answers the questions that you need at this point in time. Mordy Oberstein: I have so many questions. Crystal Carter: So many. Mordy Oberstein: And you mentioned questions. For example, for the love of god please explain the custom creation of reports and how to get started with that, but time is ebbed away. So where can people find you, Jill, in case they have questions about analytics. Where can I find you later if I have questions about analytics? Jill Quick: Probably more active on LinkedIn. So I'm Jill Quick. I'm a cartoon face. There's not many people with the name Jill Quick. I am on Twitter, but I'm a bit of a lurker. I just log on, read what's happening and then I kind of log off. I don't really engage because certain parts of Twitter are just not for me. Mordy Oberstein: I envy you. Jill Quick: Elon Musk is ruining it for us all with the feed. But yeah, LinkedIn's probably if you want to reach out and say, hi, and then there's my website, which is the coloringindepartment.com and I'm in the process of building some more easy step guides and content to get people started in this. Mordy Oberstein: I will link to a couple of those in the show notes if you're interested. Jill, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. It was really insightful and I have a million more questions. I'll find you somewhere. Jill Quick: That just means you need to bring me on for part two, doesn't it? Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Jill Quick: Shoot myself. Mordy Oberstein: I need to recover from part one though. Jill Quick: I like being called maven as well. So just for that. Yeah, marketing maven, analytics Maven, Jill, a little bit. Crystal Carter: We'll have to bring you in after July. It’s done. What? Jill Quick: Calling over your keyboard, so bad. Mordy Oberstein: If you see, by the way, you see a helicopter crashing somewhere. That is me using GA4. Jill Quick: Yeah. Okay, got it. But you can learn. I mean, one final note from me on this. Honest to God, if you can learn SEO, if you can understand Google's algorithm and do your log file analysis and make sense of Google Search Console, you can learn GA4. It is a learnable skill. You just have to get over the hump of the stages of grief, isn't it? Like ignoring it, anger, frustration, acceptance. And now we're in the doing part. Yeah, you can do it though, Mordy. I believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Accepting is hard for me. Jill Quick: Yeah. You can do it. I believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, Jill. We really appreciate it. Jill Quick: Thanks for having me. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. Jill Quick: I'll see you soon. Off now. Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Well, since we're talking about analytics and learning and questions, and since you're... I'm going to guess if you're like me, somewhat overwhelmed by what you just heard, this is a segment for you because in this segment, Crystal and I are going to dive into how much of that do you really need to know as we take a deep thought into how to even use or how much of analytics in general, not just GA4 to even use. It's a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. I have many thoughts about GA4 and analytics. Most of them are not deep, most of them are salty. Crystal Carter: Most of them are just, I don't want to. Mordy Oberstein: Right. This is not a salty thought with Crystal and Mordy. This is a deep thought. Crystal Carter: But why? No, I think it's... Well, a deep thoughts like the salty ocean. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Here we go. So let me just put it out there. There's so many data points. So let's set GA4 aside for a second. Let's stick in our comfort zone. I'm imagining myself still in Google Analytics 3 or universal analytics, the real analytics, you want to call it that. And in there is a ton of data, an enormous amount of data. And this could be applied to your SEO tools. This could be applied to Google's search console, even though I think that's a little bit less, but even to Google Search Console and of course at GA4, how much of that data is, wow, so cool. I have access to that data versus, you know what? That's really good data point that I need to make sure that I'm reporting on and tracking carefully. Crystal Carter: I don't know. People love data. They love a chart. They love a chart. And to be honest, you have to have some kind of data in order to back up the things that you want to do. And in order to get proof of concept for the things you want to do. Mordy Oberstein: Of course, this is not, should you use analytics, the question is how much of it, and I will put my foot on the landmine and say sometimes it's too much or sometimes it's not worth the while. Although, I am a data nerd, so I kind of get it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But I think that sometimes it might like less is more. I feel like that phrase in reality is usually not true. You give me a steak, I want more, not less, give me a house, more, not less. But with analytics sometimes less is more. Crystal Carter: I think that's true. Certainly I think that when you think about reporting to decision makers, you can blind them with science. And sometimes if there's too many numbers, people don't trust the numbers... Mordy Oberstein: Science. Crystal Carter: I think people don't trust the numbers that you give them because they can't see the wood for the trees as it were. So that's definitely the case. I've also seen it sometimes where I've had clients who were tracking the wrong thing and they were really, really, really worried about one particular metric or another. We had the fantastic Jill Quick here talking about GA4, yesterday we had the fifth or the... Sorry, not yesterday in podcast release time, but yesterday in podcast recording time. Mordy Oberstein: Yesterday in our recording time. Crystal Carter: We had the amazing Christian Simon and she was talking about bounce rate and how she hates bounce rate. And I know that there's an entire contingent of SEOs who really hate bounce rate as a metric. So there's metrics that people get hung up on and sometimes make big poor decisions over those metrics. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And you say, oh God, we really need to sort this out. And they're trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist because they're looking at the wrong metric. And sometimes when you have lots and lots and lots of metrics to choose from, people will pick the shiniest one and that will be the thing that they worry about. But it's not actually worth the bother, to quote you from a previous podcast, "sometimes it's a nothing burger". Mordy Oberstein: That's right. So that snore, what should I say about my meta descriptions being too long or short? By the way, I want to start optimizing meta descriptions by converting them from actual text, like wing dings, like symbols and see how that goes on my SEO. I think also at the same time when I find this, I get sometimes caught up in this is that what you end up doing is, and it's going to apply to any sort of data and analysis. Let's say keywords, keyword analysis, whether it's rankings or impressions or whatever it is, you could get so far down the rabbit hole. You can start looking at minutiae of minutiae. You can do this with any. You can dive into, let me see how I'm doing in the US. Okay, fine. Great, that makes sense. Let me see how I'm doing in New York. Okay, that kind of makes sense. Let me see how I'm doing in West Hempstead. Does not matter. I will tell you, unless you're a local business located in West Hempstead, New York, it doesn't really matter, but you could go that far. You can go so far down the rabbit hole that you end up creating problems for yourselves that if you took a minute to stop and think they are problems, you probably could fix them. You might see some benefit, but what's the opportunity cost? Does it really matter? Or is my time better spent focusing on larger problems? And I feel like that's sometimes is the danger with data and analytics. Crystal Carter: And I think also benchmarking. Benchmarking is really important in this whole conversation around GA4. There's a lot of people talking about migrating your data and storing your data from UA. So they're going to make it so that you can't access the UA data. They're going to make it so that the UA data is not available or stops collecting or that sort of thing. So if you want to get insights on what is good for your business, because that's the thing, if like someone says, "oh, we got 4,000 clicks this month", on whatever thing it was, or it's like, "is that good?" I don't know if that's good for your business. What if your business is used to having 400,000 clicks and this month you had 4,000 or what if it's used to having 4,000 and this month you had 400, then how do you know what's good? If you're used to having 40 and you have 4,000. Wow, brilliant. So the benchmarking is really important. So understanding the context of your data is really important. So I think that just a piece of quantitative data in the middle of the ether means very, very little when it's not part of a wider data story, a data profile or business. So I think the context is very important to think about with all of these things with reporting. Mordy Oberstein: You just brought up an absolutely amazing point. We just had this, let's break the fourth wall here with the Wix SEO learning hub, where sometimes you look at a data reporting period and you trying to benchmark, which essentially we're trying to do, and you could say, okay, this is the data, now we should do X or here's the data, now let's look at Y. When really you don't have enough data and sometimes it could take months and months and months to get the right data. Let's say for example, you launch a new product or new page or whatever it is. Let's say October, November is Thanksgiving and Black Friday, December is Christmas, January is people are just getting back to the new year. It'll take you to February theoretically until you start seeing normal data. So now you have October data when you launched, which is all right, whatever, you just launched it. November, not normal data. December, not normal data. January, maybe getting close to normal data and February, you have two months. Crystal Carter: This is it. And I'll tell you right now, if any SEOs out there who do monthly reporting who say, let's compare this month to last month, February always looks terrible. February always looks terrible because January's 31 days. 31 big old days, and February is 28, so that's 29... Mordy Oberstein: Stepchild month. Crystal Carter: Three days shorter. So it's going to be less. Tell you right now, if you're looking at hard numbers, it's going to be less. Mordy Oberstein: If you look at how much money you saved in February versus January and you're spending, it might be better because, "hey, I ain't spending", it's three days where I could not pull out my credit card. Crystal Carter: Right. And March is always way, way better than February. And every March, you're like, "we crushed it, guys. We crushed it". Mordy Oberstein: We're so good. Crystal Carter: So, yeah. And I think the data point, yeah, I had a look at... Like one analogy I always use is like trees. You could look at trees and that you could do six months of data for trees between May, and you look at trees in the spring, going all the way into September or something and you go, oh yeah, trees are green, they're great, they've got lots of leaves, and then you don't know why you need a rake in November and you're completely confused because your data's wrong. So yeah, the data stuff is absolutely important. You can't make decisions without solid data. What's useful is to... I always recommend having multiple sources of data, but being able to understand what's common across them with no. . . In the conversation with GA4, and one of the things that's tricky, and one of the things reasons why Jill was talking about events so much is that the things don't always line up. So if you're trying to compare, it's like you're not comparing apples to apples. You might be comparing apples to oranges. So it's very important for you to have some kind of consistent data. So one of the things that's good during this data migration is that Google, sorry, Google Search Console is going to be consistent throughout, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: You can only store data from Google Search Console for so long, so you might need to have an export thing, but she was right. We do need to be more mature about data, and this isn't just about making marketing decisions, it's also about search. Because there's so much machine learning in search and so much machine learning in search advertising right now, and so much like AI, and we say, "oh, there's AI". AI is machine learning in practice. Mordy Oberstein: So there actually is no AI, it's all machine learning, but whatever... Crystal Carter: It's all machine learning and they say, garbage in, garbage out. So you have to feed the machine good data, and the better data you're feeding it, the better the machine will reward you. So yeah, Jill's entirely right that we need to be more mature about our data. I need to make sure that works well and that includes the way that we think about data, includes the kinds of events we have. It includes the structured data that we have on our site, includes the metadata that we have on our site because that also goes into the data profile, and I've seen it before where we've had clients who were running machine learning advertising campaigns and the machine came back with all these different words that it thought were relevant to the page. Then we made some optimizations to the on page information and the on page meta tags for that page, and then the machine understood it better. So these are things that we need to think about and be much more aware of how we manage our data online and on our website. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm want to go back to one thing you said about comparing apples and oranges. There is no comparison. Oranges are infinitely better than apples. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: How is an apple better than an orange? Crystal Carter: When was the last time you had an orange pie? Mordy Oberstein: I didn't say pie. Pie is better. Crystal Carter: When was the last time you had an orange pie? When was the last time little Debbie's made you an orange pie? Mordy Oberstein: What? Orange juice or apple juice? Which one? Crystal Carter: I mean apple juice has its place... Mordy Oberstein: Two fruits, in an apple and orange fruit, which one would you eat? Crystal Carter: Which one would I eat? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Depend on what time of year. I like a nice crisp apple. I enjoy nice crisp apple. This is delicious. Mordy Oberstein: You're just saying that it's like you could be right and you know that... Crystal Carter: No, I live in England, there's so many different kinds of apples. Mordy Oberstein: I'm from New York. We have apples. We don't grow oranges, but I still like oranges better. Crystal Carter: Oranges are oranges. You got to peel them. Sometimes the rind is thin. Sometimes the rind is thick. Sometimes it's like a whole thing. Sometimes you can peel it with your fingers. Sometimes you need a knife. You can't always just bite into an apple. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: We should bite into nail though. Some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news. Snappy news. When it rains, things get wet. Wait, no, that's not how that goes. When it rains, it pours. There we go. We just finished with the February 2023 product review update, and then suddenly on March 15th, Google went ahead and announced the March 2023 core update. So I'll run through my usual spiel here. One, it takes a few weeks for this sort of thing to roll out. Two, there could be all sorts of rank spikes and losses and reversals along the way. So don't panic, let the update play itself out. Three, per tools like the summer sensor, we've already seen a few days of elevator rank fluctuations, but don't be fooled if the tools go back to normal for a few days as there can be spikes and rank reverse at the tail end, like I just said before. Definitely have a look at Barry Schwartz's search engine land coverage, if you're looking to get more context, as he's got like, I don't know, a gazillion, bazillion, trillion links to the various updates. He's coverage. You can see how the updates have functioned in the past and what's happened and how big they are, and yada, yada, yada. Yes, Barry, we know you've covered them all and now you have the internal links to prove it. Okay, onto the second item of business, and this one's not really an SEO story, but it's, Hey, hi. So who cares? Heard James Vincent over at the Verge. Google announces AI features and Gmail, docs and more to rival Microsoft. Let the AI wars begin. Okay, so basically Google is giving you the ability, or we'll be giving you the ability to enter a few prompts and have the AI create the entire content for you within a Google Doc and so forth. The example Google shows is in a Google Doc where they enter very bare bones prompt to create a job listing for a sales rep opening, and then Google goes ahead and completely goes bonkers and creates the entire complete listing format and everything in seconds. I'll just reiterate what I've been saying this entire time about AI content. Please, please, please, for the love of God, please use this responsibly. Boy do I sound like a boomer. And last, and you might say least, but I don't because it may not sound like a big deal, but to me this is huge. Again, Barry Schwartz, who else over at Search Engine Roundtable this time "Google Search, save your favorite brand's feature". So back at Google's event Search On in 2022, Google announced that you'll be able to have a setting that will let you see results on Google from your favorite brands. Well, SEO legend, Britney Mueller spotted this for the first time live in the wild on the surf when searching for something on mobile and the search came back and said, "Hey, save your favorite brand to get more relevant results". Okay, Mordy, this is cool, right? You can go to the SERP, you search for something and you search on our jeans and Google says, "Hey, save this setting so that you can get great results from either the Gap or I don't know where else do you get jeans from, Old Navy or Macy's? And you can get results from all these different companies and brands specifically and take out results from other brands that you don't like in the SERP". It's cool, but was there not a bigger SEO story than this all week, Mordy? No. It was a really quiet week. Just kidding. To me, this is huge because it hinted how the ecosystem will function going forward, where the user will be able to refine what they see at the onset. So you won't even have an opportunity to rank theoretically based upon how the user set things up. In this case, if the user set up to only see, or their favorite brands were the Gap and Old Navy, but they didn't save Macy's, well, then maybe that user wouldn't see any results from Macy's anymore. So what the user will do with the onset will define what they see, which has implications on everything from ring tracking to the very undervalued idea that brand marketing greatly impacts SEO, which in this case it directly impacts SEO, because if the people like the brand and they save the brand, if they don't like the brand, then they don't save the brand, they don't save any of the results. So there's that. Anyway, that's this week's version of the Snappy News. Oh, that was the snappiest of SEO news for you. So that was great. Crystal Carter: That was great. It was so snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy and so newsy, like every week. We say this in every week, I feel this is our most uncreative pivot. Crystal Carter: Have you seen Newsies? Did you realize that Christian Bale... Mordy Oberstein: Christian Bale? Yeah, obviously. Oh, please. If you going to just try to stump me with a movie trivia thing, it cannot be that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Like what letter comes after a? B. Crystal Carter: I didn't realize you were such a Newsies fan. Mordy Oberstein: I love Newsies. Crystal Carter: Okay. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Brooklyn is here. Crystal Carter: Oh, of course. Of course. This is a movie for me. Mordy Oberstein: This is for me, it's built for me. It's a bespoke movie. Well, speaking of Newsies, actually, no, this has absolutely nothing to do with that, but before we do leave, we need to leave you with somebody who you, it should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, in this case, more analytics awesomeness as if analytics is awesomeness, but whatever leading that little technicality aside for a moment, this week's follow of the week is the one, the only Dana DiTomaso on Twitter @DANADITOMASO. If you can't keep up with the spelling of it so quickly, which nobody can cause I talk way too fast. We'll link to Dana's Twitter profile in the show notes. And Dana is somebody who has been the forefront of the Google Analytics for conundrum. She is cautious. She speaks about it. She's a lot of great resources out there about it. So look for on Twitter. Also, by the way, on LinkedIn, she posts a lot of resources about GA4, so a great follow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's great. I saw her speak at Mozcon last year. She's very frank, and she's very clear and very astute about analytics and about how people track data on websites. So yeah, she's fantastic. Absolutely, check her out online, and if you see her speaking at a conference of which she does sometimes do check her out as well, because she's a smart person. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great way to put it. She's a smart, smart, smart person. No, it'll be smart for you. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: In the next week, because... Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... that's going to wrap it up. 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 episodes. We dive into building the ultimate SEO team with a very, very special guest. Crystal Carter: Hint. Mordy Oberstein: They may like cheese, they may not like cheese. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Look to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Jill Quick Dana DiTomaso Resources : Wix SEO Learning Hub The Coloring In Department What you need to know about GA4 Resources to learn GA4 from Jill Quick News : Google releases March 2023 broad core update Google announces AI features in Gmail, Docs, and more to rival Microsoft Google Search Save Your Favorite Brands Feature Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Jill Quick Dana DiTomaso Resources : Wix SEO Learning Hub The Coloring In Department What you need to know about GA4 Resources to learn GA4 from Jill Quick News : Google releases March 2023 broad core update Google announces AI features in Gmail, Docs, and more to rival Microsoft Google Search Save Your Favorite Brands Feature Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us for SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix.com, joined by the fantastic, the amazing, the person without any musical references this week, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: How do you dooby-dooby-doo? Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I’m on Scooby Doo now. Hey Scooby. Crystal Carter: This show is not about scatting, it's about Google Analytics. That's what we're going to talk about. But thank you for that lovely introduction there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: It's my pleasure. And speaking of Google Analytics, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can easily create a connection to GA4 and have your site or even upgrade your site from UA to GA4 with the Google Analytics, Wix marketing integration right there inside of our marketing integrations where you can easily set your site up with Google Analytics, walks you right through the whole process. So isn't that great? Because today we're talking about GA4, which Crystal already said so redundant. Canonical backdoor, Crystal said it before, SEO jokes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so today we're talking about GA4. Why are we talking about GA4, Mordy? Why? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, because they're coming for your data, hide your kids. That's right. They're coming for your kids and there is no hiding because the boogeyman is coming for your data. Your UA data. Well, it's not a boogeyman, it's Google, and they're changing your analytics to conform to the new web. So they're moving over from Universal Analytics to GA4. Either way, scare mongering aside, just for a minute, we'll get back to scare mongering later. If you're used to Google Analytics as you know it now, you can kiss it goodbye as GA4 is just around the corner. We have analytics maven and consultant and trainer over at the Coloring in Department, Jill Quick will join us as a guest host to help us make sense of GA4. Thank God someone's going to be here to help us and make sense out of this thing. Also, crystal and I will take a little bit of a deep dive down the analytics rabbit hole. We have a deep thought moment about how many of those darn analytics data points do you really need? And of course we have the snappiest SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Let's get right to the point, the data point, as episode number 30 of the SERP's Up podcast enters the final analysis, or should I say the final analytics analysis or should I say the final UA analytics analysis? Either way, take it away, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Yes. So today we're talking about GA4, Google Analytics for the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. That's what we're talking about. And the reason why we're talking about it is because the end is nine, it's coming. It's coming whether we like it or not, it is coming. And a lot of people have said that they do not like it. However, it has improved since they said that it was coming. So basically if we think about the timeline, they launched the beta for GA4 in 2019. Then in 2020 they announced the official release. Then in 2022, they announced that there was a deprecation date for UA because until that point, everyone had been pretty much with the exception of fine analytics professionals like Jill had been sort of burying their heads in the sand around GA4. And then after that point people started going, "oh my gosh, yeah, maybe we actually should deal with this". And then deadline for deprecation in June 2022, and then they finally gave us the full deprecation date, which is the 1st of July 2023, which is not that long from right now. If you look at your calendar and if you look up and you haven't done anything with regards to GA4, that is one of the reasons why we are bringing this up because it is time to take your head out of the sand. It is time to step into the light, face the music as it were, and to get involved with GA4. There was a recent email that came around that said that Google was going to migrate it for you if you didn't do it yourself. And this is something that we think that you should probably do that yourself if you can. I'm sure Jill will get into that a little bit more. But that's why we're talking about it. It's super important. And whether you are really into your analytics or not, the team that runs your marketing is almost certainly relying on quality analytics from UA or from a tool that is using UA backed data. So this is something that you should be thinking about and something that you should definitely make sure that your team is covered by because they also announced that at a certain point, you won't even be able to see or get access to that data. So this is something that you should be thinking about and this is the reason why we have Jill here and we are so grateful for Jill to be here to shed some light. I've seen Jill speak on this topic and I found it incredibly illuminating. So we're pleased to have Jill here. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Jill. Jill Quick: Hi. I've never been called a maven before. I kind of like it. Crystal Carter: I feel like it suits you. Mordy Oberstein: I try to switch things up a little on people in the intros. I try to make it unique, although Crystal's is pretty much the same every week. Crystal Carter: He just throws compliments at me, which I'm not mad at. Mordy Oberstein: Like Rose is at your feet. Crystal Carter: It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: But first off, do you hear that sound? That's me slowly taking my head out of the sand, just so you know. I guess I want to know, Jill, just top level, what's the difference between Universal Analytics, the Google Analytics we're all very fond of and used to and GA4? Jill Quick: So I am going to use my little analogy of methods of transportation because I know Crystal seen it. Mordy, you've heard it. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Jill Quick: Listeners, you might be bored of me talking about this, but here we go. For those of you that are new with it, the way that I like to think of the journey that analytics has been on is that if analytics was a mode of transportation, then the first version that we got, GA1, if we're going to call it, that was Urchin around about 2005. And that was a bike. And I am old enough to remember hit counters and other weird and wonderful things from the very early days of the worldwide web marketing. So we were honestly delighted when we started to get Urchin and it was free and it was really popular. And actually... And we'll come back to this point about servers. I'm going to put a pin in that thought later. I don't think Google expected it to be as popular as it became and it swelled and we wanted more. And then we had an upgrade with Classic analytics around about 2007, and that was getting rid of the bike and giving you a moped, a scooter. So we had a little bit more with our data. We got a new user interface. And I'm saying this because we have gone through multiple interface changes. We've just forgotten because it was so long ago. Now, Universal Analytics, where Mordy's super comfortable at the moment... Mordy Oberstein: Very comfortable. Jill Quick: Yeah, this was 2011, 2012, and it is the equivalent of getting rid of the moped and the bike and giving us the keys to our very own universal analytics car. Now, majority of people, we've had this car for over 10 years and you've either been the driver, the passenger, the engineer, I have met people that don't even know where the car is parked or who has the key. We like the car, we know the car, it's comfortable. And again, it was free and you just kind of started a job. They gave you access and you drove away and got what you needed from it. With the transition to GA4, as Crystal mentioned, we had the very... Not necessarily best name of app and web, and then they rebranded it to GA4 is the fourth version of that analytics platform. And despite Google saying it's an upgrade and it is an upgrade, but it's not an upgrade as in get rid of my crappy old card that could do with a wash and some reupholstering and give me a new one. They're taking away the car, setting it on fire this year, so we can't have it anymore. And they've given us the keys to a helicopter. That is the equivalent shift that we have. And that's where I think, and I've been in the same bucket when they announced this, it was like, not now Google. It's the pandemic. I'm teaching my kids, we’re going to get the plague not now. Read the room. We don't want to be doing any of this. And there are lots of people that, and I'm sure some people are still in this bucket, they log into GA4 and they're like, what is going on? Where are the things? Because you are used to a car and the steering wheel and the dashboard and you've now got a gear stick and there's toggles that are above your head now, and it's just really not that familiar. And I know that there's a lot of people, as I said, they love the car, they're happy with the car, but with GA4, there are some similarities. Both of them have doors and seat belts and windows, but it is a completely different data model. And if you're trying to get GA4 to do what GA3 did, you're going to be disappointed. You can't make the helicopter a car. The car can't be a helicopter. They're similar, but they can't interlink with each other. So going into what the data models are, we'll think about this as the engines of these methods of analytics, transportation, the data model of universal analytics was a hit based model that ran on users and hopefully they had multiple sessions and anytime they did anything on that website, a hit was fired, A page view was loaded, PDF downloaded, bought a product, filled out a form, that kind of thing. When it comes to the data model of GA4, because it's an adaptation of Firebase, which was the product for app and web and rebranded to GA4, they have adopted that Firebase model. So they're moving away from this hit based model towards a user and event data model. And events are slightly different to events in GA3. And we can go through that unless there's a talking point on here what those different events are. Mordy Oberstein: If you gave me the keys to a helicopter right now, I will tell you exactly what I'll do with the helicopter. I'll crash that thing so hard into a cliff between a hot fiery mess, which is exactly what's happening to me in GA4, not because I don't think I understand... I think I understand what I'm looking at once I find it. I'm just having... On that car, you said, I know where all the buttons are, I feel like I'm in the cockpit. Forget a helicopter, of a 747 and there's all the switches and I don't even know where to go to find the data because GA3 or Universal Analytics, it was to me at least so simple, it's on the left-hand nav. When you go into the report, you see, okay, I can switch the medium, I can switch this metric, I can add a secondary metric. God, I can compare periods. God, it's all uniform across the board. But I feel like when I go into GA4, at one place that functions this way, at one place it functions that way. In one place that functions like this and it feels like it's a hot mess. Jill Quick: I would say that the data story is still pretty similar. So there are four different reporting areas in GA4. One of them is the reports, the standard aggregate. You have that data for as long as you're tracking reports. And in that life cycle you've still got acquisition. How do people find you? Behavior, what did they do? Conversions, monetization, am I still in a job? And on the right-hand side, you've still got the date range. And I would point out with the date range actually, there's the ability to do a comparison between different dates and match the day of the week, which is really useful when you've got certain cyclical cycles that move around and you can still add secondary dimensions. It's just the layout's different, the buttons are different. I mean Google if you're listening, I love you. I do work in this all the time, but I don't think usability was a big thing and I don't think you've done a great job in communicating how to do it. Selling the helicopter's great. Oh, you can fly around and get loads of stuff and BigQuery and all this. It's like, no, no. Can you just go through a crash course for a better word of how to do it. Crystal Carter: I think one of the tricky things is that with UA, essentially, so all the things are on the side, it's really easy to browse and there was very much as a marketer and doing audits on sites, it would be very easy to sort of go log into an analytics account and just have a look around at various things. And sometimes I'd find stuff I wasn't even expecting to see because there was so much data there and I could see and I could compare and things like that. And the thing that I find really tricky about analytics, and I said they say, oh, you can build this, you can build that, but I'm like, I don't want to build it. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. I want to go in there, I want to see what's there and have fun, look around and see... But I feel like in GA4 there is no looking around, unless I specifically said it, I do not see it. Crystal Carter: So what I'm asking is what's your advice for people who are used to browsing and to streamline the process of rebuilding or resetting some of the reports that they're used to or that they like or even that they see other people reporting on. Jill Quick: So GA4, the success of your GA4 implementation will come down to the quality of the events that you are tracking. And I think that's been the biggest flex that... You've still got dimensions and metrics. So that terminology and that language is still the same. However, pageview is now an event and pageview was an event in GA3. So if we do a couple of minutes on what is the difference between the data model. So Events in GA3, so if you heard the word events, you typically were thinking about the behavior reports and anything outside of a page view was loaded. If you wanted anything else to be tracked in GA3, in the car, you would have to send those as events in Google Tag Manager and you'd have. . . Crystal Carter: So you downloaded something or something like that. Jill Quick: Category was a big broad bouquet. Video, the action, the doing, play the video, pause the video, label gave context of the thing that they just did brings and repeat to all the things that you wanted to track for your measurement objectives. When it comes to GA4, everything is an event. They want it all lowercase and underscore like snake case because it's a computer program. So it likes things built that way so that everything works and you now have an event name, event parameters and then there'll be values assigned to those parameters. And the way that I have done training on this and the talks I've done and the audits that I do, I'd like to think of it as event DNA. So if you can picture in your mind now the old science lesson where you did that nice little helix string of a DNA sequence, imagine that's the events that you've got in your GA4 data stream. You would have an event name up to 25 parameters, so there's 25 nodes max, and the DNA is just going to dissolve and not work and there's a certain length that we can have with each of these parameters and the values. Now, out of these events in their DNA, they are grouped into what I like to call four parent categories. These parents are made up of event DNA and we've got the auto enhanced recommended and custom. So the automatic collected events are a bundle of events that you get when you say I'm going to have a GA4 instance and I'm going to put that configuration tag on and it's going to start collecting data that's going to give you information like the page location, session start, first visit, engagement, which is like time. Great. The enhanced measurement are additional events you get in your data stream so you can further tweak what you can get. That's going to have things like page view data. It's going to have files downloaded, site search, a really crappy named event called click. But that event click has a number of parameters like link URL, which is tracking all outbound links. And for most sites that's really useful because they're sending people to Glassdoor or TripAdvisor or review sites or Google Maps. It also tracks telephone numbers and email addresses because they're technically outbound links. So these were things that were actually quite hard to track in GA3 and I've done enough audits that there were always something wrong with somebody's account, but there's a lot that comes out of the box, but you just need to know these parent categories and what you get out of it. Recommended are a bunch of events that Google has given us a list basically. So sign up events, generate lead events or forms, purchase events, they've got some pre named ones and we want to use those so we can get more information into the reports because they're listening for these. And then you have custom, which is basically anything that doesn't fit in the previous three. So I did one recently which was a B2B company that had Calendly booking so that you could book an appointment with them. There isn't a recommended event for that, doesn't come out of the box in auto and enhance, so we'd have to track it. So we've got these four parent events and if you just look at the four parents when you log in to GA4, and I think this is where the frustration comes from, you go to events and you might have nine and an event count and it'll say like, "click, file download, scroll", and you are like, "but I want to know the page that they were on. I want to know the file that they downloaded". And you can add a secondary dimension and you can play around with that if you want. But there's another concept to get your head around, which is that you can create an event from an event. Now, if we go along with my little story here that we have our four parent categories all made up of event DNA, if I wanted to create a new event, I have to take the DNA from a parent. So I'm making a child. Now, for SEO listeners, you're familiar with this concept because you've got parent categories and subcategories, children that we like. You've got all that structure. So if I wanted to create a new event to make it easy for people to see that somebody clicked mordy@website.com , then I can go into the user interface, create a new event where I say, "please create me a child and I'd like to call this email_high and where the event name equals click and the parameter equals link_URL and the value of that is mordy@website.com . Please fire a new event called email_high" and then I've got that in my reports and I can report on it. So there's some tweaking we have to do within the user interface, but it's not obvious when you log in because there's no tool tip and Google just goes, "it's flexible, you can do anything". And people are like, "give me a fricking use case". And common ones are you'll probably want to create child events for the type of file that was downloaded, see the PDFs, the zips and the docs. You might want to break out those click events for outbound links to your review site, Google Maps, telephone numbers, email addresses. And when you start getting familiar with the events, the parameters, the parents and the children, it becomes easier to understand how do I go into the user interface and ask it? Because it's a different language, isn't it? It's like hieroglyphics almost when you first start because you are not familiar with what you need to do. And it reminds me, and I think I've had this conversation with both of you before, it reminds me when I remember people showing me WordPress websites and I was like, "oh wow, that's great". I'm like, "why does mine not look great? Why does mine go hello world and there's a crap at the site, like why?" And then somebody goes, "yeah, you got to think about your information architecture and your images and your placement". I was like, "I thought it was going to build it for me. I thought it was going to do the thing and I'm not..." and GA4 is a bit like that where you have to go, "oh, I've got to do some thinking". And that's the difference between getting the helicopter off the ground and driving away on the car that the car was pre-built. A lot of these things were already there and GA4 looks wonderful. There's some great things you could do, which we were talking about in a moment. But you've got to get your head around what is an event? What are they called? Because it's taken me some rewiring of my brain to go page_location when I'm like pages, all pages, why am I having to remember new things? So there's a lot of rewiring of the brain, I think, some neuroplasticity going on to make it a little bit easier. Crystal Carter: So on the plus side, I will say for Wix users who are listening, the team at Wix have worked with Google to create some preset events for certain Wix properties. So you should have a little bit of a headstart with regards to that. But I would also say what's interesting in the events thing is that I was following along while you were chatting and starts to make a lot more sense and there's two things that stood out to me was that I think a lot of people, I've seen a lot of people when they're talking about their reporting and how they set up their events and how they set up all of the different things using additional tools to help make it easier to understand. So I know a lot of people are using Looker Studio, I'd be interested to know what you think about that. The other thing that I think is interesting is that you talked about a few other third-party tools and you talked about people trying to square peg round hole, the old of universal analytics and I've definitely done cross domain tracking and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't make sense and I believe, and maybe you can shed some light on this as well, that cross domain tracking is a bit better. Jill Quick: Yeah, it's easier. Use the same measurement ID of your data stream. You've got to make sure you go in your admin settings and do the usual that you would have to do in things in Universal, configure your domains to say Google, it's this subdomain in this domain referral exclusions. Do not pat yourself on the back for traffic and they got all the credit for the conversions, the usual. But yeah, I have noticed that a bit like Mordy be like, "my head's out of the sand". I think I spoke to a lady last week and she went, "I'm in gone past the denial. I'm in the acceptance phase now. They're not changing the deadline. I'm going to have to do it". I'm like, "yeah, you are". And I think some of the other providers like there was... Had a client that's using Drift widget for their chat box and they just announced in February that they're now able to push those events with the measurement ID and I'm like, "yay, why have you done it so close to the deadline", Shopify, they're getting it done this month now in March. They're like, "yay, Shopify's going to be working". So I think maybe the slow adoption is because we've also been waiting for other tech stack support to help that migration because you're looking for the events and now Drift widget, if you've got the chat bot is going to push those events to you. I don't have to touch Google Tag Manager. If Shopify's doing it, great, I don't have to build loads of events for e-commerce if it's going to seamlessly push that in and going to your point on Looker, Looker's using the GA4 API, so it's only as good as your data collection. So yeah, use Looker, but if you haven't got the child events and the events and the other things you want to track that's useful to you, you are not going to get as much fun in those Looker reports because it's only as good as what you've got in that data collection. Mordy Oberstein: That's exactly the point. To me, that's exactly why one of the first things we did was automatically trigger those events in GA4. But it makes me wonder at the same time, from a business point of view, do you think that people like yourself are going to end up with a lot more clients who are... Let's say SEOs, whereas before in universal analytics, I never felt like, Hey, I need to go to an analytics expert. I have a general handle on this unless I come to a specific problem, which case I need to go to somebody one level up, but the way that Google construct this, are they... And I wonder if it's purposeful or not or whatever it is, are they creating a dynamic where professionals are now going to say, "you know what? Forget this. I am just going to sub this out to somebody else to handle". Jill Quick: Yeah. I think for people it might be for time they know enough to be dangerous but they haven't got the time to do it and they want to trust that somebody else is going to do that for them. I think that when it comes to why is Google doing this and I think there are a number of reasons. The way that GA3, the previous versions work don't really work with the way that it's going to be going in the future with cookies and consent mode and things like that. I think there's another part of me that I for fun was reading some of people's financial statements to see what they were doing and they were mentioning their servers and I'm like, "oh, I wonder why they're doing that?" And a hundred percent they're going to be taking all of the servers from the old Universal analytics when they've been it and they are going to be repurposed for service side tagging and BigQuery and all the other cloud stuff because that's really expensive. When it comes to putting investment into your analytics because it's been free for so long. I don't think people... And I've made a living out this for a decade, I've done hundreds of audits and there was always something wrong. There was always a... I've got a phrase I like to use, a confabulation of data, lies, you say, honestly because nobody goes, I'm going to tinker with my data and try and fake something for my boss. They think the data's solid because they didn't know how the data model worked and how the data got there. They just took it for granted and thought, "well, that's somebody else's problem". That leads into conversations of, well, who owns analytics? Is it dev? Is it your IT department? So it kind of just drifts around in a very ephemeral way and now people are having to put some time and money in some cases to get GA4 to work, but it's probably the first time they've had to really sit down and think, what are our measurement objectives? What is it that we're trying to do with this data? You don't want to have number soup and have reports for the sake of reporting. You want data so that it's going to give you an indication of what you should be doing with your strategy and tactics. And when you report to somebody, it's only really one or two people that get that report that can action it. Here's your purchase order, carry on, you are still in a job, that kind of thing. And when you narrow that down, it makes it a little bit better and more competitive in a way for that business owner because they've really considered what do they need and how are they going to get that data? I would say out of everybody using GA4, I reckon a good 10 million or so accounts will not move over to GA4, and that's not necessarily because they're not ready or they don't want it, they're just not going to use it. They're like, do you know what? I don't do a lot of marketing or we don't invest a lot, so I just want to know that the phone rings. People come into my shop kind of happy with that and they'll find as an analytics solution that fits those measurement objectives. The people I'm working with, they've got an SEO agency, a PPC agency, a CRO agency, 50 staff, a million pound of money to spend on marketing. They need more than what you can get from other data sources and that's why they're transitioning to GA4. So I think there's going to be a real mix and from us as marketeers as SEO people listening to this, we're going to need more analytics acumen. There's going to be more accounts that you're going to look after where it's not GA as the default. You'll have people that go, well, we use Piwik, we use Amplitude, we use another software. So we're all going to have to learn more because we're going to be seeing more people choosing a different provider. And that's quite exciting, but it's work either way, isn't it? But it feels like its analytics time to grow up a little bit, I think, because you are having to really think in a measured approach. What's a nice point though, isn't it a measured approach into what you should be doing doing and why you're doing it. Crystal Carter: And I think from the Wix side, and I'm sure there's other people who are thinking this way, we've been investing in our analytics stack, so the reports that we're able to provide people, we just added another Google Search Console one, Google Search Console has been investing a lot and improving a lot of the visibility there as well. So yeah, I think you're right. I think there's going to be people who maybe don't use it as a default. I think also a lot of people aren't going to port over to GA4 because they haven't touched that website in years. There's definitely a case where there's websites that were set up ages ago, nobody pays. It goes into that GA4, nobody's going to look at it. And I think a lot of, certainly if you have a CMS like Wix, then we have analytics built into the CMS, so if you are not doing, even if you are doing a super complex thing, we have a lot of filters and things within it, but if you just need a bird's eye view, for instance, you can absolutely see that from your... Jill Quick: I think what's really useful for that, you know you've got an alternative there. Questions you should be asking yourself because yes, if you want to continue to use Google Analytics, you're going to have to get a wiggle on and get it moved over, but go through some questions around, do you use the data because there are people that go, not really, or I log in or I get a report and it makes me feel comfortable, but I don't really do anything else. How are you currently reporting on your marketing performance? You've got to look at dashboard. Well, what's in that dashboard and is there stuff there that doesn't need to be there? Are you trying tangibelize the stuff that marketing does with a report because so much of what we do feels mystical, if that's the right word. Are you ready to invest in your data quality and collection? Because if they go, "yeah, no, I can't be asked or I have no money or there's no budget", how are you currently doing your data collection? Do you trust any of the points? These are all questions you need to ask yourself. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Jill Quick: And If you come out of it and go, "yeah, do you know what? I just need to know that the SEO stuff that we're doing is useful, that the content is engaging for my readers and that I'm building my database or the shop is busy with people because they've got other sources of truth for other marketing performance stats". Then just because people are saying you should move to GA4 doesn't mean that you actually should, if it's right for you with those measurement objectives and I've had many discovery calls with prospects where I've gone, "I don't think you are ready". Like the stage of your business, which is another important thing, how big is the business and what is your stage of growth? If you are in the mature phase, you're a market leader, yeah, you're going to be using GA or Adobe or Snowplow or so you're really investing in what you're doing. But there's a lot of people at the early phases of their business and they just want to grow. They're like, what am I doing to get that hockey stick of growth? What am I doing to improve the quality of the leads and business that I'm getting? Does that mean you should be learning about GA4, setting up BigQuery, building audiences with time? You're not going to use any of that information, get your information from somewhere else and when you are ready, you review the same questions. Are we using the data? Well, how are we reporting? Are we ready to invest? Oh yes, we are. Let's move to the next step then. And then you can always go back to another provider and if some of the people that are listening, if you viciously hate it and you're not going to... Well, don't use it. If you're a consultant, you might have clients that are like, yeah, tough, you're going to have to use GA and you're just going to have to get used to it. But there's a lot of people listening that just because... I mean I do it for my job, but you don't have to do it if it's not right for you. So it's getting the right fit so that you get a dashboard that answers the questions that you need at this point in time. Mordy Oberstein: I have so many questions. Crystal Carter: So many. Mordy Oberstein: And you mentioned questions. For example, for the love of god please explain the custom creation of reports and how to get started with that, but time is ebbed away. So where can people find you, Jill, in case they have questions about analytics. Where can I find you later if I have questions about analytics? Jill Quick: Probably more active on LinkedIn. So I'm Jill Quick. I'm a cartoon face. There's not many people with the name Jill Quick. I am on Twitter, but I'm a bit of a lurker. I just log on, read what's happening and then I kind of log off. I don't really engage because certain parts of Twitter are just not for me. Mordy Oberstein: I envy you. Jill Quick: Elon Musk is ruining it for us all with the feed. But yeah, LinkedIn's probably if you want to reach out and say, hi, and then there's my website, which is the coloringindepartment.com and I'm in the process of building some more easy step guides and content to get people started in this. Mordy Oberstein: I will link to a couple of those in the show notes if you're interested. Jill, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. It was really insightful and I have a million more questions. I'll find you somewhere. Jill Quick: That just means you need to bring me on for part two, doesn't it? Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Jill Quick: Shoot myself. Mordy Oberstein: I need to recover from part one though. Jill Quick: I like being called maven as well. So just for that. Yeah, marketing maven, analytics Maven, Jill, a little bit. Crystal Carter: We'll have to bring you in after July. It’s done. What? Jill Quick: Calling over your keyboard, so bad. Mordy Oberstein: If you see, by the way, you see a helicopter crashing somewhere. That is me using GA4. Jill Quick: Yeah. Okay, got it. But you can learn. I mean, one final note from me on this. Honest to God, if you can learn SEO, if you can understand Google's algorithm and do your log file analysis and make sense of Google Search Console, you can learn GA4. It is a learnable skill. You just have to get over the hump of the stages of grief, isn't it? Like ignoring it, anger, frustration, acceptance. And now we're in the doing part. Yeah, you can do it though, Mordy. I believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Accepting is hard for me. Jill Quick: Yeah. You can do it. I believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, Jill. We really appreciate it. Jill Quick: Thanks for having me. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. Jill Quick: I'll see you soon. Off now. Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Well, since we're talking about analytics and learning and questions, and since you're... I'm going to guess if you're like me, somewhat overwhelmed by what you just heard, this is a segment for you because in this segment, Crystal and I are going to dive into how much of that do you really need to know as we take a deep thought into how to even use or how much of analytics in general, not just GA4 to even use. It's a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. I have many thoughts about GA4 and analytics. Most of them are not deep, most of them are salty. Crystal Carter: Most of them are just, I don't want to. Mordy Oberstein: Right. This is not a salty thought with Crystal and Mordy. This is a deep thought. Crystal Carter: But why? No, I think it's... Well, a deep thoughts like the salty ocean. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Here we go. So let me just put it out there. There's so many data points. So let's set GA4 aside for a second. Let's stick in our comfort zone. I'm imagining myself still in Google Analytics 3 or universal analytics, the real analytics, you want to call it that. And in there is a ton of data, an enormous amount of data. And this could be applied to your SEO tools. This could be applied to Google's search console, even though I think that's a little bit less, but even to Google Search Console and of course at GA4, how much of that data is, wow, so cool. I have access to that data versus, you know what? That's really good data point that I need to make sure that I'm reporting on and tracking carefully. Crystal Carter: I don't know. People love data. They love a chart. They love a chart. And to be honest, you have to have some kind of data in order to back up the things that you want to do. And in order to get proof of concept for the things you want to do. Mordy Oberstein: Of course, this is not, should you use analytics, the question is how much of it, and I will put my foot on the landmine and say sometimes it's too much or sometimes it's not worth the while. Although, I am a data nerd, so I kind of get it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But I think that sometimes it might like less is more. I feel like that phrase in reality is usually not true. You give me a steak, I want more, not less, give me a house, more, not less. But with analytics sometimes less is more. Crystal Carter: I think that's true. Certainly I think that when you think about reporting to decision makers, you can blind them with science. And sometimes if there's too many numbers, people don't trust the numbers... Mordy Oberstein: Science. Crystal Carter: I think people don't trust the numbers that you give them because they can't see the wood for the trees as it were. So that's definitely the case. I've also seen it sometimes where I've had clients who were tracking the wrong thing and they were really, really, really worried about one particular metric or another. We had the fantastic Jill Quick here talking about GA4, yesterday we had the fifth or the... Sorry, not yesterday in podcast release time, but yesterday in podcast recording time. Mordy Oberstein: Yesterday in our recording time. Crystal Carter: We had the amazing Christian Simon and she was talking about bounce rate and how she hates bounce rate. And I know that there's an entire contingent of SEOs who really hate bounce rate as a metric. So there's metrics that people get hung up on and sometimes make big poor decisions over those metrics. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And you say, oh God, we really need to sort this out. And they're trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist because they're looking at the wrong metric. And sometimes when you have lots and lots and lots of metrics to choose from, people will pick the shiniest one and that will be the thing that they worry about. But it's not actually worth the bother, to quote you from a previous podcast, "sometimes it's a nothing burger". Mordy Oberstein: That's right. So that snore, what should I say about my meta descriptions being too long or short? By the way, I want to start optimizing meta descriptions by converting them from actual text, like wing dings, like symbols and see how that goes on my SEO. I think also at the same time when I find this, I get sometimes caught up in this is that what you end up doing is, and it's going to apply to any sort of data and analysis. Let's say keywords, keyword analysis, whether it's rankings or impressions or whatever it is, you could get so far down the rabbit hole. You can start looking at minutiae of minutiae. You can do this with any. You can dive into, let me see how I'm doing in the US. Okay, fine. Great, that makes sense. Let me see how I'm doing in New York. Okay, that kind of makes sense. Let me see how I'm doing in West Hempstead. Does not matter. I will tell you, unless you're a local business located in West Hempstead, New York, it doesn't really matter, but you could go that far. You can go so far down the rabbit hole that you end up creating problems for yourselves that if you took a minute to stop and think they are problems, you probably could fix them. You might see some benefit, but what's the opportunity cost? Does it really matter? Or is my time better spent focusing on larger problems? And I feel like that's sometimes is the danger with data and analytics. Crystal Carter: And I think also benchmarking. Benchmarking is really important in this whole conversation around GA4. There's a lot of people talking about migrating your data and storing your data from UA. So they're going to make it so that you can't access the UA data. They're going to make it so that the UA data is not available or stops collecting or that sort of thing. So if you want to get insights on what is good for your business, because that's the thing, if like someone says, "oh, we got 4,000 clicks this month", on whatever thing it was, or it's like, "is that good?" I don't know if that's good for your business. What if your business is used to having 400,000 clicks and this month you had 4,000 or what if it's used to having 4,000 and this month you had 400, then how do you know what's good? If you're used to having 40 and you have 4,000. Wow, brilliant. So the benchmarking is really important. So understanding the context of your data is really important. So I think that just a piece of quantitative data in the middle of the ether means very, very little when it's not part of a wider data story, a data profile or business. So I think the context is very important to think about with all of these things with reporting. Mordy Oberstein: You just brought up an absolutely amazing point. We just had this, let's break the fourth wall here with the Wix SEO learning hub, where sometimes you look at a data reporting period and you trying to benchmark, which essentially we're trying to do, and you could say, okay, this is the data, now we should do X or here's the data, now let's look at Y. When really you don't have enough data and sometimes it could take months and months and months to get the right data. Let's say for example, you launch a new product or new page or whatever it is. Let's say October, November is Thanksgiving and Black Friday, December is Christmas, January is people are just getting back to the new year. It'll take you to February theoretically until you start seeing normal data. So now you have October data when you launched, which is all right, whatever, you just launched it. November, not normal data. December, not normal data. January, maybe getting close to normal data and February, you have two months. Crystal Carter: This is it. And I'll tell you right now, if any SEOs out there who do monthly reporting who say, let's compare this month to last month, February always looks terrible. February always looks terrible because January's 31 days. 31 big old days, and February is 28, so that's 29... Mordy Oberstein: Stepchild month. Crystal Carter: Three days shorter. So it's going to be less. Tell you right now, if you're looking at hard numbers, it's going to be less. Mordy Oberstein: If you look at how much money you saved in February versus January and you're spending, it might be better because, "hey, I ain't spending", it's three days where I could not pull out my credit card. Crystal Carter: Right. And March is always way, way better than February. And every March, you're like, "we crushed it, guys. We crushed it". Mordy Oberstein: We're so good. Crystal Carter: So, yeah. And I think the data point, yeah, I had a look at... Like one analogy I always use is like trees. You could look at trees and that you could do six months of data for trees between May, and you look at trees in the spring, going all the way into September or something and you go, oh yeah, trees are green, they're great, they've got lots of leaves, and then you don't know why you need a rake in November and you're completely confused because your data's wrong. So yeah, the data stuff is absolutely important. You can't make decisions without solid data. What's useful is to... I always recommend having multiple sources of data, but being able to understand what's common across them with no. . . In the conversation with GA4, and one of the things that's tricky, and one of the things reasons why Jill was talking about events so much is that the things don't always line up. So if you're trying to compare, it's like you're not comparing apples to apples. You might be comparing apples to oranges. So it's very important for you to have some kind of consistent data. So one of the things that's good during this data migration is that Google, sorry, Google Search Console is going to be consistent throughout, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: You can only store data from Google Search Console for so long, so you might need to have an export thing, but she was right. We do need to be more mature about data, and this isn't just about making marketing decisions, it's also about search. Because there's so much machine learning in search and so much machine learning in search advertising right now, and so much like AI, and we say, "oh, there's AI". AI is machine learning in practice. Mordy Oberstein: So there actually is no AI, it's all machine learning, but whatever... Crystal Carter: It's all machine learning and they say, garbage in, garbage out. So you have to feed the machine good data, and the better data you're feeding it, the better the machine will reward you. So yeah, Jill's entirely right that we need to be more mature about our data. I need to make sure that works well and that includes the way that we think about data, includes the kinds of events we have. It includes the structured data that we have on our site, includes the metadata that we have on our site because that also goes into the data profile, and I've seen it before where we've had clients who were running machine learning advertising campaigns and the machine came back with all these different words that it thought were relevant to the page. Then we made some optimizations to the on page information and the on page meta tags for that page, and then the machine understood it better. So these are things that we need to think about and be much more aware of how we manage our data online and on our website. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm want to go back to one thing you said about comparing apples and oranges. There is no comparison. Oranges are infinitely better than apples. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: How is an apple better than an orange? Crystal Carter: When was the last time you had an orange pie? Mordy Oberstein: I didn't say pie. Pie is better. Crystal Carter: When was the last time you had an orange pie? When was the last time little Debbie's made you an orange pie? Mordy Oberstein: What? Orange juice or apple juice? Which one? Crystal Carter: I mean apple juice has its place... Mordy Oberstein: Two fruits, in an apple and orange fruit, which one would you eat? Crystal Carter: Which one would I eat? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Depend on what time of year. I like a nice crisp apple. I enjoy nice crisp apple. This is delicious. Mordy Oberstein: You're just saying that it's like you could be right and you know that... Crystal Carter: No, I live in England, there's so many different kinds of apples. Mordy Oberstein: I'm from New York. We have apples. We don't grow oranges, but I still like oranges better. Crystal Carter: Oranges are oranges. You got to peel them. Sometimes the rind is thin. Sometimes the rind is thick. Sometimes it's like a whole thing. Sometimes you can peel it with your fingers. Sometimes you need a knife. You can't always just bite into an apple. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: We should bite into nail though. Some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news. Snappy news. When it rains, things get wet. Wait, no, that's not how that goes. When it rains, it pours. There we go. We just finished with the February 2023 product review update, and then suddenly on March 15th, Google went ahead and announced the March 2023 core update. So I'll run through my usual spiel here. One, it takes a few weeks for this sort of thing to roll out. Two, there could be all sorts of rank spikes and losses and reversals along the way. So don't panic, let the update play itself out. Three, per tools like the summer sensor, we've already seen a few days of elevator rank fluctuations, but don't be fooled if the tools go back to normal for a few days as there can be spikes and rank reverse at the tail end, like I just said before. Definitely have a look at Barry Schwartz's search engine land coverage, if you're looking to get more context, as he's got like, I don't know, a gazillion, bazillion, trillion links to the various updates. He's coverage. You can see how the updates have functioned in the past and what's happened and how big they are, and yada, yada, yada. Yes, Barry, we know you've covered them all and now you have the internal links to prove it. Okay, onto the second item of business, and this one's not really an SEO story, but it's, Hey, hi. So who cares? Heard James Vincent over at the Verge. Google announces AI features and Gmail, docs and more to rival Microsoft. Let the AI wars begin. Okay, so basically Google is giving you the ability, or we'll be giving you the ability to enter a few prompts and have the AI create the entire content for you within a Google Doc and so forth. The example Google shows is in a Google Doc where they enter very bare bones prompt to create a job listing for a sales rep opening, and then Google goes ahead and completely goes bonkers and creates the entire complete listing format and everything in seconds. I'll just reiterate what I've been saying this entire time about AI content. Please, please, please, for the love of God, please use this responsibly. Boy do I sound like a boomer. And last, and you might say least, but I don't because it may not sound like a big deal, but to me this is huge. Again, Barry Schwartz, who else over at Search Engine Roundtable this time "Google Search, save your favorite brand's feature". So back at Google's event Search On in 2022, Google announced that you'll be able to have a setting that will let you see results on Google from your favorite brands. Well, SEO legend, Britney Mueller spotted this for the first time live in the wild on the surf when searching for something on mobile and the search came back and said, "Hey, save your favorite brand to get more relevant results". Okay, Mordy, this is cool, right? You can go to the SERP, you search for something and you search on our jeans and Google says, "Hey, save this setting so that you can get great results from either the Gap or I don't know where else do you get jeans from, Old Navy or Macy's? And you can get results from all these different companies and brands specifically and take out results from other brands that you don't like in the SERP". It's cool, but was there not a bigger SEO story than this all week, Mordy? No. It was a really quiet week. Just kidding. To me, this is huge because it hinted how the ecosystem will function going forward, where the user will be able to refine what they see at the onset. So you won't even have an opportunity to rank theoretically based upon how the user set things up. In this case, if the user set up to only see, or their favorite brands were the Gap and Old Navy, but they didn't save Macy's, well, then maybe that user wouldn't see any results from Macy's anymore. So what the user will do with the onset will define what they see, which has implications on everything from ring tracking to the very undervalued idea that brand marketing greatly impacts SEO, which in this case it directly impacts SEO, because if the people like the brand and they save the brand, if they don't like the brand, then they don't save the brand, they don't save any of the results. So there's that. Anyway, that's this week's version of the Snappy News. Oh, that was the snappiest of SEO news for you. So that was great. Crystal Carter: That was great. It was so snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy and so newsy, like every week. We say this in every week, I feel this is our most uncreative pivot. Crystal Carter: Have you seen Newsies? Did you realize that Christian Bale... Mordy Oberstein: Christian Bale? Yeah, obviously. Oh, please. If you going to just try to stump me with a movie trivia thing, it cannot be that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Like what letter comes after a? B. Crystal Carter: I didn't realize you were such a Newsies fan. Mordy Oberstein: I love Newsies. Crystal Carter: Okay. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Brooklyn is here. Crystal Carter: Oh, of course. Of course. This is a movie for me. Mordy Oberstein: This is for me, it's built for me. It's a bespoke movie. Well, speaking of Newsies, actually, no, this has absolutely nothing to do with that, but before we do leave, we need to leave you with somebody who you, it should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, in this case, more analytics awesomeness as if analytics is awesomeness, but whatever leading that little technicality aside for a moment, this week's follow of the week is the one, the only Dana DiTomaso on Twitter @DANADITOMASO. If you can't keep up with the spelling of it so quickly, which nobody can cause I talk way too fast. We'll link to Dana's Twitter profile in the show notes. And Dana is somebody who has been the forefront of the Google Analytics for conundrum. She is cautious. She speaks about it. She's a lot of great resources out there about it. So look for on Twitter. Also, by the way, on LinkedIn, she posts a lot of resources about GA4, so a great follow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's great. I saw her speak at Mozcon last year. She's very frank, and she's very clear and very astute about analytics and about how people track data on websites. So yeah, she's fantastic. Absolutely, check her out online, and if you see her speaking at a conference of which she does sometimes do check her out as well, because she's a smart person. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great way to put it. She's a smart, smart, smart person. No, it'll be smart for you. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: In the next week, because... Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... that's going to wrap it up. 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 episodes. We dive into building the ultimate SEO team with a very, very special guest. Crystal Carter: Hint. Mordy Oberstein: They may like cheese, they may not like cheese. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Look to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. 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