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How do you successfully rank your site’s content at the top of the SERP… and then keep it there for the long haul? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by RicketyRoo’s, Melissa Popp, to discuss tactics for maintaining your rankings on the SERP. Discover how you can overcome volatility on Google and competitor targeting by taking a content-first approach to maintain rankings. Join us this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we pay tribute to the unsung heroes of SEO… those who can maintain their rankings! Back The hard work of maintaining your Google rankings How do you successfully rank your site’s content at the top of the SERP… and then keep it there for the long haul? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by RicketyRoo’s, Melissa Popp, to discuss tactics for maintaining your rankings on the SERP. Discover how you can overcome volatility on Google and competitor targeting by taking a content-first approach to maintain rankings. Join us this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we pay tribute to the unsung heroes of SEO… those who can maintain their rankings! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 93 | June 26, 2024 | 58 MIN 00:00 / 58:13 This week’s guests Melissa Popp Melissa Popp is the Content Strategy Director for RicketyRoo. With two decades of experience helping businesses amplify their online presence, Melissa brings knowledge, innovative ideas, and actionable strategies tailored to today's competitive landscape. Her expertise is backed by successful collaborations with diverse businesses, from small local shops to larger enterprises, proving the effectiveness of well-crafted content strategies in driving tangible results. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast, we're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix. Today, I'm joined by she who doesn't wear a cape, but maybe she should wear a cape. But either way, she is an SEO hero, our Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: But the good ones do like, yeah, the Flash doesn't wear one, but Batman does. Crystal Carter: I don't know, I had a plumber who really helped me out. He didn't wear a cape, that would be very impractical. Mordy Oberstein: But it would've covered up his crack. Crystal Carter: My plumber has it under control. I'll just tell you that right now. Mordy Oberstein: Plumber crack is a real thing. My stepfather's an electrician. Electrician crack is also a real thing. Crystal Carter: Wow, this is wow, that's a great start to the podcast. Thanks listeners for hanging in there with us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, it's not my fault, it's a full moon tonight. Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get inbuilt Google Search Console insights to help you maintain those rankings. Look for within our SEO dashboard, because today we pay homage to the unsung heroes of SEO, those who maintain rank, how Google updates bring maintaining rank into focus in all new ways. The content connection, why a content first focus can be your best friend when looking to keep your rankings, and how sites of all sizes can go about maintaining their rankings. To help us RicketyRoo's own, Melissa Popp will be here in just a few minutes to share what's in her utility belt as she goes about keeping her rankings. Plus, we look at how search engines try to maintain their market share by borrowing from other search engines. And of course, we have snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, put on your capes and proudly wear your underwear on the outside as we pay tribute to you, the unsung hero of SEO, AKA, Captain Rank Maintainer on this, the 93rd episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Maintaining rank is hard. It's not easy. Crystal Carter: Maintaining rank is hard. Mordy Oberstein: Because everyone's gunning for you now. Crystal Carter: Yes, everyone can see you. You were completely exposed. If you're number two or if you're number 37, you can sneak in, right? You can sneak in on the cut, you can be like, okay, I see you number one, I see what you're doing, but you can bide your time, like a sneak attack kind of thing. But if you are number one, everyone can see you and everybody knows what's going on and people will study you and get all in there. A great tool for looking at your competitors is Semrush has a great tool for that, looking at keywords and looking at competitors. One of the ones that Ross Simmons, friend of the podcast, friend of the SEO Hub has talked about is CRM. Salesforce has an article called, What is A CRM, and I'm looking at there, and that has a traffic volume, the keyword, what is a CRM has a traffic volume of 22,000. According to Semrush, they're getting 5,000 of those clicks every month. They've ranked number one in that position since May, 2023, possibly even longer. And they spend time making sure that that does not move. Why? Because that's 5,000. That's that much coming through straight away, and that's something that's really important. They're also ranked, they recently have had a tussle with HubSpot. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, a tussle, that's a good word, by the way. I just want to stop, point out what a great word tussle is. Sorry. Crystal Carter: Tussle, yes, tussle is a good word. So they're tussling a little bit with HubSpot for CRM, so sometimes they're number one, sometimes HubSpot's number one for just the word CRM, but they've had number one for, what is a CRM, for a very long time. And that's really important because that's core to their business. So if you have terms that are core to your business, it is absolutely worth maintaining that content, maintaining that position over time. And if Google understands that it is core to your business, that everything you do points to that particular keyword, then they will give you that. They'll understand that you are the authority in that, and all of the things on your website should point to that. Now, not only does what does a CRM, rank number one for what is a CRM, but it also ranks number one for loads of other terms as well. So for instance, it also ranks number one for, what is a CRM tool. It ranks number one for, CRM definition, CRM program, all of that sort of stuff. That particular piece of content is pulling in tons of traffic for them. And I think that in terms of maintaining rank, sometimes things can rank number one and get no traffic and not get much traffic at all. But according to this, according to Semrush in May alone, the page, what is a CRM, on Salesforce was getting 43,000 clicks a month. Okay, now that is absolutely, absolutely 100% worth maintaining rank. Now, if you're looking at your keywords and you've got number one but nobody's coming to the page anyway, you want to have as many number one keywords on your site as you can, but maybe don't lose any sleep if you slip a little bit. But if you have something that's coming in and bringing in thousands and thousands every month, then absolutely spend the time. And there's lots of different tools, which I'm sure that Melissa will get into the details of it, but you need to assess when you're assessing whether or not you should fight to maintain your rank, whether or not you should defend yourself from the usurpers. Make sure... I know dropping the vocabulary words. Anybody studying for their SATs, you're welcome. And- Mordy Oberstein: That's our core audience right there. Crystal Carter: Right? But basically anybody who, if you're looking at it and you're trying to think, should they hold the line here? Have a look at the search volume, have a look at how relevant it is to the rest of your content, and then also think about the links. So if you're thinking about that particular page, we have a particular piece of content. We have the SEO Guide, the Wix SEO Guide, for instance, on the Wix SEO Hub, which has lots of links out to other pieces of content, has lots of links into it from lots of other links as well, and gets a fair amount of traffic for us for that particular page. That's worth us maintaining, that's worth us looking after, that's worth us thinking about. And so have a look at which ones are those pivotal, crucial, important pages, and you should probably be monitoring those in terms of ranking. You should probably be monitoring them daily, weekly, at least. And you should be scheduling in and making sure that you're updating them regularly and making sure that you're paying attention to your competitors because sometimes if you're not looking and they can sneak in and you might miss that you lost a keyword that maybe has a knock on effect to some of the other keywords that you're ranking for. Mordy Oberstein: Now, to get more into this, I had a little chat with RicketyRoo's, Melissa Popp, because I have a lot to say about this, and we talked a lot about this. Here's a little chat with RicketyRoo's, Melissa Pop. So, welcome to this show, Melissa Popp. How are you? Melissa Popp: I'm good. How are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm good, can't complain. I think that you are one of the unsung heroes of SEO. Melissa Popp: Oh, gosh. I just have to throw that feather in my cap, won't I? Mordy Oberstein: Not all heroes wear capes, unless you're wearing a cape. You wear capes? Melissa Popp: That's true. No, not yet, not yet. No, I do have a crown though that I wear sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's close. Melissa Popp: Yeah, I'm a little extra sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: There's a whole... In every SEO conversation, podcast, webinar, article, whatever, it's all about increasing rank, increasing rank, increasing rank. But one of the things that I'll put a little spoiler out there, or I don't know, behind the scenes thing, maybe I'm not allowed to say this, but one of the things we talk about internally at Wix is maintaining rank. We're already ranking, and now we have to keep those rankings because if you don't keep those rankings, then you're back at the square one of trying to get the rankings, but no one ever talks about this. Melissa Popp: No, nobody does. Nobody talks about, what I like to think of as maintenance mode of SEO. You come to a point where depending on how big your site is, what your niche is, that you hit a saturation level where it's like, how much more can you do to continue to boost rankings when you already are in page one, top three results, earning your featured snippets, unfortunately showing up in SGE now, whether that's right or wrong, but there's a maintenance that's involved there and ongoing work that most of us, I would say, probably 60 to 70% of our job is that maintenance mode of maintaining those ranks. And then at the same time, trying to figure out, okay, where do we pivot from here to earn additional rank rankings? If that's even possible, because at some point you reach a level where you own it all, ideally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, that's one of the, I don't know, thou shall not say this, but sometimes you can't go any higher. You're number three, and that's where you're going to get for this keyword. Melissa Popp: Absolutely, and at RicketyRoo, we do a lot of work with home service clients, and you see that all the time. These businesses are competing with directors like Yelp, Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, and other websites that the domain authority and just overall topical authority that they have in those niches because of what powerhouse of websites they are. Your little mom and pop shop is never going to be able to get rank one, two, three, even in some cases when you're going up against powerhouses like that. So it's, what do you do from there? Unless you have millions of dollars to try to compete there, you're never going to maintain that. And nobody talks about that either, of what ranking is good enough before you start carrying the load of ranking right there versus trying to convince clients that you can go higher because you can't. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's fine because sometimes you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggonit, and people click on you and you're ranking number three, and that's fine. Melissa Popp: And as long as you're converting and earning business, and then also you're satisfied as a business owner at what your revenue is from that, you don't have to be number one to make a living and to keep your business growing. And there's so much competition out there, and so many, we're seeing this right now, all the changes. I mean, that could be a whole other episode, right? Talking about Reddit and Quora jumping in rankings, and now you're competing with a whole other subset of websites that shouldn't even be competing with you, but at some point you have to step back and say, okay, this is good enough. We are converting enough. Either, what other channels can we look at? Because that's another thing we don't talk about as part of this maintenance mode. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, there's life outside of Google? Melissa Popp: Oh my gosh, life outside of SEO, I'm going to get hate mail for saying, and I'm a huge, huge believer in being able to look at, where is your audience? Where are they hanging out? Where are they having discussions? Sometimes it's social media, sometimes it is Reddit. Sometimes, I mean, I was talking to someone the other week about direct mail campaigns and how nobody talks about direct mail, but when you look at certain demographics, that still works. And that's another whole aspect of maintaining not just rankings, but brand awareness. You want to go where people are. You reach a plateau with SEO, you can take that budget and spend it a little bit elsewhere to figure that out, and you're still growing just in a different way. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so spinning back around to all this, because the point about Reddit and Quora is exactly where I want go with this. You were doing just fine, things were okay. You were ranking, I don't know, one, two, or three, and now all of a sudden you're still ranking one, two, or three, but there's a giant discussions, cert feature box above you with a bunch of Reddit URLs. How much of your work is going into changes in the ecosystem, how to combat them, how to deal with them? With the Reddit one, I don't know what you do, but things like that where the SERP is changing, the algorithm is changing, there are updates, there's this or that, and you're trying to just staying out above water because you're doing better than above water. You're ranking the top of the SERP, but you're doing work that keeps you afloat at the very top of the SERP. How much of your time is spent on those kinds of things? Melissa Popp: I mean, I already, as part of my work, and especially on the content marketing side with clients, I am already looking at Reddit and Quora, whether they're ranking on page one or not. When it comes to content ideas, blogging, even updating content, looking at people, also ask boxes, I was already looking at all of this before all of a sudden they all jumped to page one. And I think that's a big problem in our industry, is that a lot of our efforts, there's a lot of people out there doing great work with content that are looking at the big picture and not just the little SEO piece of it. We need to start spending more time looking at this. So Reddit and Quora, I mean, I was doing content briefs a couple of weeks ago for a home services client, and I'm seeing Reddit discussions pop up for transactional keywords. There's no reason they need to be there at all, but I'm like, okay, if people are landing on a page, a service page, and still have that question that is popping up on page one, whether I agree that that Reddit thread should be there or not, I need to be looking at that. There is still, whether Google's algorithm is all jacked up and that is what's happening here or not, I still, if Google is going to rank that there, I need to be aware of that for my client and think, is this Reddit discussion worthy of inclusion on a piece of content I'm creating for? Do I need to update that piece of content? So I think there's two, there's two issues there. One is we're not doing enough to actually understand search intent to begin with, and Reddit in discussion is popping up there is one way to look at that. What are people discussing that they're not getting from "normal" search results, that we need to be including in our content? And not just for SEO purposes, but literally a potential customer is asking that question. And then on the flip side, why are we not doing this to begin with? We only care about it now that Reddit and Quora and other discussions are on page one. So we're already doing a disservice to clients by having not paid attention to this before it simply popped to page one. Mordy Oberstein: But that goes into, so I'll give you an example of this where if you're not paying attention to what people actually want and talking to them in a way that actually speaks to them, while you might be ranking today, I don't think you'll be ranking tomorrow. There was a couple... I'm actually running this up right now for the Wix SEO Hub. By the time this recording comes out, I hope it'll be long published. Looking at two examples from the March 2024 core update. So bankrate.com redid basically an entire folder of their content, and it was previously very, I call it sterile content, like, what is a payday loan? How to get a payday loan, when don't you choose a payday loan, how to finance a payday loan. Every H two was very topical, and it's like each one's trying to rank for a featured snippet, kind of thing. And they redid all of it and the folder went berserk in a good way, just shot up in the rankings with the March 2024 core update, because what they did was they said, okay, let's speak to the topic, but in a way that relates to what the user's going to do with the information. So for example, they added a section on when a payday loan might actually be worthwhile because they realized, okay, we're talking about payday loans and the original content was, what is a payday loan, the risk of a payday loan, and all these very generalized, sterile kind of subtopics. But if we're talking about this, obviously the user is looking to get a payday loan for a reason, so why don't we address that? And they did, and they did it across all of their content, it became very situational like, here's what you need to know about a payday loan, in the context of how it's going to work for you. They talked about just what to expect, the money would take X number of days to get into your account, blah, blah, blah. It was much more user focused. All of a sudden they shot up in the rankings, they replaced somebody. They replaced the page, and that page is now gone and not ranking. And websites, I think are slowly coming around to the idea that they have to update content. What they wrote five years ago and ranked with five years ago is not going to work anymore because the algorithm is changing. Let's change that up. And big content teams are doing that and if you're not worried about maintaining your rank, somebody's going to get after you and replace you. Melissa Popp: Exactly, and why wouldn't they? Especially when you look at bigger websites compared to smaller websites, and that's a whole other player, smaller websites being frozen out of brand dominated topical searches. But that example that you gave with bank rate, how many SEOs listening to this right now, okay, on let's say smaller or medium sized teams and websites, are going to come away from this and go, holy cow, if Bankrate did this, this is absolutely what we should do. Lily Ray, Marie Haynes have been sharing other examples of websites that are skyrocketing after pivoting their content strategy. We have that proof there. Now, can we guarantee 100% certainty that Google's always going to reward that content? Who knows what Google's going to do, but what we know is searchers want information that they can actually act on and use, beyond just whatever their initial search query is. And the problem is, is we spend so much time creating SEO content, focusing on keywords, focusing on page, what backlinks can we get, what internal links can we update? We are so focused on gaining the SEO side of things that we forget the content is the foundation of that growth. And what's even worse is most people know that, but they don't want to spend the time on creating a quality piece of content because holy cow, that's actually really hard, even if it's a topic, what is a payday loan versus how does the payday loan scam work? And so you have a problem that companies don't want to invest the time in creating quality of content. They certainly don't want to pay writers and spend the money to create quality content. I mean, I can imagine how much Wix spends with all the content that you all push out and you have a set budget for that and you can get it and you look at the names you bring on to write for you. But most companies don't have that, nor do they want to invest in it because they feel that their ROI could be better spent elsewhere, whether it's paid advertising, display, something else. They want instant gratification, not realizing that keeping your content updated to match search intent and what your users are actually looking for to make a decision through that top and middle of the funnel content, particularly, you are going to spend less money long-term on ROI than throwing money at the wall with PPC, competing with everyone else driving bids up. And I get it, I understand why this works the way it does. You're always going to try to get the most for the cheapest. But we're now finding with the helpful content update and other things Google are doing that, holy cow, that doesn't work anymore. And now companies are playing catch up and having to spend even more money that they didn't budget. In Bankrate's case, I wonder how much money they spent updating content that if they had approached the correct way to begin with, they wouldn't have had to spend. And that's the conundrum now everybody is in. Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole problem. And to your point about the smaller websites, they also, in my opinion, there's no such thing as one kind of site having a total advantage. There are things that big websites have that smaller websites don't, like we have money for SEO Hub to pay writers, yada, yada, yada, yada. But if you want to make changes, it's very slow. We're a giant brand, there's a lot of guidelines, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. If you're a smaller website and you're like, you know what? And we're more risk averse, so if we see that there's a new trend. I think for example, that content's far more conversational than it ever has been before. Good luck getting a big brand to create a landing page that's conversational, not ultimate, whatever, whatever, sell, buy here. Good luck. If you're a small brand or a small website or a small business or an SME, whatever it is, you can do that. You can take those risks and that's what'll help you maintain the rank, in my opinion. I think you're at an easier advantage to maintain rank to a certain extent. Obviously, the larger websites have that authority and that makes it easier for them but you can do things like, I think that content that Google's looking for X now and I want to pivot to do X, you can do that tomorrow if you wanted to. There's no hoops to jump through. Melissa Popp: Definitely, and the thing with smaller business versus bigger businesses, especially in brands, we're hearing that conversation a lot as well, is how is anybody going to compete with these big brands now dominating search more than ever? And depending on what your business is, especially as a small, medium sized business, you don't need to compete with those. That's not where locally people are looking for. We have these conversations with local clients all the time, that they want number one against Yelp and Angie's List, and it's like, no, you don't, you don't need to. People understand that they're shopping around, they are going to click down through results. That's the whole scary idea of, oh, if you're not at the top of page one, oh no, oh no, the sky is falling. Mordy Oberstein: What's the best place to bury a dead body? On page two of the SERP. Melissa Popp: Listen, you just need to be on page one, and you need to give searchers and actual consumers more power to make that choice, most people are shopping for that. But yeah, I absolutely agree that smaller businesses has the opportunity to make more immediate impact than bigger businesses do, and they are less risk adverse. And it comes down to the priority of changes you're making, whether it's SEO updates, link building, content, you don't have to do it all. You just have to do the right things in the right order to make the most impact and then eventually, you get to all the other things. And that's another thing that gets, I think very missed in our industry is everybody wants a checklist. Let's go through, update title tags and Meta descriptions and headers and blah, blah, blah down the list, where it's like, okay, we know Google rewrites Meta titles and descriptions all the time. Why is that your number one priority? Mordy Oberstein: That's not what's going to move... Sometimes, yes, but my experience, if you had rankings and are slowly seeing a decline, like a consistent slow degradation, it's a quality issue, usually. Melissa Popp: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: And that might be, you have terrible headers as part of the quality, but it's usually the quality overall. You need to have a hard look at your content, which is I think what people don't do. I feel like SEOs look at the SERP like I won. It's like I don't know, I'll use a sports reference, like, I scored a basket or I got a goal or I got a hit, now I'm done. Yeah, but in five minutes from now, you're back up in the order, you got to take another swing. It's not, you won and these rankings belong to you. Google doesn't owe you anything. Melissa Popp: No, no, and why we think they do. These conversations and arguments and the vitriol that our industry is showing to one another right now and frankly showing to folks like John Miller and Danny Sullivan. Okay, I'm not saying Google is the enemy, but we are competing against them. That's a realistic fact of what we do. The only thing we can do is do the best we possibly can, starting with the foundation that does everything for SEO and that piece of content. We can only do the best that we can and maybe pray, hope, whatever you want to do, burn a candle, whatever, and hope for everything else to match up and help rankings. But at the end of the day, we start with that piece of content and it's so overlooked. And to circle back to talking about unsung heroes, that's why this maintenance of your rankings is so important. And it always starts with that content. What more could you be doing? How has search intent changed that you need to now update your piece? We see that all the time in local. I feel like local search results, the search intent changes more than anywhere else that I've worked, and I've worked on e-comm brands, I've worked enterprise level national, international. I feel like at the local level, that search intent changes almost on a whim. It's like a whole demographic decides, oh, I'm going to search to buy this or find this service, this is what... And it makes no sense, but it's what happens. And that's one of the first things I do when I'm looking to update a piece of content is, I want to dive deep into SERPs and understand, has this changed? And we don't spend that time. We want to blame Google and we want to point fingers at things. And yes, sometimes, you know what? I've seen some of the cases here that I definitely think this is Google's fault for a particular domain and not what they're doing, absolutely, but those cases are so actually rare. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Yeah, the norm is, Google knows for the most part what he's doing. There are enormous gaps sometimes and there are shifts. I think we're in a point right now where, like an inflection point, where things just like multiple reasons why things are not firing in all cylinders and they're not and- Melissa Popp: No, they're not. Absolutely, I'm not defending Google here at all for any of this. I cannot imagine the algorithmic engineering, especially now that you're adding machine learning and AI into the mix, of how difficult it is to actually do this right. And part of me still believes that they do in fact want to get this right. Losing market share for people switching to AI search engines, to TikTok, to any of these things, depletes their revenue. They want to get this right, but in the meantime, we're all left holding the bag with our clients trying to explain, we have no control over this, so- Mordy Oberstein: But you do have control over, for example, let's talk about bounce rate, and they'll talk about the context of user behavior metrics and nav boost, that kind of thing, which is legit, nav boosts is a really interesting conversation, but they're not talking. We're not talking about it. Oh, you know what? I see my bounce rate has gone up, maybe my content's not what people want anymore. Let me see, maybe I should rework that. We always look for the most immediate, easy way out. Melissa Popp: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: As opposed to taking a hard look, and the only way I feel like to maintain your rankings is to take a hard look at yourself. What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? What's the data say about how people feel about our content? And it is not just your typical SEO metrics, if you're going on social media and being like, oh, I hate this. Also, you're seeing people talk about your blog in a negative way, that's going at some point to impact search and your rankings. You need to go back, you need to take a hard look, you need to think, okay, I need to rework this because your rankings, again, they're not a given. They're not going to last, no rankings last forever. Melissa Popp: No, nobody, nobody, and you bring up bounce rate, one of the most misunderstood and it's like the bad child of everything. But how many SEOs are either bringing in a content marketer to actually look at content marketing metrics like bounce rate, timeline page, etc? How many of SEOs are actually looking at those metrics at all? And I'd imagine that number is probably staggering low because like you said, a lot of us, well first off, I mean it goes back to our clients. What do our clients care about? They care about rankings, traffic and conversion, and that's usually it. They don't care about anything else, as long as rankings leave the traffic to conversion, boom, you're done, right? Mordy Oberstein: Right. Melissa Popp: But the problem is, is so many have relied on those three types of metrics for so long, they've forgotten about the world of things out there beyond just bounce rate and time on page. It's, how many websites have heat maps and are looking at what elements on a page people are clicking on? Where are they clicking out? Well how... Scroll depth, if you write a 2,000-word blog, let's say it's completely as comprehensive, topically authoritative, it's a perfect, perfect blog ever written on a subject, but nobody's reading past the first third part of it. Something is wrong with that, even if it is the greatest blog ever to be written. But we don't, for the most part, SEOs don't look at metrics outside of their little bubble. And I get it, I understand why that happens, but we're now evolving to how content is relatable, not only to search but to users. We have to be more aware. I really believe in the next couple of years, probably next 15, 18 months really, that design and user experience- Mordy Oberstein: Sure, 100%. Melissa Popp: ... that's going to be the next set of conversations we're having, it's if your user experience is terrible, starting with site speed and page load time, to just how your call to actions. I mean, how many websites do we go to nowadays that, here's a modal popup, boom, right in your face. You're not even there for two seconds and it's like, sign up for this, do this. Or my least favorite thing in the world, you get to a page and a video automatically starts playing and it scares you out of your seat because all of a sudden your screen is yelling at you. Mordy Oberstein: Here's a page I'm sharing. You can't see this audience because it's an audio experience. Melissa Popp: Oh, I already hate this. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, okay, you already hate it. This is a page that lost a lot of rank with the March 2024 core update and it's not hard to see why. There's no white space on the page, there's no spacing, there's no anything. You're looking like, oh my God, it wasn't meant for me to consume the information. The page was designed to rank for whatever keywords. Melissa Popp: No, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And the enterprise is like, you read it, it's not bad information. Melissa Popp: No. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not usable. Melissa Popp: No, my eyes already hurt. The font is terrible on the page, the image is so tiny. I can tell it's a dude, but I have no idea. Mordy Oberstein: Why is that even there? Is that the author? I don't even know what that is. Melissa Popp: Yeah, I mean, and even look at this, I see the data up here, the published date is 2022. When was the last time that this page was vetted by anybody to determine is this information still accurate? Is it correct? But then also it's like, where is the connection here? Just skimming this first paragraph. There is no connection to get people to even care. The hook is not there. This absolutely to me- Mordy Oberstein: It's very sterile content, it is written topically, it's not written for users, and the problem with this is no one since 2022 has looked at this and said, how can we make this page better? You should be constantly thinking, how can I make my content better? Because your content is never perfect and it's never good enough, and it's never, I don't want to say good enough, but it's never the pinnacle of what you want. And user expectations are always changing. To quote Glenn Gabe, Hell hath no fury, like a user scorned. If the user looks at this and says, oh this... They're never coming back, all of that nav boost interaction data is getting factored and now, and it's all because you thought I wrote the content, I won the rankings and I'm done. And hence, the unsung heroes of SEO are those who are saying, it's never done. Melissa Popp: No, and it's never, it absolutely isn't. And one of the things I do, a lot of the times when we have new clients come on board, no matter it's a 10-page website or a 1,000-page website, is we content audit the heck out of every single page on the website. And I want to understand, it's, are you getting traffic? Do you have any rankings? And then beyond that, what do these pages look like? What information is on there? And anybody on the RicketyRoo team will tell you, I am vicious when it comes to content update. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Melissa Popp: I do not play around, I take a scalpel to websites. I have recommended pruning websites two thirds of the content in cases. There has been recent cases where I've pruned a lot of content and said, no, you know what? We're just going to start over. We probably could use some of this content foundationally, but I don't even want to look at it anymore. It's that bad. And I don't do this, I laugh a little bit about it, I don't do this because I'm a mean person or I want to tick people off. I'm doing this because I see the writing on the wall. We've been saying this for 20 years, that content is king, that has not changed, it hasn't. And why every couple of years we shift back and forth on that and we don't spend the time on even just focusing on our content strategy. Most SEO's content strategy is literally, okay, what long tail keywords in Semrush or Ahrefs do I see that are questions and your when, where, whys, hows? Let's just write that content because it has high search volume and no, and it's like- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Melissa Popp: And I'm not saying that that is incorrect. Mordy Oberstein: No, there's a place for it within. Melissa Popp: Exactly, and you have to look at it bigger than that. I mean, there are lots of topics I recommend because absolutely, I'm like, oh, the search volume is there, but also, it matches search intent. And we talk a lot about a topic clustering as if that is a new thing that somehow magically has appeared. And no, that has been a marketing trend, not just in content marketing, but in other forms of marketing for decades. And when I'm building topic clusters for clients, I absolutely am looking at search volume, but I'm also thinking, okay, what do people actually want to know? And a lot of times I recommend topics that have very low search volume, and sometimes I'll get pushback on that of like, oh, but oh no, nobody's searching for that. And I'm like, listen, search volume numbers are BS, they are guesstimates. They do not necessarily mean that 1,200 people are searching a month for X, Y, Z. Now, that doesn't mean that we should ignore those guesstimates. They do help guide our efforts, but we have to think more outside the box. And especially working with smaller clients, you'll get a lot of zero volume keywords that because the tools are running nationally to aggregate that guesstimate, you actually don't know how many people locally might be searching for that because it's not enough to ping for those tools. And that's another thing people forget about when they're creating content, but also updating content. Just because something has the 1,200 volume search nationally every month doesn't mean that people are actually searching for that to eventually lead to conversion. And so that's why I always go back to the number one thing I'm always looking for when I'm updating content and in this maintenance mode, is search intent. It's the most important part of updating and creating content. And we dance around that because that's a little bit outside the SEO box. We talk about search intent at a very high level, but in the nitty-gritty- Mordy Oberstein: But the micro level, no. Micro intents, what's that? Or we feel like, yeah, we nailed it and don't think, wait, it changed. It's like anything with your content. I want you, if you're listening to this podcast and you write content and you're trying to write content, I want you to go back to something you wrote, I don't know, five years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago, and I want you to reread it and I want you to walk away. And how many of you walk away feeling like, that was amazing content? And how many times do you walk away? That's how I used to write and it's good, it's not bad, but- Melissa Popp: No. Mordy Oberstein: ... you're in a different place and you're a better writer, you're a better SEO, you're a better content person and you look back like, I could have done better with that. That's how Google's looking at your content. That was good, that was good. Melissa Popp: Exactly, that's the missing link, is as Google's algorithm gets smarter, faster and larger, encompassing more items into ranking factors, we have to evolve with that. We can sit here in our discussions and blame Google all we want, but at the end of the day, we are at their mercy of how they want to do things, whether we like it or not, and our clients are at that mercy. So we have to evolve with it. And it's like for writers, absolutely, just go back a year and look at some of the things that you wrote. Go look at where they rank. Go look where they rank now and if you still have access to any analytical data around it, how many people are coming to that page? Where are they going from that page? And I guarantee you, in a lot of cases, you're going to find that it's not performing the way you felt when you finished writing and you hit publish, because we publish pieces of content and we're like, yes, this is it. This is awesome, this is the pinnacle we did, we're at the top of the world, but then nobody comes to see it. Nobody comes, but we pretend like that doesn't exist. We pretend that that's not a thing that we need to care about. The SEO team cares about that now and it's like, no, it's like we should also care about that too, especially if we're continuing to write for that business or we work in-house or whatever our role is, and that's just part of the process. Just like you revisit keyword research, with clients, I like to revisit keyword research every six months to a year. I want to see again, where does the search intent just for on-page change that we need to pivot and change things up? Mordy Oberstein: Totally, totally. Melissa Popp: But we just don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: No, we don't get that that's, it's not a checklist. That's a different snarky point for a different time. If people wanted to revisit their processes and get some advice from you, where can they find you out there in ether? Melissa Popp: Oh gosh, everybody knows I live on Twitter and I'm going down with that ship. You can find me at- Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Melissa Popp: ... Popup writer on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Popup writer, okay, we'll link to that in the show notes. Melissa Popp: And yeah, feel free, anybody on my team will tell you I love ripping content apart and not from a place of negativity, but to help people do better. I ask my team all the time, any RicketyRoo blog that you read that I wrote, I guarantee you, two or three people on the team have told me how terrible it is and helped me make it better. I come from a place where I want to support anybody writing content to do better, not just for their clients, but for themselves. We only grow by putting ourselves out there and that's another scary part of all of this, is we have to admit that maybe we didn't do our best or something changed. That means we have to do better. So, I'm always happy to help people. Slide into my DMs, email me, any of that. I'm always around to help with this because I think these are the conversations we need to be having. Mordy Oberstein: Melissa is not only a great SEO and a great content person, just a great follow altogether, and it is why you were a previous follow of the week on the podcast for that reason. Melissa Popp: I was, I know. Mordy Oberstein: You were. Melissa Popp: I was like, oh. Mordy Oberstein: You're one of the best follows on Twitter out there in the SEO space right now. I don't want to say all of Twitter because if you're sports, maybe you don't talk about sports, but in the SEO space, not many better follows at all. So, please follow Melissa. Melissa Popp: Well, I appreciate that. I just telling it like it is. I love what I do and I love to share knowledge and I want us to have more productive conversations about the things we're doing because we're all going through it. It's not us versus one another, it's we're all in this together. And as cheesey that is, there is light at the end of this tunnel. Mordy Oberstein: Melissa, thank you so much for coming on and really say hi to all the great folks over at RicketyRoo. Melissa Popp: I will, I will. I'm sure they'll all send their love to you too. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, bye. Melissa Popp: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Melissa, she's one of the best people in the whole SEO industry. Crystal Carter: Melissa is, she's just the gold star human being. 10 out of 10 recommend following Melissa. Not only is she amazing at SEO, not only is she super warm and friendly and really nice when you meet her, but she also has fantastic music taste. Mordy Oberstein: And movie taste. Crystal Carter: Right, Melissa is just, she's just the best. And also, she's on team RicketyRoo. Team RicketyRoo are the best, they're so good. Don't get me wrong, lots of love to lots of other agencies as well, but team RicketyRoo are fantastic, I'm not going to lie. Amanda, Celeste, Tess, everybody there is fantastic, they're just a great squad. Mordy Oberstein: On that note, you might be fighting for your rankings and your own market share, but you know what else is fighting for their own rankings and market share? Search engines. Like love is a battlefield, so is search engine market share is a battlefield. So, sometimes they do borrow ideas from each other in order to maintain market share. So here's a look at how search engines maintain their market share with a little segment we call, Going, Going, Going, Google. Well, I guess in this case Going, Going, Going, Search Engines. Going back in the day, multifaceted feature snippets and there was, I think I wrote an article about this on the Wix SEO about Google is moving away from the one true answer to a multifaceted kind of approach, because that's what people expect, they don't want one answer, they want options. And to do that, Google had a whole bunch of formats, has been testing with featured snippets and multiple URLs and feature snippets and multifaceted feature snippets, which is a feature snippet on top of a feature snippet on top of another feature snippet. You know what's doing that forever? Crystal Carter: Who? Mordy Oberstein: Bing. Crystal Carter: Bing. Mordy Oberstein: Bing's been doing that for years before Google was doing it. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And I'm pretty sure Google took that from Bing. Crystal Carter: One of the things I love about the team at Bing is that they do a lot of innovation. And we had Fabrice Canel from the search team at Bing on a webinar talking about Index Now, which you should definitely check out that webinar, it was great, but also he talked about that we build new things, we drive change and they do a lot of innovation and they're always coming through with that consistently. And so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they were looking over the shoulder a little bit to see what's going on there. Mordy Oberstein: No, I mean, look at AI on the SERP. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Bing puts in what's called Copilot now, Google go code red, red alert, whatever it was. Also, now we need to add AI onto the SERP the same way, not different, the exact same thing. Crystal Carter: One of the things that we're talking about, at one point Google was talking about contextual links. Bing has been doing that for ages as well. And one of the other things that Bing does is they'll pull in lots of information from other sources into their knowledge panel type things, but they also cite those sources there really, really clearly. I think that's really interesting. Another thing that you sometimes see on Bing is that sometimes Bing has rich results as well. So we think sometimes that rich results only happen on Google, but rich results happen on Bing as well. And so for instance, FAQ schema is no longer as prominent as it was on Google search, but it is still pretty prominent on Bing search, for instance. So that's something to consider as well. And I think that also, there's been some recent discussion about Bing's market share with some interesting statistics coming from World. Is it World Stat? Mordy Oberstein: Something like that, Stat Counter? Crystal Carter: Stat Counter, that's it. Some interesting statistics coming from them, and I think that it's definitely the case that I've heard a lot of folks using Bing. I've started using Bing a little bit more for different things as well. But yeah, they add in lots of different features and they're really innovative. Sometimes the SERP can be a little bit busy at Bing, but I think they're really innovative and it can sometimes give you an idea. Optimizing for Bing can sometimes give you ideas for optimizing for Google in the future. Mordy Oberstein: And I'm not saying this is bad, this is just the nature of how things go. You would open SERP, anyone can look at it, and Bing structures like, for example, you Google who are the Yankees, you get a big sports box at the top of the Bing SERP, that came from Google. The way they have site links, that came from Google. The way they have a people also ask kind of similar result, the related searches in that little gray box, that came from Google and that's fine, that's how it goes, everyone's kind of keeping up with the Joneses, keeping up with the Googles and the Bings, and that's just the way it is to quote Bruce Hornsby. Crystal Carter: But I think also one of the things, Google has started doing those really rich knowledge panel things like particularly for people. For instance, if you look up Beyonce, you'll get a picture of her, her date of birth, the music video panel, a Spotify panel, that sort of thing. And Bing have been doing things like that, particularly for location for a little while. So, one of the ones was like the Paris catacombs was one of my favorite ones because I've never been there but I'm like, oh, that looks really interesting. But I'm looking at one for the Grand Canyon right now and it's got a real mix of stuff all across it and there's lots of different ways that you can connect with it. One of the other things I find really interesting is the way that they parse things out. So this can help you to understand how search engines are seeing your content as well. So for instance, if you go to look up something like the Grand Canyon, they have these little explore this page button on the side, which is a little light bulb. Mordy Oberstein: Right, yeah, that's why I like that feature. Crystal Carter: Right, and it'll pull out different things from it. So it'll pull out the images that are related to it. It will also pull out some of the topics from it. So for instance, I found one that's like, everything you need to know about Grand Canyon National Park, and it's a National Geographic article, and it says, about this website, which talks about, about this website on the little explore this page. And then it says topics on this page and it pulls out some of the headers from the page. So, there you can see whether or not a search engine is able to parse that, is able to see all of it, is able to understand the topics that you're trying to cover and whether it all makes sense. It also allows you to get a summary of some of that information there. And we talked a little bit about competitors. It also lets you see your competitors at a glance really easily as well. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, on that Grand Canyon SERP, Bing had this really cool 3D exploration tool for seeing the Grand Canyon, it's got nothing to do with anything, but you see, it is just interesting to me how one follows the other, how competitive they are, how they borrow from each other. Just for example, Barry Schwartz covered in searches at Round Table that after Google announced that they're getting rid of their cache link, on April 8th, Bing tests removing cache link from search results. Interesting how that is. So they do follow each other's, it's interesting to see what they find. I find it's interesting to see what they find meaningful, that they follow each other on, what they tend to steal and not steal from each other or borrow from each other. And it's just how it goes, it's not good or bad, I guess it's a good thing. It makes everybody better. Rising tide lifts all ships. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, if you are somebody who's interested in search engine marketing and search engine optimization, it's definitely worth becoming familiar with Bing and also with Bing webmaster tools. So that's something that also drives innovation I think on both sides as well. I've spoken to folks at Google before who said, yeah, I think Bing webmaster tools are pretty solid and I think that they're really great. I think it's worth being familiar with both so that you can understand how search engines work overall. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, and if you're looking to understand how search engines work overall, another great resource for you. It's not Google, it's not Bing, it's the king, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine land. So, that means that we're now about to head into Barry Land, also known as the Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a whole bunch for you this week. So I'll try to keep it snappy, but I also like to talk a lot. So, I'll still try to keep it snappy, but I might not succeed. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land, Google Unleashes June 2024, spam update. I like that, Barry, unleashes, it feels so aggressive. Google released it's June 2024 spam update. It is a regular spam update. It's not, I repeat, it's not and do not ask Danny Sullivan on X this question. It is not the algorithmic integration that will result in Google being able to algorithmically go after third party content hosted on websites that should not actually be there, also known as site reputation abuse. That was implemented thus far only with manual actions, this is known as parasite SEO within the SEO industry. The spam update of this June 2024 is not that. I cannot be clearer. It is not that. If you want something clearer, then go to X and look at the search liaison account, it'll be clearer but not much clearer. Perhaps a little bit more aggressive though, unleashes. Anyway, this from Barry Schwarz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable. Google Search bug not indexing or serving new content. So news websites noticed that there are content which they're constantly creating because there's news and they're creating new content for the news wasn't being indexed by Google. This has happened in the past before, it's not the first time, won't be the last time, but it's obviously super, super scary for a publisher. Google said that the problem has been fixed. They said we identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates, end transmission. They didn't say end transmission, I added that. Crystal pointed out on X, perhaps LinkedIn, I saw it on X. You should make note of this if you are in that category of publisher and make a note because you might see a dip in your search console and traffic data and so forth. And you might go hey, what happened there? But if you make a note, you realize, oh, there was an indexing thing there. So that explains it. Okay, onto Search Engine Land, but not from Barry this time. Barry, you can't have them. This from Danny Goodwin. Google AI overview is showing less often with less Reddit, data shows. We've actually covered a bunch of studies showing there's less AI overviews being produced by Google. In this study by SEO ranking, Danny notes also that Reddit's visibility in the AI overviews is no longer a top 10 most cited domain, which is interesting because on June 19th, Barry Schwartz reported, there's Barry, on seoroundtable.com, report on if Google's showing fewer Reddit links in search. So some guy who's name rhymes with Gordy Boberstein, sent a whole bunch of data from Semrush showing that there's just a little bit of a slight drop off in the Reddit and Quora URLs that Google is showing within its discussion and forms. ERP feature. I'm not talking about, I mean, Gordy Boberstein wasn't talking about the entire SERP on the organic results, only the discussion of form SERP feature, but there's a little bit of a trend from April through June where Reddit URLs used to show in 49% of these SERP features, now is down to 48.56%. Same for Quora and other forums have seen a more noticeable rise in visibility within the platform. The same time, by the way, the Semrush data I looked at, I mean, Gordy looked at, was indicating that there are less instances or fewer instances if I'm going to speak grammatically correctly, of multiple Reddit URLs showing up in the discussion and form SERP feature. So there's less cases of Google using multiple URLs in the same SERP feature box from Reddit. That combined with the data that Danny's showing in the AI overview where Danny's discussing from SEO ranking, creates this picture where we're kind of seeing Reddit being scaled back just a bit. I do think Google realizes that it's a little bit too much on the Reddit front, but I don't see any dramatic shifts, I don't think advantage coming soon, but perhaps it's Google trying to act on that. I don't know, the data story is still to be told. However, continuing on that data story, wow I'm really threading the narratives together. This comes from Lily Ray over Amps of Digital, SEO visibility shifts to review sites to e-commerce and user generated content sites in 2024. What Lily shows is basically, I search for something like best jeans, not bad, or I don't know, I always go blank when I'm trying to figure out query to show an example of, like best cell phone or best mug or best glasses, or I just use Lily's cases, laptops, or bird feeders. There used to be a lot of product review websites showing up. What Lily is showing is that in May 2024, Google seems to have shifted away from the product review site and more to the actual product site, so less URLs being shown in the organic results for, here's my top five best bird feeders and more Homedepot.com, buy a bird feeder. By the way, that's happened in the past in other verticals. One of the cases I used to always study was insurance. So if I search for car insurance. Back in the day, there used to be a lot of informational content about how to buy insurance versus just places to buy insurance. That narrative switched back a little bit, and that's the last time I checked a few months ago, is a little bit more commerce side and less informational side. So, intent does change. But it's interesting to see this considering the fact that Google is not happy with affiliates. We spoke about this on our episode with Glenn Gabe, where we basically asked, is Google at war with affiliate sites? And the answer is yes, Google is at war with affiliate sites. Product review sites tend to be very heavy on the affiliate side, so this makes sense in that context of that narrative. Another thing going, making this full circle that Lily also noticed is that instead of relying on product review sites, she sees a shift from those affiliate review sites to user-generated content like Reddit and Quora and YouTube. So, maybe it's not the end of Reddit on the SERP. It already wasn't, but you get what I'm saying. Do I have another story? No, that's it. Okay. I thought I had another one. Wow. We covered a lot of ground this week. I try to keep each story snappy, so maybe it still is, the snappy news. How was your trip to Barry Land, Crystal? Crystal Carter: It was fantastic. We stand and optimize King. Mordy Oberstein: You have to be this short to ride. Crystal Carter: Leaving that, I have no further comment. Mordy Oberstein: I have another further comment. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: My further comment is that this week you should be following Roxana Stingu as your follow of the week. She's at Roxana, R-O-X-A-N-A S-T-I-N-G-U over on X. Head of SEO over at Alamy. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's fantastic. She's so clever and has such a great technical knowledge across lots of different elements, and I think that she works across Alamy, which is trying to maintain brand reputation and maintain ranking across lots of different elements. And I think that it's that in-house play when you're an in-house SEO, you really have to guard your keywords, and she is an in-house SEO, who's been there for a while. And I think that when you've been there for a long time, you're able to, you know your keywords, you know them, and you need to know them inside out, and you need to know who comes for you, who your competitors are, and I think that she does a great job of it. Mordy Oberstein: I can't believe it took us this long to mention how maintaining reign comes into focus when you're in-house, but here we are, took us this long to mention that point. On the ball. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's really, really important in-house. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, make sure to give her a follow over on X and check it out on LinkedIn as well. Links in the show notes. That's all the maintenance I have, I can do today. Crystal Carter: Okay, all right. Well, we will keep going. We will maintain the podcast for next week. We will also be on the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: We'll maintain our rankings on Spotify. Crystal Carter: And anybody who wants to help us with that, please leave a review. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and a rating. Yeah, please. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because maintenance is a team effort. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. Crystal Carter: And it's so fun. Mordy Oberstein: And a whole bunch of other cliches. Thanks for joining us on The SERPs Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how agency SEO is changing. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or as Crystal already told you, a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Melissa Popp Roxana Stingu Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter It's New: Daily SEO News Series RicketyRoo SEO Agency Google’s Shifts From Authority to Content Diversity on the SERP Is Google Going After Affiliate Sites News: Google unleashes June 2024 spam update Google Search Bug: Not Indexing or Serving New Content Google AI Overviews showing less often, with less Reddit, data shows Report On If Google Showing Fewer Reddit Links In Search? SEO Visibility Shifts from Review Sites to eCommmerce & User-Generated Content Sites in 2024 Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Melissa Popp Roxana Stingu Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter It's New: Daily SEO News Series RicketyRoo SEO Agency Google’s Shifts From Authority to Content Diversity on the SERP Is Google Going After Affiliate Sites News: Google unleashes June 2024 spam update Google Search Bug: Not Indexing or Serving New Content Google AI Overviews showing less often, with less Reddit, data shows Report On If Google Showing Fewer Reddit Links In Search? SEO Visibility Shifts from Review Sites to eCommmerce & User-Generated Content Sites in 2024 Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast, we're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix. Today, I'm joined by she who doesn't wear a cape, but maybe she should wear a cape. But either way, she is an SEO hero, our Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: But the good ones do like, yeah, the Flash doesn't wear one, but Batman does. Crystal Carter: I don't know, I had a plumber who really helped me out. He didn't wear a cape, that would be very impractical. Mordy Oberstein: But it would've covered up his crack. Crystal Carter: My plumber has it under control. I'll just tell you that right now. Mordy Oberstein: Plumber crack is a real thing. My stepfather's an electrician. Electrician crack is also a real thing. Crystal Carter: Wow, this is wow, that's a great start to the podcast. Thanks listeners for hanging in there with us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, it's not my fault, it's a full moon tonight. Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get inbuilt Google Search Console insights to help you maintain those rankings. Look for within our SEO dashboard, because today we pay homage to the unsung heroes of SEO, those who maintain rank, how Google updates bring maintaining rank into focus in all new ways. The content connection, why a content first focus can be your best friend when looking to keep your rankings, and how sites of all sizes can go about maintaining their rankings. To help us RicketyRoo's own, Melissa Popp will be here in just a few minutes to share what's in her utility belt as she goes about keeping her rankings. Plus, we look at how search engines try to maintain their market share by borrowing from other search engines. And of course, we have snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, put on your capes and proudly wear your underwear on the outside as we pay tribute to you, the unsung hero of SEO, AKA, Captain Rank Maintainer on this, the 93rd episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Maintaining rank is hard. It's not easy. Crystal Carter: Maintaining rank is hard. Mordy Oberstein: Because everyone's gunning for you now. Crystal Carter: Yes, everyone can see you. You were completely exposed. If you're number two or if you're number 37, you can sneak in, right? You can sneak in on the cut, you can be like, okay, I see you number one, I see what you're doing, but you can bide your time, like a sneak attack kind of thing. But if you are number one, everyone can see you and everybody knows what's going on and people will study you and get all in there. A great tool for looking at your competitors is Semrush has a great tool for that, looking at keywords and looking at competitors. One of the ones that Ross Simmons, friend of the podcast, friend of the SEO Hub has talked about is CRM. Salesforce has an article called, What is A CRM, and I'm looking at there, and that has a traffic volume, the keyword, what is a CRM has a traffic volume of 22,000. According to Semrush, they're getting 5,000 of those clicks every month. They've ranked number one in that position since May, 2023, possibly even longer. And they spend time making sure that that does not move. Why? Because that's 5,000. That's that much coming through straight away, and that's something that's really important. They're also ranked, they recently have had a tussle with HubSpot. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, a tussle, that's a good word, by the way. I just want to stop, point out what a great word tussle is. Sorry. Crystal Carter: Tussle, yes, tussle is a good word. So they're tussling a little bit with HubSpot for CRM, so sometimes they're number one, sometimes HubSpot's number one for just the word CRM, but they've had number one for, what is a CRM, for a very long time. And that's really important because that's core to their business. So if you have terms that are core to your business, it is absolutely worth maintaining that content, maintaining that position over time. And if Google understands that it is core to your business, that everything you do points to that particular keyword, then they will give you that. They'll understand that you are the authority in that, and all of the things on your website should point to that. Now, not only does what does a CRM, rank number one for what is a CRM, but it also ranks number one for loads of other terms as well. So for instance, it also ranks number one for, what is a CRM tool. It ranks number one for, CRM definition, CRM program, all of that sort of stuff. That particular piece of content is pulling in tons of traffic for them. And I think that in terms of maintaining rank, sometimes things can rank number one and get no traffic and not get much traffic at all. But according to this, according to Semrush in May alone, the page, what is a CRM, on Salesforce was getting 43,000 clicks a month. Okay, now that is absolutely, absolutely 100% worth maintaining rank. Now, if you're looking at your keywords and you've got number one but nobody's coming to the page anyway, you want to have as many number one keywords on your site as you can, but maybe don't lose any sleep if you slip a little bit. But if you have something that's coming in and bringing in thousands and thousands every month, then absolutely spend the time. And there's lots of different tools, which I'm sure that Melissa will get into the details of it, but you need to assess when you're assessing whether or not you should fight to maintain your rank, whether or not you should defend yourself from the usurpers. Make sure... I know dropping the vocabulary words. Anybody studying for their SATs, you're welcome. And- Mordy Oberstein: That's our core audience right there. Crystal Carter: Right? But basically anybody who, if you're looking at it and you're trying to think, should they hold the line here? Have a look at the search volume, have a look at how relevant it is to the rest of your content, and then also think about the links. So if you're thinking about that particular page, we have a particular piece of content. We have the SEO Guide, the Wix SEO Guide, for instance, on the Wix SEO Hub, which has lots of links out to other pieces of content, has lots of links into it from lots of other links as well, and gets a fair amount of traffic for us for that particular page. That's worth us maintaining, that's worth us looking after, that's worth us thinking about. And so have a look at which ones are those pivotal, crucial, important pages, and you should probably be monitoring those in terms of ranking. You should probably be monitoring them daily, weekly, at least. And you should be scheduling in and making sure that you're updating them regularly and making sure that you're paying attention to your competitors because sometimes if you're not looking and they can sneak in and you might miss that you lost a keyword that maybe has a knock on effect to some of the other keywords that you're ranking for. Mordy Oberstein: Now, to get more into this, I had a little chat with RicketyRoo's, Melissa Popp, because I have a lot to say about this, and we talked a lot about this. Here's a little chat with RicketyRoo's, Melissa Pop. So, welcome to this show, Melissa Popp. How are you? Melissa Popp: I'm good. How are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm good, can't complain. I think that you are one of the unsung heroes of SEO. Melissa Popp: Oh, gosh. I just have to throw that feather in my cap, won't I? Mordy Oberstein: Not all heroes wear capes, unless you're wearing a cape. You wear capes? Melissa Popp: That's true. No, not yet, not yet. No, I do have a crown though that I wear sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's close. Melissa Popp: Yeah, I'm a little extra sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: There's a whole... In every SEO conversation, podcast, webinar, article, whatever, it's all about increasing rank, increasing rank, increasing rank. But one of the things that I'll put a little spoiler out there, or I don't know, behind the scenes thing, maybe I'm not allowed to say this, but one of the things we talk about internally at Wix is maintaining rank. We're already ranking, and now we have to keep those rankings because if you don't keep those rankings, then you're back at the square one of trying to get the rankings, but no one ever talks about this. Melissa Popp: No, nobody does. Nobody talks about, what I like to think of as maintenance mode of SEO. You come to a point where depending on how big your site is, what your niche is, that you hit a saturation level where it's like, how much more can you do to continue to boost rankings when you already are in page one, top three results, earning your featured snippets, unfortunately showing up in SGE now, whether that's right or wrong, but there's a maintenance that's involved there and ongoing work that most of us, I would say, probably 60 to 70% of our job is that maintenance mode of maintaining those ranks. And then at the same time, trying to figure out, okay, where do we pivot from here to earn additional rank rankings? If that's even possible, because at some point you reach a level where you own it all, ideally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, that's one of the, I don't know, thou shall not say this, but sometimes you can't go any higher. You're number three, and that's where you're going to get for this keyword. Melissa Popp: Absolutely, and at RicketyRoo, we do a lot of work with home service clients, and you see that all the time. These businesses are competing with directors like Yelp, Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, and other websites that the domain authority and just overall topical authority that they have in those niches because of what powerhouse of websites they are. Your little mom and pop shop is never going to be able to get rank one, two, three, even in some cases when you're going up against powerhouses like that. So it's, what do you do from there? Unless you have millions of dollars to try to compete there, you're never going to maintain that. And nobody talks about that either, of what ranking is good enough before you start carrying the load of ranking right there versus trying to convince clients that you can go higher because you can't. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's fine because sometimes you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggonit, and people click on you and you're ranking number three, and that's fine. Melissa Popp: And as long as you're converting and earning business, and then also you're satisfied as a business owner at what your revenue is from that, you don't have to be number one to make a living and to keep your business growing. And there's so much competition out there, and so many, we're seeing this right now, all the changes. I mean, that could be a whole other episode, right? Talking about Reddit and Quora jumping in rankings, and now you're competing with a whole other subset of websites that shouldn't even be competing with you, but at some point you have to step back and say, okay, this is good enough. We are converting enough. Either, what other channels can we look at? Because that's another thing we don't talk about as part of this maintenance mode. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, there's life outside of Google? Melissa Popp: Oh my gosh, life outside of SEO, I'm going to get hate mail for saying, and I'm a huge, huge believer in being able to look at, where is your audience? Where are they hanging out? Where are they having discussions? Sometimes it's social media, sometimes it is Reddit. Sometimes, I mean, I was talking to someone the other week about direct mail campaigns and how nobody talks about direct mail, but when you look at certain demographics, that still works. And that's another whole aspect of maintaining not just rankings, but brand awareness. You want to go where people are. You reach a plateau with SEO, you can take that budget and spend it a little bit elsewhere to figure that out, and you're still growing just in a different way. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so spinning back around to all this, because the point about Reddit and Quora is exactly where I want go with this. You were doing just fine, things were okay. You were ranking, I don't know, one, two, or three, and now all of a sudden you're still ranking one, two, or three, but there's a giant discussions, cert feature box above you with a bunch of Reddit URLs. How much of your work is going into changes in the ecosystem, how to combat them, how to deal with them? With the Reddit one, I don't know what you do, but things like that where the SERP is changing, the algorithm is changing, there are updates, there's this or that, and you're trying to just staying out above water because you're doing better than above water. You're ranking the top of the SERP, but you're doing work that keeps you afloat at the very top of the SERP. How much of your time is spent on those kinds of things? Melissa Popp: I mean, I already, as part of my work, and especially on the content marketing side with clients, I am already looking at Reddit and Quora, whether they're ranking on page one or not. When it comes to content ideas, blogging, even updating content, looking at people, also ask boxes, I was already looking at all of this before all of a sudden they all jumped to page one. And I think that's a big problem in our industry, is that a lot of our efforts, there's a lot of people out there doing great work with content that are looking at the big picture and not just the little SEO piece of it. We need to start spending more time looking at this. So Reddit and Quora, I mean, I was doing content briefs a couple of weeks ago for a home services client, and I'm seeing Reddit discussions pop up for transactional keywords. There's no reason they need to be there at all, but I'm like, okay, if people are landing on a page, a service page, and still have that question that is popping up on page one, whether I agree that that Reddit thread should be there or not, I need to be looking at that. There is still, whether Google's algorithm is all jacked up and that is what's happening here or not, I still, if Google is going to rank that there, I need to be aware of that for my client and think, is this Reddit discussion worthy of inclusion on a piece of content I'm creating for? Do I need to update that piece of content? So I think there's two, there's two issues there. One is we're not doing enough to actually understand search intent to begin with, and Reddit in discussion is popping up there is one way to look at that. What are people discussing that they're not getting from "normal" search results, that we need to be including in our content? And not just for SEO purposes, but literally a potential customer is asking that question. And then on the flip side, why are we not doing this to begin with? We only care about it now that Reddit and Quora and other discussions are on page one. So we're already doing a disservice to clients by having not paid attention to this before it simply popped to page one. Mordy Oberstein: But that goes into, so I'll give you an example of this where if you're not paying attention to what people actually want and talking to them in a way that actually speaks to them, while you might be ranking today, I don't think you'll be ranking tomorrow. There was a couple... I'm actually running this up right now for the Wix SEO Hub. By the time this recording comes out, I hope it'll be long published. Looking at two examples from the March 2024 core update. So bankrate.com redid basically an entire folder of their content, and it was previously very, I call it sterile content, like, what is a payday loan? How to get a payday loan, when don't you choose a payday loan, how to finance a payday loan. Every H two was very topical, and it's like each one's trying to rank for a featured snippet, kind of thing. And they redid all of it and the folder went berserk in a good way, just shot up in the rankings with the March 2024 core update, because what they did was they said, okay, let's speak to the topic, but in a way that relates to what the user's going to do with the information. So for example, they added a section on when a payday loan might actually be worthwhile because they realized, okay, we're talking about payday loans and the original content was, what is a payday loan, the risk of a payday loan, and all these very generalized, sterile kind of subtopics. But if we're talking about this, obviously the user is looking to get a payday loan for a reason, so why don't we address that? And they did, and they did it across all of their content, it became very situational like, here's what you need to know about a payday loan, in the context of how it's going to work for you. They talked about just what to expect, the money would take X number of days to get into your account, blah, blah, blah. It was much more user focused. All of a sudden they shot up in the rankings, they replaced somebody. They replaced the page, and that page is now gone and not ranking. And websites, I think are slowly coming around to the idea that they have to update content. What they wrote five years ago and ranked with five years ago is not going to work anymore because the algorithm is changing. Let's change that up. And big content teams are doing that and if you're not worried about maintaining your rank, somebody's going to get after you and replace you. Melissa Popp: Exactly, and why wouldn't they? Especially when you look at bigger websites compared to smaller websites, and that's a whole other player, smaller websites being frozen out of brand dominated topical searches. But that example that you gave with bank rate, how many SEOs listening to this right now, okay, on let's say smaller or medium sized teams and websites, are going to come away from this and go, holy cow, if Bankrate did this, this is absolutely what we should do. Lily Ray, Marie Haynes have been sharing other examples of websites that are skyrocketing after pivoting their content strategy. We have that proof there. Now, can we guarantee 100% certainty that Google's always going to reward that content? Who knows what Google's going to do, but what we know is searchers want information that they can actually act on and use, beyond just whatever their initial search query is. And the problem is, is we spend so much time creating SEO content, focusing on keywords, focusing on page, what backlinks can we get, what internal links can we update? We are so focused on gaining the SEO side of things that we forget the content is the foundation of that growth. And what's even worse is most people know that, but they don't want to spend the time on creating a quality piece of content because holy cow, that's actually really hard, even if it's a topic, what is a payday loan versus how does the payday loan scam work? And so you have a problem that companies don't want to invest the time in creating quality of content. They certainly don't want to pay writers and spend the money to create quality content. I mean, I can imagine how much Wix spends with all the content that you all push out and you have a set budget for that and you can get it and you look at the names you bring on to write for you. But most companies don't have that, nor do they want to invest in it because they feel that their ROI could be better spent elsewhere, whether it's paid advertising, display, something else. They want instant gratification, not realizing that keeping your content updated to match search intent and what your users are actually looking for to make a decision through that top and middle of the funnel content, particularly, you are going to spend less money long-term on ROI than throwing money at the wall with PPC, competing with everyone else driving bids up. And I get it, I understand why this works the way it does. You're always going to try to get the most for the cheapest. But we're now finding with the helpful content update and other things Google are doing that, holy cow, that doesn't work anymore. And now companies are playing catch up and having to spend even more money that they didn't budget. In Bankrate's case, I wonder how much money they spent updating content that if they had approached the correct way to begin with, they wouldn't have had to spend. And that's the conundrum now everybody is in. Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole problem. And to your point about the smaller websites, they also, in my opinion, there's no such thing as one kind of site having a total advantage. There are things that big websites have that smaller websites don't, like we have money for SEO Hub to pay writers, yada, yada, yada, yada. But if you want to make changes, it's very slow. We're a giant brand, there's a lot of guidelines, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. If you're a smaller website and you're like, you know what? And we're more risk averse, so if we see that there's a new trend. I think for example, that content's far more conversational than it ever has been before. Good luck getting a big brand to create a landing page that's conversational, not ultimate, whatever, whatever, sell, buy here. Good luck. If you're a small brand or a small website or a small business or an SME, whatever it is, you can do that. You can take those risks and that's what'll help you maintain the rank, in my opinion. I think you're at an easier advantage to maintain rank to a certain extent. Obviously, the larger websites have that authority and that makes it easier for them but you can do things like, I think that content that Google's looking for X now and I want to pivot to do X, you can do that tomorrow if you wanted to. There's no hoops to jump through. Melissa Popp: Definitely, and the thing with smaller business versus bigger businesses, especially in brands, we're hearing that conversation a lot as well, is how is anybody going to compete with these big brands now dominating search more than ever? And depending on what your business is, especially as a small, medium sized business, you don't need to compete with those. That's not where locally people are looking for. We have these conversations with local clients all the time, that they want number one against Yelp and Angie's List, and it's like, no, you don't, you don't need to. People understand that they're shopping around, they are going to click down through results. That's the whole scary idea of, oh, if you're not at the top of page one, oh no, oh no, the sky is falling. Mordy Oberstein: What's the best place to bury a dead body? On page two of the SERP. Melissa Popp: Listen, you just need to be on page one, and you need to give searchers and actual consumers more power to make that choice, most people are shopping for that. But yeah, I absolutely agree that smaller businesses has the opportunity to make more immediate impact than bigger businesses do, and they are less risk adverse. And it comes down to the priority of changes you're making, whether it's SEO updates, link building, content, you don't have to do it all. You just have to do the right things in the right order to make the most impact and then eventually, you get to all the other things. And that's another thing that gets, I think very missed in our industry is everybody wants a checklist. Let's go through, update title tags and Meta descriptions and headers and blah, blah, blah down the list, where it's like, okay, we know Google rewrites Meta titles and descriptions all the time. Why is that your number one priority? Mordy Oberstein: That's not what's going to move... Sometimes, yes, but my experience, if you had rankings and are slowly seeing a decline, like a consistent slow degradation, it's a quality issue, usually. Melissa Popp: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: And that might be, you have terrible headers as part of the quality, but it's usually the quality overall. You need to have a hard look at your content, which is I think what people don't do. I feel like SEOs look at the SERP like I won. It's like I don't know, I'll use a sports reference, like, I scored a basket or I got a goal or I got a hit, now I'm done. Yeah, but in five minutes from now, you're back up in the order, you got to take another swing. It's not, you won and these rankings belong to you. Google doesn't owe you anything. Melissa Popp: No, no, and why we think they do. These conversations and arguments and the vitriol that our industry is showing to one another right now and frankly showing to folks like John Miller and Danny Sullivan. Okay, I'm not saying Google is the enemy, but we are competing against them. That's a realistic fact of what we do. The only thing we can do is do the best we possibly can, starting with the foundation that does everything for SEO and that piece of content. We can only do the best that we can and maybe pray, hope, whatever you want to do, burn a candle, whatever, and hope for everything else to match up and help rankings. But at the end of the day, we start with that piece of content and it's so overlooked. And to circle back to talking about unsung heroes, that's why this maintenance of your rankings is so important. And it always starts with that content. What more could you be doing? How has search intent changed that you need to now update your piece? We see that all the time in local. I feel like local search results, the search intent changes more than anywhere else that I've worked, and I've worked on e-comm brands, I've worked enterprise level national, international. I feel like at the local level, that search intent changes almost on a whim. It's like a whole demographic decides, oh, I'm going to search to buy this or find this service, this is what... And it makes no sense, but it's what happens. And that's one of the first things I do when I'm looking to update a piece of content is, I want to dive deep into SERPs and understand, has this changed? And we don't spend that time. We want to blame Google and we want to point fingers at things. And yes, sometimes, you know what? I've seen some of the cases here that I definitely think this is Google's fault for a particular domain and not what they're doing, absolutely, but those cases are so actually rare. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Yeah, the norm is, Google knows for the most part what he's doing. There are enormous gaps sometimes and there are shifts. I think we're in a point right now where, like an inflection point, where things just like multiple reasons why things are not firing in all cylinders and they're not and- Melissa Popp: No, they're not. Absolutely, I'm not defending Google here at all for any of this. I cannot imagine the algorithmic engineering, especially now that you're adding machine learning and AI into the mix, of how difficult it is to actually do this right. And part of me still believes that they do in fact want to get this right. Losing market share for people switching to AI search engines, to TikTok, to any of these things, depletes their revenue. They want to get this right, but in the meantime, we're all left holding the bag with our clients trying to explain, we have no control over this, so- Mordy Oberstein: But you do have control over, for example, let's talk about bounce rate, and they'll talk about the context of user behavior metrics and nav boost, that kind of thing, which is legit, nav boosts is a really interesting conversation, but they're not talking. We're not talking about it. Oh, you know what? I see my bounce rate has gone up, maybe my content's not what people want anymore. Let me see, maybe I should rework that. We always look for the most immediate, easy way out. Melissa Popp: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: As opposed to taking a hard look, and the only way I feel like to maintain your rankings is to take a hard look at yourself. What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? What's the data say about how people feel about our content? And it is not just your typical SEO metrics, if you're going on social media and being like, oh, I hate this. Also, you're seeing people talk about your blog in a negative way, that's going at some point to impact search and your rankings. You need to go back, you need to take a hard look, you need to think, okay, I need to rework this because your rankings, again, they're not a given. They're not going to last, no rankings last forever. Melissa Popp: No, nobody, nobody, and you bring up bounce rate, one of the most misunderstood and it's like the bad child of everything. But how many SEOs are either bringing in a content marketer to actually look at content marketing metrics like bounce rate, timeline page, etc? How many of SEOs are actually looking at those metrics at all? And I'd imagine that number is probably staggering low because like you said, a lot of us, well first off, I mean it goes back to our clients. What do our clients care about? They care about rankings, traffic and conversion, and that's usually it. They don't care about anything else, as long as rankings leave the traffic to conversion, boom, you're done, right? Mordy Oberstein: Right. Melissa Popp: But the problem is, is so many have relied on those three types of metrics for so long, they've forgotten about the world of things out there beyond just bounce rate and time on page. It's, how many websites have heat maps and are looking at what elements on a page people are clicking on? Where are they clicking out? Well how... Scroll depth, if you write a 2,000-word blog, let's say it's completely as comprehensive, topically authoritative, it's a perfect, perfect blog ever written on a subject, but nobody's reading past the first third part of it. Something is wrong with that, even if it is the greatest blog ever to be written. But we don't, for the most part, SEOs don't look at metrics outside of their little bubble. And I get it, I understand why that happens, but we're now evolving to how content is relatable, not only to search but to users. We have to be more aware. I really believe in the next couple of years, probably next 15, 18 months really, that design and user experience- Mordy Oberstein: Sure, 100%. Melissa Popp: ... that's going to be the next set of conversations we're having, it's if your user experience is terrible, starting with site speed and page load time, to just how your call to actions. I mean, how many websites do we go to nowadays that, here's a modal popup, boom, right in your face. You're not even there for two seconds and it's like, sign up for this, do this. Or my least favorite thing in the world, you get to a page and a video automatically starts playing and it scares you out of your seat because all of a sudden your screen is yelling at you. Mordy Oberstein: Here's a page I'm sharing. You can't see this audience because it's an audio experience. Melissa Popp: Oh, I already hate this. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, okay, you already hate it. This is a page that lost a lot of rank with the March 2024 core update and it's not hard to see why. There's no white space on the page, there's no spacing, there's no anything. You're looking like, oh my God, it wasn't meant for me to consume the information. The page was designed to rank for whatever keywords. Melissa Popp: No, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And the enterprise is like, you read it, it's not bad information. Melissa Popp: No. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not usable. Melissa Popp: No, my eyes already hurt. The font is terrible on the page, the image is so tiny. I can tell it's a dude, but I have no idea. Mordy Oberstein: Why is that even there? Is that the author? I don't even know what that is. Melissa Popp: Yeah, I mean, and even look at this, I see the data up here, the published date is 2022. When was the last time that this page was vetted by anybody to determine is this information still accurate? Is it correct? But then also it's like, where is the connection here? Just skimming this first paragraph. There is no connection to get people to even care. The hook is not there. This absolutely to me- Mordy Oberstein: It's very sterile content, it is written topically, it's not written for users, and the problem with this is no one since 2022 has looked at this and said, how can we make this page better? You should be constantly thinking, how can I make my content better? Because your content is never perfect and it's never good enough, and it's never, I don't want to say good enough, but it's never the pinnacle of what you want. And user expectations are always changing. To quote Glenn Gabe, Hell hath no fury, like a user scorned. If the user looks at this and says, oh this... They're never coming back, all of that nav boost interaction data is getting factored and now, and it's all because you thought I wrote the content, I won the rankings and I'm done. And hence, the unsung heroes of SEO are those who are saying, it's never done. Melissa Popp: No, and it's never, it absolutely isn't. And one of the things I do, a lot of the times when we have new clients come on board, no matter it's a 10-page website or a 1,000-page website, is we content audit the heck out of every single page on the website. And I want to understand, it's, are you getting traffic? Do you have any rankings? And then beyond that, what do these pages look like? What information is on there? And anybody on the RicketyRoo team will tell you, I am vicious when it comes to content update. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Melissa Popp: I do not play around, I take a scalpel to websites. I have recommended pruning websites two thirds of the content in cases. There has been recent cases where I've pruned a lot of content and said, no, you know what? We're just going to start over. We probably could use some of this content foundationally, but I don't even want to look at it anymore. It's that bad. And I don't do this, I laugh a little bit about it, I don't do this because I'm a mean person or I want to tick people off. I'm doing this because I see the writing on the wall. We've been saying this for 20 years, that content is king, that has not changed, it hasn't. And why every couple of years we shift back and forth on that and we don't spend the time on even just focusing on our content strategy. Most SEO's content strategy is literally, okay, what long tail keywords in Semrush or Ahrefs do I see that are questions and your when, where, whys, hows? Let's just write that content because it has high search volume and no, and it's like- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Melissa Popp: And I'm not saying that that is incorrect. Mordy Oberstein: No, there's a place for it within. Melissa Popp: Exactly, and you have to look at it bigger than that. I mean, there are lots of topics I recommend because absolutely, I'm like, oh, the search volume is there, but also, it matches search intent. And we talk a lot about a topic clustering as if that is a new thing that somehow magically has appeared. And no, that has been a marketing trend, not just in content marketing, but in other forms of marketing for decades. And when I'm building topic clusters for clients, I absolutely am looking at search volume, but I'm also thinking, okay, what do people actually want to know? And a lot of times I recommend topics that have very low search volume, and sometimes I'll get pushback on that of like, oh, but oh no, nobody's searching for that. And I'm like, listen, search volume numbers are BS, they are guesstimates. They do not necessarily mean that 1,200 people are searching a month for X, Y, Z. Now, that doesn't mean that we should ignore those guesstimates. They do help guide our efforts, but we have to think more outside the box. And especially working with smaller clients, you'll get a lot of zero volume keywords that because the tools are running nationally to aggregate that guesstimate, you actually don't know how many people locally might be searching for that because it's not enough to ping for those tools. And that's another thing people forget about when they're creating content, but also updating content. Just because something has the 1,200 volume search nationally every month doesn't mean that people are actually searching for that to eventually lead to conversion. And so that's why I always go back to the number one thing I'm always looking for when I'm updating content and in this maintenance mode, is search intent. It's the most important part of updating and creating content. And we dance around that because that's a little bit outside the SEO box. We talk about search intent at a very high level, but in the nitty-gritty- Mordy Oberstein: But the micro level, no. Micro intents, what's that? Or we feel like, yeah, we nailed it and don't think, wait, it changed. It's like anything with your content. I want you, if you're listening to this podcast and you write content and you're trying to write content, I want you to go back to something you wrote, I don't know, five years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago, and I want you to reread it and I want you to walk away. And how many of you walk away feeling like, that was amazing content? And how many times do you walk away? That's how I used to write and it's good, it's not bad, but- Melissa Popp: No. Mordy Oberstein: ... you're in a different place and you're a better writer, you're a better SEO, you're a better content person and you look back like, I could have done better with that. That's how Google's looking at your content. That was good, that was good. Melissa Popp: Exactly, that's the missing link, is as Google's algorithm gets smarter, faster and larger, encompassing more items into ranking factors, we have to evolve with that. We can sit here in our discussions and blame Google all we want, but at the end of the day, we are at their mercy of how they want to do things, whether we like it or not, and our clients are at that mercy. So we have to evolve with it. And it's like for writers, absolutely, just go back a year and look at some of the things that you wrote. Go look at where they rank. Go look where they rank now and if you still have access to any analytical data around it, how many people are coming to that page? Where are they going from that page? And I guarantee you, in a lot of cases, you're going to find that it's not performing the way you felt when you finished writing and you hit publish, because we publish pieces of content and we're like, yes, this is it. This is awesome, this is the pinnacle we did, we're at the top of the world, but then nobody comes to see it. Nobody comes, but we pretend like that doesn't exist. We pretend that that's not a thing that we need to care about. The SEO team cares about that now and it's like, no, it's like we should also care about that too, especially if we're continuing to write for that business or we work in-house or whatever our role is, and that's just part of the process. Just like you revisit keyword research, with clients, I like to revisit keyword research every six months to a year. I want to see again, where does the search intent just for on-page change that we need to pivot and change things up? Mordy Oberstein: Totally, totally. Melissa Popp: But we just don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: No, we don't get that that's, it's not a checklist. That's a different snarky point for a different time. If people wanted to revisit their processes and get some advice from you, where can they find you out there in ether? Melissa Popp: Oh gosh, everybody knows I live on Twitter and I'm going down with that ship. You can find me at- Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Melissa Popp: ... Popup writer on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Popup writer, okay, we'll link to that in the show notes. Melissa Popp: And yeah, feel free, anybody on my team will tell you I love ripping content apart and not from a place of negativity, but to help people do better. I ask my team all the time, any RicketyRoo blog that you read that I wrote, I guarantee you, two or three people on the team have told me how terrible it is and helped me make it better. I come from a place where I want to support anybody writing content to do better, not just for their clients, but for themselves. We only grow by putting ourselves out there and that's another scary part of all of this, is we have to admit that maybe we didn't do our best or something changed. That means we have to do better. So, I'm always happy to help people. Slide into my DMs, email me, any of that. I'm always around to help with this because I think these are the conversations we need to be having. Mordy Oberstein: Melissa is not only a great SEO and a great content person, just a great follow altogether, and it is why you were a previous follow of the week on the podcast for that reason. Melissa Popp: I was, I know. Mordy Oberstein: You were. Melissa Popp: I was like, oh. Mordy Oberstein: You're one of the best follows on Twitter out there in the SEO space right now. I don't want to say all of Twitter because if you're sports, maybe you don't talk about sports, but in the SEO space, not many better follows at all. So, please follow Melissa. Melissa Popp: Well, I appreciate that. I just telling it like it is. I love what I do and I love to share knowledge and I want us to have more productive conversations about the things we're doing because we're all going through it. It's not us versus one another, it's we're all in this together. And as cheesey that is, there is light at the end of this tunnel. Mordy Oberstein: Melissa, thank you so much for coming on and really say hi to all the great folks over at RicketyRoo. Melissa Popp: I will, I will. I'm sure they'll all send their love to you too. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, bye. Melissa Popp: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Melissa, she's one of the best people in the whole SEO industry. Crystal Carter: Melissa is, she's just the gold star human being. 10 out of 10 recommend following Melissa. Not only is she amazing at SEO, not only is she super warm and friendly and really nice when you meet her, but she also has fantastic music taste. Mordy Oberstein: And movie taste. Crystal Carter: Right, Melissa is just, she's just the best. And also, she's on team RicketyRoo. Team RicketyRoo are the best, they're so good. Don't get me wrong, lots of love to lots of other agencies as well, but team RicketyRoo are fantastic, I'm not going to lie. Amanda, Celeste, Tess, everybody there is fantastic, they're just a great squad. Mordy Oberstein: On that note, you might be fighting for your rankings and your own market share, but you know what else is fighting for their own rankings and market share? Search engines. Like love is a battlefield, so is search engine market share is a battlefield. So, sometimes they do borrow ideas from each other in order to maintain market share. So here's a look at how search engines maintain their market share with a little segment we call, Going, Going, Going, Google. Well, I guess in this case Going, Going, Going, Search Engines. Going back in the day, multifaceted feature snippets and there was, I think I wrote an article about this on the Wix SEO about Google is moving away from the one true answer to a multifaceted kind of approach, because that's what people expect, they don't want one answer, they want options. And to do that, Google had a whole bunch of formats, has been testing with featured snippets and multiple URLs and feature snippets and multifaceted feature snippets, which is a feature snippet on top of a feature snippet on top of another feature snippet. You know what's doing that forever? Crystal Carter: Who? Mordy Oberstein: Bing. Crystal Carter: Bing. Mordy Oberstein: Bing's been doing that for years before Google was doing it. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And I'm pretty sure Google took that from Bing. Crystal Carter: One of the things I love about the team at Bing is that they do a lot of innovation. And we had Fabrice Canel from the search team at Bing on a webinar talking about Index Now, which you should definitely check out that webinar, it was great, but also he talked about that we build new things, we drive change and they do a lot of innovation and they're always coming through with that consistently. And so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they were looking over the shoulder a little bit to see what's going on there. Mordy Oberstein: No, I mean, look at AI on the SERP. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Bing puts in what's called Copilot now, Google go code red, red alert, whatever it was. Also, now we need to add AI onto the SERP the same way, not different, the exact same thing. Crystal Carter: One of the things that we're talking about, at one point Google was talking about contextual links. Bing has been doing that for ages as well. And one of the other things that Bing does is they'll pull in lots of information from other sources into their knowledge panel type things, but they also cite those sources there really, really clearly. I think that's really interesting. Another thing that you sometimes see on Bing is that sometimes Bing has rich results as well. So we think sometimes that rich results only happen on Google, but rich results happen on Bing as well. And so for instance, FAQ schema is no longer as prominent as it was on Google search, but it is still pretty prominent on Bing search, for instance. So that's something to consider as well. And I think that also, there's been some recent discussion about Bing's market share with some interesting statistics coming from World. Is it World Stat? Mordy Oberstein: Something like that, Stat Counter? Crystal Carter: Stat Counter, that's it. Some interesting statistics coming from them, and I think that it's definitely the case that I've heard a lot of folks using Bing. I've started using Bing a little bit more for different things as well. But yeah, they add in lots of different features and they're really innovative. Sometimes the SERP can be a little bit busy at Bing, but I think they're really innovative and it can sometimes give you an idea. Optimizing for Bing can sometimes give you ideas for optimizing for Google in the future. Mordy Oberstein: And I'm not saying this is bad, this is just the nature of how things go. You would open SERP, anyone can look at it, and Bing structures like, for example, you Google who are the Yankees, you get a big sports box at the top of the Bing SERP, that came from Google. The way they have site links, that came from Google. The way they have a people also ask kind of similar result, the related searches in that little gray box, that came from Google and that's fine, that's how it goes, everyone's kind of keeping up with the Joneses, keeping up with the Googles and the Bings, and that's just the way it is to quote Bruce Hornsby. Crystal Carter: But I think also one of the things, Google has started doing those really rich knowledge panel things like particularly for people. For instance, if you look up Beyonce, you'll get a picture of her, her date of birth, the music video panel, a Spotify panel, that sort of thing. And Bing have been doing things like that, particularly for location for a little while. So, one of the ones was like the Paris catacombs was one of my favorite ones because I've never been there but I'm like, oh, that looks really interesting. But I'm looking at one for the Grand Canyon right now and it's got a real mix of stuff all across it and there's lots of different ways that you can connect with it. One of the other things I find really interesting is the way that they parse things out. So this can help you to understand how search engines are seeing your content as well. So for instance, if you go to look up something like the Grand Canyon, they have these little explore this page button on the side, which is a little light bulb. Mordy Oberstein: Right, yeah, that's why I like that feature. Crystal Carter: Right, and it'll pull out different things from it. So it'll pull out the images that are related to it. It will also pull out some of the topics from it. So for instance, I found one that's like, everything you need to know about Grand Canyon National Park, and it's a National Geographic article, and it says, about this website, which talks about, about this website on the little explore this page. And then it says topics on this page and it pulls out some of the headers from the page. So, there you can see whether or not a search engine is able to parse that, is able to see all of it, is able to understand the topics that you're trying to cover and whether it all makes sense. It also allows you to get a summary of some of that information there. And we talked a little bit about competitors. It also lets you see your competitors at a glance really easily as well. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, on that Grand Canyon SERP, Bing had this really cool 3D exploration tool for seeing the Grand Canyon, it's got nothing to do with anything, but you see, it is just interesting to me how one follows the other, how competitive they are, how they borrow from each other. Just for example, Barry Schwartz covered in searches at Round Table that after Google announced that they're getting rid of their cache link, on April 8th, Bing tests removing cache link from search results. Interesting how that is. So they do follow each other's, it's interesting to see what they find. I find it's interesting to see what they find meaningful, that they follow each other on, what they tend to steal and not steal from each other or borrow from each other. And it's just how it goes, it's not good or bad, I guess it's a good thing. It makes everybody better. Rising tide lifts all ships. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, if you are somebody who's interested in search engine marketing and search engine optimization, it's definitely worth becoming familiar with Bing and also with Bing webmaster tools. So that's something that also drives innovation I think on both sides as well. I've spoken to folks at Google before who said, yeah, I think Bing webmaster tools are pretty solid and I think that they're really great. I think it's worth being familiar with both so that you can understand how search engines work overall. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, and if you're looking to understand how search engines work overall, another great resource for you. It's not Google, it's not Bing, it's the king, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine land. So, that means that we're now about to head into Barry Land, also known as the Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a whole bunch for you this week. So I'll try to keep it snappy, but I also like to talk a lot. So, I'll still try to keep it snappy, but I might not succeed. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land, Google Unleashes June 2024, spam update. I like that, Barry, unleashes, it feels so aggressive. Google released it's June 2024 spam update. It is a regular spam update. It's not, I repeat, it's not and do not ask Danny Sullivan on X this question. It is not the algorithmic integration that will result in Google being able to algorithmically go after third party content hosted on websites that should not actually be there, also known as site reputation abuse. That was implemented thus far only with manual actions, this is known as parasite SEO within the SEO industry. The spam update of this June 2024 is not that. I cannot be clearer. It is not that. If you want something clearer, then go to X and look at the search liaison account, it'll be clearer but not much clearer. Perhaps a little bit more aggressive though, unleashes. Anyway, this from Barry Schwarz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable. Google Search bug not indexing or serving new content. So news websites noticed that there are content which they're constantly creating because there's news and they're creating new content for the news wasn't being indexed by Google. This has happened in the past before, it's not the first time, won't be the last time, but it's obviously super, super scary for a publisher. Google said that the problem has been fixed. They said we identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates, end transmission. They didn't say end transmission, I added that. Crystal pointed out on X, perhaps LinkedIn, I saw it on X. You should make note of this if you are in that category of publisher and make a note because you might see a dip in your search console and traffic data and so forth. And you might go hey, what happened there? But if you make a note, you realize, oh, there was an indexing thing there. So that explains it. Okay, onto Search Engine Land, but not from Barry this time. Barry, you can't have them. This from Danny Goodwin. Google AI overview is showing less often with less Reddit, data shows. We've actually covered a bunch of studies showing there's less AI overviews being produced by Google. In this study by SEO ranking, Danny notes also that Reddit's visibility in the AI overviews is no longer a top 10 most cited domain, which is interesting because on June 19th, Barry Schwartz reported, there's Barry, on seoroundtable.com, report on if Google's showing fewer Reddit links in search. So some guy who's name rhymes with Gordy Boberstein, sent a whole bunch of data from Semrush showing that there's just a little bit of a slight drop off in the Reddit and Quora URLs that Google is showing within its discussion and forms. ERP feature. I'm not talking about, I mean, Gordy Boberstein wasn't talking about the entire SERP on the organic results, only the discussion of form SERP feature, but there's a little bit of a trend from April through June where Reddit URLs used to show in 49% of these SERP features, now is down to 48.56%. Same for Quora and other forums have seen a more noticeable rise in visibility within the platform. The same time, by the way, the Semrush data I looked at, I mean, Gordy looked at, was indicating that there are less instances or fewer instances if I'm going to speak grammatically correctly, of multiple Reddit URLs showing up in the discussion and form SERP feature. So there's less cases of Google using multiple URLs in the same SERP feature box from Reddit. That combined with the data that Danny's showing in the AI overview where Danny's discussing from SEO ranking, creates this picture where we're kind of seeing Reddit being scaled back just a bit. I do think Google realizes that it's a little bit too much on the Reddit front, but I don't see any dramatic shifts, I don't think advantage coming soon, but perhaps it's Google trying to act on that. I don't know, the data story is still to be told. However, continuing on that data story, wow I'm really threading the narratives together. This comes from Lily Ray over Amps of Digital, SEO visibility shifts to review sites to e-commerce and user generated content sites in 2024. What Lily shows is basically, I search for something like best jeans, not bad, or I don't know, I always go blank when I'm trying to figure out query to show an example of, like best cell phone or best mug or best glasses, or I just use Lily's cases, laptops, or bird feeders. There used to be a lot of product review websites showing up. What Lily is showing is that in May 2024, Google seems to have shifted away from the product review site and more to the actual product site, so less URLs being shown in the organic results for, here's my top five best bird feeders and more Homedepot.com, buy a bird feeder. By the way, that's happened in the past in other verticals. One of the cases I used to always study was insurance. So if I search for car insurance. Back in the day, there used to be a lot of informational content about how to buy insurance versus just places to buy insurance. That narrative switched back a little bit, and that's the last time I checked a few months ago, is a little bit more commerce side and less informational side. So, intent does change. But it's interesting to see this considering the fact that Google is not happy with affiliates. We spoke about this on our episode with Glenn Gabe, where we basically asked, is Google at war with affiliate sites? And the answer is yes, Google is at war with affiliate sites. Product review sites tend to be very heavy on the affiliate side, so this makes sense in that context of that narrative. Another thing going, making this full circle that Lily also noticed is that instead of relying on product review sites, she sees a shift from those affiliate review sites to user-generated content like Reddit and Quora and YouTube. So, maybe it's not the end of Reddit on the SERP. It already wasn't, but you get what I'm saying. Do I have another story? No, that's it. Okay. I thought I had another one. Wow. We covered a lot of ground this week. I try to keep each story snappy, so maybe it still is, the snappy news. How was your trip to Barry Land, Crystal? Crystal Carter: It was fantastic. We stand and optimize King. Mordy Oberstein: You have to be this short to ride. Crystal Carter: Leaving that, I have no further comment. Mordy Oberstein: I have another further comment. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: My further comment is that this week you should be following Roxana Stingu as your follow of the week. She's at Roxana, R-O-X-A-N-A S-T-I-N-G-U over on X. Head of SEO over at Alamy. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's fantastic. She's so clever and has such a great technical knowledge across lots of different elements, and I think that she works across Alamy, which is trying to maintain brand reputation and maintain ranking across lots of different elements. And I think that it's that in-house play when you're an in-house SEO, you really have to guard your keywords, and she is an in-house SEO, who's been there for a while. And I think that when you've been there for a long time, you're able to, you know your keywords, you know them, and you need to know them inside out, and you need to know who comes for you, who your competitors are, and I think that she does a great job of it. Mordy Oberstein: I can't believe it took us this long to mention how maintaining reign comes into focus when you're in-house, but here we are, took us this long to mention that point. On the ball. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's really, really important in-house. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, make sure to give her a follow over on X and check it out on LinkedIn as well. Links in the show notes. That's all the maintenance I have, I can do today. Crystal Carter: Okay, all right. Well, we will keep going. We will maintain the podcast for next week. We will also be on the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: We'll maintain our rankings on Spotify. Crystal Carter: And anybody who wants to help us with that, please leave a review. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and a rating. Yeah, please. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because maintenance is a team effort. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. Crystal Carter: And it's so fun. Mordy Oberstein: And a whole bunch of other cliches. Thanks for joining us on The SERPs Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how agency SEO is changing. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or as Crystal already told you, a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece and love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What does good E-E-A-T actually look like? What does E-E-A-T mean for your ability to rank on the Google SERP? Why did Google add ‘Experience’ to E-A-T? On this episode, Wix’s own Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by the fabulous Lily Ray to clarify the significance of Google’s “E-E-A-T ranking factors”, and how to demonstrate these qualifications to Google. We explore the elements laid out in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that help bolster your website's E-E-A-T foundation, and teach you how to connect the dots when it comes to your brands credentials. Hope you're hungry, because there’s a lot to E-E-A-T today! We’re putting an emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness so you can showcase your website's true value this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back What does good E-E-A-T even mean? What does good E-E-A-T actually look like? What does E-E-A-T mean for your ability to rank on the Google SERP? Why did Google add ‘Experience’ to E-A-T? On this episode, Wix’s own Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by the fabulous Lily Ray to clarify the significance of Google’s “E-E-A-T ranking factors”, and how to demonstrate these qualifications to Google. We explore the elements laid out in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that help bolster your website's E-E-A-T foundation, and teach you how to connect the dots when it comes to your brands credentials. Hope you're hungry, because there’s a lot to E-E-A-T today! We’re putting an emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness so you can showcase your website's true value this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 62 | November 15, 2023 | 42 MIN 00:00 / 41:59 This week’s guests Lily Ray Lily has been making waves in the SEO industry since 2010. Shifting from start-up to agency–she has helped develop and establish an award-winning SEO department at Amsive Digital, delivering high impact work for a long-list of notable clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast and putting on some grouping insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by our always hungry for more SEO knowledge, our head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I'm also always hungry. I'm big into snacks and things. We have a lot of good snacks. We recently found these biscuits that have rosemary in them. They're incredibly what in England, people refer to as Moreish. As in if they say Pringles, once you pop, you can't stop. Similar thing with these particular snacks. Mordy Oberstein: Are they Triscuits? Those are amazing. Crystal Carter: They're not Triscuits, but I love Triscuits. I love me a Triscuit. That is the quality. You get a little cheese on there, oh. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best cracker. I don't know what the hell is wrong with the rest of the world for not being into Triscuits. It's ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Although, to be fair, sometimes Ritz does it. Sometimes it's a Ritz and I'm like, "Oh yeah." Mordy Oberstein: Ritz is fine. It's good with Herring. I know it's an old Jewish thing. Totally lost the audience with that one, but Triscuits are far superior. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. People who are listening, hit us with your favorite cheese accompanying snack tray. Mordy Oberstein: And it'll all makes sense why we're talking about food in a few moments. But first, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also showcase your years of experience to your clients with the advanced design and clients tools found in Wix Studio. Look for it over at wix.com/studio. Experience? You ask. What can that mean for today's topic? Well, I hope you're as hungry as we have something to eat today. That's right. We're taking off the oddly controversial, though lately less so, topic of experience, expertise, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness also known as EEAT. Was EAT, but now it's EEAT. That's a mouthful, whatever. We'll explore what does good EEAT actually look like? What does EEAT mean for the Google algorithm and your ability to rank? And why did Google add the extra E after all? To help us get two full scoops of EEAT, the world's best, Lily Ray of Amsive Digital will join us as we make our way to the proverbial salad bar in the sky, known as the SERP. Plus, we'll look at how Google goes all in on experience with its own features on the results page. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social. So head over to the buffet and load up on free food like it's a famine. As episode number 63 of the SERP's UP podcast helps you stuff your faces with the lowdown on EEAT. That's EEAT. Crystal Carter: I hooked up a lot to chew on there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice, nice., Nice. I'm really going to digest that for a while. Lily Ray: That was quite an intro and you guys make me laugh so much that I was like, "Should I go on mute? Should I not go on mute?" Because I'm just sitting here cracking up and it's amazing. So thanks for having me. This is- Mordy Oberstein: Lily, thanks for being here. Crystal Carter: So happy to have you here. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. You're a second time guest. You're our second, second time guest. Lily Ray: Isn't that right? Yeah, it was fun the first time, so that's why I said yes again. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I also noticed during our bit of banter in the front, I mentioned Ritz and you were shaking your head no. You were like … Lily Ray: Well, it's more like I love Ritz, but I'm just like, that's such a snack from childhood. So much butter. You know what I mean? But you're right, it's still a guilty pleasure for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's true. It's a little basic, but it does the job. I enjoy it. I enjoy it. But there we go. Lily Ray: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: They used to have a guy who's a kid, like Kosher knockoffs. This wasn't technically Kosher at one point, whatever. Now that I've experienced real Ritz, they were crumbly and not nearly as good. The level of expertise and trustworthiness around the cracker making of the knockoff was not nearly as good as the original. Which brings us to our topic, and I want to give a little bit of background... Pat in the back for that pivot. A little bit of background on what the heck EEAT is. So we're going to go on a little magical SEO history tour, cue up The Beatles, I guess. Because in March of 2018, Google released a medic update. It was I guess the August, 2018 core update, but they weren't calling it that then, which we call it now but it was called a medic update. And it was one of those, I don't know, moments in SEO history where something just started to be different. And one of the things that was different was the conversation around Your Money, Your Life websites, YMYL, and the impact that we saw on health websites and finance sites getting hit really hard during the medic update and the emphasis on site quality, meaning it became apparent that Google was able to assess and profile quality in brand new ways. And back then, literally a few weeks after the update rolled out, yours truly wrote a I'll call a prophetic blog post, which has been since deleted by the place that hosted it, salty point, around Google profiling site identity, a topic you hear a lot more about, and the website's really building upside identity and that sort of thing. And that really started emerging during or after, rather, the medic update and the subsequent core updates that followed and EAT... Well, at the time it was EAT because there was only expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, experience came later, really started becoming a focal point of the SEO dialogue. And eventually EAT became EEAT. But there's always the question of what was Google doing? What were they able to do? EEAT came from Google's quality radar guidelines, which are not part of the algorithm, but we were seeing things that look similar to what Google was talking about and the guidelines happen in the algorithm and EAT at the time and now EEAT really became part of the SEO equation and a little bit controversial because of that. So maybe let's take it from there. The algorithm and EEAT, is EEAT part of the algorithm? Lily Ray: Softball. Softball question. The way that Google talks about this, so they talk about there's many different signals that go into their evaluations, their EEAT evaluations. And those can be many, many different, let's say on page, off page direct, indirect signals about a brand, about a website, about content. And those signals factor into their evaluations of the EEAT, which of course then can impact rankings. So they're not going to tell you that EEAT is a direct ranking factor. In fact, they've said many times it's indirect. But if you think about it as a whole, as a concept, it is essentially a big, huge part of Google's algorithms and it depends on the query itself, how much it matters. So they've been very clear that for certain queries, it's extremely important. For other queries, maybe it's less important. But there's other statements from Google saying this matters for every query. So people like to get into these silly debates about whether or not it's important. But if you read pretty much all of Google's documentation from the last several years, it's by far the most common theme about how SEO works. But they have to keep it really vague for the same reasons they have to keep all of their information about ranking very vague. Because people think that it's something that can be faked and exploited and just like all these spammy approaches are trying to fake EEAT, which people are doing now and with some success in some cases. But yeah, Google's not going to tell us directly how it works. So in my perspective, yes, it's probably the single most important thing you should be thinking about for SEO, but it's not as simple as saying putting a keyword in your title tag is a ranking factor. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that part of this comes from... They had that piece of content that they said, "What site owners should know about Google's August, 2019 core update." And they talk loads about the EEAT and they link to your content there as well, and they talk about how important it is. And I think that, as you say, it's not a one pill sort of thing. It's not like you do one thing and then it's completely fixed. It's a holistic approach. And I think that that's certainly something that you've talked about for many years. I've been on your website, you have a section that says, "I talk about EEAT lot, and the reason why is because it's very complex." Lily Ray: Yeah, it's complex. And it's very hard for a lot of SEOs to wrap their heads around because a lot of SEO in years past has been more like you do one thing and you can see a result of that thing pretty clearly. So you can draw a conclusion, oh, I added this keyword to my title, or I changed my H1, or I improved page speed, and I'm pretty sure it led to these outcomes. With EAT and EEAT, it's hardly ever like that. So a lot of people made the mistake early on of saying, "Oh, I added an author name and I tested adding an author name and nothing happened." Because it's not how it works. Google has all the data in the entire world and they're using it in ways we probably cannot even wrap our heads around. So that in and of itself is probably not going to change how Google evaluates the EEAT of your site and your brand. Mordy Oberstein: That's always been my major hangup with the EEAT. I call it a matter of factor. Yeah, you have all these ranking signals like your keyword and your title tag and blah blah blah blah blah…. But looking at the quality of the website, its ability to transmit information in a expert led manner that results in it being trustworthy, it's very holistic, and it's very meta. It's like, okay, before we even get to a keyword in a title tag, what's the nature of this content? Is it applicable and is it quality? And that's before a ranking factor. It's prior to a ranking factor, and I think that confuses the heck out of SEOs. Lily Ray: Yeah, yeah. It's because they can't understand how Google's doing it, and they also can't imagine what's possible and what's not possible. So a lot of the times it's like Google can't possibly know who these authors are. Meanwhile, literally today, Glenn Gabe just posted, in Google Discover, they're putting author names in the thumbnail, and now you can click on the author name and it takes you to their knowledge graph. And Glenn found it for Barry Barry Schwartz, the author in the SEO community. So I'm like, "Okay, if they can't do it, why are they literally continuing to push products that show that they're trying to do it." Crystal Carter: Right. And they rolled out lots and lots more knowledge panels for people of all different levels of notoriety and the knowledge panels that they have for people who are big names, for instance, are much more robust these days. How have you seen that evolve? Lily Ray: Yeah, I think you're right. I think I've seen a lot more people this year saying, especially SEO people, like, "Hey, I put structured data around my name and now I have a knowledge panel." It's like, okay, well, that's a much easier barrier to entry than it was before. But you're right, Crystal, if you Google prominent people's names, it's like Google's gone so far into making it a beautiful search result with connecting all the different dots. Sometimes when I Google my own name, I'm like, "You chose that YouTube video to display at the very top of the page." It's like curating almost these personal websites for people, and they're absolutely building that out more over time. Mordy Oberstein: No, they're really smart about it. In mine, they show a picture of me when I was a kid that I once posted, I went, "Wow." Lily Ray: You're like, "Take that down." Mordy Oberstein: Really. To be honest to you, I look way better back then than I do now, so I'm going to leave it there. Lily Ray: You're going to keep it? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, keep it. So to piggyback off of that, what does good... Because we mentioned, okay, throw the author in there, have an author bio, but I feel like EEAT has... We've SEOed it, it became a checklist. We need to do this, I need to do that and I need to do that. But what does developing good EEAT actually look like? Lily Ray: Yeah, it's doing the hard work that nobody wants to do. Everybody wants a shortcut. A lot of people these days are saying, you'll see these people, "Oh, I created this fake mid-journey person and a fake author bio and got all these fake mentions and all these publications did it, did all these fake things and it's ranking." I'm like, "Yeah, it's ranking for now until Google sees enough of these patterns to the point where they launch another helpful content update and it doesn't work anymore." If you're willing to have something work for a month or three months or whatever, great, good for you. But sustainable long-term marketing and EEAT means all the things that have always contributed to building a trustworthy brand. So we work with our clients to say, who are the legitimate experts at your company? The people that actually know these things, are they looped into the content creation process? And the more that these people go and make themselves public speaking at events, doing interviews, making YouTube videos, doing TikTok, all this stuff, it all gets factored back into EEAT. Google loves those signals. Crystal Carter: So I've worked with clients on this who were in the medical space on one of the things you do a EEAT audit, and I presume that that's something that you do and many think that you do. And when I've done that sort of thing, it's sometimes very difficult to explain to clients what you're actually looking for because they're like, "But I thought you were going to look at the website." And you're like, "Yeah, kind of. Yes, but also your whole digital footprint." How do you talk to clients about that? Because one of the things I think people struggle with, they'll say, "Oh, well, we are qualified. Oh, well, we do have that certification." But they don't necessarily demonstrate it. So do you find it tricky for clients to get their head around that? Lily Ray: It's a great question. I mean, personally, I think it's one of the most fun and exciting areas of SEO when you start to believe in it and understand how it works. Because like you said, if they are truly qualified, then it's just a matter of connecting the dots and making that super easy for search engines to understand and users. All of this is mutually beneficial for search engines and users. That's one of the nice things about it. It's not like, "Oh, let's go buy a million shady links and spam the internet." Because it's good for SEO, but it's terrible for users. No, we're actually doing something that's good for the internet and brands as a whole. But to your question, Crystal, it's like if you go in the search quality rater guidelines, which have finally become trendy, Marie Haynes made this trendy and Olaf Kopp maybe and three other people five years ago, seven years ago. Now, suddenly the SEO industry's like, "Check out this nugget from page 18 of the search quality guidelines." I'm like, "It's no secret. It's been there the whole time." Mordy Oberstein: The main content should be clearly accessible on the page. Lily Ray: Yeah, guys. Found this great hack. Oh my God. Crystal Carter: I'm not going to lie. If you're new to SEO and you're interested in it, look up Google search quality rater guidelines. And honestly, Lily, you hit me to this and you were like, "Oh yeah." This and this. And I was like, "Okay, let me have a look myself." Literally printed it out and was going through that with the highlighter with all of this stuff that I used to carry it around dogeared, but it's a great read and it's super, super useful. It's also worth bookmarking because they just update the link. I was trying to compare one year to the other and it will go. There's a couple of people that do really good line by line what's changed. But yeah, it's a great document. We should link that in the share notes. Lily Ray: Yeah, it's hard to find. And one last thing about that, if you read the guidelines, the whole point of why I brought that up is because the first thing it says for quality raters to do is, which the document is intended for, is to research the reputation of websites outside of what the website says about itself, including a search operator that they can add to Google that literally looks at the website reputation without looking at the website, subtract the website's domain. So they're actually looking directly outside of the website to understand what other people are saying about the website, not the website itself. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's why I feel like there's so much of what goes into EEAT and branding and content marketing, right? You can do very mundane tasks like I mentioned before, but though the real work is really developing the brand. I think the point you made before about getting the people who work at your company involved in the content creation and promoting that content is, first off just leaving SEO aside, is a great brand marketing tactic. You want to show you as the expert and in order to do that, your people need to be out there talking about what makes them an expert. How many times is a random content marketing agency in Wichita, Kansas writing about whatever it is that you actually do and the actual experts are not actually involved in the content? If you're like, "What's the biggest thing you can do to build up your EEAT?" But make sure the content's really actually good. Crystal Carter: And accurate and factual. Lily Ray: Yeah, and beyond good. I think we'll talk about this soon, but now it's just true experience. So another thing the SEO community is trying to do with the onset of the new E, which I think we'll talk about is faking experience. And the amazing thing that Google's done and cornered people into doing, which I think is a great thing, is now you need that to rank. I mean, the data just shows it over and over with different types of algorithm updates or ranking systems. We had the review system, now we have the helpful content system. It's always saying the same thing now, which is, do you have true experience? So people are going into ChatGPT and saying, "Pretend I'm an SEO expert with real SEO experience and say this and this thing." And the answers, I'm like, "If you're a real SEO person with experience, you'll know the answers are not good." So people can tell the difference, right? Crystal Carter: And I think also you talked about being good for users and being good for the algorithm or whatever as well. I heard a radio advert the other day and it was like, "Here are real customers talking about their customer experience with our energy company." And it was literally slightly grainy phone calls of people going, "Oh, I had a great, thank you so much for your help. That was really helpful." And that sort of stuff. And I think TikTok is a classic venue for this. There's a lot of ugly videos on TikTok that are like, "Here's how I fixed the bicycle." Or "Here's how I did this thing." And I think people are really looking for something real that they can quantify as real because there's so much content everywhere. So I think that that experience level, I think that's a response to that. Do you agree? Or you're seeing something else? Lily Ray: Yeah, no, I think it's really clear. It's interesting in the past couple of weeks and months how so many people are so blindsided by what Google's doing because Google's been warning us for years about this. The feedback that Google's been getting about its algorithms and the quality of its results have been in mainstream media for a couple of years now. We think that Google provides a lot of very inauthentic results, a lot of results from brands that don't know what they're talking about. Too many brands are doing affiliate content. This is not authentic but we want to hear from real people. TikTok is the biggest threat to Google search. It has been clear for months and years the challenges that Google's facing. Now they're probably maybe over indexing on real experience with some of their ranking updates, but it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Google searchers in general want that classic old feeling of how Google used to be when you would get Joe Schmoe's website about fixing his bike. They're trying to go back there while still honoring many of the other signals that are important for search. Mordy Oberstein: That to me, by the way, is a mistake that I think people in the SEO industry make. Okay, so Google added an extra E to EEAT where it was originally expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and then they added an E for experience. And SEO's like, "Oh, okay, now we've to optimize for experience." They're out thinking, where did the E come from? They didn't pull it out of a hat. Google realized that there's a new content trend. People are preferring content from actual people with actual experience. And in order for them to stay relevant, they need to figure out a way to include that in the algorithm. So it's not like, oh, I need to optimize for Google. No, you need to give people what they actually want, which is what Google's trying to do. So we've talked about this on Twitter a while back when they started doing the product review updates and now they're called the review updates. And Google said, "Okay, we want you to have actual experience with the toaster oven that you're using." How do they do that? And to me, it's not crazy complicated. The language structure you're going to use if you use the stupid toaster oven is going to be so different than if you didn't. So for example, you would write, great toaster oven, was really good on bread, if you didn't use it. But if you actually used it, you would be like, "I tried to put a steak in there and it did not work. Do not use this on steak." Lily Ray: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I've been looking at sites that got hit by the recent helpful content update. And I'm not the most advanced set of algorithms on the planet. I'm just a person looking at sites one by one. So obviously, whatever Google's capable of doing is going to be a million times more sophisticated than what I'm doing. Okay, first of all, so many of the sites that were impacted have absolutely no experience. That's just obvious. Okay, we get it. You wrote a million pieces of content about all the great places to travel in the world. You've obviously never been there. There's no evidence, there's no author, there's nothing. That's obviously the most extreme example. But then you get these mid-range like, "Oh, I really enjoyed going to the restaurant. The breakfast was excellent. Highly recommend it. Try the pancakes." Okay, did you really go there? Mordy Oberstein: No, you did add the word I and we in a thousand times. I told Crystal this, I took that product review page and I went to the way back machine and it was clear. They try to mimic experience and it was not actual experience. And I went back and they used the word I and we eight times. Fast-forward to now, and they use it 150 times. Lily Ray: It's real experience. If I just put that word there a million times, people will never know. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So note to the audience, and I feel like if you're listening to this podcast and you're a smaller website, this is for you. You have actual experience, you have the ability to really give that experience over to your audience and create something different and valuable. But if you're listening to this and you're on an SEO, stuffing in we and our and I is not optimizing for the experience of EEAT. Lily Ray: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great segue. I have a question. So the way I always describe for our Wix audience, and I know not everybody here is Wix user yet. But the way I like to describe it is Wix folks are doers, we like to do stuff, make websites, do stuff, et cetera. So if somebody was looking for something to do, I don't know if you'd be interested in this, going through each acronym. So a quick tip, is that ridiculous? Or something you could do to demonstrate experience on a website that almost anyone could do, what would be something you could recommend for someone? Lily Ray: Yeah, I mean, this is where it gets fun because presumably if you are making a website and marketing the website, presumably and hopefully it's because you actually like what you're doing, you know about what you're doing, you care about what you're doing. Of course, that's definitely not true for many people that are doing marketing on the internet. But if those things are true, assuming those things are true, share what you know. You know what I mean? What are the unique insights and experiences that you have? Me personally, I think you both as well. I can talk about SEO all day, every day. I have very strong opinions as everybody knows and I like to share them and people like to hear them. So do that. If you're a biker or a bike mechanic, what have you experienced? What frustrates you? What's the cool new bike? What's going on? And then of course you can map that to the different SEO tools that we use to say, okay, how should I write this headline? What keywords should I include on this page? How should I set up my content structure? But when you start from what you know, this is a very different way of thinking about SEO because most people start from the keywords themselves and then try to pretend that they know these things or research what other people have said. But I almost only write SEO content or content about SEO when there's something that I need to say and that's a lot. It's very frequent, but it doesn't happen not because my company's like, "Lily, we haven't heard from you in a while." I'm like, "Guys, it's Sunday night and something really big happened and I have an idea and I'm writing a blog." So think about it that way. Crystal Carter: So this is reminding me. So on Wix SEO hub, I have an article about user first SEO content ideas and I'm sure you must get this a lot as in your experience, you talk to SEOs all over the world. If anyone doesn't know, it's not really a conference if Lily's not there. No, I'm kidding. But every SEO conference is made better by Lily Ray. But yeah, there we go. Anyway, at conferences, you speak to SEOs all over the world and you must have lots of people asking you questions all the time about different things. So again, rather than keywords, if you're hearing people regularly asking you those questions, those are potentially users. That's potentially a place where you can validate your experience or the experiences of other people in order to create the content. So I think that that's something that folks can do as well. Listen to people who are talking to you. Lily Ray: Yeah, or your customers or your calls or your chats, right? Crystal Carter: Right. So we did experience. And expertise, what is a good win for expertise in terms of something that someone could work on, sort of a thing? Lily Ray: Yeah, I think this is when we start to get into things like author bios and building out a personal brand. Every place that one would expect you to be mentioned or recognized in your industry, make sure that you're there or make sure that it's clear that you're there. Here's a random example for me. I'm in Google Scholar. I was included in an academic journal where I've talked about SEO. That's extreme, but that's all the different places that you might expect somebody who's saying they're an expert in something to have expertise. So I just spoke at a recipe blogger conference last week. It's like, where are all the publications where you've been mentioned? Where did you go to culinary school? Right? Just connecting all those dots and making sure that they're all easy for people and search engines to see. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think one thing that I've seen is that, and I think you've mentioned this as well on Twitter, is LinkedIn for instance, even if you're not posting every single day on LinkedIn, if you have your LinkedIn, if you spent an hour going through your LinkedIn profile and making sure that's got your relevant qualifications and has the skill sets and all of that sort of stuff, Google pulls those results into the SERP, for instance. So that can be a good source of that as well. And then with regards to authority, is that one trickier? Lily Ray: Yeah, probably. I mean, the SEO industry will tell you because Gary-ish from Google- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the link thing. Lily Ray: One time said that it's links. Yeah. So Gary in maybe 2018 or 2019 said that page rank and links are the only things we really look at for EAT or something along those lines, and authority is largely driven by links. So of course, the SEO industry likes to misconstrue this into links are the only thing that matters, nothing else matters. Which is not true. But of course, similar to having the right credentials and experience listed in your online profiles, you do want to back up your legitimacy with links and also social media mentions. I can't say enough about when I share an article that I wrote on Twitter, it shows up in Google Discover the next day. So it's like Google's looking at these signals, even if they don't tell you the social media signals are ranking factors, they're looking at them, for sure. Crystal Carter: And what about trust? What's a good opportunity in terms of demonstrating trust online? Lily Ray: Yeah, this is where the trust pilots and the G2s and testimonials and online ratings and online reviews come in. There's so many different sites where you should be listed, building out a knowledge panel using Crunchbase, all these things. Just making sure that your brand is a legitimate brand. Other sites that were impacted by the recent algorithm updates, including the helpful content update, one of the first things that I noticed is a lot of these sites are obviously just blogs that someone bought because of the name. It's just obvious, right? So if you're bestpizzaslices.com, okay, great, you're going to write about the best pizza slices. I'm sure the content is fine, but that's not a brand. There's no evidence that you started a business. Who are you? Why should we trust you? So that's a silly example because I'm sure you can do fine with pizza slices, but you know what I mean? People are just buying domains and not investing any energy into making this a real brand because that's the whole point, they're churn and burn sites. So you have to show that you're a real brand. Mordy Oberstein: And all that bleeds over, right? Even the Google's graphic, the whole diagram, they have a Venn diagram and the E, and the A, and the T they overlap a little bit to make a one overall picture. So one of these things, again, that makes it hard is that it's not very linear. As Lily mentioned before, I just want to harbor on that point for a real quick second. It is a mindset. It is a way of thinking about producing content and websites and working with sites and content. And I think we're done. I think we've exhausted the topic for this particular episode. Lily, if people wanted to experience your expertise and experience in SEO, where could they find you? Lily Ray: Well, my new answer to this question is that Google me and pick wherever you want to follow me because there's a lot of different options. So it's Lily Ray, L-I-L-Y R-A-Y. Mordy Oberstein: That's the best answer I've heard. I know it's... Lily Ray: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good answer in this whole mumble-jumbled world of social media. That is the best answer I've heard in a long time. Lily Ray: Pick your favorite. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, we'll link to Lily's various social media profiles and perhaps just the SERP. Lily Ray: Just the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, in the show notes. So look for the link to Lily's SERP in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Such an honor to have you with us. Thank you so much. Lily Ray: Thanks for having me. You guys are the best. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Lily. Bye. Thanks again, Lily. Experience is not just fodder for the algorithm. Google didn't pull it out of a magic hat and say, "Hey, let's focus on experience and expertise." Content trends impact search engines and Google saw experience and expertise are actual content trends that people want. Hence, you all are going to TikTok for information. Thus Google knows it itself needs to show experience and expertise in its own SERP features. So like that, with that, let's dive into what it all looks like on the SERP as we take a directional look at what Google is doing with a little segment we call going, going Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going Google. It's out of here. Mordy Oberstein: Google does a lot of things to help give results within its own SERP feature the little boxes and doohickeys it offers that are not the actual results that pull in expertise and experience. In fact, Crystal, you found one of these and shared it with the great Barry Schwartz. Care to share that with us? Crystal Carter: Yes. So I found a mentioned in drop down, and I found this on the couple of top level searches, so broad search keywords. And essentially, I entered in something and then further down there was a brand and underneath the brand it would say mentioned in, and it mentioned a few different places where people have mentioned this particular topic. These are really useful for providing context. They also provide a little bit of a point of panic potentially if you might have something there where you're mentioned, did he not? So flattering way. So I think it's important for people to think about how their reputation is being managed across the web and to make sure that they're creating some great content that is actually about them. So people talking about them. This is essentially the authority piece. So I tend to say that when we think about authority, it's what other people are saying about you. So if you were applying for a job, you get references. You might say great things about yourself on your resume, but then you have your references. And if your references are your mom or your best friend, that'll give your employer one kind of impression. If your references are somebody that you worked with who also has a good reputation, for instance, that's going to give another impression. And it's the same with some of these online recommendations that Google's trying to get more people more comfortable for. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it really helps Google showcase the result that they're giving is expert driven, right? Other people are mentioning that website, then that website has some sort of expertise on whatever topic is that you're searching for. So it's Google saying, "Hey, let's make sure that you, the searcher, understand that this website is an expert because other people are saying that they are." Crystal Carter: Right. And that when you're looking at the SERP, I mean, it takes up a lot of real estate. So the one that I saw had a couple of different options. And I think that what's interesting is that it takes up probably double the space of a normal plain blue link, which is great because that's saying not only is this somebody who's got content on this, but they've got content and other people think that content is good. So I think that that is an absolute plus for people who have good brand knowledge or good topic knowledge on a particular topic. And I think that it's worth investing time in making yourself be seen as a very clear authority. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and on the flip side of that, from the experience angle, Google has a whole set of results where you can get a perspective from actual people, meaning you search for something like, are The Beatles good? It was the example we used in the previous episode. And you get a set of results of people sharing their opinions about The Beatles. It's really results based on experience. A lot of it coming from social media because that's a great place to see where people have their experiences and their thoughts on that from actual people. Crystal Carter: So one of the examples that I found was Coco Gauff. So after she won the US Open with plastic finish there. Well done Coco. So after she won that, there were people who also had opinions on that as well. So there was something that was specifically an opinion piece, for instance from CNN that was mentioned in The Perspective. But I think it's great to have the content earmarked so that essentially you're saying this is content that's objective or that's a news piece, core news and this is the opinion column area. In a newspaper, you'll have current events, you'll have some people who are making think pieces about what they think it might mean or what context they see in a particular news event, and then you'll have people who are just reporting what happened on that particular occasion. And both ideas are useful for you to get context of what's going on, but they're not exactly the same. So I think it's good that Google's saying, "Okay, these are opinions, they're interesting and things, but they're opinions." And I think that it provides context and provides a great way to get more information on the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: The point is, if you look at what Google's doing in their own SERP features, you can get a sense of what they're trying to focus on and what they're trying to do and what direction they're going, and it's the name of the segment going, going Google. So take a look at what Google's doing and take a look at what's changing on the results page and take a look at the change in testing that they're doing because that'll show you what they're looking for and what they're trying to do, what they think is valuable. Crystal Carter: Right. And one of the other ones that Glenn Gabe identified recently was within the Discover tab there, for instance, he found something that was talking about Google, Google search results, and it was an article written by Barry Schwartz and underneath the article it said, "Get the latest on Barry Schwartz." And when you click on it goes to Barry's knowledge graph. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: So that is a good way that you're connecting the dots, and it's something I've talked about in terms of thinking about mobile optimization. I did a course recently for Semrush and I talked about how actually spending some time making sure the people on your team have good knowledge graphs, have good biographical entities, have good information across the web, is actually really useful for mobile, for EEAT, for all of those sorts of things. So Google wants to add citations essentially to the kind of content that they're giving. So they want to add context to the authors. They want to add context to the information the publishers that they're pointing people to. They want to give people more context for the kind of information that they're getting. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of Barry, of course, it is the perfect time for us to dive into this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Google SGE expands through 120 countries per Barry Schwartz override Search Engine Land. Basically, it's what I just said. Google's SGE, it's Search Generative Experience expands to 120 new countries. Which means that if you are in Angola, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Brazil. Just reading off the list. Cambodia. Let's go to E, Ethiopia. G for, I don't know, Guam. In all of these countries, you can, in theory, access the SGE Google Search Generative Experience, which is super interesting. Google has stated that yes, this is still on beta, still being tested, but the expansion obviously indicates that Google is far more comfortable with what it's been doing in the US with its SGE. So look forward at a country or in a country near you. Also in a country near you, per Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, it's two berries from two different publications this week as it is with pretty much every week. Google November 2023 reviews update rolls out. So Google said, if you listened to our news last week, Google said they're going to roll out a new review update and that the review update, this one, will be the last of the official announced review updates. What you're basically going to have is a continuously updating ranking system, which means that the review update is essentially real time. I hate using that word because it's not exactly what it means, but it will be out live and changing rankings on a consistent and ongoing basis without specific roll-outs as we have now. So that's super interesting. As I believe I mentioned last time, I think this is the way of the algorithm. This is where I think the Google updates in general are going. We actually cover this in our BrightonSEO session, our live recording of SERP's Up over at BrightonSEO in San Diego. So look for that episode. I believe that one comes out next week. So we get into that there and then. So listen then for that there. Wow, that's so many pronouns. Just so you know, the reviews update is live, at least the beginning of it is live at the same time as the November 2023 core update, which makes picking out ranking movements perhaps a little bit more complex than it usually is, and there's multiple layers of Google updates going on, so that's always fun, right? And with that, that's this week's snappy news. Thank you as always to the great writers of all the great news articles that are out there, and of course, in particular, the great Barry Schwartz. With that, let's dive into who you should be following this week for more SEO awesomeness. And since we're focused so much on experience and expertise and EEAT, we thought this week's follow of the week should be Olaf Kopp. He is on X, but he's more on LinkedIn. So look for Olaf Kopp. However on LinkedIn, we'll link to that in the show notes. Olaf is a EEAT aficionado. He's written many, many articles around it for Search Engine Land. He's got a really, what I like, a really conceptual understanding of EEAT. And it's the kind of content that when you go and look at it, you're learning how to fish and you're not just getting the fish. Crystal Carter: I mean, what fish are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Mackerel. Crystal Carter: Mackerel. Mackerel's so pretty. They're such pretty little fish. They're very shiny and cute. I think they're adorable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. What's an ugly fish? I know, a fluke. Flounder. Crystal Carter: Have you ever seen salmon? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've seen salmon. Crystal Carter: Salmon are ugly fish. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, we're really crapping on the fish here. Crystal Carter: Say it to it's face. But salmon are ugly fish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I would say salmon cannot hurt you. I would say it to it. I wouldn't say it to a shark though. Crystal Carter: I mean, they jump pretty high. If you ever watch people talk about bears eating salmon. But if you watch a bear eating salmon, I've not seen this personally, but on nature documentaries, they're literally just hanging their mouths open trying to catch the salmon who are jumping upstream. It's not very graceful, but I mean, that's what... You got to do what you got to do if you're a bear and you need a snack. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, bears have to eat too. Crystal Carter: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: Bears have to eat too. Well, I'm that happy note, thank you for joining us on the SERP's UP Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into a very special live episode from BrightonSEO in San Diego live from the conference. So look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at, you got it, wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Lily Ray Olaf Kopp Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter Amsive Digital Lily Ray Website News: Google Search testing “Mentioned in” search snippet Google Quality Rater Guidelines Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Lily Ray Olaf Kopp Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter Amsive Digital Lily Ray Website News: Google Search testing “Mentioned in” search snippet Google Quality Rater Guidelines 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 and putting on some grouping insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by our always hungry for more SEO knowledge, our head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I'm also always hungry. I'm big into snacks and things. We have a lot of good snacks. We recently found these biscuits that have rosemary in them. They're incredibly what in England, people refer to as Moreish. As in if they say Pringles, once you pop, you can't stop. Similar thing with these particular snacks. Mordy Oberstein: Are they Triscuits? Those are amazing. Crystal Carter: They're not Triscuits, but I love Triscuits. I love me a Triscuit. That is the quality. You get a little cheese on there, oh. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best cracker. I don't know what the hell is wrong with the rest of the world for not being into Triscuits. It's ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Although, to be fair, sometimes Ritz does it. Sometimes it's a Ritz and I'm like, "Oh yeah." Mordy Oberstein: Ritz is fine. It's good with Herring. I know it's an old Jewish thing. Totally lost the audience with that one, but Triscuits are far superior. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. People who are listening, hit us with your favorite cheese accompanying snack tray. Mordy Oberstein: And it'll all makes sense why we're talking about food in a few moments. But first, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also showcase your years of experience to your clients with the advanced design and clients tools found in Wix Studio. Look for it over at wix.com/studio. Experience? You ask. What can that mean for today's topic? Well, I hope you're as hungry as we have something to eat today. That's right. We're taking off the oddly controversial, though lately less so, topic of experience, expertise, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness also known as EEAT. Was EAT, but now it's EEAT. That's a mouthful, whatever. We'll explore what does good EEAT actually look like? What does EEAT mean for the Google algorithm and your ability to rank? And why did Google add the extra E after all? To help us get two full scoops of EEAT, the world's best, Lily Ray of Amsive Digital will join us as we make our way to the proverbial salad bar in the sky, known as the SERP. Plus, we'll look at how Google goes all in on experience with its own features on the results page. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social. So head over to the buffet and load up on free food like it's a famine. As episode number 63 of the SERP's UP podcast helps you stuff your faces with the lowdown on EEAT. That's EEAT. Crystal Carter: I hooked up a lot to chew on there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice, nice., Nice. I'm really going to digest that for a while. Lily Ray: That was quite an intro and you guys make me laugh so much that I was like, "Should I go on mute? Should I not go on mute?" Because I'm just sitting here cracking up and it's amazing. So thanks for having me. This is- Mordy Oberstein: Lily, thanks for being here. Crystal Carter: So happy to have you here. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. You're a second time guest. You're our second, second time guest. Lily Ray: Isn't that right? Yeah, it was fun the first time, so that's why I said yes again. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I also noticed during our bit of banter in the front, I mentioned Ritz and you were shaking your head no. You were like … Lily Ray: Well, it's more like I love Ritz, but I'm just like, that's such a snack from childhood. So much butter. You know what I mean? But you're right, it's still a guilty pleasure for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's true. It's a little basic, but it does the job. I enjoy it. I enjoy it. But there we go. Lily Ray: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: They used to have a guy who's a kid, like Kosher knockoffs. This wasn't technically Kosher at one point, whatever. Now that I've experienced real Ritz, they were crumbly and not nearly as good. The level of expertise and trustworthiness around the cracker making of the knockoff was not nearly as good as the original. Which brings us to our topic, and I want to give a little bit of background... Pat in the back for that pivot. A little bit of background on what the heck EEAT is. So we're going to go on a little magical SEO history tour, cue up The Beatles, I guess. Because in March of 2018, Google released a medic update. It was I guess the August, 2018 core update, but they weren't calling it that then, which we call it now but it was called a medic update. And it was one of those, I don't know, moments in SEO history where something just started to be different. And one of the things that was different was the conversation around Your Money, Your Life websites, YMYL, and the impact that we saw on health websites and finance sites getting hit really hard during the medic update and the emphasis on site quality, meaning it became apparent that Google was able to assess and profile quality in brand new ways. And back then, literally a few weeks after the update rolled out, yours truly wrote a I'll call a prophetic blog post, which has been since deleted by the place that hosted it, salty point, around Google profiling site identity, a topic you hear a lot more about, and the website's really building upside identity and that sort of thing. And that really started emerging during or after, rather, the medic update and the subsequent core updates that followed and EAT... Well, at the time it was EAT because there was only expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, experience came later, really started becoming a focal point of the SEO dialogue. And eventually EAT became EEAT. But there's always the question of what was Google doing? What were they able to do? EEAT came from Google's quality radar guidelines, which are not part of the algorithm, but we were seeing things that look similar to what Google was talking about and the guidelines happen in the algorithm and EAT at the time and now EEAT really became part of the SEO equation and a little bit controversial because of that. So maybe let's take it from there. The algorithm and EEAT, is EEAT part of the algorithm? Lily Ray: Softball. Softball question. The way that Google talks about this, so they talk about there's many different signals that go into their evaluations, their EEAT evaluations. And those can be many, many different, let's say on page, off page direct, indirect signals about a brand, about a website, about content. And those signals factor into their evaluations of the EEAT, which of course then can impact rankings. So they're not going to tell you that EEAT is a direct ranking factor. In fact, they've said many times it's indirect. But if you think about it as a whole, as a concept, it is essentially a big, huge part of Google's algorithms and it depends on the query itself, how much it matters. So they've been very clear that for certain queries, it's extremely important. For other queries, maybe it's less important. But there's other statements from Google saying this matters for every query. So people like to get into these silly debates about whether or not it's important. But if you read pretty much all of Google's documentation from the last several years, it's by far the most common theme about how SEO works. But they have to keep it really vague for the same reasons they have to keep all of their information about ranking very vague. Because people think that it's something that can be faked and exploited and just like all these spammy approaches are trying to fake EEAT, which people are doing now and with some success in some cases. But yeah, Google's not going to tell us directly how it works. So in my perspective, yes, it's probably the single most important thing you should be thinking about for SEO, but it's not as simple as saying putting a keyword in your title tag is a ranking factor. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that part of this comes from... They had that piece of content that they said, "What site owners should know about Google's August, 2019 core update." And they talk loads about the EEAT and they link to your content there as well, and they talk about how important it is. And I think that, as you say, it's not a one pill sort of thing. It's not like you do one thing and then it's completely fixed. It's a holistic approach. And I think that that's certainly something that you've talked about for many years. I've been on your website, you have a section that says, "I talk about EEAT lot, and the reason why is because it's very complex." Lily Ray: Yeah, it's complex. And it's very hard for a lot of SEOs to wrap their heads around because a lot of SEO in years past has been more like you do one thing and you can see a result of that thing pretty clearly. So you can draw a conclusion, oh, I added this keyword to my title, or I changed my H1, or I improved page speed, and I'm pretty sure it led to these outcomes. With EAT and EEAT, it's hardly ever like that. So a lot of people made the mistake early on of saying, "Oh, I added an author name and I tested adding an author name and nothing happened." Because it's not how it works. Google has all the data in the entire world and they're using it in ways we probably cannot even wrap our heads around. So that in and of itself is probably not going to change how Google evaluates the EEAT of your site and your brand. Mordy Oberstein: That's always been my major hangup with the EEAT. I call it a matter of factor. Yeah, you have all these ranking signals like your keyword and your title tag and blah blah blah blah blah…. But looking at the quality of the website, its ability to transmit information in a expert led manner that results in it being trustworthy, it's very holistic, and it's very meta. It's like, okay, before we even get to a keyword in a title tag, what's the nature of this content? Is it applicable and is it quality? And that's before a ranking factor. It's prior to a ranking factor, and I think that confuses the heck out of SEOs. Lily Ray: Yeah, yeah. It's because they can't understand how Google's doing it, and they also can't imagine what's possible and what's not possible. So a lot of the times it's like Google can't possibly know who these authors are. Meanwhile, literally today, Glenn Gabe just posted, in Google Discover, they're putting author names in the thumbnail, and now you can click on the author name and it takes you to their knowledge graph. And Glenn found it for Barry Barry Schwartz, the author in the SEO community. So I'm like, "Okay, if they can't do it, why are they literally continuing to push products that show that they're trying to do it." Crystal Carter: Right. And they rolled out lots and lots more knowledge panels for people of all different levels of notoriety and the knowledge panels that they have for people who are big names, for instance, are much more robust these days. How have you seen that evolve? Lily Ray: Yeah, I think you're right. I think I've seen a lot more people this year saying, especially SEO people, like, "Hey, I put structured data around my name and now I have a knowledge panel." It's like, okay, well, that's a much easier barrier to entry than it was before. But you're right, Crystal, if you Google prominent people's names, it's like Google's gone so far into making it a beautiful search result with connecting all the different dots. Sometimes when I Google my own name, I'm like, "You chose that YouTube video to display at the very top of the page." It's like curating almost these personal websites for people, and they're absolutely building that out more over time. Mordy Oberstein: No, they're really smart about it. In mine, they show a picture of me when I was a kid that I once posted, I went, "Wow." Lily Ray: You're like, "Take that down." Mordy Oberstein: Really. To be honest to you, I look way better back then than I do now, so I'm going to leave it there. Lily Ray: You're going to keep it? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, keep it. So to piggyback off of that, what does good... Because we mentioned, okay, throw the author in there, have an author bio, but I feel like EEAT has... We've SEOed it, it became a checklist. We need to do this, I need to do that and I need to do that. But what does developing good EEAT actually look like? Lily Ray: Yeah, it's doing the hard work that nobody wants to do. Everybody wants a shortcut. A lot of people these days are saying, you'll see these people, "Oh, I created this fake mid-journey person and a fake author bio and got all these fake mentions and all these publications did it, did all these fake things and it's ranking." I'm like, "Yeah, it's ranking for now until Google sees enough of these patterns to the point where they launch another helpful content update and it doesn't work anymore." If you're willing to have something work for a month or three months or whatever, great, good for you. But sustainable long-term marketing and EEAT means all the things that have always contributed to building a trustworthy brand. So we work with our clients to say, who are the legitimate experts at your company? The people that actually know these things, are they looped into the content creation process? And the more that these people go and make themselves public speaking at events, doing interviews, making YouTube videos, doing TikTok, all this stuff, it all gets factored back into EEAT. Google loves those signals. Crystal Carter: So I've worked with clients on this who were in the medical space on one of the things you do a EEAT audit, and I presume that that's something that you do and many think that you do. And when I've done that sort of thing, it's sometimes very difficult to explain to clients what you're actually looking for because they're like, "But I thought you were going to look at the website." And you're like, "Yeah, kind of. Yes, but also your whole digital footprint." How do you talk to clients about that? Because one of the things I think people struggle with, they'll say, "Oh, well, we are qualified. Oh, well, we do have that certification." But they don't necessarily demonstrate it. So do you find it tricky for clients to get their head around that? Lily Ray: It's a great question. I mean, personally, I think it's one of the most fun and exciting areas of SEO when you start to believe in it and understand how it works. Because like you said, if they are truly qualified, then it's just a matter of connecting the dots and making that super easy for search engines to understand and users. All of this is mutually beneficial for search engines and users. That's one of the nice things about it. It's not like, "Oh, let's go buy a million shady links and spam the internet." Because it's good for SEO, but it's terrible for users. No, we're actually doing something that's good for the internet and brands as a whole. But to your question, Crystal, it's like if you go in the search quality rater guidelines, which have finally become trendy, Marie Haynes made this trendy and Olaf Kopp maybe and three other people five years ago, seven years ago. Now, suddenly the SEO industry's like, "Check out this nugget from page 18 of the search quality guidelines." I'm like, "It's no secret. It's been there the whole time." Mordy Oberstein: The main content should be clearly accessible on the page. Lily Ray: Yeah, guys. Found this great hack. Oh my God. Crystal Carter: I'm not going to lie. If you're new to SEO and you're interested in it, look up Google search quality rater guidelines. And honestly, Lily, you hit me to this and you were like, "Oh yeah." This and this. And I was like, "Okay, let me have a look myself." Literally printed it out and was going through that with the highlighter with all of this stuff that I used to carry it around dogeared, but it's a great read and it's super, super useful. It's also worth bookmarking because they just update the link. I was trying to compare one year to the other and it will go. There's a couple of people that do really good line by line what's changed. But yeah, it's a great document. We should link that in the share notes. Lily Ray: Yeah, it's hard to find. And one last thing about that, if you read the guidelines, the whole point of why I brought that up is because the first thing it says for quality raters to do is, which the document is intended for, is to research the reputation of websites outside of what the website says about itself, including a search operator that they can add to Google that literally looks at the website reputation without looking at the website, subtract the website's domain. So they're actually looking directly outside of the website to understand what other people are saying about the website, not the website itself. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's why I feel like there's so much of what goes into EEAT and branding and content marketing, right? You can do very mundane tasks like I mentioned before, but though the real work is really developing the brand. I think the point you made before about getting the people who work at your company involved in the content creation and promoting that content is, first off just leaving SEO aside, is a great brand marketing tactic. You want to show you as the expert and in order to do that, your people need to be out there talking about what makes them an expert. How many times is a random content marketing agency in Wichita, Kansas writing about whatever it is that you actually do and the actual experts are not actually involved in the content? If you're like, "What's the biggest thing you can do to build up your EEAT?" But make sure the content's really actually good. Crystal Carter: And accurate and factual. Lily Ray: Yeah, and beyond good. I think we'll talk about this soon, but now it's just true experience. So another thing the SEO community is trying to do with the onset of the new E, which I think we'll talk about is faking experience. And the amazing thing that Google's done and cornered people into doing, which I think is a great thing, is now you need that to rank. I mean, the data just shows it over and over with different types of algorithm updates or ranking systems. We had the review system, now we have the helpful content system. It's always saying the same thing now, which is, do you have true experience? So people are going into ChatGPT and saying, "Pretend I'm an SEO expert with real SEO experience and say this and this thing." And the answers, I'm like, "If you're a real SEO person with experience, you'll know the answers are not good." So people can tell the difference, right? Crystal Carter: And I think also you talked about being good for users and being good for the algorithm or whatever as well. I heard a radio advert the other day and it was like, "Here are real customers talking about their customer experience with our energy company." And it was literally slightly grainy phone calls of people going, "Oh, I had a great, thank you so much for your help. That was really helpful." And that sort of stuff. And I think TikTok is a classic venue for this. There's a lot of ugly videos on TikTok that are like, "Here's how I fixed the bicycle." Or "Here's how I did this thing." And I think people are really looking for something real that they can quantify as real because there's so much content everywhere. So I think that that experience level, I think that's a response to that. Do you agree? Or you're seeing something else? Lily Ray: Yeah, no, I think it's really clear. It's interesting in the past couple of weeks and months how so many people are so blindsided by what Google's doing because Google's been warning us for years about this. The feedback that Google's been getting about its algorithms and the quality of its results have been in mainstream media for a couple of years now. We think that Google provides a lot of very inauthentic results, a lot of results from brands that don't know what they're talking about. Too many brands are doing affiliate content. This is not authentic but we want to hear from real people. TikTok is the biggest threat to Google search. It has been clear for months and years the challenges that Google's facing. Now they're probably maybe over indexing on real experience with some of their ranking updates, but it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Google searchers in general want that classic old feeling of how Google used to be when you would get Joe Schmoe's website about fixing his bike. They're trying to go back there while still honoring many of the other signals that are important for search. Mordy Oberstein: That to me, by the way, is a mistake that I think people in the SEO industry make. Okay, so Google added an extra E to EEAT where it was originally expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and then they added an E for experience. And SEO's like, "Oh, okay, now we've to optimize for experience." They're out thinking, where did the E come from? They didn't pull it out of a hat. Google realized that there's a new content trend. People are preferring content from actual people with actual experience. And in order for them to stay relevant, they need to figure out a way to include that in the algorithm. So it's not like, oh, I need to optimize for Google. No, you need to give people what they actually want, which is what Google's trying to do. So we've talked about this on Twitter a while back when they started doing the product review updates and now they're called the review updates. And Google said, "Okay, we want you to have actual experience with the toaster oven that you're using." How do they do that? And to me, it's not crazy complicated. The language structure you're going to use if you use the stupid toaster oven is going to be so different than if you didn't. So for example, you would write, great toaster oven, was really good on bread, if you didn't use it. But if you actually used it, you would be like, "I tried to put a steak in there and it did not work. Do not use this on steak." Lily Ray: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I've been looking at sites that got hit by the recent helpful content update. And I'm not the most advanced set of algorithms on the planet. I'm just a person looking at sites one by one. So obviously, whatever Google's capable of doing is going to be a million times more sophisticated than what I'm doing. Okay, first of all, so many of the sites that were impacted have absolutely no experience. That's just obvious. Okay, we get it. You wrote a million pieces of content about all the great places to travel in the world. You've obviously never been there. There's no evidence, there's no author, there's nothing. That's obviously the most extreme example. But then you get these mid-range like, "Oh, I really enjoyed going to the restaurant. The breakfast was excellent. Highly recommend it. Try the pancakes." Okay, did you really go there? Mordy Oberstein: No, you did add the word I and we in a thousand times. I told Crystal this, I took that product review page and I went to the way back machine and it was clear. They try to mimic experience and it was not actual experience. And I went back and they used the word I and we eight times. Fast-forward to now, and they use it 150 times. Lily Ray: It's real experience. If I just put that word there a million times, people will never know. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So note to the audience, and I feel like if you're listening to this podcast and you're a smaller website, this is for you. You have actual experience, you have the ability to really give that experience over to your audience and create something different and valuable. But if you're listening to this and you're on an SEO, stuffing in we and our and I is not optimizing for the experience of EEAT. Lily Ray: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great segue. I have a question. So the way I always describe for our Wix audience, and I know not everybody here is Wix user yet. But the way I like to describe it is Wix folks are doers, we like to do stuff, make websites, do stuff, et cetera. So if somebody was looking for something to do, I don't know if you'd be interested in this, going through each acronym. So a quick tip, is that ridiculous? Or something you could do to demonstrate experience on a website that almost anyone could do, what would be something you could recommend for someone? Lily Ray: Yeah, I mean, this is where it gets fun because presumably if you are making a website and marketing the website, presumably and hopefully it's because you actually like what you're doing, you know about what you're doing, you care about what you're doing. Of course, that's definitely not true for many people that are doing marketing on the internet. But if those things are true, assuming those things are true, share what you know. You know what I mean? What are the unique insights and experiences that you have? Me personally, I think you both as well. I can talk about SEO all day, every day. I have very strong opinions as everybody knows and I like to share them and people like to hear them. So do that. If you're a biker or a bike mechanic, what have you experienced? What frustrates you? What's the cool new bike? What's going on? And then of course you can map that to the different SEO tools that we use to say, okay, how should I write this headline? What keywords should I include on this page? How should I set up my content structure? But when you start from what you know, this is a very different way of thinking about SEO because most people start from the keywords themselves and then try to pretend that they know these things or research what other people have said. But I almost only write SEO content or content about SEO when there's something that I need to say and that's a lot. It's very frequent, but it doesn't happen not because my company's like, "Lily, we haven't heard from you in a while." I'm like, "Guys, it's Sunday night and something really big happened and I have an idea and I'm writing a blog." So think about it that way. Crystal Carter: So this is reminding me. So on Wix SEO hub, I have an article about user first SEO content ideas and I'm sure you must get this a lot as in your experience, you talk to SEOs all over the world. If anyone doesn't know, it's not really a conference if Lily's not there. No, I'm kidding. But every SEO conference is made better by Lily Ray. But yeah, there we go. Anyway, at conferences, you speak to SEOs all over the world and you must have lots of people asking you questions all the time about different things. So again, rather than keywords, if you're hearing people regularly asking you those questions, those are potentially users. That's potentially a place where you can validate your experience or the experiences of other people in order to create the content. So I think that that's something that folks can do as well. Listen to people who are talking to you. Lily Ray: Yeah, or your customers or your calls or your chats, right? Crystal Carter: Right. So we did experience. And expertise, what is a good win for expertise in terms of something that someone could work on, sort of a thing? Lily Ray: Yeah, I think this is when we start to get into things like author bios and building out a personal brand. Every place that one would expect you to be mentioned or recognized in your industry, make sure that you're there or make sure that it's clear that you're there. Here's a random example for me. I'm in Google Scholar. I was included in an academic journal where I've talked about SEO. That's extreme, but that's all the different places that you might expect somebody who's saying they're an expert in something to have expertise. So I just spoke at a recipe blogger conference last week. It's like, where are all the publications where you've been mentioned? Where did you go to culinary school? Right? Just connecting all those dots and making sure that they're all easy for people and search engines to see. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think one thing that I've seen is that, and I think you've mentioned this as well on Twitter, is LinkedIn for instance, even if you're not posting every single day on LinkedIn, if you have your LinkedIn, if you spent an hour going through your LinkedIn profile and making sure that's got your relevant qualifications and has the skill sets and all of that sort of stuff, Google pulls those results into the SERP, for instance. So that can be a good source of that as well. And then with regards to authority, is that one trickier? Lily Ray: Yeah, probably. I mean, the SEO industry will tell you because Gary-ish from Google- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the link thing. Lily Ray: One time said that it's links. Yeah. So Gary in maybe 2018 or 2019 said that page rank and links are the only things we really look at for EAT or something along those lines, and authority is largely driven by links. So of course, the SEO industry likes to misconstrue this into links are the only thing that matters, nothing else matters. Which is not true. But of course, similar to having the right credentials and experience listed in your online profiles, you do want to back up your legitimacy with links and also social media mentions. I can't say enough about when I share an article that I wrote on Twitter, it shows up in Google Discover the next day. So it's like Google's looking at these signals, even if they don't tell you the social media signals are ranking factors, they're looking at them, for sure. Crystal Carter: And what about trust? What's a good opportunity in terms of demonstrating trust online? Lily Ray: Yeah, this is where the trust pilots and the G2s and testimonials and online ratings and online reviews come in. There's so many different sites where you should be listed, building out a knowledge panel using Crunchbase, all these things. Just making sure that your brand is a legitimate brand. Other sites that were impacted by the recent algorithm updates, including the helpful content update, one of the first things that I noticed is a lot of these sites are obviously just blogs that someone bought because of the name. It's just obvious, right? So if you're bestpizzaslices.com, okay, great, you're going to write about the best pizza slices. I'm sure the content is fine, but that's not a brand. There's no evidence that you started a business. Who are you? Why should we trust you? So that's a silly example because I'm sure you can do fine with pizza slices, but you know what I mean? People are just buying domains and not investing any energy into making this a real brand because that's the whole point, they're churn and burn sites. So you have to show that you're a real brand. Mordy Oberstein: And all that bleeds over, right? Even the Google's graphic, the whole diagram, they have a Venn diagram and the E, and the A, and the T they overlap a little bit to make a one overall picture. So one of these things, again, that makes it hard is that it's not very linear. As Lily mentioned before, I just want to harbor on that point for a real quick second. It is a mindset. It is a way of thinking about producing content and websites and working with sites and content. And I think we're done. I think we've exhausted the topic for this particular episode. Lily, if people wanted to experience your expertise and experience in SEO, where could they find you? Lily Ray: Well, my new answer to this question is that Google me and pick wherever you want to follow me because there's a lot of different options. So it's Lily Ray, L-I-L-Y R-A-Y. Mordy Oberstein: That's the best answer I've heard. I know it's... Lily Ray: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good answer in this whole mumble-jumbled world of social media. That is the best answer I've heard in a long time. Lily Ray: Pick your favorite. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, we'll link to Lily's various social media profiles and perhaps just the SERP. Lily Ray: Just the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, in the show notes. So look for the link to Lily's SERP in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Such an honor to have you with us. Thank you so much. Lily Ray: Thanks for having me. You guys are the best. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Lily. Bye. Thanks again, Lily. Experience is not just fodder for the algorithm. Google didn't pull it out of a magic hat and say, "Hey, let's focus on experience and expertise." Content trends impact search engines and Google saw experience and expertise are actual content trends that people want. Hence, you all are going to TikTok for information. Thus Google knows it itself needs to show experience and expertise in its own SERP features. So like that, with that, let's dive into what it all looks like on the SERP as we take a directional look at what Google is doing with a little segment we call going, going Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going Google. It's out of here. Mordy Oberstein: Google does a lot of things to help give results within its own SERP feature the little boxes and doohickeys it offers that are not the actual results that pull in expertise and experience. In fact, Crystal, you found one of these and shared it with the great Barry Schwartz. Care to share that with us? Crystal Carter: Yes. So I found a mentioned in drop down, and I found this on the couple of top level searches, so broad search keywords. And essentially, I entered in something and then further down there was a brand and underneath the brand it would say mentioned in, and it mentioned a few different places where people have mentioned this particular topic. These are really useful for providing context. They also provide a little bit of a point of panic potentially if you might have something there where you're mentioned, did he not? So flattering way. So I think it's important for people to think about how their reputation is being managed across the web and to make sure that they're creating some great content that is actually about them. So people talking about them. This is essentially the authority piece. So I tend to say that when we think about authority, it's what other people are saying about you. So if you were applying for a job, you get references. You might say great things about yourself on your resume, but then you have your references. And if your references are your mom or your best friend, that'll give your employer one kind of impression. If your references are somebody that you worked with who also has a good reputation, for instance, that's going to give another impression. And it's the same with some of these online recommendations that Google's trying to get more people more comfortable for. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it really helps Google showcase the result that they're giving is expert driven, right? Other people are mentioning that website, then that website has some sort of expertise on whatever topic is that you're searching for. So it's Google saying, "Hey, let's make sure that you, the searcher, understand that this website is an expert because other people are saying that they are." Crystal Carter: Right. And that when you're looking at the SERP, I mean, it takes up a lot of real estate. So the one that I saw had a couple of different options. And I think that what's interesting is that it takes up probably double the space of a normal plain blue link, which is great because that's saying not only is this somebody who's got content on this, but they've got content and other people think that content is good. So I think that that is an absolute plus for people who have good brand knowledge or good topic knowledge on a particular topic. And I think that it's worth investing time in making yourself be seen as a very clear authority. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and on the flip side of that, from the experience angle, Google has a whole set of results where you can get a perspective from actual people, meaning you search for something like, are The Beatles good? It was the example we used in the previous episode. And you get a set of results of people sharing their opinions about The Beatles. It's really results based on experience. A lot of it coming from social media because that's a great place to see where people have their experiences and their thoughts on that from actual people. Crystal Carter: So one of the examples that I found was Coco Gauff. So after she won the US Open with plastic finish there. Well done Coco. So after she won that, there were people who also had opinions on that as well. So there was something that was specifically an opinion piece, for instance from CNN that was mentioned in The Perspective. But I think it's great to have the content earmarked so that essentially you're saying this is content that's objective or that's a news piece, core news and this is the opinion column area. In a newspaper, you'll have current events, you'll have some people who are making think pieces about what they think it might mean or what context they see in a particular news event, and then you'll have people who are just reporting what happened on that particular occasion. And both ideas are useful for you to get context of what's going on, but they're not exactly the same. So I think it's good that Google's saying, "Okay, these are opinions, they're interesting and things, but they're opinions." And I think that it provides context and provides a great way to get more information on the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: The point is, if you look at what Google's doing in their own SERP features, you can get a sense of what they're trying to focus on and what they're trying to do and what direction they're going, and it's the name of the segment going, going Google. So take a look at what Google's doing and take a look at what's changing on the results page and take a look at the change in testing that they're doing because that'll show you what they're looking for and what they're trying to do, what they think is valuable. Crystal Carter: Right. And one of the other ones that Glenn Gabe identified recently was within the Discover tab there, for instance, he found something that was talking about Google, Google search results, and it was an article written by Barry Schwartz and underneath the article it said, "Get the latest on Barry Schwartz." And when you click on it goes to Barry's knowledge graph. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: So that is a good way that you're connecting the dots, and it's something I've talked about in terms of thinking about mobile optimization. I did a course recently for Semrush and I talked about how actually spending some time making sure the people on your team have good knowledge graphs, have good biographical entities, have good information across the web, is actually really useful for mobile, for EEAT, for all of those sorts of things. So Google wants to add citations essentially to the kind of content that they're giving. So they want to add context to the authors. They want to add context to the information the publishers that they're pointing people to. They want to give people more context for the kind of information that they're getting. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of Barry, of course, it is the perfect time for us to dive into this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Google SGE expands through 120 countries per Barry Schwartz override Search Engine Land. Basically, it's what I just said. Google's SGE, it's Search Generative Experience expands to 120 new countries. Which means that if you are in Angola, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Brazil. Just reading off the list. Cambodia. Let's go to E, Ethiopia. G for, I don't know, Guam. In all of these countries, you can, in theory, access the SGE Google Search Generative Experience, which is super interesting. Google has stated that yes, this is still on beta, still being tested, but the expansion obviously indicates that Google is far more comfortable with what it's been doing in the US with its SGE. So look forward at a country or in a country near you. Also in a country near you, per Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, it's two berries from two different publications this week as it is with pretty much every week. Google November 2023 reviews update rolls out. So Google said, if you listened to our news last week, Google said they're going to roll out a new review update and that the review update, this one, will be the last of the official announced review updates. What you're basically going to have is a continuously updating ranking system, which means that the review update is essentially real time. I hate using that word because it's not exactly what it means, but it will be out live and changing rankings on a consistent and ongoing basis without specific roll-outs as we have now. So that's super interesting. As I believe I mentioned last time, I think this is the way of the algorithm. This is where I think the Google updates in general are going. We actually cover this in our BrightonSEO session, our live recording of SERP's Up over at BrightonSEO in San Diego. So look for that episode. I believe that one comes out next week. So we get into that there and then. So listen then for that there. Wow, that's so many pronouns. Just so you know, the reviews update is live, at least the beginning of it is live at the same time as the November 2023 core update, which makes picking out ranking movements perhaps a little bit more complex than it usually is, and there's multiple layers of Google updates going on, so that's always fun, right? And with that, that's this week's snappy news. Thank you as always to the great writers of all the great news articles that are out there, and of course, in particular, the great Barry Schwartz. With that, let's dive into who you should be following this week for more SEO awesomeness. And since we're focused so much on experience and expertise and EEAT, we thought this week's follow of the week should be Olaf Kopp. He is on X, but he's more on LinkedIn. So look for Olaf Kopp. However on LinkedIn, we'll link to that in the show notes. Olaf is a EEAT aficionado. He's written many, many articles around it for Search Engine Land. He's got a really, what I like, a really conceptual understanding of EEAT. And it's the kind of content that when you go and look at it, you're learning how to fish and you're not just getting the fish. Crystal Carter: I mean, what fish are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Mackerel. Crystal Carter: Mackerel. Mackerel's so pretty. They're such pretty little fish. They're very shiny and cute. I think they're adorable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. What's an ugly fish? I know, a fluke. Flounder. Crystal Carter: Have you ever seen salmon? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've seen salmon. Crystal Carter: Salmon are ugly fish. Mordy Oberstein: Wow, we're really crapping on the fish here. Crystal Carter: Say it to it's face. But salmon are ugly fish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I would say salmon cannot hurt you. I would say it to it. I wouldn't say it to a shark though. Crystal Carter: I mean, they jump pretty high. If you ever watch people talk about bears eating salmon. But if you watch a bear eating salmon, I've not seen this personally, but on nature documentaries, they're literally just hanging their mouths open trying to catch the salmon who are jumping upstream. It's not very graceful, but I mean, that's what... You got to do what you got to do if you're a bear and you need a snack. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, bears have to eat too. Crystal Carter: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: Bears have to eat too. Well, I'm that happy note, thank you for joining us on the SERP's UP Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into a very special live episode from BrightonSEO in San Diego live from the conference. So look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at, you got it, wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Does momentum matter in SEO? What does having “momentum” in the context of SEO even mean? Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how cadence and momentum factor into SEO and why it might just be an SEO’s best friend. Guest Erica Schnieder shares her model for maintaining quality when trying to generate momentum by creating content at scale. Tune in for momentum, cadence, and quality and how it all factors into your SEO strategy on this week's episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Back Building SEO momentum for growth Does momentum matter in SEO? What does having “momentum” in the context of SEO even mean? Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how cadence and momentum factor into SEO and why it might just be an SEO’s best friend. Guest Erica Schnieder shares her model for maintaining quality when trying to generate momentum by creating content at scale. Tune in for momentum, cadence, and quality and how it all factors into your SEO strategy on this week's episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 38 | May 17, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 37:22 This week’s guests Erica Schneider Erica is the Head of Content at Grizzle, an agency that creates high-quality content and develops product-led marketing strategies for SaaS and tech companies like Pipedrive, Tide, and Semrush. She grew her audience from 0-42k on Twitter and 500-18k on LinkedIn in only 9 months. She's also trained 100+ writers to produce page-turning content that moves the needle and co-teaches Impactful Social Writing, one of Maven's most popular courses with a 9.6️ rating. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us SERP's Up podcast reporting on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Overstein, I am SEO of Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulously incredible, the absolutely unequivocable, the absolutely uncomparable, the absolutely best in every way, shape, or form. The best person on planet Earth. Head of Instant Communications here at Wix, crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I think Mordy's finally reached the end of the platitudes. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what to do anymore. Crystal Carter: I must tell you. I'm mediocre at bowling. Mordy Oberstein: I'm terrible at bowling. I stink with bumpers. Crystal Carter: I was in a bowling league when I was in my youth and my husband, who was never in a bowling league, always beats me at bowling. And I'm like, you're a non-bowler, you never even bowled. And yet I'm happy if I crack 100, if I'm doing that. If I hit three digits, I'm like, job done here. All right, I can go home. Mordy Oberstein: I'm embarrassed to say this. So you have an 8 pound ball, a 10 pound ball, 12 pound. I really enjoy the 8 pound ball. Crystal Carter: That's like softball. That's just playing softball. That's not like bowling. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And then I'll, even with the bumper because I play with my kids, the bumpers are up. You know that one spot in the corners? Crystal Carter: Oh, just before the pins? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's me. Crystal Carter: That's you. Mordy Oberstein: Got my name all over it. That one spot you, you're lucky you get like one pin. Crystal Carter: I'm a mediocre bowler, but I cannot stand bad bowling etiquette. If I'm up there trying to set up my shot and I'm stood there on the little lines and I'm trying to get myself lined up pretending I'm like doing the Lebowski thing or whatever, and somebody just walks up on the lane next door to me and just rolls along and starts throwing the... I get so angry as if they were ruining my perfect shot, as if this was... It's never going to be the perfect shot. I'm never going to get more than two or three pins or whatever. But let me have my moment. Let me just meditate for a second before I embarrass myself. Let me do what I'm doing. Come on. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm the baller who's standing behind you saying, "Hurry up to get on with it and let's keep this train wreck moving because there's still eight more frames left and four more people." Crystal Carter: I’m here] for the snacks. I love bowling alley snacks like the snack bar at the bowling alley is what's up. Also the beer is flowing. They'll give you a whole pitcher and you can just settle in and I love a good bowling session. The last time I bowled actually was with you, Mordy, you and Nikki Moser. Mordy Oberstein: We bowled. Crystal Carter: No, I completely made that up. It was with Nikki. Mordy Oberstein: No. We didn't bowl. Crystal Carter: Was it Nikki at Moscon? You missed it. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't there. I was probably ed a baseball game. Crystal Carter: Nikki's very good at bowling, also Blaine. He's also very good at- Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? Yeah. Okay. So note to self, never bowl these people. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you should check out our e-commerce offering from integrations with Amazon, to drop shipping, to a POS system to help you keep track of your client's transactions, both on and offline. Wix's e-commerce offering can help you and your clients' sites build financial momentum, which is today's word of the day momentum. Which means I should probably not take a break between talking about the next thing cause I just lost the momentum. Ah. Crystal Carter: Moving incremental gains. Move forward further. Mordy Oberstein: Momentum. That's right. Today we're talking about inertia science. Well, SEO inertia as we take out building SEO momentum for growth. Why the opportunity mindset is an SEO's best friend. The real advantage to growth by taking things slowly and keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight, stages of development. Oh look, he's crawling now as... I don't know what that makes any sense. And keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight stages of development. Plus Erica Schneider of Grizzle joins us to offer her take on how can you maintain quality when creating content at scale? Because momentum means scalability sometimes. So how do you keep the quality of the content at the same time? We're going to get into that. And since we're talking about inertia and growth for SEO, Crystal and I will take a deep dive into the role of momentum in marketing. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Careful now as you don't want to miss a thing because episode number 38 of the SERP's Up podcast is gaining momentum. Crystal Carter: We are on the move. We have reached velocity, we are going for it, we're moving forward. Mordy Oberstein: Warp speed. Continue with our Star Trek references for the past couple of episodes. Crystal Carter: Many. Mordy Oberstein: So many. Engage. So this is a very much mindset podcast for me. I'm all about mindset by the way, and I know people are, oh, practical tips. And I'm like, yeah, what's the mindset behind those tips? And people are like, yeah, I want the tips. So whatever. I think this is very much for me, a mindset episode. We talk about SEO very categorically, very often on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO. Or we speak of SEO with a continuum of task like task number one, then task number two, then task number three, then task... I can go on. Crystal Carter: And check it, put it on the checklist. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, but... And I get that when we talk about SEO in that way, it feels like a chore to me. And I don't think SEO should be a chore. I think SEO should be meaningful and to make SEO meaningful, I think it's a mindset. And this is why I love talking about SEO from a growth point of view. So how does SEO help you grow? And growth for me, whatever it is, from growing social media followings to growing as a person, is all about momentum. One thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing. So huge sappy music about improving as a person by the way, Crystal Carter: One step at a time, everybody, one step at a time. Mordy Oberstein: As you grow as a person, one step of self-reflection of internal growth often puts you on a path towards transcending and transforming the self on this journey to step number two. And they are not disconnected, one small change leads to another. Same in SEO. Crystal Carter: I mean these are life lessons Mordy, you're dropping some gems here that people can live by as well as do SEO by. Mordy Oberstein: It's not about podcasting, about SEO, it's about showing how podcasting about SEO was really podcasting about life. Crystal Carter: Philosophical this week. Mordy Oberstein: For the second time. Internal joke. For the second time. So anyway, one improvement you do to the site. One strategy you take on should, all things being equal, naturally lead to the next thing and open up all sorts of new doors. And all you really need to do is put your ear to the ground. So cue more sappy music. Crystal Carter: Music. I mean, I don't think you're wrong here at all. I think there's that movie where it says we need a montage. That's that sort of thing. And I feel like that it's that way sometimes with SEO, you work and you add little bits. And even if with a single piece of content, you can create one piece of content and then optimize it again and then optimize it again and then optimize it again. And what happens is Google knows about that content and they learn about that content and they see that you're improving it and they see that you're continuing to improve it and they understand that this is a piece of content that is not being left to wither on the vine, but is growing and is increasing. And if they see that you're doing that across your site, then they will understand that your site is something that is constantly improving and that the bulk of information that they have around you is valuable and is valuable to users. And then they'll send users to you. I think sometimes people think they have to do all of the SEO all at once. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You don't. Mordy Oberstein: So not true and don't, it's detrimental. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: And not only is it not helpful, it's a bad idea. Crystal Carter: Right. So a lot of times people will say, well, why do we need to do SEO for this long? Why do I need this agency to contract for six months or a year or whatever it may be? And it's because they're putting in building blocks for what you're doing. So you have your technical SEOs, your foundation, making sure that everything works. Then you're going to look at your architecture, then you're going to look at your keywords, then you're going to look at more content more, then you're going to look... And you add and add an ad, and sometimes you add them as in tandem. But the momentum is really, really important to that because I think I've certainly seen it where, and I don't know if you have an example of this where momentum can make a really, really big difference to make a really big impact on what your outcomes are. Have you seen this in the wild there, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: All the time. So one of the things that's great about momentum, and if you are bold enough to do this is that it will shift your strategy. So the detriment of being super checklisty is that you're not open to shifting, you're not open to changing. So as you start first off, you'll skip steps, you try to do it all in one shot. But if you're overly methodical where you try to break it into too many things, do you get hung up on the process? We did step one, now we must do step two. Now we must do step three. Now we must do step four. As opposed to saying after step three, where are we at? What are the things that we should be doing now? You'll often say, you know what, we should be shifting. Our business has changed, our audience has changed, or we've managed to capture an audience we never expected. We never thought this would rank well and it did and now we have a new audience. How do we now cater to that audience? How do we now nurture that audience? How do we now move that audience down the funnel? Whatever it is, which means being open minded enough to say, okay, take stock, ear to the ground. Now let's shift and let's take on a new strategy. And I've seen this a million times over where opportunities that you never knew existed or never thought would exist or didn't even know existed come up because of momentum and be open enough to be able to say, okay, stop, shift change to grab those opportunities. Crystal Carter: And I think that you see this with trending topics and things. So we recently published an article on the Wix SEO hub talking about trending topics. And if let's say you write an article on something that's trending, and let's say it hits right? You're like, oh my gosh, people are really interested in that. You can build momentum on that. You can start to build a topic cluster around that. You can start to pull in a little bit of content around that. You can say, "Wow, people are really interested in this particular topic and we seem to be leading the pack here, so let's put more content on that." Now, if you have your checklist that you are sticking to methodically and you're not paying attention to the momentum that you've got from both users and from Google and also from maybe social interest, et cetera, then you might go, well, that did well onto the next thing and miss the opportunity to grow. Mordy Oberstein: I'll ask you, how many times have you been working on a site or with a client or whatever it is, and the initial plan was X, and you get, let's say a quarter of the way, a third of the way, halfway through the plan of X, and you were like, wait a second, this doesn't make sense, we need to change this up. Crystal Carter: Oh, I mean during COVID, Mordy Oberstein: Right? I was just thinking that COVID is the classic case of this. Crystal Carter: Like the best laid plans were completely set of flame during COVID. I mean, so many times we'd say, "Right, we're going to do this," and then the business would have to close its physical doors and then you'd have to do something completely different, or you'd have to come up with a completely new funnel because they didn't have virtual tours of their real estate buildings before or book a video tour, that sort of thing. So these are things that you need to think about and yeah, it does make a difference. And I think that also, I love building up the momentum. If you think about it like sports training, and this is interesting because I asked the SEO hive mind, I said, "Do you think momentum matters in SEO?" And Myriam Jessier said, "It's like weight loss. On a diet you lose a few pounds early and then it motivates you to keep going. Then it's the same with SEO, but you need to keep building." If you think about sports people, they don't do nothing in the off season. The people who do really well, I talk about Michael Jordan a lot on this podcast, but Michael Jordan was getting slammed by the pistons for years and then spent one season in the off season really bulking up. And when he was doing stuff for Space Jam, he set up a basketball court and had pickup games with all... So in the off season, he was building up all of these skills when nobody was paying any attention, when it was low pressure, when he had time to think strategically about what he wanted to do. With seasonal businesses, the off season is a great time to start building up momentum and to start building up Google understanding your search, the focus of your content. It's a good time to take stock of your content, to do a sort of full audit and full update of things that are tricky to do when you're in the midst of everything. And so that means by the time you hit peak season, you've already crested, you're already at the top so that you're ready to meet that traffic because you built up the momentum when things were quiet. Mordy Oberstein: That example, that metaphor from Myriam, it's perfect because as somebody who's lost weight at one point a couple times in my life, like that initial like you have to get started with something. You have to get started somewhere. And then that one small success breeds another success. I don't know about you, but I look at SEO data when I want to start... That initial feeling, you're looking at a site for the first few times is overwhelming. You're like, I don't know, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where do I start? And what I like to do is start on one thing, one page, whatever it is, start somewhere with one thing and dive into that. And then you start seeing the next thing. You start seeing the next thing and you start slowly and slowly building a picture. That's momentum. That's an example of SEO momentum that I think is super important because when you look at, say in the case of data, when you look at it all in one shot, you get lost. You don't know where to go with it. So you need that momentum to guide you. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And if you turn it off, you sometimes get this in PPC, people are like, oh, let's just turn off the PPC. Let's turn on the PPC. And with PPC, it can be tricky because nowadays, particularly when we think about momentum, there's machine learning. And if you turn off your PPC entirely, I always recommend that you keep a little low level bit of something running in the background just so that if you need to ramp it up, you don't have to do that part where it goes, "Oh, the machine learning is learning about your site." And you're like, "What?" You're like, "We have a sale that starts tomorrow." And they're like, "We're still deciding." And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. And Google, we talk about AI and we talk about machine learning and we talk about all of this, but Google's been using AI and machine learning for years through all sorts of stuff. It's been an integral part of search for years. So when you stop and put things down, just like if you stop exercising... You'll notice that it'll be harder to get back going. If you've got the vacation in two weeks and you haven't done any exercise in two years, it's going to be tricky to get that beach body if that's what you want. Not that any body isn't perfect for the beach, but I'm just saying that sort of thing. If you're worried about that, you have to keep going with something so that if you need to ramp it up, you can when you need to. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, which is why this conversation about momentum and SEO, it's really a much wider... Right? About momentum and marketing overall. But before we get into that, as you're growing, as you're building momentum, as you're doing... Which often means scaling things up, you have to worry about maintaining quality at the same time. So momentum is great, things are firing in all cylinders, blah, blah, blah. Or you got to make sure the quality is maintained. So to help us tackle this is Erica Schneider over at Grizzle who's going to help us understand how you can maintain quality when creating content at scale. Erica Schneider: So the best way to maintain quality when creating content at scale is to treat quality scaling, just like you would treat business scaling. Right? You need to document your processes, you need to have goals, a mission statement, objectives, like everything that you do for your business when you want to be able to scale effectively and not fail and have everything fall apart, is the same way that you should treat scaling your content operations so that you don't mess with your quality as you scale. So my answer is twofold, right? It's really important that you set editorial goals, values, and integrity, and I can just quickly explain what those are. But the other piece of that is that you should start slow and then ramp up in my opinion, just like you're building a business, you don't bring on 50 clients on day one. Right? That would be an absolute disaster. You need to make sure that what you're doing is documented that it works. Get through all the kinks, figure out what you want to keep, what you want to discard from your process, all that jazz, and then scale. So it makes no sense. If you are trying to produce quality content to try to do 10 blogs a week, it's better to maybe start with one a week. Right? I could go into the quality versus quantity argument, but I definitely think that no matter how much you ultimately want to publish on your blog or anywhere that you're distributing content, regardless of the amount that you put out there, it should always be quality content. I don't think that you should ever sacrifice quality, which I actually think means credibility and authority for the sake of ranking, for the sake of brand awareness. Because if people find your content, but it sucks, what's the point. Right? You're going to be remembered for all of the wrong reasons. So you should always put your best content out there regardless of where you are in the process. So back to the editorial goals, values and integrity. The editorial goals are the reasons behind why you're creating content and who you are creating it for. So it just means that every single piece of content you create should be tied to your overall content strategy. It's simple, but if you don't have these editorial goals and you're not comparing them to your strategy, it can be easy to create a content that looks like it fits into your strategy, but it actually doesn't, right? Because the way that you've executed it doesn't align with your original mission. So it's that sense check at the end. What are the editorial goals? Editorial values? Describe how you as a business want to provide meaningful experiences to readers. Right? So deciding which content formats are going to work best to help you reach your goals and all that jazz. Define that at the beginning and that'll change, that's fine. But then continuously revisit it and define it. And then editorial integrity is all about upholding your brand reputation, making sure that your tone of voice and your writing style and the way that you are speaking to your audience is exactly reflected the way that you want it to. And that again, comes down to making sure that there's a rigorous editorial process of sense checking the content. So every step of the way through the production line, there should be somebody in an editorial role reviewing it, whether that's a strategist, making sure that the brief aligns with the editorial goals, somebody checking out the outlines, somebody checking out the final draft. Someone should be sense checking it every step of the way against those original editorial goals. So the best way to maintain quality when creating your content at scale is to set up documented processes. Start slow and continuously sense check your content every single step of the way as you grow. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you so much, Erica. I met Erica at Semrush's Global Marketing Day. We were recording it in New York. She is amazing. Definitely give her a follow on Twitter again, EricasMyName, E-R-I-C-A-S-M-Y-N-A-M-E. She talks about an amazing amount of topics over on Twitter. You should definitely give her a follow. She's one of these people where you meet her for the first time and you're like, "Wow, this person has that it factor." That's how I would describe Erica. She loves talking about all things, editorial standards, quality, strategy, all of it is great. So follow her over on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Fantastic. So all of us talk around building SEO, momentum, SEO momentum, momentum for SEO and capturing opportunity and being smart about and so forth makes me feel like, as I mentioned before that we should be talking about the importance of, I'll call it, cadence and momentum for your business or for your client's business as a whole, not just from an SEO. Let's not pigeonhole momentum to make it all about SEO. That'd be narcissistic as SEOs, but there's so much about cadence and momentum. It's a huge part of doing good marketing. So here's a deep thought on the role of cadence and momentum in marketing. So I think sometimes... I'll start this off... I think that ROI can sometimes be the killer of momentum. Crystal Carter: How so, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, let me just revel on the hot tick of that for a second. Because sometimes... it's so poetic... Sometimes the ROI is just showing that you're alive. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Sometimes the ROI is showing that you are still a relevant, vitalic... That's not a real word. Crystal Carter: Vital? Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious? Vital. Crystal Carter: Vitalicious. Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious. Crystal Carter: Vitalicious. Vitalicious, we're sticking with that. Let's go with that Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious part of the conversation of whatever your niche is. It's like sometimes you create content to get traffic, and sometimes you create content to show that you're just part of the equation here. Crystal Carter: This is really interesting because Christie Holtz was talking about this on her Instagram. So she was talking about how to do good marketing, and she was like, you do stuff and you tell people about it, then you do some other stuff and you tell people about it. So it's essentially, it's one of those things to sort of keep in front of mind and to keep in the conversation. And again, so that you are being consistent in your visibility, and so that you don't have to start afresh from zero. Going from 70 to 80 is much, much easier than going from 0 to 80, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: It's like farming, which I know nothing about. I can't even plant a tomato plant without killing it. Crystal Carter: Old MacMorty had a farm, Mordy Oberstein: Old MacMorty had a farm and it all died. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: And no but so you have to plant the seeds, and from the seeds it grows. Wait, before you even plant the seeds, you need to, what's it sowing the ground. You have to sow the ground. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Cadence is sowing the ground so that eventually you can plant the seeds. So like you're saying, so that you don't just start off, all right, new product, got to get back in there, got to start shoveling the dirt to plant the seeds. If you have cadence, you have momentum. You're a natural, integral part of the conversation. Whatever community that you're in- Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: ... Lets you do the things later on that give you the ROI. So cadence and momentum is such a huge, valuable, I'll call it a tool in delivering ROI. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's not easy to show up every week and do a podcast or show up every week and do your YouTube thing or show up every week with a brand new blog or show up with all those sorts of things. It's not easy. And that's the reason why it's so valuable is because it is not easy. The NFL happens on a Monday, right? You have Monday night football. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's Thursday night football now, and some weeks are we go Saturday football. Crystal Carter: There's always a Monday night football right? Now imagine if they were like, yeah, not this week. Maybe next week. Oh, we're not sure. Because that's the other thing is that if somebody knows that every week they'll get a new piece of content from you every month, they'll get a something from you. That you're consistent with your things. And even if they miss you once, they can come back to you for that. So again, so that they're ready to see that you do, and also being consistent there helps to show that you're somebody who is reliable. So whatever tool that you have, it helps to build trust that the thing that they get from you will be of good quality and will be valuable for them and will provide consistent and good results. Mordy Oberstein: It's going to a Google business profile, and there's no information there and you're like, ah, well. There's no cadence, momentum, there's nothing in there. There's no vitality, again, using that word. Crystal Carter: And I always check to see if people have been responding to comments, if people have been posting things, if there's actual, even if there is something there, if it's recent. So if there's something recent, then you can go, okay, this business is still working, this business is still doing stuff. Because sometimes things are online and you think, oh, this is online, and you get there and the ice cream shop is closed, they're not there, and you can't get any ice cream and you're really upset. Mordy Oberstein: And your day is ruined because you did not get ice cream. But it's a great point because the thing that really builds buzz, and the thing that really builds notoriety is not the going viral moment, which usually never happens. It's the micro moments. It's all these little things that add up and add up. So let's go with the Google business profile, the momentum around that. You see that they have a good description, you see they have reviews in there, they're answering. It's all these little things add up to create a sense, to create an association, to create a feeling or sentiment about that brand or product or whatever it is. So the momentum of one little thing and then one other little thing and one other little thing. While in and of itself, each little thing might not have a big ROI, whatever, but together it does. And you shouldn't look at it as each individual thing. You should look at it as all the things, all that cadence and momentum together. What does that produce? Crystal Carter: Right? Exactly. And this is why when I asked the hive mine, I said, "Does momentum matter in SEO?" I had a few people come back to me and they were like, "I'd say consistency is a better term." Amy Hergan said in the trades industries where there's a lot of black hat SEO, continuous white hat momentum is needed to be continued to be competitive. And this is what people were saying. They were like, "No, consistency. You say momentum, I say consistency," and I think it's because one breeds the other. Mordy Oberstein: Tomato, tomato. Tomato. I don't know what the heck of tomato is. But to go full circle, it all comes back to what I was saying before about mindset. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Having that cadence, having that momentum is really a mindset where you're hunting, finding opportunity where you're hunting, feeling out where you're at with your audience and being able to shift. That's not a thing you can quantify. That's very much an outlook on marketing. It's very much an outlook on everything. It's a mindset first and foremost. Crystal Carter: And I think also to bring it back to a technical SEO point, this also affects your crawling and your crawl rate. Google understands your crawl rate based on the amount of content that you create. If you're creating content once a month and then like six weeks later and then a week later, and then three months later or something, Google's like, we don't need to crawl these people all the time. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know when they're doing. But if you're creating content every single day, then Google knows, well, they're making new stuff every day, so we need to check on what they're doing every day. So new sites that are publishing 20, 50, 60 articles a day, they're getting crawled lots over the course of a week. A site that's publishing something once a month, they're going to get crawled a lot less because Google knows they don't need to. So if you're worried about your indexing and you haven't published anything new, like start publishing. Mordy Oberstein: Is it new? Crystal Carter: Right? Is it new? No. And Google knows it's not new, so that's why your pages aren't indexed. So they saw them already and they have nothing new to report. So think about that. Think about that when you're thinking about your cadence and your momentum as well, is that it's both a marketing thing, it's also a technical thing. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: And all of them work together. Mordy Oberstein: It all goes together. Everything works together. Don't separate the things out in general, but you know who's constantly creating content, who Google itself cannot keep up with? It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is a machine of creating content. Google is probably like has a dedicated server just keeping up with the content that Barry is creating. Crystal Carter: Last time I checked, I think he was up to 40? Mordy Oberstein: Over 40 or 30,000 articles about the SEO news. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to this week's snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Monster. Absolute monster of a week for SEO news. This week is the kind of week that brings warm and fuzzy feelings to Barry Schwartz's heart. That's how big the news was this week. Google IO 2023 was here, and we finally have the answer to what was whole AI thing on the SERP is going to look like. Needless to say, SEO will never be the same again. And I'm not even kidding. Okay. As part of the coverage of Google IO 2023, first up as a port over at Search Engine Journal by Matt Southern, Bard, Google's version of ChatGPT is live for everyone. If you haven't had access till now, like myself, go play with it. Have a look at it and see what differs from, let's say Bing. Also Google showcased at IO 2023, how there will be links to sites within that ecosystem. So win. Great. Now for what we're all here for, how will AI chat interact with the SERP and organic results? Drum roll please. For certain queries, for example, those not related to YMYL, health, finance, things can actually impact your life in a significant way, your financial life, your physical, mental life. Google will not show an AI produced summary answering those questions, but very often will produce an AI summary answering a question as part of a query, making featured snippets obsolete for those particular queries. By the way, that doesn't mean that featured snippets are obsolete as a concept, but we shall see. Either way, there will be three cards representing organic results that are attached to that initial summary produced by Google's AI chat experience. You can then refine the answer or ask a follow-up question and/or expand the answer. Here, Google will break down each section of the answer produced into subtopics with links to sites under each breakdown, which I think is absolutely amazing. It's exactly what I think I'm looking for as a user in terms of getting a more topical breakdown of a particular query so that I can explore different areas of that query. What exactly am I talking about? I will read to you what Google used as an example at Google IO. So they searched for what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon, or... I don't remember, I think it was like Yellowstone National Park, was something like that. Anyway, so Google's AI experience produced, "Both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly, although both parks prohibit dogs on unpaved trails. Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." The summary goes on, "Bryce Canyon has distinctive features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls, and it goes on and on and on." When you click to expand and you see the expanded generative AI experience, it took the original summary and started off "Both Bryce Cannon and Arches National Park are family friendly." Right underneath that is a little card to a website. Then it continues with the summary and goes, "Although both park prohibit dogs on unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." And then it has three cards talking about pets at these different national parks. And then it goes, "Bryce Canyon has the features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls," and then has another card to another URL that talks about the features at Bryce Canyon. So it's breaking down the summary into different lines and underneath each section or each line are different URLs, different cards to different URLs, helping you understand more about that particular subtopic within the general answer that Google gave. I think it's brilliant. I think it's awesome. Also to this, when you query something related to a product, Google will show you a list of products underneath an entire summary. And when you click on the product, it brings up a knowledge panel around the product listing much the way that it does now on the SERP where you can actually see a list of stores where you can shop and actually get the product. Make sure your products are listed on Google Merchant Center and are properly optimized. It's already huge. It's going to be huger when all this goes live because the initial listing that Google is showing, the summary is built on the shopping graph. Lastly, Google announces at Google IO or with the content around Google IO, a helpful content update is coming. We're getting another update to the helpful content ranking system to quote, "Google will roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on search." This is a big deal to me. It was part of the official materials created around Google IO, it was tacked onto a blog post where they talked about a new feature around perspectives. Crystal and I talk all about what this means and what all of the AI announcements for search means on a special episode of the SERP's Up podcast we did covering Google IO so look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, we'll link to the show notes here or look for it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We talk a lot about the announcements, analyze what they mean for SEO, and do a summary of what others in the community, the SEO community were saying as well. Also, check out Barry's coverage of both of these items of the helpful content update that's coming and of the overall AI experience on the SERP. Barry did a bang up job over a search engine land and an SE Roundtable. You can see what it all actually looks like there and get Barry's thoughts and analysis. So definitely have a look at what Barry wrote up over on Search Engine Land and at seroundtable.com. With that, that is a mouthful of this snappy news. Thank you as always, Barry, for your contribution to the SEO community and the articles that you write so that we can feature them on this news. And also to Matt Southern and Roger Montti, to all the other people, and Danny Goodwin who are contributing to the SEO news community. Crystal Carter: Thank you. And to everyone else, everyone on Twitter who's playing against this new all over the place. So yes, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: We're here. We're here. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yes, it's Mordy's favorite game. Mordy Oberstein: It's my favorite game, but I never win. It's like bowling. It's my bowling. Is this new on Twitter is my bowling. Crystal Carter: I won once and I insisted on getting a little trophy. I think Lily Ray gave me a trophy and a trophy emoji. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of social media, here's who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomes, and this week, since we're talking about momentum and content and all that good stuff, we thought, who better than Casie Gillette, an SEO OG, has been around the community for a long time, super smart. Had the opportunity to work with her a little bit when I was over at Semrush. Super, incredibly smart, incredibly giving and sharing. So definitely give her a follow on Twitter at C-A-S-I-E-G. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I did a Twitter space with her, and the Twitter space was a little bit sort of like ding ding. Is it content or technical SEO? Which one's better? And we were both like, they're both good. Mordy Oberstein: Fun story. Do you want to know who was the person behind who should be on that Twitter space? Got two thumbs and loves controversy, right now... Because they said, "Who should we have?" "Oh, you should have Crystal for the tech. And ask Casie for the-" Crystal Carter: We just made friends Mordy. We just made friends. Casie's lovely and she's very smart, and she knows that you need tech SEO, and I know that you need content SEO, and we all just got along. Mordy Oberstein: I knew that you were in need of a friend, so I recommend them Casie. Crystal Carter: Thank you for being a friend. Mordy Oberstein: And just cue the music. You've got our friend and me. I don't know if we can. Is that licensed? Can we do that? Anyway, that's it for us. Not for us. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: We're still friends. We're still friends. Crystal Carter: Yes. What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's it for us. I didn't mean it that way. I mean like that's it for the show. Crystal Carter: I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: Come back next week. Not like that's it forever. That's it till next week. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Because we are consistent. Crystal Carter: Until next week. Mordy Oberstein: I am anything but a creature of habit and consistent. Crystal Carter: Until next time, everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Until next time, right. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into getting it right with programmatic SEO or getting with the programmatic SEO program. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it. wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Erica Schneider Casie Gilette Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Grizzle SEO Changes From Google i/o 2023 News: Google Bard Removes Waitlist, Adds Image & Coding Features The new Google Search Generative Experience: Here’s what it looks like Google to update the helpful content system algorithm in the coming months Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Erica Schneider Casie Gilette Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Grizzle SEO Changes From Google i/o 2023 News: Google Bard Removes Waitlist, Adds Image & Coding Features The new Google Search Generative Experience: Here’s what it looks like Google to update the helpful content system algorithm in the coming months Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us SERP's Up podcast reporting on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Overstein, I am SEO of Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulously incredible, the absolutely unequivocable, the absolutely uncomparable, the absolutely best in every way, shape, or form. The best person on planet Earth. Head of Instant Communications here at Wix, crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I think Mordy's finally reached the end of the platitudes. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what to do anymore. Crystal Carter: I must tell you. I'm mediocre at bowling. Mordy Oberstein: I'm terrible at bowling. I stink with bumpers. Crystal Carter: I was in a bowling league when I was in my youth and my husband, who was never in a bowling league, always beats me at bowling. And I'm like, you're a non-bowler, you never even bowled. And yet I'm happy if I crack 100, if I'm doing that. If I hit three digits, I'm like, job done here. All right, I can go home. Mordy Oberstein: I'm embarrassed to say this. So you have an 8 pound ball, a 10 pound ball, 12 pound. I really enjoy the 8 pound ball. Crystal Carter: That's like softball. That's just playing softball. That's not like bowling. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And then I'll, even with the bumper because I play with my kids, the bumpers are up. You know that one spot in the corners? Crystal Carter: Oh, just before the pins? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's me. Crystal Carter: That's you. Mordy Oberstein: Got my name all over it. That one spot you, you're lucky you get like one pin. Crystal Carter: I'm a mediocre bowler, but I cannot stand bad bowling etiquette. If I'm up there trying to set up my shot and I'm stood there on the little lines and I'm trying to get myself lined up pretending I'm like doing the Lebowski thing or whatever, and somebody just walks up on the lane next door to me and just rolls along and starts throwing the... I get so angry as if they were ruining my perfect shot, as if this was... It's never going to be the perfect shot. I'm never going to get more than two or three pins or whatever. But let me have my moment. Let me just meditate for a second before I embarrass myself. Let me do what I'm doing. Come on. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm the baller who's standing behind you saying, "Hurry up to get on with it and let's keep this train wreck moving because there's still eight more frames left and four more people." Crystal Carter: I’m here] for the snacks. I love bowling alley snacks like the snack bar at the bowling alley is what's up. Also the beer is flowing. They'll give you a whole pitcher and you can just settle in and I love a good bowling session. The last time I bowled actually was with you, Mordy, you and Nikki Moser. Mordy Oberstein: We bowled. Crystal Carter: No, I completely made that up. It was with Nikki. Mordy Oberstein: No. We didn't bowl. Crystal Carter: Was it Nikki at Moscon? You missed it. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't there. I was probably ed a baseball game. Crystal Carter: Nikki's very good at bowling, also Blaine. He's also very good at- Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? Yeah. Okay. So note to self, never bowl these people. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you should check out our e-commerce offering from integrations with Amazon, to drop shipping, to a POS system to help you keep track of your client's transactions, both on and offline. Wix's e-commerce offering can help you and your clients' sites build financial momentum, which is today's word of the day momentum. Which means I should probably not take a break between talking about the next thing cause I just lost the momentum. Ah. Crystal Carter: Moving incremental gains. Move forward further. Mordy Oberstein: Momentum. That's right. Today we're talking about inertia science. Well, SEO inertia as we take out building SEO momentum for growth. Why the opportunity mindset is an SEO's best friend. The real advantage to growth by taking things slowly and keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight, stages of development. Oh look, he's crawling now as... I don't know what that makes any sense. And keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight stages of development. Plus Erica Schneider of Grizzle joins us to offer her take on how can you maintain quality when creating content at scale? Because momentum means scalability sometimes. So how do you keep the quality of the content at the same time? We're going to get into that. And since we're talking about inertia and growth for SEO, Crystal and I will take a deep dive into the role of momentum in marketing. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Careful now as you don't want to miss a thing because episode number 38 of the SERP's Up podcast is gaining momentum. Crystal Carter: We are on the move. We have reached velocity, we are going for it, we're moving forward. Mordy Oberstein: Warp speed. Continue with our Star Trek references for the past couple of episodes. Crystal Carter: Many. Mordy Oberstein: So many. Engage. So this is a very much mindset podcast for me. I'm all about mindset by the way, and I know people are, oh, practical tips. And I'm like, yeah, what's the mindset behind those tips? And people are like, yeah, I want the tips. So whatever. I think this is very much for me, a mindset episode. We talk about SEO very categorically, very often on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO. Or we speak of SEO with a continuum of task like task number one, then task number two, then task number three, then task... I can go on. Crystal Carter: And check it, put it on the checklist. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, but... And I get that when we talk about SEO in that way, it feels like a chore to me. And I don't think SEO should be a chore. I think SEO should be meaningful and to make SEO meaningful, I think it's a mindset. And this is why I love talking about SEO from a growth point of view. So how does SEO help you grow? And growth for me, whatever it is, from growing social media followings to growing as a person, is all about momentum. One thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing. So huge sappy music about improving as a person by the way, Crystal Carter: One step at a time, everybody, one step at a time. Mordy Oberstein: As you grow as a person, one step of self-reflection of internal growth often puts you on a path towards transcending and transforming the self on this journey to step number two. And they are not disconnected, one small change leads to another. Same in SEO. Crystal Carter: I mean these are life lessons Mordy, you're dropping some gems here that people can live by as well as do SEO by. Mordy Oberstein: It's not about podcasting, about SEO, it's about showing how podcasting about SEO was really podcasting about life. Crystal Carter: Philosophical this week. Mordy Oberstein: For the second time. Internal joke. For the second time. So anyway, one improvement you do to the site. One strategy you take on should, all things being equal, naturally lead to the next thing and open up all sorts of new doors. And all you really need to do is put your ear to the ground. So cue more sappy music. Crystal Carter: Music. I mean, I don't think you're wrong here at all. I think there's that movie where it says we need a montage. That's that sort of thing. And I feel like that it's that way sometimes with SEO, you work and you add little bits. And even if with a single piece of content, you can create one piece of content and then optimize it again and then optimize it again and then optimize it again. And what happens is Google knows about that content and they learn about that content and they see that you're improving it and they see that you're continuing to improve it and they understand that this is a piece of content that is not being left to wither on the vine, but is growing and is increasing. And if they see that you're doing that across your site, then they will understand that your site is something that is constantly improving and that the bulk of information that they have around you is valuable and is valuable to users. And then they'll send users to you. I think sometimes people think they have to do all of the SEO all at once. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You don't. Mordy Oberstein: So not true and don't, it's detrimental. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: And not only is it not helpful, it's a bad idea. Crystal Carter: Right. So a lot of times people will say, well, why do we need to do SEO for this long? Why do I need this agency to contract for six months or a year or whatever it may be? And it's because they're putting in building blocks for what you're doing. So you have your technical SEOs, your foundation, making sure that everything works. Then you're going to look at your architecture, then you're going to look at your keywords, then you're going to look at more content more, then you're going to look... And you add and add an ad, and sometimes you add them as in tandem. But the momentum is really, really important to that because I think I've certainly seen it where, and I don't know if you have an example of this where momentum can make a really, really big difference to make a really big impact on what your outcomes are. Have you seen this in the wild there, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: All the time. So one of the things that's great about momentum, and if you are bold enough to do this is that it will shift your strategy. So the detriment of being super checklisty is that you're not open to shifting, you're not open to changing. So as you start first off, you'll skip steps, you try to do it all in one shot. But if you're overly methodical where you try to break it into too many things, do you get hung up on the process? We did step one, now we must do step two. Now we must do step three. Now we must do step four. As opposed to saying after step three, where are we at? What are the things that we should be doing now? You'll often say, you know what, we should be shifting. Our business has changed, our audience has changed, or we've managed to capture an audience we never expected. We never thought this would rank well and it did and now we have a new audience. How do we now cater to that audience? How do we now nurture that audience? How do we now move that audience down the funnel? Whatever it is, which means being open minded enough to say, okay, take stock, ear to the ground. Now let's shift and let's take on a new strategy. And I've seen this a million times over where opportunities that you never knew existed or never thought would exist or didn't even know existed come up because of momentum and be open enough to be able to say, okay, stop, shift change to grab those opportunities. Crystal Carter: And I think that you see this with trending topics and things. So we recently published an article on the Wix SEO hub talking about trending topics. And if let's say you write an article on something that's trending, and let's say it hits right? You're like, oh my gosh, people are really interested in that. You can build momentum on that. You can start to build a topic cluster around that. You can start to pull in a little bit of content around that. You can say, "Wow, people are really interested in this particular topic and we seem to be leading the pack here, so let's put more content on that." Now, if you have your checklist that you are sticking to methodically and you're not paying attention to the momentum that you've got from both users and from Google and also from maybe social interest, et cetera, then you might go, well, that did well onto the next thing and miss the opportunity to grow. Mordy Oberstein: I'll ask you, how many times have you been working on a site or with a client or whatever it is, and the initial plan was X, and you get, let's say a quarter of the way, a third of the way, halfway through the plan of X, and you were like, wait a second, this doesn't make sense, we need to change this up. Crystal Carter: Oh, I mean during COVID, Mordy Oberstein: Right? I was just thinking that COVID is the classic case of this. Crystal Carter: Like the best laid plans were completely set of flame during COVID. I mean, so many times we'd say, "Right, we're going to do this," and then the business would have to close its physical doors and then you'd have to do something completely different, or you'd have to come up with a completely new funnel because they didn't have virtual tours of their real estate buildings before or book a video tour, that sort of thing. So these are things that you need to think about and yeah, it does make a difference. And I think that also, I love building up the momentum. If you think about it like sports training, and this is interesting because I asked the SEO hive mind, I said, "Do you think momentum matters in SEO?" And Myriam Jessier said, "It's like weight loss. On a diet you lose a few pounds early and then it motivates you to keep going. Then it's the same with SEO, but you need to keep building." If you think about sports people, they don't do nothing in the off season. The people who do really well, I talk about Michael Jordan a lot on this podcast, but Michael Jordan was getting slammed by the pistons for years and then spent one season in the off season really bulking up. And when he was doing stuff for Space Jam, he set up a basketball court and had pickup games with all... So in the off season, he was building up all of these skills when nobody was paying any attention, when it was low pressure, when he had time to think strategically about what he wanted to do. With seasonal businesses, the off season is a great time to start building up momentum and to start building up Google understanding your search, the focus of your content. It's a good time to take stock of your content, to do a sort of full audit and full update of things that are tricky to do when you're in the midst of everything. And so that means by the time you hit peak season, you've already crested, you're already at the top so that you're ready to meet that traffic because you built up the momentum when things were quiet. Mordy Oberstein: That example, that metaphor from Myriam, it's perfect because as somebody who's lost weight at one point a couple times in my life, like that initial like you have to get started with something. You have to get started somewhere. And then that one small success breeds another success. I don't know about you, but I look at SEO data when I want to start... That initial feeling, you're looking at a site for the first few times is overwhelming. You're like, I don't know, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where do I start? And what I like to do is start on one thing, one page, whatever it is, start somewhere with one thing and dive into that. And then you start seeing the next thing. You start seeing the next thing and you start slowly and slowly building a picture. That's momentum. That's an example of SEO momentum that I think is super important because when you look at, say in the case of data, when you look at it all in one shot, you get lost. You don't know where to go with it. So you need that momentum to guide you. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And if you turn it off, you sometimes get this in PPC, people are like, oh, let's just turn off the PPC. Let's turn on the PPC. And with PPC, it can be tricky because nowadays, particularly when we think about momentum, there's machine learning. And if you turn off your PPC entirely, I always recommend that you keep a little low level bit of something running in the background just so that if you need to ramp it up, you don't have to do that part where it goes, "Oh, the machine learning is learning about your site." And you're like, "What?" You're like, "We have a sale that starts tomorrow." And they're like, "We're still deciding." And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. And Google, we talk about AI and we talk about machine learning and we talk about all of this, but Google's been using AI and machine learning for years through all sorts of stuff. It's been an integral part of search for years. So when you stop and put things down, just like if you stop exercising... You'll notice that it'll be harder to get back going. If you've got the vacation in two weeks and you haven't done any exercise in two years, it's going to be tricky to get that beach body if that's what you want. Not that any body isn't perfect for the beach, but I'm just saying that sort of thing. If you're worried about that, you have to keep going with something so that if you need to ramp it up, you can when you need to. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, which is why this conversation about momentum and SEO, it's really a much wider... Right? About momentum and marketing overall. But before we get into that, as you're growing, as you're building momentum, as you're doing... Which often means scaling things up, you have to worry about maintaining quality at the same time. So momentum is great, things are firing in all cylinders, blah, blah, blah. Or you got to make sure the quality is maintained. So to help us tackle this is Erica Schneider over at Grizzle who's going to help us understand how you can maintain quality when creating content at scale. Erica Schneider: So the best way to maintain quality when creating content at scale is to treat quality scaling, just like you would treat business scaling. Right? You need to document your processes, you need to have goals, a mission statement, objectives, like everything that you do for your business when you want to be able to scale effectively and not fail and have everything fall apart, is the same way that you should treat scaling your content operations so that you don't mess with your quality as you scale. So my answer is twofold, right? It's really important that you set editorial goals, values, and integrity, and I can just quickly explain what those are. But the other piece of that is that you should start slow and then ramp up in my opinion, just like you're building a business, you don't bring on 50 clients on day one. Right? That would be an absolute disaster. You need to make sure that what you're doing is documented that it works. Get through all the kinks, figure out what you want to keep, what you want to discard from your process, all that jazz, and then scale. So it makes no sense. If you are trying to produce quality content to try to do 10 blogs a week, it's better to maybe start with one a week. Right? I could go into the quality versus quantity argument, but I definitely think that no matter how much you ultimately want to publish on your blog or anywhere that you're distributing content, regardless of the amount that you put out there, it should always be quality content. I don't think that you should ever sacrifice quality, which I actually think means credibility and authority for the sake of ranking, for the sake of brand awareness. Because if people find your content, but it sucks, what's the point. Right? You're going to be remembered for all of the wrong reasons. So you should always put your best content out there regardless of where you are in the process. So back to the editorial goals, values and integrity. The editorial goals are the reasons behind why you're creating content and who you are creating it for. So it just means that every single piece of content you create should be tied to your overall content strategy. It's simple, but if you don't have these editorial goals and you're not comparing them to your strategy, it can be easy to create a content that looks like it fits into your strategy, but it actually doesn't, right? Because the way that you've executed it doesn't align with your original mission. So it's that sense check at the end. What are the editorial goals? Editorial values? Describe how you as a business want to provide meaningful experiences to readers. Right? So deciding which content formats are going to work best to help you reach your goals and all that jazz. Define that at the beginning and that'll change, that's fine. But then continuously revisit it and define it. And then editorial integrity is all about upholding your brand reputation, making sure that your tone of voice and your writing style and the way that you are speaking to your audience is exactly reflected the way that you want it to. And that again, comes down to making sure that there's a rigorous editorial process of sense checking the content. So every step of the way through the production line, there should be somebody in an editorial role reviewing it, whether that's a strategist, making sure that the brief aligns with the editorial goals, somebody checking out the outlines, somebody checking out the final draft. Someone should be sense checking it every step of the way against those original editorial goals. So the best way to maintain quality when creating your content at scale is to set up documented processes. Start slow and continuously sense check your content every single step of the way as you grow. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you so much, Erica. I met Erica at Semrush's Global Marketing Day. We were recording it in New York. She is amazing. Definitely give her a follow on Twitter again, EricasMyName, E-R-I-C-A-S-M-Y-N-A-M-E. She talks about an amazing amount of topics over on Twitter. You should definitely give her a follow. She's one of these people where you meet her for the first time and you're like, "Wow, this person has that it factor." That's how I would describe Erica. She loves talking about all things, editorial standards, quality, strategy, all of it is great. So follow her over on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Fantastic. So all of us talk around building SEO, momentum, SEO momentum, momentum for SEO and capturing opportunity and being smart about and so forth makes me feel like, as I mentioned before that we should be talking about the importance of, I'll call it, cadence and momentum for your business or for your client's business as a whole, not just from an SEO. Let's not pigeonhole momentum to make it all about SEO. That'd be narcissistic as SEOs, but there's so much about cadence and momentum. It's a huge part of doing good marketing. So here's a deep thought on the role of cadence and momentum in marketing. So I think sometimes... I'll start this off... I think that ROI can sometimes be the killer of momentum. Crystal Carter: How so, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, let me just revel on the hot tick of that for a second. Because sometimes... it's so poetic... Sometimes the ROI is just showing that you're alive. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Sometimes the ROI is showing that you are still a relevant, vitalic... That's not a real word. Crystal Carter: Vital? Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious? Vital. Crystal Carter: Vitalicious. Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious. Crystal Carter: Vitalicious. Vitalicious, we're sticking with that. Let's go with that Mordy Oberstein: Vitalicious part of the conversation of whatever your niche is. It's like sometimes you create content to get traffic, and sometimes you create content to show that you're just part of the equation here. Crystal Carter: This is really interesting because Christie Holtz was talking about this on her Instagram. So she was talking about how to do good marketing, and she was like, you do stuff and you tell people about it, then you do some other stuff and you tell people about it. So it's essentially, it's one of those things to sort of keep in front of mind and to keep in the conversation. And again, so that you are being consistent in your visibility, and so that you don't have to start afresh from zero. Going from 70 to 80 is much, much easier than going from 0 to 80, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: It's like farming, which I know nothing about. I can't even plant a tomato plant without killing it. Crystal Carter: Old MacMorty had a farm, Mordy Oberstein: Old MacMorty had a farm and it all died. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: And no but so you have to plant the seeds, and from the seeds it grows. Wait, before you even plant the seeds, you need to, what's it sowing the ground. You have to sow the ground. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Cadence is sowing the ground so that eventually you can plant the seeds. So like you're saying, so that you don't just start off, all right, new product, got to get back in there, got to start shoveling the dirt to plant the seeds. If you have cadence, you have momentum. You're a natural, integral part of the conversation. Whatever community that you're in- Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: ... Lets you do the things later on that give you the ROI. So cadence and momentum is such a huge, valuable, I'll call it a tool in delivering ROI. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's not easy to show up every week and do a podcast or show up every week and do your YouTube thing or show up every week with a brand new blog or show up with all those sorts of things. It's not easy. And that's the reason why it's so valuable is because it is not easy. The NFL happens on a Monday, right? You have Monday night football. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's Thursday night football now, and some weeks are we go Saturday football. Crystal Carter: There's always a Monday night football right? Now imagine if they were like, yeah, not this week. Maybe next week. Oh, we're not sure. Because that's the other thing is that if somebody knows that every week they'll get a new piece of content from you every month, they'll get a something from you. That you're consistent with your things. And even if they miss you once, they can come back to you for that. So again, so that they're ready to see that you do, and also being consistent there helps to show that you're somebody who is reliable. So whatever tool that you have, it helps to build trust that the thing that they get from you will be of good quality and will be valuable for them and will provide consistent and good results. Mordy Oberstein: It's going to a Google business profile, and there's no information there and you're like, ah, well. There's no cadence, momentum, there's nothing in there. There's no vitality, again, using that word. Crystal Carter: And I always check to see if people have been responding to comments, if people have been posting things, if there's actual, even if there is something there, if it's recent. So if there's something recent, then you can go, okay, this business is still working, this business is still doing stuff. Because sometimes things are online and you think, oh, this is online, and you get there and the ice cream shop is closed, they're not there, and you can't get any ice cream and you're really upset. Mordy Oberstein: And your day is ruined because you did not get ice cream. But it's a great point because the thing that really builds buzz, and the thing that really builds notoriety is not the going viral moment, which usually never happens. It's the micro moments. It's all these little things that add up and add up. So let's go with the Google business profile, the momentum around that. You see that they have a good description, you see they have reviews in there, they're answering. It's all these little things add up to create a sense, to create an association, to create a feeling or sentiment about that brand or product or whatever it is. So the momentum of one little thing and then one other little thing and one other little thing. While in and of itself, each little thing might not have a big ROI, whatever, but together it does. And you shouldn't look at it as each individual thing. You should look at it as all the things, all that cadence and momentum together. What does that produce? Crystal Carter: Right? Exactly. And this is why when I asked the hive mine, I said, "Does momentum matter in SEO?" I had a few people come back to me and they were like, "I'd say consistency is a better term." Amy Hergan said in the trades industries where there's a lot of black hat SEO, continuous white hat momentum is needed to be continued to be competitive. And this is what people were saying. They were like, "No, consistency. You say momentum, I say consistency," and I think it's because one breeds the other. Mordy Oberstein: Tomato, tomato. Tomato. I don't know what the heck of tomato is. But to go full circle, it all comes back to what I was saying before about mindset. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Having that cadence, having that momentum is really a mindset where you're hunting, finding opportunity where you're hunting, feeling out where you're at with your audience and being able to shift. That's not a thing you can quantify. That's very much an outlook on marketing. It's very much an outlook on everything. It's a mindset first and foremost. Crystal Carter: And I think also to bring it back to a technical SEO point, this also affects your crawling and your crawl rate. Google understands your crawl rate based on the amount of content that you create. If you're creating content once a month and then like six weeks later and then a week later, and then three months later or something, Google's like, we don't need to crawl these people all the time. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know when they're doing. But if you're creating content every single day, then Google knows, well, they're making new stuff every day, so we need to check on what they're doing every day. So new sites that are publishing 20, 50, 60 articles a day, they're getting crawled lots over the course of a week. A site that's publishing something once a month, they're going to get crawled a lot less because Google knows they don't need to. So if you're worried about your indexing and you haven't published anything new, like start publishing. Mordy Oberstein: Is it new? Crystal Carter: Right? Is it new? No. And Google knows it's not new, so that's why your pages aren't indexed. So they saw them already and they have nothing new to report. So think about that. Think about that when you're thinking about your cadence and your momentum as well, is that it's both a marketing thing, it's also a technical thing. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: And all of them work together. Mordy Oberstein: It all goes together. Everything works together. Don't separate the things out in general, but you know who's constantly creating content, who Google itself cannot keep up with? It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is a machine of creating content. Google is probably like has a dedicated server just keeping up with the content that Barry is creating. Crystal Carter: Last time I checked, I think he was up to 40? Mordy Oberstein: Over 40 or 30,000 articles about the SEO news. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to this week's snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Monster. Absolute monster of a week for SEO news. This week is the kind of week that brings warm and fuzzy feelings to Barry Schwartz's heart. That's how big the news was this week. Google IO 2023 was here, and we finally have the answer to what was whole AI thing on the SERP is going to look like. Needless to say, SEO will never be the same again. And I'm not even kidding. Okay. As part of the coverage of Google IO 2023, first up as a port over at Search Engine Journal by Matt Southern, Bard, Google's version of ChatGPT is live for everyone. If you haven't had access till now, like myself, go play with it. Have a look at it and see what differs from, let's say Bing. Also Google showcased at IO 2023, how there will be links to sites within that ecosystem. So win. Great. Now for what we're all here for, how will AI chat interact with the SERP and organic results? Drum roll please. For certain queries, for example, those not related to YMYL, health, finance, things can actually impact your life in a significant way, your financial life, your physical, mental life. Google will not show an AI produced summary answering those questions, but very often will produce an AI summary answering a question as part of a query, making featured snippets obsolete for those particular queries. By the way, that doesn't mean that featured snippets are obsolete as a concept, but we shall see. Either way, there will be three cards representing organic results that are attached to that initial summary produced by Google's AI chat experience. You can then refine the answer or ask a follow-up question and/or expand the answer. Here, Google will break down each section of the answer produced into subtopics with links to sites under each breakdown, which I think is absolutely amazing. It's exactly what I think I'm looking for as a user in terms of getting a more topical breakdown of a particular query so that I can explore different areas of that query. What exactly am I talking about? I will read to you what Google used as an example at Google IO. So they searched for what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon, or... I don't remember, I think it was like Yellowstone National Park, was something like that. Anyway, so Google's AI experience produced, "Both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly, although both parks prohibit dogs on unpaved trails. Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." The summary goes on, "Bryce Canyon has distinctive features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls, and it goes on and on and on." When you click to expand and you see the expanded generative AI experience, it took the original summary and started off "Both Bryce Cannon and Arches National Park are family friendly." Right underneath that is a little card to a website. Then it continues with the summary and goes, "Although both park prohibit dogs on unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." And then it has three cards talking about pets at these different national parks. And then it goes, "Bryce Canyon has the features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls," and then has another card to another URL that talks about the features at Bryce Canyon. So it's breaking down the summary into different lines and underneath each section or each line are different URLs, different cards to different URLs, helping you understand more about that particular subtopic within the general answer that Google gave. I think it's brilliant. I think it's awesome. Also to this, when you query something related to a product, Google will show you a list of products underneath an entire summary. And when you click on the product, it brings up a knowledge panel around the product listing much the way that it does now on the SERP where you can actually see a list of stores where you can shop and actually get the product. Make sure your products are listed on Google Merchant Center and are properly optimized. It's already huge. It's going to be huger when all this goes live because the initial listing that Google is showing, the summary is built on the shopping graph. Lastly, Google announces at Google IO or with the content around Google IO, a helpful content update is coming. We're getting another update to the helpful content ranking system to quote, "Google will roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on search." This is a big deal to me. It was part of the official materials created around Google IO, it was tacked onto a blog post where they talked about a new feature around perspectives. Crystal and I talk all about what this means and what all of the AI announcements for search means on a special episode of the SERP's Up podcast we did covering Google IO so look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, we'll link to the show notes here or look for it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We talk a lot about the announcements, analyze what they mean for SEO, and do a summary of what others in the community, the SEO community were saying as well. Also, check out Barry's coverage of both of these items of the helpful content update that's coming and of the overall AI experience on the SERP. Barry did a bang up job over a search engine land and an SE Roundtable. You can see what it all actually looks like there and get Barry's thoughts and analysis. So definitely have a look at what Barry wrote up over on Search Engine Land and at seroundtable.com. With that, that is a mouthful of this snappy news. Thank you as always, Barry, for your contribution to the SEO community and the articles that you write so that we can feature them on this news. And also to Matt Southern and Roger Montti, to all the other people, and Danny Goodwin who are contributing to the SEO news community. Crystal Carter: Thank you. And to everyone else, everyone on Twitter who's playing against this new all over the place. So yes, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: We're here. We're here. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yes, it's Mordy's favorite game. Mordy Oberstein: It's my favorite game, but I never win. It's like bowling. It's my bowling. Is this new on Twitter is my bowling. Crystal Carter: I won once and I insisted on getting a little trophy. I think Lily Ray gave me a trophy and a trophy emoji. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of social media, here's who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomes, and this week, since we're talking about momentum and content and all that good stuff, we thought, who better than Casie Gillette, an SEO OG, has been around the community for a long time, super smart. Had the opportunity to work with her a little bit when I was over at Semrush. Super, incredibly smart, incredibly giving and sharing. So definitely give her a follow on Twitter at C-A-S-I-E-G. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I did a Twitter space with her, and the Twitter space was a little bit sort of like ding ding. Is it content or technical SEO? Which one's better? And we were both like, they're both good. Mordy Oberstein: Fun story. Do you want to know who was the person behind who should be on that Twitter space? Got two thumbs and loves controversy, right now... Because they said, "Who should we have?" "Oh, you should have Crystal for the tech. And ask Casie for the-" Crystal Carter: We just made friends Mordy. We just made friends. Casie's lovely and she's very smart, and she knows that you need tech SEO, and I know that you need content SEO, and we all just got along. Mordy Oberstein: I knew that you were in need of a friend, so I recommend them Casie. Crystal Carter: Thank you for being a friend. Mordy Oberstein: And just cue the music. You've got our friend and me. I don't know if we can. Is that licensed? Can we do that? Anyway, that's it for us. Not for us. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: We're still friends. We're still friends. Crystal Carter: Yes. What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's it for us. I didn't mean it that way. I mean like that's it for the show. Crystal Carter: I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: Come back next week. Not like that's it forever. That's it till next week. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Because we are consistent. Crystal Carter: Until next week. Mordy Oberstein: I am anything but a creature of habit and consistent. Crystal Carter: Until next time, everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Until next time, right. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into getting it right with programmatic SEO or getting with the programmatic SEO program. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it. wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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