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Why do SEOs have a disdain for site migrations? Could it be the broken URLs, the redirects, or even a new hosting environment? It could be that or a million other things. The point is that successful site migrations require attention to detail. We explore the intricacies and considerations of site migrations on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Miracle Inameti, an expert in SEO and data strategy, joins the podcast to tackle challenging site migration problems by implementing practical and pragmatic solutions. This, as the SERP’s Up team discusses site migrations and the associated SEO considerations. Join Mordy and Crystal to understand the complexity of site migration. Back How big of a headache are site migrations? Why do SEOs have a disdain for site migrations? Could it be the broken URLs, the redirects, or even a new hosting environment? It could be that or a million other things. The point is that successful site migrations require attention to detail. We explore the intricacies and considerations of site migrations on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Miracle Inameti, an expert in SEO and data strategy, joins the podcast to tackle challenging site migration problems by implementing practical and pragmatic solutions. This, as the SERP’s Up team discusses site migrations and the associated SEO considerations. Join Mordy and Crystal to understand the complexity of site migration. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 21 | January 18, 2023 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 34:17 This week’s guests Miracle Inameti A rounded SEO consultant, trainer, and speaker. Miracle provides expertise in SEO and Data Strategy to resolve challenging problems and implement practical and pragmatic solutions. Relentlessly focused on customer outcomes with strong commercial acumen, natural drive, with a strong passion for people. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Guess we're pushing out some grueling new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of SEO branding here at Wix, the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, I was going to say edible, but that doesn't make any sense. Our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. SEO internet people. Welcome to episode 21. We're about to double down on these SEO insights. Mordy Oberstein: It's Blackjack. It's our Blackjack episode. Crystal Carter: It's right. That's what's up. We're going to put two on the river or double down. I can't... I've forgotten about Blackjack. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. If I tell you, I've been to a casino one time. My wife, 15 years ago, we walked in, we played a couple of games. We said, "This is boring." And we bounced the hell out of there. Crystal Carter: I got married in Las Vegas. I spend a lot of time. Mordy Oberstein: On purpose? Crystal Carter: My family on purpose. Las Vegas. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you meant to get married? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Okay cool. I was checking. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You know Caesars Palace? Mordy Oberstein: Sure, I've heard of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got married across the street from there. Mordy Oberstein: Across the street. It's good set up. Crystal Carter: Thank you. So, yeah, they demolished it. It was a dive, but we had a great wedding. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can easily set up 301 redirects with our redirect managers. Set single redirects, group redirects when the URL follow the same logic like they live in the same folder, upload bulk redirects, or do nothing as we implement redirect automatically and aesthetic product and event pages. And we're talking about redirects because guess what we're talking about today? Site migrations. Oh, the word itself made me gas and choke. 'Cause you're going to wreck the URLs with the site migration. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. Mordy Oberstein: And that's where things get into problems. Crystal Carter: You weren't there, man. You weren't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Today's show is about the root canal and lobotomy of SEO site migrations. We'll dive into migrations and why do so many people get them wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing that can happen? Why are SEO so freaked out about site migrations? The ever wonderful Miracle Inameti stops by to talk about when SEOs should become involved in the site migration process. Also, have a bit of fun around migrations and the people also ask box. And of course, we have your ever so snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social. For more SEO awesomeness episode number 21 of the SERP's Up podcast is migrating your way. Get it. That was a bad one. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: That was a bad... I tried. That was a bad one. I was thinking of that or it's an SEO migraine-tion, get it because it's a migraine and migrate at the same time. Crystal Carter: Oh man. Wow. okay Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How's that? Not good? Yeah. Crystal Carter: All right, so moving on. Mordy Oberstein: We're migrating past that and to the next thing. Crystal Carter: We're going to shift, we're going to do a 301 from that. No, kidding. Okay. So just so we're all on the same page, we are going to talk a little bit about what a site migration is. On the Wix SEO Learning Hub, there's a fantastic article from Mr. Chris Green where he explains the fundamentals of site migrations and he explains that site migration is a term that SEOs use quite often. But being familiar with the different types of elements that make up a site migration can really help you to make the process easier. He talks about a few common site migration scenarios. One is changing domain names, which is essentially where you change your name from, say, redshoes.com to maybe even redshoes.co.uk or the red shoes or bestredshoes.com. So that's where you change your domain name. There's also migrating through hosting providers, which is something that people don't very often think about, but that's one that he thinks about as well. And then he considers that where your website's hosted one company and then maybe moving hosting to another company. And sometimes going into the ins and outs of that can be quite complicated because sometimes with hosting, people don't remember where the hosting is and all of that sort of thing. Also, you can think about changing the content management system. So for instance, if you're keeping the same domain name but you're changing from maybe one CMS to another CMS, then that might be something that you want to think about with regards to... Well, it is absolutely something you need to think about with regards to migrations. I would also add to this, sometimes changing the design of your website can be migration. So there's a few SEOs that I've heard talk about migrations and they're like, "It can have it, big deal." And sometimes people don't think about this, but I've had it where clients were like, "Oh yeah, we're just changing the homepage," or, "We're just changing this big money page. We're changing around the design of it." And I'm like, "We need to check that." And they say, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, if you have the design of a page and you have a certain number of links that are coming from that, you have certain elements that are on that page that if you change that page, then we need to figure out what we're going to do with all of that link equity as we're spreading it out across the rest of the page. And that is something that we need to think about as well." So we can also think about URL changes overall. Now, when you're talking about your migration, Google sometimes call this a site move. So they have a page on their documentation saying, "What is a site move?" And in that they talk about site moves without URL changes and they talk about site moves with URL changes. And all of these things are considered migrations. And essentially what you want to think about when you have a migration is making sure that Google can find the new content and that Google can find the old content as well, so that if you have old content, that's really important that they can find it, that there's links to it. And you also need to think about how it impacts your wider digital footprint. So Mordy mentioned 301 redirects. 301 redirects are really useful for what happens within your site, but they're also really useful for what happens with the links that you have out there on the web still coming into your site. So for instance, let's say you changed your blog format. So let's say it used to be example.com/post, and then you change it to example.com/article for instance, you need to think about that because you'll have old links to the old URL format and those will impact how your site is indexed, how your site is performing, and how it all works out. So there's a lot of ins and outs. There's a lot of different parts of a migration that you should think about. They should not be taken lightly at all. And essentially anything that you're changing that's a structural change or even a design change that impacts your link structure should be considered a migration. And sometimes there's big, big migration. Sometimes it's a smaller migration, but you still should think about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: I think you answered all three of the questions we mentioned in the intro in one breath. What was it? Why did so many people get cyber migrations wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen and why are we all freaked out about them? And it's because there's so many things to think about. And then you think about the implications of those. I've had a case one time where it's like they forgot like, "Oh wait, the canonicals that..." We actually use the old website for the canonical. We don't know why we did that, but we did. And now things are totally messed up and we don't want even thought about that. 'Cause you're not thinking about that. Okay, the URL, I got the old URL, I got the new URL, I got this. But when you're transferring things over and you're copying and pasting certain things, you end up copying and pasting the canonicals over and now doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And there can be other things underneath that. So sometimes it might be that you have old menu configurations in the back end of the website. You copied and pasted those over and there's a 404. I've seen that before where people are like, "Why have we got this 404?" And it's like, because it's in the menu that we migrated over from the other thing. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? It's like when you're family, you stick all the dirty laundry, sweep it under the carpet for a long, long time and then a family event happens. And all those things, the dysfunction that you swept under the carpet for years, all of a sudden it comes out at one time and it's complete chaos and dysfunction. That's a site migration. Crystal Carter: I think that there's so many different moving parts. So there's the stuff with all the DNS stuff and making sure that all of that stuff is working well. There's also the migrations from before. So sometimes if somebody did a bad migration before you then that can haunt you when you try to do the next migration, for instance. So it can be very, very tricky. And then sometimes it can feel a little bit like... There's that magic trick where there's a fully set table and somebody tries to remove the tablecloth from the table. And what you want to do is essentially make sure that everything that you need stays there, but it can also be a really, really good time to clean house. So you talked about sweeping things under the carpet and migration can be a really good time to be like, "We don't need this URL, we don't need that one, we don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need that." And to clear those things out and that can be a really good time to do that as well. And I think also with migrations, it's very important that someone has the reins, that there is someone who is in charge of it. And this is normally an SEO and it should be an SEO. There's somebody who's in charge of making sure that holistically it works. So I've had it before where a client migrated a site to a new setup and the client, they had a third party subduing without documentation and they decided to copy all of those things and put them on the blog of the new site. And you're making a face here like, "Oh my gosh." But they did not cut off the old help doc. So instead we had a whole another set of content that was competing, which Google had already indexed the other site and then they added it onto the new site. And the way that it had been configured was super complicated and it was very, very difficult to unpick all of these different pages that had been added into and with all of the different URLs and stuff. So it can be very, very tricky. And one of the things we have built into Wix, because it's such a pain in the box, one of the things we have built into Wix is sometimes you have to do some of the big folder updates via DHT access file for instance. But within Wix for instance, you can go into this bulk URL management tool and you can set up so that any URL that starts with a certain prefix will be redirected to a certain thing. So for instance, in the post article example, if you had all of your blogs under post, you can set up bulk redirect within the tool that's within the CMS. You can set a bulk redirect that says any URL that starts with... That has the prefixed post should be redirected to this one in this framework. And you can set it up so it's in the same way that you would with an HD access file. And it makes it a lot easier to manage those things in bulk. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm going to catch the error. So that's also good. But I want to go back to your point about the tablecloth where you pull a tablecloth off and then you're hoping everything stays the same. I think one of the reasons why I think we're freaked out about site migration and why they're pain in the neck is that we don't properly set expectations. 'Cause when you pull that table cloth out, it's inevitable that something's going to shift around a little bit and it's not going to be a 100% perfect. I think Google has to come and say like, "Yep, if you're going to migrate over, expect there to be some traffic loss for some time." Those are the things that are just going to happen and there's going to be a problem, there's going to be things you have to fix. I mean, it could be, by the way, things that you have to fix that are not really even on the SEO side. For example, I saw they moved over, I don't remember how the heck they ended up like this, but all of their blog posts, the first paragraph, somehow they coded it automatically that the text was in white and you couldn't read it. You got to the page and you couldn't read it. Now Google could read it great, but the users got there and they were like, "This sucks." And no one's linking to it or whatever it is. It's just not good, obviously. And you mentioned being holistic about it and as an SEO, I mean maybe it's not really here, but you should look, you should see what's going on and you should be take care of what's... Because they're going to be things that shift and it impacts sometimes everything, which by the way, what's the worst that can happen? Well, that's like everything's the worst that could... It could be really bad, which is why you need to be careful. And I would say you're right about having one person manage all of it, or overseeing it. I would also recommend that person be a type A personality. Somebody who's got a checklist for everything. It's crossing every T, dotting every I, thinking about what the next problem is going to be so they can predict what the problem is going to be before it happens and have a list about those. It's one of those things that you could be super smart and greatest strategy and that's not be your thing. There are definitely people who are brilliant with migration, not their thing because it's so detail oriented. Crystal Carter: So detailed. And the other thing I would say is that thinking about that, is that one of the things that I always do with the migration is I always download the original site. So benchmarking and sorting out yourself before the website so that you can see. So for instance, if we're talking about the tablecloth, if you don't know what the table looked like before, how do you know if something moved? How do you know if something moved? How do you know if something changed? So you should always benchmark what you want to see. So benchmark what your normal traffic is, what things you normally rank for, which things you normally... What you would normally expect to see over the course of even a year. Because there's a lot of seasonality. In all businesses, there's going to be some seasonality. If you think about accountants or whatever, come tax season, there's going to be a high... There's going to be a peak season. And then for white collar industries, it tends to be like during holiday seasons, that tends to be a bit of a lull. So for instance, there's always some seasonality. So make sure you know what your traffic looks like. Make sure that you know what your keywords look like. And I always download the site before because it's always useful to have that to hand. There's a couple of tools that you can get to do this, but I always download the full site before so that I can see what it looked like before anything gets moved around. And also monitor it, monitor it, monitor it, before, during, after, throughout the whole thing and keep monitoring it. And I'll even monitor up to a year. And the other thing is if it's done well, you don't necessarily see a drop in traffic. Sometimes you see a big increase actually if you've done it well. And also, a migration, again, I talked about it being an opportunity to clean house. It's sometimes a really good opportunity to add new content and stuff because if you're changing around the format of the website, the how of the website, for instance, like how people navigate to different pages or how people use or how people access different information, you might look around and say, "Oh, actually we can do that in a different way." Maybe those bits of blogs that are thin should actually be formatted as FAQs instead. So maybe we can do that differently. And when you do that, you can add more value to the website and sometimes you actually see a boost, but you should make sure that you're mapping those things correctly. So for instance, if you change a blog into an FAQ, then make sure that you've done the 301s correctly and that you've formatted the new page correctly and that you're tracking it and you know what's going on. Mordy Oberstein: It's also a good time to reflect how your ecosystem is working. If you work with a bunch of sub domains and you're looking out from the main site to these other sub domains. First off, that might be the best way to do it. If you have to reform it, restructure anyway, this is a great time. I've seen sites where there's one page, for whatever reason, it's linking to all of their different sub-domains and then they mess around with that page. First off, even if you did that right, that might not be the best way to go about this to begin with. So it's a good opportunity to sit and think, does this actually make sense for how we want our site to be structured and how we want people to access and move along, as you said, from page to page or sub domain to sub domain or whatever it is. I guess to end off real quick, if you are migrating a website, hopefully you get a boost. If you see it, slight traffic loss, don't freak out. It's sometimes par for the course. Try to keep URL the same whenever you can. Just avoids a lot of the mess. Just makes things so much easier. And then check it all before it goes live so you don't end up with the canolicalization problem I mentioned before. Check it before it goes live, a bunch of times. Crystal Carter: Check it, check again, check it 25 times. I keep checking it. Mordy Oberstein: And then check it afterwards. Crystal Carter: Check it afterwards. Check all of the things and make sure that you're checking as well as user experience. Because the other thing is when you're migrating, there's all the technical stuff as well. But very funny, if I go to a website and they changed things around, I'm like, "Where's that thing I liked? I don't know where it is. I don't know where that is." So you might see your conversion rates change for a while, while people get used to your new configuration. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to look at the whole ecosystem. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good time. It's a good time for all. You know what's a good time? When's a good time? When is it a good time for an SEO to be involved in a site migration? If you are an SEO, when should you demand that you be involved? And if you're a website owner, when should you involve the SEO in the site migration process? To help answer that, let's please welcome Miracle Inameti. Take it away, Miracle. Miracle Inameti: Never involve the SEO team. Just wait. If it's a success, then take all the credit. If it's not, then you can blame them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that you should always involve the SEO team. Once you start thinking of a site migration, you should speak to your SEO team. When this doesn't happen, it's either because people within the organization don't understand the SEO team's function. They see the SEO team on the marketing as a campaigns function and they want to present to you this shiny news site and go, "Is this fit for purpose?" However, there's so many things that the SEO team has to think about when you're planning a site migration. And in order for the site migration to be successful and for you not to lose any visibility, you need to involve the SEO team in the planning process. So there are various types of site migration. There is several migrations, there's platform migrations. There is just a risking, there's URL. I think the ones that are most critical to the SEO team is when you are changing the URL structure, migrating the domain because they need to plan redirects, make sure that everything is going end to end and relevant page to relevant page. On a page by page level, not just like the whole domain is redirected to the homepage. They need to ensure that all critical pages are taking long. They need to look at back links, which ones are relevant, which ones they want to, you know, walk contact into, to link directly to the pages. So there's so many things that the SEO team needs to think about. There is tracking as well. You want to make sure that your tracking and monitoring still stays on or are migrated to the right pages. So you need to make sure that you are set up in search console, any of the tools that you are using to track them and monitor the performance of your site is done. So all of these things. You need to make sure that when the site is migrated, the search engines are informed that your site is migrating. You want the new structure to get crawled quick and index. It's very, very critical that the SEO team is involved right at the start so that they can plan for all of this. Mordy Oberstein: Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Miracle. Obviously, it's super important to have your SEO team involved in the migration process as soon as possible. I'll say I don't want to double down on SEO. I think it's really important to have all your teams involved in the migration process as soon as possible so you all can communicate and be on the same page with each other. I think it's just getting people involved in communication at the very, very beginning is probably the linchpin of migration success. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think everyone should know what's going on and I absolutely agree with Miracle about saying that it's very important to have input from SEO and for all of the different layers. When you're talking about having other teams involved, that impacts the effectiveness of the migration. So SEOs will have their own priorities. She talked a lot about back links, she talked a lot about the structure of the page. But again, there's going to be things that the sales team needs as well and that they want to. That might be their favorite thing, that's a really useful tool that works really, really well for them that an SEO might not be able to see from their assessment. So it's really important to have lots of different parts of your team involved. And not to just, like she said, just present "Oh, look at our shiny new thing." I've had people do that and they've had a panic attack because they're like, "Look at our brand new..." And then you didn't... This is completely no. And that can be really, really stressful and it can mean that you're starting on a back foot when you don't involve teams, then rely on the website in order to do their work and in order to make sure that the business is performing the way that it should. So- Mordy Oberstein: You know why you don't want to start on a bad foot, if you're an SEO, as strategically as possible, fight for a seat at the table. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those things. Crystal Carter: Totally. And starting on the back foot particularly with migration can be a real challenge because Google's trying to figure out all of the things anyway. And so if you've just migrated the site and you have to do a lot of the SEO work that should have been done before whilst Google's trying to understand the new site, then it's going to make it very difficult to rank and fight those fires at the same time. So make sure that you're involved early. Make sure that if your SEO is saying they want a meeting about the migration, that you're getting that meeting, setting that meeting making sure that happens. Mordy Oberstein: The early SEO gets the worm. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of migration, so we sum that up a fascinating little example around keyword disambiguation that means, what does this keyword actually mean? So if I type in for example, Rangers, is that the New York Rangers hockey team? Is it the Rangers soccer football team? Is it the Texas Rangers, baseball team and or police organization? What does it actually mean? And Google has ways of disambiguating what that actually is, but we're going to use the term how to migrate the keyword, how to migrate to show you how you could use the PAA box, the people also ask box, which is Google's set of four initial questions that, I ask a very popular question, to ask around the web and then offer you a snippet of content and a URL to answer that question. So we're going to see how everyone's little favorite SERP feature the PAA, people also ask box can help you disambiguate because it is time for fun with the PAA box. Crystal Carter: Oh, we used to have so much fun with the PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: It's so much fun. When I ever go to Google and I look at it, I look at the SERP, I'm like, "Oh, the PAA box is so fun because you keep clicking on it and more things load." Crystal Carter: Just more and more. Mordy Oberstein: This is so much fun. Crystal Carter: This is so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: Look at, look more things load when you search for how to migrate, what I find interesting is sometimes Google has a little box on the side that's literally called an ambiguation box that helps you understand, okay, migrate what? As I mentioned before, rangers, if you type rangers, you'll probably get a box. I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to type rangers into Google. I know it. I'm going to get a box on the side, right? See results about Texas Rangers, baseball team, even though the one... The SERP I have now is about the hockey team. Google knows I might mean something else, but in this case how to migrate, it's not there, but it should be there. Crystal Carter: It should be there. Mordy Oberstein: And it's important. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. But the people also ask here, it's coming in to save the day on this particular section to help people to understand which thing they're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Which is super important because if you are trying to target the keyword, how to migrate, because you have a blog post about how to migrate, then you need to understand what's actually showing up on Google because your post might not be the migrate that Google thinks it is, or Google thinks that users want. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So I think on this particular one we have, the questions that you get are how do we migrate, how does migrate work? Again, people also ask, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but there we go. How do you plan a migration? Also, how long is a migration process? Now, when you think about the term migration, there's lots of different ways you can talk about that particular term if we're thinking about a disambiguation situation. And so they're hedging their bets with some of those answers. So some of them answers some kinds of ways to migrate and some of them answers other kinds of ways to migrate because they're trying to help people find what they need. Mordy Oberstein: So just so you know, by the way, I've had, how do we migrate? How does migrate work? How do you plan on migration? How is data migration done? So I have that last question that's different because I'm looking at it from the US right now and I'm assuming you're set up from the UK. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So then how do we migrate that gives us a human migration thing? Mordy Oberstein: Right, so that's topic one, is human migration. Crystal Carter: Then the second one I've got is how animal migration works. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, topic two, animal migration. Crystal Carter: And then I've got how do you plan a migration? And then that's talking about data migration. Mordy Oberstein: Topic three. Crystal Carter: And how long is migration process? That's also talking about data migration. So here Google's trying to figure out different ways to understand that. Similarly, with- Mordy Oberstein: Three different ways, 'cause I can count 1, 2, 3. Crystal Carter: And if you look up something similar like migrating, you also get some answers that are around human migration. Some answers that are around salmon migration, for instance. And so Google sometimes uses the people also ask to help point people where they need to go if they've entered a term that's ambiguous. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So by the way, this is a great example because if you're writing this post about how to migrate, let's say yours is about data migration. So realizing that you're limiting your chance to pull in organic traffic because Google's addressing three different intents on the page. So you probably want to go a little bit more specific or realize that if you're targeting how to migrate, you're not going to get a lot of traffic necessarily because you're only relevant to... Let's assume that Google has it proportionate to a third of the people who are coming for that keyword. Also, really interesting by the way, is that both of our cases, and this is part of the disambiguation process, the first question we both had was relevant to... I'm talking about human migration then animal migration. And even though our last two questions weren't the same, they both addressed data migration, meaning that shows you that the dominant intent might be data migration because Google thinks that's the strongest... Let's rephrase that, because Google is showing a double result there because that's probably the strongest intent on the page or for the keyword rather. Crystal Carter: Had a webinar recently and someone was asking about keywords and they said, "Oh, this keyword is too difficult." And sometimes that happens when you have a keyword that is like this. So something like how to migrate, if you were writing an SEO blog around that, for instance, then you would think, "Oh yeah, those are the questions that people are asking." But actually there's lots of people asking you those questions in lots of different ways. So as you're saying, if you're making it more specific, maybe you might not have the same huge search volume, but the people who are actually searching for what you are actually talking about are much more likely to actually find the information that you have. So that's really useful to think about. And again, the ways that that data flows from the people also ask can, yeah, give you such information about how people think about that terminology. And if you're finding that, like you said, that two out of three are for a different topic, actually, then- Mordy Oberstein: You should pivot. Crystal Carter: ... you should pivot. Mordy Oberstein: Which comes back to this old, the SEO adage. Don't just rely on when an SEO tool tells you the search volume is super high for this keyword, you should grow the SERP and see what it actually looks like. That's the best advice I could ever give you about SEO is go to the SERP, go to Google, look at the results and see what's there and use Google to your advantage. Now speaking of using Google to your advantage, what gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Crystal Carter: What gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Understanding the latest news around what's happening in SEO? Crystal Carter: You don't say. Mordy Oberstein: I do say, which means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh boy, the sky is falling. Big brands such as Bankrate are now using, well, now admitting to using AI writers for some of its content. And Google has taken notice per the great Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Google Search responds to Bankrate, more brands using AI to write content. As I mentioned about five seconds ago, AI written content has been spotted on big name websites because they admitted it right there on the page saying quote, "This article was generated using automation technology," et cetera. Don't say the et cetera, I'm just using half the quote. The attribution is, one, great to see, and two, also mentions the content was reviewed by a human. When you look at the actual article, it does list the name of the human who reviewed that content. And now a word of caution by Mordy Oberstein. AI scrapes the web and regurgitates what's already been said. So it can't really offer something genuinely unique. So be careful and don't be swayed by sites with a huge amount of topical authority using AI written content. Also, again, they may have extensionally revised it with their human reviewers. So it's not a carte blanche, just start doing whatever you want with AI written content. However, Google did say, and this is coming from Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan, that it is okay to use AI written content. The general problem with AI written content is that it's low quality content written for search rankings as opposed to users. But when it is used or written for the sake of being helpful, then that's spying. So Danny said, if content is helpful and creative for people first, that's not an issue referring to AI written content. So Google is in my opinion, walking back on its hard line that they've taken in the past. I think they have to, AA content is here, it is staying, it is not going anywhere. It does have a place, my personal opinion is that it has a place with borders. And knowing those borders and how to use AI properly is incredibly important, particularly if you're not one of these ginormous sites on the web that's just banking on a lot of pre-established authority. Article number two, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. This time Google linking to multiple providers in product reviews might give a small ranking boost. So way back when Google updated its guidance around product reviews in relation to its product review updates, saying that, "Yeah, you have to have more than one provider in the review." Meaning if you're just stuffing in an affiliate link or multiple affiliate links to the one company that you are tied to, that's not a great user experience, it's a questionable user experience altogether. So now we have official confirmation that Google is looking at this algorithmically. I would have expected the impact to have been bigger or Google to have wanted the impact, at least to have been bigger. Google is saying here, that's a pretty small factor. My takeaway is Google, as a whole, is not happy about the state of affiliates. They are looking at the web and trying to improve the web and is looking to the change the game here in regards to affiliates, which is why I thought that this would've been a bigger factor. But again, linking to multiple providers from the user's point of view is a more... It's called honest experience that Google is trying to push for and it has been confirmed. It is a small ranking boost. So if you are writing up product reviews and just stuffing in your one particular affiliate, that could, all things being equal, impact your rankings and that will do it for this week's snappy news. And now we're back from the Snappy news. Now, before we go, as we always do, you should have a diverse set of information in front of you from a diverse set of SEOs. So we always end off, before we have to duly depart with our follow of the week, and you already mentioned him. Yeah, you did. It was like SEO, podcasting, foreshadowing. Now who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? It's Chris Green people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Chris Green. Crystal Carter: Chris Green. Mordy Oberstein: The one and only Chris Green who you can find on Twitter at Chris Green SEO, C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-E-N SEO. Link to his profile and show notes. And Chris is a wonderful SEO, technical SEO to has done... As Crystal mentioned, he did a poll post on the Wix SEO hub about things you need to know about migrating and particularly about money you're migrating to Wix as well, so if you're looking to bring a site to Wix, that's a great resource for you. He says it's a great resource in general on social media. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training, and so he's got a lot of really great information and his article on migration is particularly useful for people who are looking to migrate to Wix. I mean, he just lays it out really, really clearly. He's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he's got a lot of really cool resources for you, also, on his own website. It's chris-green.net, all sorts of templates you can use and checklists you can use, and all sorts of deep dive SEO stuffed greatness for you. So check that website out, which happens to be, by the way, a Wix website. Yes, dare I say. So definitely check that out. That gave you a quick Tech SEO audit template. There's mapping for keywords to your website for SEO using blended data to add annotations onto time series in Google Looker Data Studio. Lot of great resources for you on Chris's website, so definitely check that out. Awesome. I think we're done then. Crystal Carter: Well done. I think we have moved everything along. I think that everything has gone from one place to another. Mordy Oberstein: There's been no hiccups. It's all been- Crystal Carter: There's been no hiccups. Mordy Oberstein: Permanently moved with all the proper checks and balances and whatnot. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Indeed, we've moved everything we have migrated from the beginning of the podcast to the end of the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Amazingly. Crystal Carter: Now we shall see you again. Mordy Oberstein: I hope the traffic is good. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into why ranking factors might not matter nearly as much as you think. Heresy, I know. Look for wherever you consume your podcast 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 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. And until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Miracle Inameti Chris Green Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The Fundamentals of Site Migrations Site Moves & Migrations News: Google search responds to BankRate, more brands using AI to write content Google: Linking To Multiple Providers In Product Reviews Might Give A Small Ranking Boost Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Miracle Inameti Chris Green Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The Fundamentals of Site Migrations Site Moves & Migrations News: Google search responds to BankRate, more brands using AI to write content Google: Linking To Multiple Providers In Product Reviews Might Give A Small Ranking Boost Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Guess we're pushing out some grueling new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of SEO branding here at Wix, the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, I was going to say edible, but that doesn't make any sense. Our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. SEO internet people. Welcome to episode 21. We're about to double down on these SEO insights. Mordy Oberstein: It's Blackjack. It's our Blackjack episode. Crystal Carter: It's right. That's what's up. We're going to put two on the river or double down. I can't... I've forgotten about Blackjack. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. If I tell you, I've been to a casino one time. My wife, 15 years ago, we walked in, we played a couple of games. We said, "This is boring." And we bounced the hell out of there. Crystal Carter: I got married in Las Vegas. I spend a lot of time. Mordy Oberstein: On purpose? Crystal Carter: My family on purpose. Las Vegas. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you meant to get married? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Okay cool. I was checking. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You know Caesars Palace? Mordy Oberstein: Sure, I've heard of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got married across the street from there. Mordy Oberstein: Across the street. It's good set up. Crystal Carter: Thank you. So, yeah, they demolished it. It was a dive, but we had a great wedding. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can easily set up 301 redirects with our redirect managers. Set single redirects, group redirects when the URL follow the same logic like they live in the same folder, upload bulk redirects, or do nothing as we implement redirect automatically and aesthetic product and event pages. And we're talking about redirects because guess what we're talking about today? Site migrations. Oh, the word itself made me gas and choke. 'Cause you're going to wreck the URLs with the site migration. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. Mordy Oberstein: And that's where things get into problems. Crystal Carter: You weren't there, man. You weren't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Today's show is about the root canal and lobotomy of SEO site migrations. We'll dive into migrations and why do so many people get them wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing that can happen? Why are SEO so freaked out about site migrations? The ever wonderful Miracle Inameti stops by to talk about when SEOs should become involved in the site migration process. Also, have a bit of fun around migrations and the people also ask box. And of course, we have your ever so snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social. For more SEO awesomeness episode number 21 of the SERP's Up podcast is migrating your way. Get it. That was a bad one. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: That was a bad... I tried. That was a bad one. I was thinking of that or it's an SEO migraine-tion, get it because it's a migraine and migrate at the same time. Crystal Carter: Oh man. Wow. okay Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How's that? Not good? Yeah. Crystal Carter: All right, so moving on. Mordy Oberstein: We're migrating past that and to the next thing. Crystal Carter: We're going to shift, we're going to do a 301 from that. No, kidding. Okay. So just so we're all on the same page, we are going to talk a little bit about what a site migration is. On the Wix SEO Learning Hub, there's a fantastic article from Mr. Chris Green where he explains the fundamentals of site migrations and he explains that site migration is a term that SEOs use quite often. But being familiar with the different types of elements that make up a site migration can really help you to make the process easier. He talks about a few common site migration scenarios. One is changing domain names, which is essentially where you change your name from, say, redshoes.com to maybe even redshoes.co.uk or the red shoes or bestredshoes.com. So that's where you change your domain name. There's also migrating through hosting providers, which is something that people don't very often think about, but that's one that he thinks about as well. And then he considers that where your website's hosted one company and then maybe moving hosting to another company. And sometimes going into the ins and outs of that can be quite complicated because sometimes with hosting, people don't remember where the hosting is and all of that sort of thing. Also, you can think about changing the content management system. So for instance, if you're keeping the same domain name but you're changing from maybe one CMS to another CMS, then that might be something that you want to think about with regards to... Well, it is absolutely something you need to think about with regards to migrations. I would also add to this, sometimes changing the design of your website can be migration. So there's a few SEOs that I've heard talk about migrations and they're like, "It can have it, big deal." And sometimes people don't think about this, but I've had it where clients were like, "Oh yeah, we're just changing the homepage," or, "We're just changing this big money page. We're changing around the design of it." And I'm like, "We need to check that." And they say, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, if you have the design of a page and you have a certain number of links that are coming from that, you have certain elements that are on that page that if you change that page, then we need to figure out what we're going to do with all of that link equity as we're spreading it out across the rest of the page. And that is something that we need to think about as well." So we can also think about URL changes overall. Now, when you're talking about your migration, Google sometimes call this a site move. So they have a page on their documentation saying, "What is a site move?" And in that they talk about site moves without URL changes and they talk about site moves with URL changes. And all of these things are considered migrations. And essentially what you want to think about when you have a migration is making sure that Google can find the new content and that Google can find the old content as well, so that if you have old content, that's really important that they can find it, that there's links to it. And you also need to think about how it impacts your wider digital footprint. So Mordy mentioned 301 redirects. 301 redirects are really useful for what happens within your site, but they're also really useful for what happens with the links that you have out there on the web still coming into your site. So for instance, let's say you changed your blog format. So let's say it used to be example.com/post, and then you change it to example.com/article for instance, you need to think about that because you'll have old links to the old URL format and those will impact how your site is indexed, how your site is performing, and how it all works out. So there's a lot of ins and outs. There's a lot of different parts of a migration that you should think about. They should not be taken lightly at all. And essentially anything that you're changing that's a structural change or even a design change that impacts your link structure should be considered a migration. And sometimes there's big, big migration. Sometimes it's a smaller migration, but you still should think about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: I think you answered all three of the questions we mentioned in the intro in one breath. What was it? Why did so many people get cyber migrations wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen and why are we all freaked out about them? And it's because there's so many things to think about. And then you think about the implications of those. I've had a case one time where it's like they forgot like, "Oh wait, the canonicals that..." We actually use the old website for the canonical. We don't know why we did that, but we did. And now things are totally messed up and we don't want even thought about that. 'Cause you're not thinking about that. Okay, the URL, I got the old URL, I got the new URL, I got this. But when you're transferring things over and you're copying and pasting certain things, you end up copying and pasting the canonicals over and now doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And there can be other things underneath that. So sometimes it might be that you have old menu configurations in the back end of the website. You copied and pasted those over and there's a 404. I've seen that before where people are like, "Why have we got this 404?" And it's like, because it's in the menu that we migrated over from the other thing. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? It's like when you're family, you stick all the dirty laundry, sweep it under the carpet for a long, long time and then a family event happens. And all those things, the dysfunction that you swept under the carpet for years, all of a sudden it comes out at one time and it's complete chaos and dysfunction. That's a site migration. Crystal Carter: I think that there's so many different moving parts. So there's the stuff with all the DNS stuff and making sure that all of that stuff is working well. There's also the migrations from before. So sometimes if somebody did a bad migration before you then that can haunt you when you try to do the next migration, for instance. So it can be very, very tricky. And then sometimes it can feel a little bit like... There's that magic trick where there's a fully set table and somebody tries to remove the tablecloth from the table. And what you want to do is essentially make sure that everything that you need stays there, but it can also be a really, really good time to clean house. So you talked about sweeping things under the carpet and migration can be a really good time to be like, "We don't need this URL, we don't need that one, we don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need that." And to clear those things out and that can be a really good time to do that as well. And I think also with migrations, it's very important that someone has the reins, that there is someone who is in charge of it. And this is normally an SEO and it should be an SEO. There's somebody who's in charge of making sure that holistically it works. So I've had it before where a client migrated a site to a new setup and the client, they had a third party subduing without documentation and they decided to copy all of those things and put them on the blog of the new site. And you're making a face here like, "Oh my gosh." But they did not cut off the old help doc. So instead we had a whole another set of content that was competing, which Google had already indexed the other site and then they added it onto the new site. And the way that it had been configured was super complicated and it was very, very difficult to unpick all of these different pages that had been added into and with all of the different URLs and stuff. So it can be very, very tricky. And one of the things we have built into Wix, because it's such a pain in the box, one of the things we have built into Wix is sometimes you have to do some of the big folder updates via DHT access file for instance. But within Wix for instance, you can go into this bulk URL management tool and you can set up so that any URL that starts with a certain prefix will be redirected to a certain thing. So for instance, in the post article example, if you had all of your blogs under post, you can set up bulk redirect within the tool that's within the CMS. You can set a bulk redirect that says any URL that starts with... That has the prefixed post should be redirected to this one in this framework. And you can set it up so it's in the same way that you would with an HD access file. And it makes it a lot easier to manage those things in bulk. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm going to catch the error. So that's also good. But I want to go back to your point about the tablecloth where you pull a tablecloth off and then you're hoping everything stays the same. I think one of the reasons why I think we're freaked out about site migration and why they're pain in the neck is that we don't properly set expectations. 'Cause when you pull that table cloth out, it's inevitable that something's going to shift around a little bit and it's not going to be a 100% perfect. I think Google has to come and say like, "Yep, if you're going to migrate over, expect there to be some traffic loss for some time." Those are the things that are just going to happen and there's going to be a problem, there's going to be things you have to fix. I mean, it could be, by the way, things that you have to fix that are not really even on the SEO side. For example, I saw they moved over, I don't remember how the heck they ended up like this, but all of their blog posts, the first paragraph, somehow they coded it automatically that the text was in white and you couldn't read it. You got to the page and you couldn't read it. Now Google could read it great, but the users got there and they were like, "This sucks." And no one's linking to it or whatever it is. It's just not good, obviously. And you mentioned being holistic about it and as an SEO, I mean maybe it's not really here, but you should look, you should see what's going on and you should be take care of what's... Because they're going to be things that shift and it impacts sometimes everything, which by the way, what's the worst that can happen? Well, that's like everything's the worst that could... It could be really bad, which is why you need to be careful. And I would say you're right about having one person manage all of it, or overseeing it. I would also recommend that person be a type A personality. Somebody who's got a checklist for everything. It's crossing every T, dotting every I, thinking about what the next problem is going to be so they can predict what the problem is going to be before it happens and have a list about those. It's one of those things that you could be super smart and greatest strategy and that's not be your thing. There are definitely people who are brilliant with migration, not their thing because it's so detail oriented. Crystal Carter: So detailed. And the other thing I would say is that thinking about that, is that one of the things that I always do with the migration is I always download the original site. So benchmarking and sorting out yourself before the website so that you can see. So for instance, if we're talking about the tablecloth, if you don't know what the table looked like before, how do you know if something moved? How do you know if something moved? How do you know if something changed? So you should always benchmark what you want to see. So benchmark what your normal traffic is, what things you normally rank for, which things you normally... What you would normally expect to see over the course of even a year. Because there's a lot of seasonality. In all businesses, there's going to be some seasonality. If you think about accountants or whatever, come tax season, there's going to be a high... There's going to be a peak season. And then for white collar industries, it tends to be like during holiday seasons, that tends to be a bit of a lull. So for instance, there's always some seasonality. So make sure you know what your traffic looks like. Make sure that you know what your keywords look like. And I always download the site before because it's always useful to have that to hand. There's a couple of tools that you can get to do this, but I always download the full site before so that I can see what it looked like before anything gets moved around. And also monitor it, monitor it, monitor it, before, during, after, throughout the whole thing and keep monitoring it. And I'll even monitor up to a year. And the other thing is if it's done well, you don't necessarily see a drop in traffic. Sometimes you see a big increase actually if you've done it well. And also, a migration, again, I talked about it being an opportunity to clean house. It's sometimes a really good opportunity to add new content and stuff because if you're changing around the format of the website, the how of the website, for instance, like how people navigate to different pages or how people use or how people access different information, you might look around and say, "Oh, actually we can do that in a different way." Maybe those bits of blogs that are thin should actually be formatted as FAQs instead. So maybe we can do that differently. And when you do that, you can add more value to the website and sometimes you actually see a boost, but you should make sure that you're mapping those things correctly. So for instance, if you change a blog into an FAQ, then make sure that you've done the 301s correctly and that you've formatted the new page correctly and that you're tracking it and you know what's going on. Mordy Oberstein: It's also a good time to reflect how your ecosystem is working. If you work with a bunch of sub domains and you're looking out from the main site to these other sub domains. First off, that might be the best way to do it. If you have to reform it, restructure anyway, this is a great time. I've seen sites where there's one page, for whatever reason, it's linking to all of their different sub-domains and then they mess around with that page. First off, even if you did that right, that might not be the best way to go about this to begin with. So it's a good opportunity to sit and think, does this actually make sense for how we want our site to be structured and how we want people to access and move along, as you said, from page to page or sub domain to sub domain or whatever it is. I guess to end off real quick, if you are migrating a website, hopefully you get a boost. If you see it, slight traffic loss, don't freak out. It's sometimes par for the course. Try to keep URL the same whenever you can. Just avoids a lot of the mess. Just makes things so much easier. And then check it all before it goes live so you don't end up with the canolicalization problem I mentioned before. Check it before it goes live, a bunch of times. Crystal Carter: Check it, check again, check it 25 times. I keep checking it. Mordy Oberstein: And then check it afterwards. Crystal Carter: Check it afterwards. Check all of the things and make sure that you're checking as well as user experience. Because the other thing is when you're migrating, there's all the technical stuff as well. But very funny, if I go to a website and they changed things around, I'm like, "Where's that thing I liked? I don't know where it is. I don't know where that is." So you might see your conversion rates change for a while, while people get used to your new configuration. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to look at the whole ecosystem. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good time. It's a good time for all. You know what's a good time? When's a good time? When is it a good time for an SEO to be involved in a site migration? If you are an SEO, when should you demand that you be involved? And if you're a website owner, when should you involve the SEO in the site migration process? To help answer that, let's please welcome Miracle Inameti. Take it away, Miracle. Miracle Inameti: Never involve the SEO team. Just wait. If it's a success, then take all the credit. If it's not, then you can blame them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that you should always involve the SEO team. Once you start thinking of a site migration, you should speak to your SEO team. When this doesn't happen, it's either because people within the organization don't understand the SEO team's function. They see the SEO team on the marketing as a campaigns function and they want to present to you this shiny news site and go, "Is this fit for purpose?" However, there's so many things that the SEO team has to think about when you're planning a site migration. And in order for the site migration to be successful and for you not to lose any visibility, you need to involve the SEO team in the planning process. So there are various types of site migration. There is several migrations, there's platform migrations. There is just a risking, there's URL. I think the ones that are most critical to the SEO team is when you are changing the URL structure, migrating the domain because they need to plan redirects, make sure that everything is going end to end and relevant page to relevant page. On a page by page level, not just like the whole domain is redirected to the homepage. They need to ensure that all critical pages are taking long. They need to look at back links, which ones are relevant, which ones they want to, you know, walk contact into, to link directly to the pages. So there's so many things that the SEO team needs to think about. There is tracking as well. You want to make sure that your tracking and monitoring still stays on or are migrated to the right pages. So you need to make sure that you are set up in search console, any of the tools that you are using to track them and monitor the performance of your site is done. So all of these things. You need to make sure that when the site is migrated, the search engines are informed that your site is migrating. You want the new structure to get crawled quick and index. It's very, very critical that the SEO team is involved right at the start so that they can plan for all of this. Mordy Oberstein: Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Miracle. Obviously, it's super important to have your SEO team involved in the migration process as soon as possible. I'll say I don't want to double down on SEO. I think it's really important to have all your teams involved in the migration process as soon as possible so you all can communicate and be on the same page with each other. I think it's just getting people involved in communication at the very, very beginning is probably the linchpin of migration success. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think everyone should know what's going on and I absolutely agree with Miracle about saying that it's very important to have input from SEO and for all of the different layers. When you're talking about having other teams involved, that impacts the effectiveness of the migration. So SEOs will have their own priorities. She talked a lot about back links, she talked a lot about the structure of the page. But again, there's going to be things that the sales team needs as well and that they want to. That might be their favorite thing, that's a really useful tool that works really, really well for them that an SEO might not be able to see from their assessment. So it's really important to have lots of different parts of your team involved. And not to just, like she said, just present "Oh, look at our shiny new thing." I've had people do that and they've had a panic attack because they're like, "Look at our brand new..." And then you didn't... This is completely no. And that can be really, really stressful and it can mean that you're starting on a back foot when you don't involve teams, then rely on the website in order to do their work and in order to make sure that the business is performing the way that it should. So- Mordy Oberstein: You know why you don't want to start on a bad foot, if you're an SEO, as strategically as possible, fight for a seat at the table. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those things. Crystal Carter: Totally. And starting on the back foot particularly with migration can be a real challenge because Google's trying to figure out all of the things anyway. And so if you've just migrated the site and you have to do a lot of the SEO work that should have been done before whilst Google's trying to understand the new site, then it's going to make it very difficult to rank and fight those fires at the same time. So make sure that you're involved early. Make sure that if your SEO is saying they want a meeting about the migration, that you're getting that meeting, setting that meeting making sure that happens. Mordy Oberstein: The early SEO gets the worm. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of migration, so we sum that up a fascinating little example around keyword disambiguation that means, what does this keyword actually mean? So if I type in for example, Rangers, is that the New York Rangers hockey team? Is it the Rangers soccer football team? Is it the Texas Rangers, baseball team and or police organization? What does it actually mean? And Google has ways of disambiguating what that actually is, but we're going to use the term how to migrate the keyword, how to migrate to show you how you could use the PAA box, the people also ask box, which is Google's set of four initial questions that, I ask a very popular question, to ask around the web and then offer you a snippet of content and a URL to answer that question. So we're going to see how everyone's little favorite SERP feature the PAA, people also ask box can help you disambiguate because it is time for fun with the PAA box. Crystal Carter: Oh, we used to have so much fun with the PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: It's so much fun. When I ever go to Google and I look at it, I look at the SERP, I'm like, "Oh, the PAA box is so fun because you keep clicking on it and more things load." Crystal Carter: Just more and more. Mordy Oberstein: This is so much fun. Crystal Carter: This is so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: Look at, look more things load when you search for how to migrate, what I find interesting is sometimes Google has a little box on the side that's literally called an ambiguation box that helps you understand, okay, migrate what? As I mentioned before, rangers, if you type rangers, you'll probably get a box. I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to type rangers into Google. I know it. I'm going to get a box on the side, right? See results about Texas Rangers, baseball team, even though the one... The SERP I have now is about the hockey team. Google knows I might mean something else, but in this case how to migrate, it's not there, but it should be there. Crystal Carter: It should be there. Mordy Oberstein: And it's important. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. But the people also ask here, it's coming in to save the day on this particular section to help people to understand which thing they're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Which is super important because if you are trying to target the keyword, how to migrate, because you have a blog post about how to migrate, then you need to understand what's actually showing up on Google because your post might not be the migrate that Google thinks it is, or Google thinks that users want. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So I think on this particular one we have, the questions that you get are how do we migrate, how does migrate work? Again, people also ask, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but there we go. How do you plan a migration? Also, how long is a migration process? Now, when you think about the term migration, there's lots of different ways you can talk about that particular term if we're thinking about a disambiguation situation. And so they're hedging their bets with some of those answers. So some of them answers some kinds of ways to migrate and some of them answers other kinds of ways to migrate because they're trying to help people find what they need. Mordy Oberstein: So just so you know, by the way, I've had, how do we migrate? How does migrate work? How do you plan on migration? How is data migration done? So I have that last question that's different because I'm looking at it from the US right now and I'm assuming you're set up from the UK. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So then how do we migrate that gives us a human migration thing? Mordy Oberstein: Right, so that's topic one, is human migration. Crystal Carter: Then the second one I've got is how animal migration works. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, topic two, animal migration. Crystal Carter: And then I've got how do you plan a migration? And then that's talking about data migration. Mordy Oberstein: Topic three. Crystal Carter: And how long is migration process? That's also talking about data migration. So here Google's trying to figure out different ways to understand that. Similarly, with- Mordy Oberstein: Three different ways, 'cause I can count 1, 2, 3. Crystal Carter: And if you look up something similar like migrating, you also get some answers that are around human migration. Some answers that are around salmon migration, for instance. And so Google sometimes uses the people also ask to help point people where they need to go if they've entered a term that's ambiguous. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So by the way, this is a great example because if you're writing this post about how to migrate, let's say yours is about data migration. So realizing that you're limiting your chance to pull in organic traffic because Google's addressing three different intents on the page. So you probably want to go a little bit more specific or realize that if you're targeting how to migrate, you're not going to get a lot of traffic necessarily because you're only relevant to... Let's assume that Google has it proportionate to a third of the people who are coming for that keyword. Also, really interesting by the way, is that both of our cases, and this is part of the disambiguation process, the first question we both had was relevant to... I'm talking about human migration then animal migration. And even though our last two questions weren't the same, they both addressed data migration, meaning that shows you that the dominant intent might be data migration because Google thinks that's the strongest... Let's rephrase that, because Google is showing a double result there because that's probably the strongest intent on the page or for the keyword rather. Crystal Carter: Had a webinar recently and someone was asking about keywords and they said, "Oh, this keyword is too difficult." And sometimes that happens when you have a keyword that is like this. So something like how to migrate, if you were writing an SEO blog around that, for instance, then you would think, "Oh yeah, those are the questions that people are asking." But actually there's lots of people asking you those questions in lots of different ways. So as you're saying, if you're making it more specific, maybe you might not have the same huge search volume, but the people who are actually searching for what you are actually talking about are much more likely to actually find the information that you have. So that's really useful to think about. And again, the ways that that data flows from the people also ask can, yeah, give you such information about how people think about that terminology. And if you're finding that, like you said, that two out of three are for a different topic, actually, then- Mordy Oberstein: You should pivot. Crystal Carter: ... you should pivot. Mordy Oberstein: Which comes back to this old, the SEO adage. Don't just rely on when an SEO tool tells you the search volume is super high for this keyword, you should grow the SERP and see what it actually looks like. That's the best advice I could ever give you about SEO is go to the SERP, go to Google, look at the results and see what's there and use Google to your advantage. Now speaking of using Google to your advantage, what gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Crystal Carter: What gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Understanding the latest news around what's happening in SEO? Crystal Carter: You don't say. Mordy Oberstein: I do say, which means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh boy, the sky is falling. Big brands such as Bankrate are now using, well, now admitting to using AI writers for some of its content. And Google has taken notice per the great Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Google Search responds to Bankrate, more brands using AI to write content. As I mentioned about five seconds ago, AI written content has been spotted on big name websites because they admitted it right there on the page saying quote, "This article was generated using automation technology," et cetera. Don't say the et cetera, I'm just using half the quote. The attribution is, one, great to see, and two, also mentions the content was reviewed by a human. When you look at the actual article, it does list the name of the human who reviewed that content. And now a word of caution by Mordy Oberstein. AI scrapes the web and regurgitates what's already been said. So it can't really offer something genuinely unique. So be careful and don't be swayed by sites with a huge amount of topical authority using AI written content. Also, again, they may have extensionally revised it with their human reviewers. So it's not a carte blanche, just start doing whatever you want with AI written content. However, Google did say, and this is coming from Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan, that it is okay to use AI written content. The general problem with AI written content is that it's low quality content written for search rankings as opposed to users. But when it is used or written for the sake of being helpful, then that's spying. So Danny said, if content is helpful and creative for people first, that's not an issue referring to AI written content. So Google is in my opinion, walking back on its hard line that they've taken in the past. I think they have to, AA content is here, it is staying, it is not going anywhere. It does have a place, my personal opinion is that it has a place with borders. And knowing those borders and how to use AI properly is incredibly important, particularly if you're not one of these ginormous sites on the web that's just banking on a lot of pre-established authority. Article number two, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. This time Google linking to multiple providers in product reviews might give a small ranking boost. So way back when Google updated its guidance around product reviews in relation to its product review updates, saying that, "Yeah, you have to have more than one provider in the review." Meaning if you're just stuffing in an affiliate link or multiple affiliate links to the one company that you are tied to, that's not a great user experience, it's a questionable user experience altogether. So now we have official confirmation that Google is looking at this algorithmically. I would have expected the impact to have been bigger or Google to have wanted the impact, at least to have been bigger. Google is saying here, that's a pretty small factor. My takeaway is Google, as a whole, is not happy about the state of affiliates. They are looking at the web and trying to improve the web and is looking to the change the game here in regards to affiliates, which is why I thought that this would've been a bigger factor. But again, linking to multiple providers from the user's point of view is a more... It's called honest experience that Google is trying to push for and it has been confirmed. It is a small ranking boost. So if you are writing up product reviews and just stuffing in your one particular affiliate, that could, all things being equal, impact your rankings and that will do it for this week's snappy news. And now we're back from the Snappy news. Now, before we go, as we always do, you should have a diverse set of information in front of you from a diverse set of SEOs. So we always end off, before we have to duly depart with our follow of the week, and you already mentioned him. Yeah, you did. It was like SEO, podcasting, foreshadowing. Now who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? It's Chris Green people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Chris Green. Crystal Carter: Chris Green. Mordy Oberstein: The one and only Chris Green who you can find on Twitter at Chris Green SEO, C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-E-N SEO. Link to his profile and show notes. And Chris is a wonderful SEO, technical SEO to has done... As Crystal mentioned, he did a poll post on the Wix SEO hub about things you need to know about migrating and particularly about money you're migrating to Wix as well, so if you're looking to bring a site to Wix, that's a great resource for you. He says it's a great resource in general on social media. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training, and so he's got a lot of really great information and his article on migration is particularly useful for people who are looking to migrate to Wix. I mean, he just lays it out really, really clearly. He's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he's got a lot of really cool resources for you, also, on his own website. It's chris-green.net, all sorts of templates you can use and checklists you can use, and all sorts of deep dive SEO stuffed greatness for you. So check that website out, which happens to be, by the way, a Wix website. Yes, dare I say. So definitely check that out. That gave you a quick Tech SEO audit template. There's mapping for keywords to your website for SEO using blended data to add annotations onto time series in Google Looker Data Studio. Lot of great resources for you on Chris's website, so definitely check that out. Awesome. I think we're done then. Crystal Carter: Well done. I think we have moved everything along. I think that everything has gone from one place to another. Mordy Oberstein: There's been no hiccups. It's all been- Crystal Carter: There's been no hiccups. Mordy Oberstein: Permanently moved with all the proper checks and balances and whatnot. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Indeed, we've moved everything we have migrated from the beginning of the podcast to the end of the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Amazingly. Crystal Carter: Now we shall see you again. Mordy Oberstein: I hope the traffic is good. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into why ranking factors might not matter nearly as much as you think. Heresy, I know. Look for wherever you consume your podcast 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 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. And until next time, peace, love and SEO. 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Are offline marketing efforts a lost art in the digital age? What's the SEO connection of it all? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter talk with Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling from Near Media to tackle the intricate balance between online and offline marketing strategies. Find out where common offline marketing mistakes play a critical role in your digital presence and SEO strategy. Dive into how word-of-mouth marketing translates into online growth for businesses We’re going “unplugged” in this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Unifying your offline & online marketing Are offline marketing efforts a lost art in the digital age? What's the SEO connection of it all? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter talk with Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling from Near Media to tackle the intricate balance between online and offline marketing strategies. Find out where common offline marketing mistakes play a critical role in your digital presence and SEO strategy. Dive into how word-of-mouth marketing translates into online growth for businesses We’re going “unplugged” in this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 109 | November 6, 2024 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 51:15 This week’s guests Mike Blumenthal Mike has been involved with offering web services since 1995. Prior to specializing in web design and search consulting in 2001, Mike was a principal in a family owned & operated retail business for over 30 years. That business was very successful until it wasn't and was crushed by the new reality of retail. Mike helped co-found LocalU in 2009 (acquired by SterlingSky in 2019) and co-founded GatherUp.com in 2012 (acquired by ByTraject in 2019). During the week, you can find him at Nearmedia.co where David, Greg and he do a weekly podcast on all things local and where he writes about local search and its impact on the business community. Greg Sterling Greg Sterling is one of the leading authorities on local digital marketing, location intelligence and the SMB market. He's been engaged in online strategy, research, content development and event programming since 1998. He most recently was the VP of Market Insights for Uberall and a former contributing editor for Search Engine Land, where he wrote for 14 years. Sterling is also, thankfully, a former attorney. 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. So we're going to have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is so hip, so cool, both offline and online, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everyone. I don't know, podcasts are very often, you're not in front of a screen when you listen to a podcast a lot of times. Lots of people are like, "Oh, I'm walking my dog. I'm hiking a mountain. I'm at the beach." That sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good hybrid. It's both offline, especially if you download the episode, you don't have to be connected to the internet, and kind of online. It's digital, kind of, somewhat. Crystal Carter: Right. You could be on a plane and you could not be trying to argue with airplane wifi, which apparently is the slowest thing on earth, or above earth, I guess. And yeah, you could just be living your best podcast life, offline or online, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: I download lots of podcasts before I go on an airplane, because I find watching movies on airplanes annoying at this point. I used to love watching movies on airplanes. Now I find it annoying. I don't know why. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I don't know. The last time I had a big flight, I just read Percy Jackson. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: The books were good. I read them to my kids, but the movie was- Crystal Carter: No, I read the book. I was reading one of the books, Percy Jackson. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you're reading the book, not watching the movie. No, the books are great. Sorry, Percy Jackson, I didn't mean to... Books are great. Okay. The SERF's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also leverage all the inbuilt marketing tools and capabilities, along with all the marketing apps inside of Wix Studio to build your and your clients' online presence, as this week, we're talking about the connection between online and offline marketing. How does offline marketing impact your digital efforts? Has online marketing become a lost art in the AI and digital age? And what's the SEO connection of it all? To help us run the proverbial extension cord between your offline and online marketing, Near Media's Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling will join us in just a bit, plus we got a look at a nifty little tool that'll help you see the impact of your offline marketing efforts on the digital stage. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness across social media. So pull out that rocking chair and acoustic guitar and put on your best grunge voice, because like MTV of yesteryear, Episode 109 of the SERP's Up podcast is going unplugged. Crystal Carter: That is a deep cut. I loved MTV Unplugged. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Crystal Carter: The Nirvana one is great. Mordy Oberstein: Nirvana. Stone Temple Pilots had a great one. Crystal Carter: Stone Temple Pilots did have a great one. Mariah Carey's was amazing, and also, they did the one in Latin American MTV and Shakira's Unplugged is phenomenal. Mordy Oberstein: Really? I didn't even know there was a Shakira Unplugged. Crystal Carter: It's phenomenal. Mordy Oberstein: It went that long. I tuned out of MTV by that point. Crystal Carter: I don't think it was on English speaking MTV, but I had the album and it was amazing. The band she had was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to remember, because Eric Clapton Unplugged, it was like amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, that's classic. That's classic. Mordy Oberstein: But I can't remember if that was just him doing an episode Unplugged or it was for MTV. It was. I'm looking online. It was MTV. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they're all MTV. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. That's an amazing album. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. For any of you young whippersnappers, go check it out. Mordy Oberstein: MTV used to be about music. Is it even a thing? Does it exist anymore? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. They just had the MTV Awards, so Megan Thee Stallion hosted it. That's the only thing I know about it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm so busy online, I don't see all those offline things of MTV. Crystal Carter: Right, right. This is a thing, so much stuff going on, but I think that, for some of those events, they do tons of offline. And I think that it really is, I think, where you see some incredible mixes of marketing genius. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll start this with a little bit of a hot tip before we get to Greg and Mike. Digital marketing tends to be pretty siloed about pretty much everything, like SEOs stick to SEO, PPCs stick to PPC. I think it's getting a little bit less maybe right now, but like PPCs are like, "Don't talk to me about organic. Just click on my paid ads." And the truth is, like everything in life, it's a little bit messy. There are all sorts of overlaps and implications across not just the disciplines of digital marketing, but of marketing overall. And that includes the things that you're doing offline. By the way, I prefer offline marketing. I like offline marketing more than I like online marketing as a consumer. Obviously, I do digital marketing, but as somebody who's watching the marketing happen, I feel that better marketing happens offline than online. For me, when you see that good, really solid TV spot, and I'm trying to think of a good one off the top of my head, and of course, I can't think of a good example, that hits home, like, "Oh, that's good branding right there. I like that." And it really resonates. Yet, we, the people of the digital, I don't think, tend to give enough credence to the power of offline marketing and the mindset that offline marketing produces. And in fact, I think the only place I ever hear SEOs talk about offline marketing is like, "Oh, if you're doing local link building, you should go to an event and talk to other people, and that'll help you get links." But the merge or the overlap between offline and online is so much richer than that. I feel like you want to say something, so I'm going to stop talking right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so I've seen this happen on so many occasions, and basically, this is where great SEOs really shine is that, if you're speaking to your clients and they're telling you about their offline marketing that they're doing, and a lot of clients are going to be sponsoring the little league team or they'll put up a billboard or they're taking out an ad in a newspaper or something like that. Now, I had a client that was working in a space and their audience was older, even older than MTV, Unplugged elder millennial myself. So it was older and they took out an ad in a big newspaper, a full sheet ad in the newspaper, and I was like, "Cool, when's it running?" And they were like, "It's running on Sunday." I was like, "Great. We will set up Facebook ads that are attached to people that follow that newspaper. We will target people that follow that newspaper and we will send them the same creative, so that, when they're flipping through the newspaper and they see that, they see the ad, they go, "Huh." Then when they're on Facebook and they see the ad again, they will click through it on it." And that campaign went really, really well. We got incredible engagement, we got incredible leads, and it all went really well. Similarly, you sometimes see fails, so you see something on a billboard or you see something on the subway or the bus stop or whatever it is, and you go to Google it and you cannot find it, right? And you're like, "I really want this thing. Where is it? I cannot find it." That's such a fail. It breaks my heart. Mordy Oberstein: Fail. Fail. And we spoke about this on the podcast, I forgot what episode it was, but the epitome of that, I think Eli Schwartz pointed this out, it was, I forgot, so long ago already, it was a Super Bowl, and a company ran an ad, and people, it was one of these unknown-ish kind of companies trying to break into a new market. They ran the ad and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go Google them now." And they weren't even ranking for their name, so they spent all this money. And I'm like, "I don't know who you are." Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. This is it. So they'll do that or they won't put the email or they won't put the website on the visuals or they won't take into account the multiple channels. So layering your advertising to retargeting folks that are related to either the event or the location. So I've also done things where we've had a client that was doing an event and you can target, you can geotarget, your ads. So in Google Ads, for instance, you can geotarget, let's say you have an event at Madison Square Garden, you're sponsoring Madison Square Garden. You can geotarget your ads for people who are at Madison Square Garden. So if somebody's at Madison Square Garden and within like a quarter mile radius of the Madison Square Garden, you can target it at them. And then, when people search there, when they're in their hotel or when they're even at Madison Square Garden, you're more likely to show up on the top. And if they're seeing that you sponsored the halftime show or whatever it may be, then it allows you to connect the dots. And so, I think that's really useful. And also, there's also retargeting from brand engagement. So let's say somebody signs up for your newsletter or people put their cards in a fish bowl and then you win a prize or something like that, people will sign up for something there, then you can put them on a dedicated cohort mailing list and then, you can roll out your marketing accordingly for that. There's lots of things you can do there. Another one to think about, in terms of uniting your offline with your online marketing, is visual search. So I've had it before where I've been at a conference and I have taken a picture of somebody's role banner. And Google lens, if you're on an Android, is baked into your images. So if you take a picture of somebody's role banner, it will scan it for text, and if there's a website, it will give you the opportunity to click on that website. If there's a QR code on the role banner, it will give you the opportunity to click on that role banner. And it will tell you about the business that you're looking at. And if you have your logo in your website, then it'll be able to say, "This is that element." So I've spoken about this significantly, but yeah, the way you think about your positioning, your brand positioning, in real life is really, really important. Because people are taking photos all the time, and Google allows you to search any photo at any point. So it really is a missed opportunity if you're not thinking about making sure that your branding is really cohesive, that your logo is the way it's supposed to be, that it's the right color, that it's well illuminated, that it's not behind something else, it's not surrounded by a bunch of other logos, all of that sort of thing, so that you can get both online and offline impact. Mordy Oberstein: You mentioned conference. Before we pivot to Greg and Mike, I just want to mention, when we do a conference, one of the things we're looking to do is to create buzz on social media. It's like it's not a secret, and the way you do that is all of your offline activities. What do you do? You take a cutout of Barry Schwartz, you take a cornhole game, you put it in front of your booth at brightonSEO in the UK, and you have tons of people playing this thing. And right behind Barry is a big old Wix logo, and people are taking pictures with the cutout of Barry Schwartz and the cornhole game. In the meantime, they're taking pictures of the Wix logo and sharing it all over social media. None of that, all of that buzz and visibility and brand awareness on social media, all of that happened because of all the things we're focused on offline. Online wasn't even really a thought in terms of the actual process of what we were trying to do in terms of creating that cadence. It was just like, "Okay, we know this will happen if we do this, so yeah, let's do it." But in terms of the execution of the thing itself, it was all focused offline, but huge online. Crystal Carter: And I think it's really important to remember that a lot of our offline lives are online. Like pics or it didn't happen. If I go on vacation, people are going to know about it. I'm going to take a picture. And so, it's important that we remember that there is a lot of hybrid experiences in all of the things we're going around in, and also, that people will talk about these things in real life. So if you have, I think, Amex Bike sponsors like bicycles in different towns, that there's Barclays has had some bikes that they were sponsoring in London. And people call them like the Barclays bikes. "Oh, I was using a Barclays bike." Mordy Oberstein: Right, exactly. Crystal Carter: And that's something that's offline that comes into online parlance, because it exists in the real world. So I think it's really important to remember that and to pay attention to how people are discussing your offline activity and monitoring those things. So if you're able to see that people are talking about the Pink Wall, for instance, there was, I think, Fred Segal has the Pink Wall in Beverly Hills or whatever, then maybe you should have a page on your website about the Pink Wall, so that people, when they Google that, you show up for that. And Google will give you that traffic, because it's your Pink Wall. Mordy Oberstein: And with that, let's pivot into our conversation with Near Media's own Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal. Welcome to the show, Greg and Mike. How you doing? Greg Sterling: Good. Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm sorry you had to endure that really long intro. Greg Sterling: It was very long and painful to listen to. Mordy Oberstein: For the record, we're jumping right into the interview. They don't even know how long the intro was. It didn't even happen yet, to break the fourth wall. Greg Sterling: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So pitch your podcast, the Near Media. Greg Sterling: Yeah, so Near Media is now on, I think, 175. We're ahead of you by a few, Mordy. Hopefully, we'll stay that in that position. It has become a podcast mostly about Google and local SEO, but we do also talk about other things, privacy and AI trust. I think it's pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. And it usually features Mike, in addition to me, and David Mihm, who's also one of the co-founders of Near Media. And we just recently had you on, Mordy, to talk about the role of brand now in SEO, which was a really great session. And we do three segments typically. Each of us takes, unless we have a special guest, we take a sort of a news item from the week and then, unpack it and debate it and discuss it. So that's the simple version. Mike Blumenthal: And the more complex version for me is that I do it, because at least once a week, I get to sit with two very smart people and dissect things in a way that maybe I hadn't thought about. And by doing it weekly and having three or four topics, it really brings local and local marketing more clearly into focus for me. And so, for me, I do it for myself, because I gain so much every week by talking to David and Greg. Greg Sterling: We try and contextualize things also. We're not simply just telling what happened, but go ahead, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that, because no, because you should also sign up for the newsletter. I actually just used what you all write. Someone was asking me for exemplar content where there's a lot of information, but you also understand what they're actually thinking and how they're thinking about it and actually use your newsletter for that. So I highly recommend that people sign up for it. Links in the show notes. Mike Blumenthal: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you're one of the only newsletters I get that I actually read. It's in my inbox right now. I have to read it. Greg Sterling: That's perhaps the most flattering thing anybody could say, because there's so many newsletters. And you're not the only person to say that, but it's an enormous compliment. Mike Blumenthal: Greg's mother said it too. Greg Sterling: From beyond the grave. Remember the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Tevye's dream, that's what it was like. It was exactly like that. Mordy Oberstein: My wife quotes that scene all the time, "What are you talking about?" Greg Sterling: Perhaps we should get your wife on here. We should be having a conversation with her. Mordy Oberstein: That would be an interesting conversation by the way to have and one that would probably not work out well for me. Greg Sterling: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: What will work out well for me is talking about online and offline marketing, something that we touched on when I was on your podcast that got me thinking about it. So let's talk a little bit about, I don't know like a hot topic, but has offline marketing, because you all are very thoughtful thinkers, has it become a lost art? Does it feel like it's become a lost art, at least from the digital folks? Greg Sterling: I would say, to sort of jump in here, I would say yes is the short answer to that. I think that people see online marketing and offline marketing as two completely distinct universes, with offline marketing being sort of dying a slow death, maybe with a couple of exceptions, like out-of-home billboards and maybe direct mail. But people sort of think that digital marketing is the successor to offline marketing, traditional marketing. And traditional marketing has almost no role to play anymore, because everybody's online and everybody does everything online. That's the sort of simple version, I think. Mike, do you have a different view? Mike Blumenthal: Well, at LocalU, we always pitched the idea that offline and online were two sides of the same coin, in that, if you are doing something in the real world, say sponsoring the little league in local or helping the blood drive, then putting that online had the double benefit of appealing to your existing customers, plus appealing to Google. So we always pitched it, and I still do, as sort of a duality. And in the end, when you think about it, really, Google needs that offline stuff, as we learned, particularly with things like Navboost and other sort of links. But Google needs that sort of view to really be able to rank businesses effectively. So from my point of view, they've never been separate. Now, clearly, there's been this decline of traditional offline in local, like the Yellow Pages went south. Greg Sterling: Newspapers. Mike Blumenthal: Newspapers went south to a large extent, although in my community, newspapers still play a role. So it's important, from my point of view, that these businesses, and I think this showed up in the survey you did, Greg, that businesses still do some offline stuff and prioritize it. Greg Sterling: Yeah. It's really different by industry, and you see a lot of variation. And some industries still do traditional media and say it performs pretty well. It outperforms expectations. There's an interesting sort of, people have expectations of how something's going to work out versus something else, and traditional media seems to often outperform expectations. Because people have very low expectations. I want to add one thing to what Mike was saying. Reviews is the area where these two things come together most obviously, right? People are typically having an offline experience of some kind with a service business or a restaurant or a hotel or whatever it is, and then, they write a review online. So that offline experience and activity shows up directly in reviews, and those impact local rankings and general rankings, depending on the website. Mike Blumenthal: I would extend that metaphor though or that idea, because like I said, with the little league, most local businesses at least are already doing donations to the little league or whatever they choose. And the only thing they should be doing, in addition to that contribution, is making sure that it's visible on the little league websites or Google knows about it. Or in the case of joining membership groups, like the Chamber, they're already doing that. The critical issue there is making sure that the Chamber has the right link to your business, so that Google can see it. Or becoming a member of the Better Business Bureau. And the same with media, that, if you have a local newspaper, which we still do, getting in that local paper and making sure that you're visible in their online version, so Google can see it. That sort of, to me, is the ultimate local marketing strategy, where you're doing all the traditional stuff to build your brand, going to business meetings, helping people through the community, asking for testimonials, and getting media, all that stuff should have an online mirror and an offline reality. And if you do that, then Google will naturally rank you higher. Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting, because you're talking about the little league example, which is such a nostalgic example for me. For those who are not from the US, little league is the kids' baseball teams and you would normally have their uniforms and the local grocery store would be a sponsor and they have the logo on the uniform and so forth. Mike Blumenthal: And there'd be a big banner in center field. Mordy Oberstein: Right, right, right. It's funny, because that's a mindset and I feel like that's a mindset that people don't have online sometimes, "I'm going to go interact, I'm going to do community work, I'm going to create partnerships." And that should all translate online. But that way of thinking, I find, sometimes, people don't translate from offline to online. Offline is about partnership, it's about community, it's about whatever, relationships, because there is no click. There's no way to click on the center field banner, on the uniform banner. You have to think a little bit more strategically, because there's nothing immediately in front of you. But on online, I feel we all get distracted though, "I'll get a click, I'll get the traffic, I'll get the ROI, yada, yada, yada," and you don't take those offline ways of thinking and then, translate them, use them online, which I feel like you should be doing. Greg Sterling: One thing I would add to that is that this online marketer mindset, which is about measuring everything, tracking everything, everything has to be accountable. It's this sort of brand performance marketing dichotomy in a certain way. In order to build your brand, you have to be willing to do things that you can't immediately measure and that have a sort of a ripple effect or an intangible effect. And I think there's a lot of bias that digital marketers have toward doing only things that can be tracked, that you can show to your boss, that contribute to your KPIs, that there's a certain kind of mindset and worldview that, I think, results in a bunch of lost opportunities. Rand Fishkin has advocated doing things that can't be measured. You've got to do stuff that isn't necessarily going to be measurable or visible to you in Google Search Console. And I think that that's exactly right. You have to do a bunch of stuff, especially in the offline world that builds goodwill, loyalty, word of mouth. Consistently, if you're a small business owner, consistently what you say, whether or not it's true, what you say and what you often perceive is word of mouth is the number one source of leads for you, right? And that's really about customer experience and brand ultimately. Sometimes, it's about price, but mostly, it's about a holistic kind of idea, "Oh, this person painted my house, they did a great job. I need somebody to do my taxes. I need whatever it is. I need a landscape designer." And it's consistently the most reliable and, very often, the biggest source of leads for these local businesses, not withstanding all the online stuff. And so, that's a lot about the things you do in the world to enhance your reputation, enhance your brand. And they're not really measurable in most cases. A lot of businesses will say, "Well, how'd you find us?" And sometimes that's inaccurate, but that's kind of a crude way to do it in a way that has been done historically. Anyway, I could go on. Mordy Oberstein: No. Oh no, I don't want to stop... Mike Blumenthal: My take on that is that particularly small bricks and mortars, who never really measure that, like you said, should occasionally measure it once a year, once a quarter, should survey their clients. So at least they have this general sense of what is driving traffic, right? If they say word of mouth and that turns out to be 35%, then they know that and they can then focus on the things that matter. But I think that, to some extent, it is at least broadly measurable and small businesses should take the time to occasionally do it. All too often, they're too busy, they don't think of it. But in the businesses I worked with who I recommended it, it was incredibly insightful. Also, when you map that against the analytics, you can get a sense of how many map directions or calls actually convert to sales, so that you can then model what a growth in phone calls might mean, in terms of business. So it's critical component to both understand and plan, but it's also critical component to get the most out of your digital marketing. So I would highly recommend it to a small business, if they have any business, to occasionally be doing that, which is how they found them. Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting, Greg, that you mentioned Rand, because I don't know if you all saw this, he did a, I think it was a video on LinkedIn or something like that, where he showed Google brings whatever amount of traffic, 55%, 60% of all web traffic. But if you're only looking at it directly, "Oh, Google is where I should focus, because that's where the web traffic is coming from," you're really missing how it all works. Because what happened is they saw you at an event, they saw you on social media, they saw you at a conference, they saw you at a little league, whatever it is, and then, they Googled you, found you, and that traffic gets attributed to Google, but it's not really Google's traffic. It's just they're a facilitator in that sense. Greg Sterling: That's totally true. It's kind of a last-click mindset in a certain way. I think, if we all just reflect on our own behavior in the world, you see something, you see an ad, you see a billboard, somebody tells you, recommends somebody, and what you do then is you typically search on that business or that person to look at their reviews or to get more information or get an address. Yesterday, I'm having some car issues, and so, I was at a mechanic and it turned out they couldn't help me. And so, I said, "Could you recommend somebody else?" And they said, "Oh, I recommend this other person." And so, I looked up that other person online, I looked at the reviews, and I called from the GBP page. So what they're not going to see is that whole interaction in the real world. They're going to just see the Google interaction and make some assumptions, as you're saying, about the source of that being Google. But really, the source of it was this guy's recommendation and this other mechanic's recommendation, which would not be visible, but it illustrates the larger point that there's a lot of stuff going on, as Rand says, in the world, that then people follow up with a Google search. Mike Blumenthal: And what Greg left unsaid was he wanted to check this guy's rating to confirm that the person who recommended it was right. Greg Sterling: Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's what people do. What is that called, Mike? What is the term for that? Mike Blumenthal: I'm not sure. Greg Sterling: Word of mouth now usually comes along with some kind of Google search or some kind of lookup online to validate the referral. You can learn a lot about behavior just from reflecting on your own and your immediate family and your friends' behavior, which people don't do that much. It's anecdotal, it's unreliable as a sort of a you can't make a lot of business decisions on the basis of that alone. But it's really helpful information that gives you context that you don't otherwise get just from data. Mordy Oberstein: To bring that into the local space for a second, because I feel like one of the things that I do when I'm looking something up and you're looking at their GBP profile and there's nothing there, they may be a great business, there's no post or products, there's no description, it kind of feels bare bones. That leaves me feeling like maybe they're not so great. And it's kind of like, is that a ranking factor? Some of the things might be, but the fact that you don't have Google posts there, I don't believe is a ranking factor, unless Joy Hawkins has discovered that, somehow, it is a ranking factor, and I completely missed that study. But it does come from that mindset. It's not something that maybe is attributable to any traffic. I can't measure its effectiveness in my bottom line, but if I'm thinking like I'm a real marketer, I'm going to realize that, if I don't have that profile filled out, when people are coming to verify if I'm actually somebody of decent reputation, they're going to be left feeling like, "Ah, this looks a little bare bones. Do they not really care? Are they not really active? Are they not really alive?" And being alive for a business is a very big thing, but it's not a measurable thing that you could tangibly say, "Because of this feeling of vitality, I got X number of more leads." Mike Blumenthal: I would reinforce that, in our research, where we do consumer behavior research, and we've done a number of verticals. But hotels was the most recent one. And people spent a tremendous amount of time looking at the photographs on Google and on, say, Booking.com in Europe, because that's very popular. One woman I had looked at 11 different places to stay, looking for a full-length mirror in the bedroom, because you couldn't tell how well you were dressed if you only had a half-length mirror. And it's like hotel after hotel, but she would look at all the pictures and literally look for the picture of the room with the full-length hotel. So pictures play an incredibly important role, both on Google, on your website, and on whatever directory is important in your industry. We know that from our research, but other attributes do as well. Reviews. We listen to people when they're doing these searches, and 65% of them say, "Reviews are important to us." Now, we don't know about the other 35%, but they just didn't say it, doesn't mean it isn't important to them. BrightLocal indicates it's upwards of 85%, although they're mostly looking at stars and quantity of reviews, and only 25% of the time do they ever actually read them. But I agree with you, having a full profile now, most people don't dig in as deep as posts, but from where I sit, any page on Google you can control, you should. And it makes sense to me to maximize your potential surfaces. And that's Q&A, that's posts, it's all that sort of stuff. Greg Sterling: People are evaluating the credibility of businesses. It's kind of curb appeal. The Google Business Profile, as well as your website, are kind of your brand online. If things are well filled out, well developed, there's a lot of information there. It's going to give people confidence. What people are looking for online very often is confidence to try that business or call that business or include that business in their final consideration set. And so, as you sort of point out, even though somebody's heard that this is a good business, they might be skeptical if they see something that looks very thin or is unclaimed or doesn't have a lot of information. And there are tons and tons of businesses that fall into that category, that may be doing a great job, but they just haven't taken the time to claim their profile or do anything with it. Mike Blumenthal: An example where we saw this very explicitly in consumer research was in physician search. People would come in looking for an OBGYN or a general practitioner and they'd say, "I want the best." They'd go into the Local Finder, which I thought people never went into. They'd scroll 20 deep and pick three or four that had the best reviews, and it was a case where they would skip over people that didn't have pictures or reviews. And they'd go to the ones that did, and it was clear they were willing to scroll. And so, you saw a very long tail in the Local Finder in that industry, in that vertical, because people did take the time to look for more complete profiles. Mordy Oberstein: That totally aligns. It's what I do. It totally aligns with my actual experience. Do you find, because you both are so heavily in local, and there's such a natural tendency to see the connection... Mike Blumenthal: "All local all the time," that's our radio show's motto. Mordy Oberstein: There's a natural bridge between offline and online, I think, is unique to local. Do you find that the local businesses realize that connection more so than, say, like a SaaS platform, that kind of thing? Greg Sterling: Go ahead, Mike. Mike Blumenthal: Well, I was going to say it's very vertically dependent, right? In storage. Most of them get it. In doctors, two-thirds of them didn't get it. It's very vertically dependent, whether they're engaging with Google. Greg Sterling: I think, for the longest time, since the beginning of the internet, the consumer behavior really has been search online, buy offline, and then, that's changed with the rise of e-commerce, but it's still relatively small, 15, 20% of total retail, and at least in the United States. Elsewhere, it may be different. And so, consumers, for 20-plus years, have been using the internet as a tool to do research and get information about often local businesses or things to do in their area or where to buy something or where to find something. And I think business owners do this themselves, but they often don't, this comes back to what I was saying earlier, they often don't generalize and think, "My customers are doing this too." I think they tend to focus on channels as independent of one another. It's like, "This is Google, this is social, this is email, this is my website." And they're not thinking kind of holistically about the relationships of all these things together. I think that that's an unusual small business, a more savvy marketer that is thinking holistically, thinking about the relationship of online to offline, even though these business owners themselves and marketers, however sophisticated, are doing this very thing, they are using the internet, they're interacting with businesses in the world, they're seeing stuff that's happening. I think marketers on TV maybe get it more than others, where they try and connect TV to... Well, TV now is part of online, because it's often streaming, but connect to TV. But things like QR codes and using search volume to measure certain kinds of TV advertising. There are certain pockets where people do really get it and ticket integrated approach, but most small businesses, I don't think do. They don't have that overall view of how these channels work together. Mordy Oberstein: You're basically, in a way, describing Nike. I know Nike doubled down on digital, said, "We're going to go direct to consumer and we're going to bypass the store." And people were like, "I love looking for your shoes online, but I'm going to go try them out in the store before I actually go ahead and buy them." And you can see Nike had major, major problems. They actually opened the door for a bunch of other brands, On, to come in, because they weren't filling... Mike Blumenthal: Hokas. Mordy Oberstein: Hoka, yeah. Mike Blumenthal: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because Nike wasn't filling the stores up and there was shelf space, so foot Locker was putting Hoka up on the shelf and not Nike. And the rankings aren't Nike's problem. Looking at Semrush right now, since 2020, their traffic's been up like crazy. Traffic is great, but the conversions were the issue. Because, "I don't want to buy it online. I want to go to the store," that gap and not realizing the consumers germinating offline and online killed them. Greg Sterling: Yeah, there's also a brand impact there. Ultimately, people are concerned about sales and revenue, but not seeing Nike in the store, not seeing Nike featured prominently does have a kind of degrading impact on the brand. Degrading meaning erosion, as opposed to humiliation, as the case may be. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Mike, last word? Mike Blumenthal: At one of these rare occasions in life, don't have one. Mordy Oberstein: No, really? Do you want me to throw another question out there, so you can have the last word over Greg? Mike Blumenthal: Not necessary. Like I said, I meet with Greg every week, because I like to hear his pearls of wisdom. Mordy Oberstein: Greg does have pearls of wisdom. Greg Sterling: Such as they are. Such as they are. Mike Blumenthal: I don't always agree with them, but... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's the last word right there. Mike Blumenthal: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Where can people find you online? Mike Blumenthal: I'm on Twitter still, unfortunately, mblumenthal Twitter, I'm trying to increase my presence on LinkedIn and at Near Media, where I do the weekly podcast and try to do two or three analysis pieces a month around tactics and strategy in local marketing. Mordy Oberstein: And Greg? Greg Sterling: I'm at gsterling on Twitter, I refuse to call it X, and I don't know what my LinkedIn handle is, but you can find me on LinkedIn and Near Media. And my email, for people that want to harass me or give me death threats, is Greg.Sterling.gmail. Mike Blumenthal: And mine is MBlumenthal@NearMedia.co . Mordy Oberstein: So for the death threats, not on Twitter and not on LinkedIn, specifically email? Greg Sterling: Yeah, it's more effective, I think, if you do it directly in email, because otherwise, it'll be sort of diffused and people may comment and may turn it into something humorous. But if you're really serious, you want to go straight to the email, I think. Mordy Oberstein: All right, great. So link to the show notes, case you want to follow these fine gentlemen. And remember, I won't put their emails in the show notes, but if you want to send them a death threat, just play back the episode and you'll hear their emails again and you can send them a death threat. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. It's a lot of fun. Make sure you check out Near Media and the podcast and the newsletter. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for coming on the show. Greg Sterling: Thank you. Mike Blumenthal: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Greg and Mike, for coming on the show. Make sure you give them a follow. Check out their newsletter, again. I love their newsletters. Again, I told you during the interview, it's one of the only ones I actually open and actually read, which is a rarity, right? Come on, you know what I'm talking about, which is why you don't put too much emphasis on open rates in newsletters. Because I open them so my inbox will be less. Crystal Carter: I always open and read the Searchlight newsletter. That's my favorite newsletter. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, don't do it to Searchlight. No, no, no. Crystal Carter: Of course. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. Crystal Carter: That's my favorite one to open. Mordy Oberstein: It’s about all the other newsletters, other than the ones that we also like, like SEOFOMO, Core Updates by Mike Williams-Cook, #SEOForLunch, Nick LeRoy, those ones you should read. It's the other ones. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's very tricky. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm just trying to talk truth. Anyway. Anyway, your offline marketing impacts what happens on the digital side of things. We've seen this, we've discussed that. We're at a lot of conferences, and if we do a good job, like you mentioned before, engaging with folks, you see it on social very easily. So here's a little dive into a tool that can help you see it on social, as we go tool time on the SERP's Up podcast. So here's a cool tool for you that I came across and we both came across, that looks like it's like, there's a lot of tools that do this kind of thing, but it looks pretty prolific. It's called Brand24. And what it helps you do is basically monitor your mentions across social and beyond social, because a lot of these tools monitor social, but they don't go beyond social. But it helps you see the impact of an offline event and the communications impact of that. It can help you see how you're comparing with your competitors. It can help you track sentiment, which is super helpful, and it has all sorts of topic analysis tools as well. So Brand24 for you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. And I think it's something that seems to be useful for agencies. It's also something that offers things for information on how to measure your share of voice. So they've got a lot of really great resources for helping you to understand that. I've seen marketers who are working across the social space significantly, and this can be really, really important. I think that, if there's a particular product or particular product vertical where it's quite competitive, that share of voice element is so critical in order to cut through. So being able to see that and be able to have some metrics for that, to be able to illustrate the value of that in-person sponsorship, the value of that influencer engagement, the value of that brand activation can be really, really important. Mordy Oberstein: So people always ask, "Oh, well, brand, you can't measure brand, you can't measure offline activity." And it's not true, by the way. It's completely not true. It's just a little bit different than what we're used to on the performance side. You can absolutely track and measure. It's just a little bit correlative. You know correlations equal causation? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. But sometimes, a good correlation ain't nothing like a good correlation. And what this allows you to do is, for example, if you're looking at your trend of negative mentions in the tool, you can kind of correlate, "Oh, wait a second. We launched a new campaign." I will say, North Face launched a new campaign and I did not like it. So if I'm North Face, and all of a sudden, you have these yo-yos like Mordy Oberstein going out there on X and LinkedIn, saying, "I didn't like that campaign," and you start seeing those negative mentions, if it correlates to when you started that campaign, that'll give you a good, "Hey, wait a second. That might be a good indicator of how we measure the success of this new campaign or not." Now, obviously, you need to go deeper and see what are people saying and who is saying it, because maybe I'm not your customer, so who cares that I'm crapping all over it. But having a tool like this helps you better measure brand, because it helps you find those correlative activities and the data that correlates to them. So that you can dive in a little bit deeper. Crystal Carter: And I think that it helps you to sign off, helps you get more funding for the things that you want to do, helps you get more conversions, helps you just move forward with your campaigns. So yeah, it's never bad to have more data. Mordy Oberstein: No, and it's also never bad to have more SEO news from Barry Schwartz, whether it's a small change to a line of a SERP feature that's completely inconsequential or an actual thing like, oh my gosh, search console data has an enormous gap or there's an issue with indexing. Barry Schwartz is your go-to source for the SEO news, and we are your go-to source for covering Barry, even snappier than Barry already writes, which is pretty snappy to be honest with you. Crystal Carter: That's snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So it's like snappy snappiness with our snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, big news this week, as per Search Engine Journal and everybody else covering the story, which is everybody else, SearchGPT launches as ChatGPT's, real-time search feature. So there is a search engine-ish version of ChatGPT, which is called now called SearchGPT, and you can ask it to search for stuff and it'll give you citations and whatnot and whatnot. This is not live, as of this recording, everyone everyone yet for OpenAI. It said all ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist use, will have access today, today being the day they launched this, which was on October 31st. It's interesting. I will say this, it's interesting. On the mobile version, what happens is there's an icon for search, right? You type in your query like, I don't know, like, "Who is Aaron Judge?" or whatever, and you have a little option to search. And on the search, what happens is there's a little button at the end of the summary, you know your typical ChatGPT summary for sources, and you click on sources and up comes a whole list of the URLs. You can pull that panel up, and then, you can see the full list of URLs and click on whatever URL you want to. And of course, there's questions of like, will this replace Google and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of talked this about this, I think, two weeks ago on the episode. It's interesting. Leaving that question aside for a minute, it's interesting. I don't find yet that the URLs are accessible in the way I like them to be accessible, particularly on the mobile side. And I think it's a problem, not just because of SearchGPT. I think it's a problem because there's multiple things happening at one time. For example, social media is kind of a mess right now. A lot of these things create a disincentive to create new content. If I can't get my URLs out there the same way, if I can't get engagement on social, which will drive content to the links that I'm sharing on social, do I still have that same incentive to create content? And I think, it might be a little bit of a hot take, I think the web is in a place right now where that's going to become problematic down the line, unless something changes. The path forward would indicate that there'll be a problem down the line of some sort, and I think it's really problematic for the web ecosystem overall and things like SearchGPT could contribute to that problem. That's my take. That's my personal take. Anyway, onto more AI and search information. This from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. I've always wanted to see this roundtable, by the way, Barry. Where's the roundtable? Do you have a roundtable? If not, I feel like false advertising. There's no roundtable. There is no actual SEO Roundtable. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google AI Answers in Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries, & About This Place." To translate, Google added a bunch of AI stuff to local stuff. One of the things, for example, is, in Google Maps, you can now say like, "Hey, show me things to do with a friend at night in Lower Manhattan," and Gemini will curate a list for you of little cards, carousel of cards, a typical format you've seen for all sorts of carousels on Google with a bunch of places. And they'll categorize them like things to do with live music, I don't know, comedy clubs, whatever it is. I think that's great. I think that's a great way to get your listings in front of people. I think it's a great way to get people to the Google Business Profile, eventually to your website, and to your business like that. To my previous point, this would be using AI to send traffic to an actual business. At the same time, Google has also announced that they're doing review summaries based on AI. So they'll go through your reviews and they'll pull out a summary and it will say, "Summarized with Gemini," basically summarizing all the things in the reviews, so you don't have to look through all the reviews. You just get a, "People say this is a great place for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Obviously, my apprehension here is, if you have negative reviewers or you have negative review spammers or whatever it is, that can influence the AI answer. Also, I like to think of the Google Business Profile as a place where there's more control for the business, not less, and this would seemingly be less control in a way. Okay. At the same time, there's also a feature about ask about this place. So let's say you have a listing, I don't know, like Bob's Comedy Club, and you want to know, does Bob's Comedy Club Serve cocktails? And you can now ask Maps about that place, and Maps will tell you, "Oh yes, they serve wonderful cocktails, yada, yada, yada." Again, great. Could be really, really helpful, but it's because you're directly impacting what someone might do with their money at a particular business or might not do with their money at a particular business, like, "Oh, there's no cocktails here. I'm not going to this comedy club now," but maybe they do offer cocktails. I think it's really, really important for something like this to make sure that the AI answers are as accurate as possible, because you are actually impacting people's livelihoods directly with something like this. Check out the full write up that Barry has over here on SERoundtable.com. Again, is there a roundtable? I would like to know. And that is this week's version of the Snappy News. There are the occasions where I drone on with the Snappy News, and it's not so snappy. Barry actually called one of those instances out on social media. He's like, "You went on too long." Crystal Carter: Barry is the king of efficiency. He's like, "How can we get this done?" Mordy Oberstein: If you watch, It's New, which is our Monday through Thursday new show with Barry and Greg Finn. I'm repeating myself here, but Barry says that he wears his cell phone in his nerd pocket. Crystal Carter: Yeah, front pocket. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, your front pocket, the nerd pocket. Because I'm thinking back of when you have pocket protectors. Crystal Carter: Revenge of the Nerds. Mordy Oberstein: Revenge of the Nerds, exactly. That movie didn't age well, and he puts his phone in there, so that it takes less time to pull out when he has to use it, that fraction of a second. Crystal Carter: Yes. It reminded me of stock changing things. When people buy stuff, there are machines that buy stocks and shares and they make them closer to the server, because they save a fraction of a second and get the share faster or something like that. And that works if you're like, I don't know, some giant stock company or something, but I didn't realize that Barry was working in those milliseconds. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of SEO news to cover. Every fraction of a second counts. Crystal Carter: I think you might be right. But your hands are closer to your pockets, to your hip pockets, right? Mordy Oberstein: Not when you're sitting on a keyboard writing SEO news all day long. Then your hands is actually closer to your front pocket, nerd pocket. Crystal Carter: I suppose so. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Barry thinks of these things. Don't worry. I trust Barry. Crystal Carter: Sure, I'm sure. Mordy Oberstein: In Barry, we trust. Speaking of great personalities out there across the internet, our follow of the week is somebody who does a great job pulling his offline activities and pulling them online for his personal branding. It's Terry Rice, who is actually a part of our meetup in New York City, the digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal. So look at Terry's LinkedIn profile, and you will see a ton of personal things about exercise and fitness. And he leverages it in and pulls it into his profile to create something that has an amazing personal brand for himself. It has so much value, and it has so much personality. And it's a great way of seeing that, if you do great things offline, you can pull those things into online to add value that way. Crystal Carter: Nice. Nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's good stuff. Crystal Carter: I'll check it out. Mordy Oberstein: Please check them out. So Crystal, you going to be offline anywhere? People should come look for you soon. Crystal Carter: I'm offline all the time. I'm offline all the time, probably at a conference near you. Mordy Oberstein: Look for Crystal at a conference near you. By the way, I'm surprised that there's not an SEO conference out there called Conference Near You. Crystal Carter: They totally should do that. Mordy Oberstein: They should totally do that. Crystal Carter: We just did a conference with the team at LocalU and the team at Sterling Sky. They were fantastic. Guys, Joy Hawkins and co, Conference Near You. Mordy Oberstein: Conference Near You, maybe not a rebrand, because I know LocalU's got a whole brand, but maybe a special event. Conference Near You. Crystal Carter: Local SEOs, y'all need to bring this together. It's just waiting for it. It's like this open goal. Mordy Oberstein: I can't believe it hasn't happened already. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Or, okay, either that or if they do, let's say they did a conference in Boston, but name the conference Boston SEO Conference Near You, Boston Conference, SEO Conference Near You, SEO Conference Boston. Crystal Carter: Greater Metropolitan Boston Area. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Near You. Crystal Carter: Massachusetts. Mordy Oberstein: Massachusetts. So that's a lot of letters. Yeah, it's too much. Crystal Carter: Cannot spell that. I can't spell that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, not a clue. Crystal Carter: I can spell Mississippi, but that's because it's like... Mordy Oberstein: Is there a thing like a song like M-I-S-S letter? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Sorry, Massachusetts. Well, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we'll be next week with a new episode, as we dive into doing SEO for a sub-brand. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars and whatnot on the Wix Studio SEO Learning over 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 of love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Greg Sterling Mike Blumenthal Terry Rice Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Near Media The Near Memo Podcast Brand24 News: SearchGPT Launches As ChatGPT’s Real-Time Search Feature Google AI Answers In Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries & About This Place Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Greg Sterling Mike Blumenthal Terry Rice Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Near Media The Near Memo Podcast Brand24 News: SearchGPT Launches As ChatGPT’s Real-Time Search Feature Google AI Answers In Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries & About This Place 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. So we're going to have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is so hip, so cool, both offline and online, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everyone. I don't know, podcasts are very often, you're not in front of a screen when you listen to a podcast a lot of times. Lots of people are like, "Oh, I'm walking my dog. I'm hiking a mountain. I'm at the beach." That sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good hybrid. It's both offline, especially if you download the episode, you don't have to be connected to the internet, and kind of online. It's digital, kind of, somewhat. Crystal Carter: Right. You could be on a plane and you could not be trying to argue with airplane wifi, which apparently is the slowest thing on earth, or above earth, I guess. And yeah, you could just be living your best podcast life, offline or online, I suppose. Mordy Oberstein: I download lots of podcasts before I go on an airplane, because I find watching movies on airplanes annoying at this point. I used to love watching movies on airplanes. Now I find it annoying. I don't know why. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I don't know. The last time I had a big flight, I just read Percy Jackson. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: The books were good. I read them to my kids, but the movie was- Crystal Carter: No, I read the book. I was reading one of the books, Percy Jackson. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you're reading the book, not watching the movie. No, the books are great. Sorry, Percy Jackson, I didn't mean to... Books are great. Okay. The SERF's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also leverage all the inbuilt marketing tools and capabilities, along with all the marketing apps inside of Wix Studio to build your and your clients' online presence, as this week, we're talking about the connection between online and offline marketing. How does offline marketing impact your digital efforts? Has online marketing become a lost art in the AI and digital age? And what's the SEO connection of it all? To help us run the proverbial extension cord between your offline and online marketing, Near Media's Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling will join us in just a bit, plus we got a look at a nifty little tool that'll help you see the impact of your offline marketing efforts on the digital stage. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness across social media. So pull out that rocking chair and acoustic guitar and put on your best grunge voice, because like MTV of yesteryear, Episode 109 of the SERP's Up podcast is going unplugged. Crystal Carter: That is a deep cut. I loved MTV Unplugged. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Crystal Carter: The Nirvana one is great. Mordy Oberstein: Nirvana. Stone Temple Pilots had a great one. Crystal Carter: Stone Temple Pilots did have a great one. Mariah Carey's was amazing, and also, they did the one in Latin American MTV and Shakira's Unplugged is phenomenal. Mordy Oberstein: Really? I didn't even know there was a Shakira Unplugged. Crystal Carter: It's phenomenal. Mordy Oberstein: It went that long. I tuned out of MTV by that point. Crystal Carter: I don't think it was on English speaking MTV, but I had the album and it was amazing. The band she had was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to remember, because Eric Clapton Unplugged, it was like amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, that's classic. That's classic. Mordy Oberstein: But I can't remember if that was just him doing an episode Unplugged or it was for MTV. It was. I'm looking online. It was MTV. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they're all MTV. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. That's an amazing album. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. For any of you young whippersnappers, go check it out. Mordy Oberstein: MTV used to be about music. Is it even a thing? Does it exist anymore? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. They just had the MTV Awards, so Megan Thee Stallion hosted it. That's the only thing I know about it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm so busy online, I don't see all those offline things of MTV. Crystal Carter: Right, right. This is a thing, so much stuff going on, but I think that, for some of those events, they do tons of offline. And I think that it really is, I think, where you see some incredible mixes of marketing genius. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll start this with a little bit of a hot tip before we get to Greg and Mike. Digital marketing tends to be pretty siloed about pretty much everything, like SEOs stick to SEO, PPCs stick to PPC. I think it's getting a little bit less maybe right now, but like PPCs are like, "Don't talk to me about organic. Just click on my paid ads." And the truth is, like everything in life, it's a little bit messy. There are all sorts of overlaps and implications across not just the disciplines of digital marketing, but of marketing overall. And that includes the things that you're doing offline. By the way, I prefer offline marketing. I like offline marketing more than I like online marketing as a consumer. Obviously, I do digital marketing, but as somebody who's watching the marketing happen, I feel that better marketing happens offline than online. For me, when you see that good, really solid TV spot, and I'm trying to think of a good one off the top of my head, and of course, I can't think of a good example, that hits home, like, "Oh, that's good branding right there. I like that." And it really resonates. Yet, we, the people of the digital, I don't think, tend to give enough credence to the power of offline marketing and the mindset that offline marketing produces. And in fact, I think the only place I ever hear SEOs talk about offline marketing is like, "Oh, if you're doing local link building, you should go to an event and talk to other people, and that'll help you get links." But the merge or the overlap between offline and online is so much richer than that. I feel like you want to say something, so I'm going to stop talking right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so I've seen this happen on so many occasions, and basically, this is where great SEOs really shine is that, if you're speaking to your clients and they're telling you about their offline marketing that they're doing, and a lot of clients are going to be sponsoring the little league team or they'll put up a billboard or they're taking out an ad in a newspaper or something like that. Now, I had a client that was working in a space and their audience was older, even older than MTV, Unplugged elder millennial myself. So it was older and they took out an ad in a big newspaper, a full sheet ad in the newspaper, and I was like, "Cool, when's it running?" And they were like, "It's running on Sunday." I was like, "Great. We will set up Facebook ads that are attached to people that follow that newspaper. We will target people that follow that newspaper and we will send them the same creative, so that, when they're flipping through the newspaper and they see that, they see the ad, they go, "Huh." Then when they're on Facebook and they see the ad again, they will click through it on it." And that campaign went really, really well. We got incredible engagement, we got incredible leads, and it all went really well. Similarly, you sometimes see fails, so you see something on a billboard or you see something on the subway or the bus stop or whatever it is, and you go to Google it and you cannot find it, right? And you're like, "I really want this thing. Where is it? I cannot find it." That's such a fail. It breaks my heart. Mordy Oberstein: Fail. Fail. And we spoke about this on the podcast, I forgot what episode it was, but the epitome of that, I think Eli Schwartz pointed this out, it was, I forgot, so long ago already, it was a Super Bowl, and a company ran an ad, and people, it was one of these unknown-ish kind of companies trying to break into a new market. They ran the ad and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go Google them now." And they weren't even ranking for their name, so they spent all this money. And I'm like, "I don't know who you are." Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. This is it. So they'll do that or they won't put the email or they won't put the website on the visuals or they won't take into account the multiple channels. So layering your advertising to retargeting folks that are related to either the event or the location. So I've also done things where we've had a client that was doing an event and you can target, you can geotarget, your ads. So in Google Ads, for instance, you can geotarget, let's say you have an event at Madison Square Garden, you're sponsoring Madison Square Garden. You can geotarget your ads for people who are at Madison Square Garden. So if somebody's at Madison Square Garden and within like a quarter mile radius of the Madison Square Garden, you can target it at them. And then, when people search there, when they're in their hotel or when they're even at Madison Square Garden, you're more likely to show up on the top. And if they're seeing that you sponsored the halftime show or whatever it may be, then it allows you to connect the dots. And so, I think that's really useful. And also, there's also retargeting from brand engagement. So let's say somebody signs up for your newsletter or people put their cards in a fish bowl and then you win a prize or something like that, people will sign up for something there, then you can put them on a dedicated cohort mailing list and then, you can roll out your marketing accordingly for that. There's lots of things you can do there. Another one to think about, in terms of uniting your offline with your online marketing, is visual search. So I've had it before where I've been at a conference and I have taken a picture of somebody's role banner. And Google lens, if you're on an Android, is baked into your images. So if you take a picture of somebody's role banner, it will scan it for text, and if there's a website, it will give you the opportunity to click on that website. If there's a QR code on the role banner, it will give you the opportunity to click on that role banner. And it will tell you about the business that you're looking at. And if you have your logo in your website, then it'll be able to say, "This is that element." So I've spoken about this significantly, but yeah, the way you think about your positioning, your brand positioning, in real life is really, really important. Because people are taking photos all the time, and Google allows you to search any photo at any point. So it really is a missed opportunity if you're not thinking about making sure that your branding is really cohesive, that your logo is the way it's supposed to be, that it's the right color, that it's well illuminated, that it's not behind something else, it's not surrounded by a bunch of other logos, all of that sort of thing, so that you can get both online and offline impact. Mordy Oberstein: You mentioned conference. Before we pivot to Greg and Mike, I just want to mention, when we do a conference, one of the things we're looking to do is to create buzz on social media. It's like it's not a secret, and the way you do that is all of your offline activities. What do you do? You take a cutout of Barry Schwartz, you take a cornhole game, you put it in front of your booth at brightonSEO in the UK, and you have tons of people playing this thing. And right behind Barry is a big old Wix logo, and people are taking pictures with the cutout of Barry Schwartz and the cornhole game. In the meantime, they're taking pictures of the Wix logo and sharing it all over social media. None of that, all of that buzz and visibility and brand awareness on social media, all of that happened because of all the things we're focused on offline. Online wasn't even really a thought in terms of the actual process of what we were trying to do in terms of creating that cadence. It was just like, "Okay, we know this will happen if we do this, so yeah, let's do it." But in terms of the execution of the thing itself, it was all focused offline, but huge online. Crystal Carter: And I think it's really important to remember that a lot of our offline lives are online. Like pics or it didn't happen. If I go on vacation, people are going to know about it. I'm going to take a picture. And so, it's important that we remember that there is a lot of hybrid experiences in all of the things we're going around in, and also, that people will talk about these things in real life. So if you have, I think, Amex Bike sponsors like bicycles in different towns, that there's Barclays has had some bikes that they were sponsoring in London. And people call them like the Barclays bikes. "Oh, I was using a Barclays bike." Mordy Oberstein: Right, exactly. Crystal Carter: And that's something that's offline that comes into online parlance, because it exists in the real world. So I think it's really important to remember that and to pay attention to how people are discussing your offline activity and monitoring those things. So if you're able to see that people are talking about the Pink Wall, for instance, there was, I think, Fred Segal has the Pink Wall in Beverly Hills or whatever, then maybe you should have a page on your website about the Pink Wall, so that people, when they Google that, you show up for that. And Google will give you that traffic, because it's your Pink Wall. Mordy Oberstein: And with that, let's pivot into our conversation with Near Media's own Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal. Welcome to the show, Greg and Mike. How you doing? Greg Sterling: Good. Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm sorry you had to endure that really long intro. Greg Sterling: It was very long and painful to listen to. Mordy Oberstein: For the record, we're jumping right into the interview. They don't even know how long the intro was. It didn't even happen yet, to break the fourth wall. Greg Sterling: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So pitch your podcast, the Near Media. Greg Sterling: Yeah, so Near Media is now on, I think, 175. We're ahead of you by a few, Mordy. Hopefully, we'll stay that in that position. It has become a podcast mostly about Google and local SEO, but we do also talk about other things, privacy and AI trust. I think it's pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. And it usually features Mike, in addition to me, and David Mihm, who's also one of the co-founders of Near Media. And we just recently had you on, Mordy, to talk about the role of brand now in SEO, which was a really great session. And we do three segments typically. Each of us takes, unless we have a special guest, we take a sort of a news item from the week and then, unpack it and debate it and discuss it. So that's the simple version. Mike Blumenthal: And the more complex version for me is that I do it, because at least once a week, I get to sit with two very smart people and dissect things in a way that maybe I hadn't thought about. And by doing it weekly and having three or four topics, it really brings local and local marketing more clearly into focus for me. And so, for me, I do it for myself, because I gain so much every week by talking to David and Greg. Greg Sterling: We try and contextualize things also. We're not simply just telling what happened, but go ahead, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that, because no, because you should also sign up for the newsletter. I actually just used what you all write. Someone was asking me for exemplar content where there's a lot of information, but you also understand what they're actually thinking and how they're thinking about it and actually use your newsletter for that. So I highly recommend that people sign up for it. Links in the show notes. Mike Blumenthal: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you're one of the only newsletters I get that I actually read. It's in my inbox right now. I have to read it. Greg Sterling: That's perhaps the most flattering thing anybody could say, because there's so many newsletters. And you're not the only person to say that, but it's an enormous compliment. Mike Blumenthal: Greg's mother said it too. Greg Sterling: From beyond the grave. Remember the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Tevye's dream, that's what it was like. It was exactly like that. Mordy Oberstein: My wife quotes that scene all the time, "What are you talking about?" Greg Sterling: Perhaps we should get your wife on here. We should be having a conversation with her. Mordy Oberstein: That would be an interesting conversation by the way to have and one that would probably not work out well for me. Greg Sterling: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: What will work out well for me is talking about online and offline marketing, something that we touched on when I was on your podcast that got me thinking about it. So let's talk a little bit about, I don't know like a hot topic, but has offline marketing, because you all are very thoughtful thinkers, has it become a lost art? Does it feel like it's become a lost art, at least from the digital folks? Greg Sterling: I would say, to sort of jump in here, I would say yes is the short answer to that. I think that people see online marketing and offline marketing as two completely distinct universes, with offline marketing being sort of dying a slow death, maybe with a couple of exceptions, like out-of-home billboards and maybe direct mail. But people sort of think that digital marketing is the successor to offline marketing, traditional marketing. And traditional marketing has almost no role to play anymore, because everybody's online and everybody does everything online. That's the sort of simple version, I think. Mike, do you have a different view? Mike Blumenthal: Well, at LocalU, we always pitched the idea that offline and online were two sides of the same coin, in that, if you are doing something in the real world, say sponsoring the little league in local or helping the blood drive, then putting that online had the double benefit of appealing to your existing customers, plus appealing to Google. So we always pitched it, and I still do, as sort of a duality. And in the end, when you think about it, really, Google needs that offline stuff, as we learned, particularly with things like Navboost and other sort of links. But Google needs that sort of view to really be able to rank businesses effectively. So from my point of view, they've never been separate. Now, clearly, there's been this decline of traditional offline in local, like the Yellow Pages went south. Greg Sterling: Newspapers. Mike Blumenthal: Newspapers went south to a large extent, although in my community, newspapers still play a role. So it's important, from my point of view, that these businesses, and I think this showed up in the survey you did, Greg, that businesses still do some offline stuff and prioritize it. Greg Sterling: Yeah. It's really different by industry, and you see a lot of variation. And some industries still do traditional media and say it performs pretty well. It outperforms expectations. There's an interesting sort of, people have expectations of how something's going to work out versus something else, and traditional media seems to often outperform expectations. Because people have very low expectations. I want to add one thing to what Mike was saying. Reviews is the area where these two things come together most obviously, right? People are typically having an offline experience of some kind with a service business or a restaurant or a hotel or whatever it is, and then, they write a review online. So that offline experience and activity shows up directly in reviews, and those impact local rankings and general rankings, depending on the website. Mike Blumenthal: I would extend that metaphor though or that idea, because like I said, with the little league, most local businesses at least are already doing donations to the little league or whatever they choose. And the only thing they should be doing, in addition to that contribution, is making sure that it's visible on the little league websites or Google knows about it. Or in the case of joining membership groups, like the Chamber, they're already doing that. The critical issue there is making sure that the Chamber has the right link to your business, so that Google can see it. Or becoming a member of the Better Business Bureau. And the same with media, that, if you have a local newspaper, which we still do, getting in that local paper and making sure that you're visible in their online version, so Google can see it. That sort of, to me, is the ultimate local marketing strategy, where you're doing all the traditional stuff to build your brand, going to business meetings, helping people through the community, asking for testimonials, and getting media, all that stuff should have an online mirror and an offline reality. And if you do that, then Google will naturally rank you higher. Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting, because you're talking about the little league example, which is such a nostalgic example for me. For those who are not from the US, little league is the kids' baseball teams and you would normally have their uniforms and the local grocery store would be a sponsor and they have the logo on the uniform and so forth. Mike Blumenthal: And there'd be a big banner in center field. Mordy Oberstein: Right, right, right. It's funny, because that's a mindset and I feel like that's a mindset that people don't have online sometimes, "I'm going to go interact, I'm going to do community work, I'm going to create partnerships." And that should all translate online. But that way of thinking, I find, sometimes, people don't translate from offline to online. Offline is about partnership, it's about community, it's about whatever, relationships, because there is no click. There's no way to click on the center field banner, on the uniform banner. You have to think a little bit more strategically, because there's nothing immediately in front of you. But on online, I feel we all get distracted though, "I'll get a click, I'll get the traffic, I'll get the ROI, yada, yada, yada," and you don't take those offline ways of thinking and then, translate them, use them online, which I feel like you should be doing. Greg Sterling: One thing I would add to that is that this online marketer mindset, which is about measuring everything, tracking everything, everything has to be accountable. It's this sort of brand performance marketing dichotomy in a certain way. In order to build your brand, you have to be willing to do things that you can't immediately measure and that have a sort of a ripple effect or an intangible effect. And I think there's a lot of bias that digital marketers have toward doing only things that can be tracked, that you can show to your boss, that contribute to your KPIs, that there's a certain kind of mindset and worldview that, I think, results in a bunch of lost opportunities. Rand Fishkin has advocated doing things that can't be measured. You've got to do stuff that isn't necessarily going to be measurable or visible to you in Google Search Console. And I think that that's exactly right. You have to do a bunch of stuff, especially in the offline world that builds goodwill, loyalty, word of mouth. Consistently, if you're a small business owner, consistently what you say, whether or not it's true, what you say and what you often perceive is word of mouth is the number one source of leads for you, right? And that's really about customer experience and brand ultimately. Sometimes, it's about price, but mostly, it's about a holistic kind of idea, "Oh, this person painted my house, they did a great job. I need somebody to do my taxes. I need whatever it is. I need a landscape designer." And it's consistently the most reliable and, very often, the biggest source of leads for these local businesses, not withstanding all the online stuff. And so, that's a lot about the things you do in the world to enhance your reputation, enhance your brand. And they're not really measurable in most cases. A lot of businesses will say, "Well, how'd you find us?" And sometimes that's inaccurate, but that's kind of a crude way to do it in a way that has been done historically. Anyway, I could go on. Mordy Oberstein: No. Oh no, I don't want to stop... Mike Blumenthal: My take on that is that particularly small bricks and mortars, who never really measure that, like you said, should occasionally measure it once a year, once a quarter, should survey their clients. So at least they have this general sense of what is driving traffic, right? If they say word of mouth and that turns out to be 35%, then they know that and they can then focus on the things that matter. But I think that, to some extent, it is at least broadly measurable and small businesses should take the time to occasionally do it. All too often, they're too busy, they don't think of it. But in the businesses I worked with who I recommended it, it was incredibly insightful. Also, when you map that against the analytics, you can get a sense of how many map directions or calls actually convert to sales, so that you can then model what a growth in phone calls might mean, in terms of business. So it's critical component to both understand and plan, but it's also critical component to get the most out of your digital marketing. So I would highly recommend it to a small business, if they have any business, to occasionally be doing that, which is how they found them. Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting, Greg, that you mentioned Rand, because I don't know if you all saw this, he did a, I think it was a video on LinkedIn or something like that, where he showed Google brings whatever amount of traffic, 55%, 60% of all web traffic. But if you're only looking at it directly, "Oh, Google is where I should focus, because that's where the web traffic is coming from," you're really missing how it all works. Because what happened is they saw you at an event, they saw you on social media, they saw you at a conference, they saw you at a little league, whatever it is, and then, they Googled you, found you, and that traffic gets attributed to Google, but it's not really Google's traffic. It's just they're a facilitator in that sense. Greg Sterling: That's totally true. It's kind of a last-click mindset in a certain way. I think, if we all just reflect on our own behavior in the world, you see something, you see an ad, you see a billboard, somebody tells you, recommends somebody, and what you do then is you typically search on that business or that person to look at their reviews or to get more information or get an address. Yesterday, I'm having some car issues, and so, I was at a mechanic and it turned out they couldn't help me. And so, I said, "Could you recommend somebody else?" And they said, "Oh, I recommend this other person." And so, I looked up that other person online, I looked at the reviews, and I called from the GBP page. So what they're not going to see is that whole interaction in the real world. They're going to just see the Google interaction and make some assumptions, as you're saying, about the source of that being Google. But really, the source of it was this guy's recommendation and this other mechanic's recommendation, which would not be visible, but it illustrates the larger point that there's a lot of stuff going on, as Rand says, in the world, that then people follow up with a Google search. Mike Blumenthal: And what Greg left unsaid was he wanted to check this guy's rating to confirm that the person who recommended it was right. Greg Sterling: Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's what people do. What is that called, Mike? What is the term for that? Mike Blumenthal: I'm not sure. Greg Sterling: Word of mouth now usually comes along with some kind of Google search or some kind of lookup online to validate the referral. You can learn a lot about behavior just from reflecting on your own and your immediate family and your friends' behavior, which people don't do that much. It's anecdotal, it's unreliable as a sort of a you can't make a lot of business decisions on the basis of that alone. But it's really helpful information that gives you context that you don't otherwise get just from data. Mordy Oberstein: To bring that into the local space for a second, because I feel like one of the things that I do when I'm looking something up and you're looking at their GBP profile and there's nothing there, they may be a great business, there's no post or products, there's no description, it kind of feels bare bones. That leaves me feeling like maybe they're not so great. And it's kind of like, is that a ranking factor? Some of the things might be, but the fact that you don't have Google posts there, I don't believe is a ranking factor, unless Joy Hawkins has discovered that, somehow, it is a ranking factor, and I completely missed that study. But it does come from that mindset. It's not something that maybe is attributable to any traffic. I can't measure its effectiveness in my bottom line, but if I'm thinking like I'm a real marketer, I'm going to realize that, if I don't have that profile filled out, when people are coming to verify if I'm actually somebody of decent reputation, they're going to be left feeling like, "Ah, this looks a little bare bones. Do they not really care? Are they not really active? Are they not really alive?" And being alive for a business is a very big thing, but it's not a measurable thing that you could tangibly say, "Because of this feeling of vitality, I got X number of more leads." Mike Blumenthal: I would reinforce that, in our research, where we do consumer behavior research, and we've done a number of verticals. But hotels was the most recent one. And people spent a tremendous amount of time looking at the photographs on Google and on, say, Booking.com in Europe, because that's very popular. One woman I had looked at 11 different places to stay, looking for a full-length mirror in the bedroom, because you couldn't tell how well you were dressed if you only had a half-length mirror. And it's like hotel after hotel, but she would look at all the pictures and literally look for the picture of the room with the full-length hotel. So pictures play an incredibly important role, both on Google, on your website, and on whatever directory is important in your industry. We know that from our research, but other attributes do as well. Reviews. We listen to people when they're doing these searches, and 65% of them say, "Reviews are important to us." Now, we don't know about the other 35%, but they just didn't say it, doesn't mean it isn't important to them. BrightLocal indicates it's upwards of 85%, although they're mostly looking at stars and quantity of reviews, and only 25% of the time do they ever actually read them. But I agree with you, having a full profile now, most people don't dig in as deep as posts, but from where I sit, any page on Google you can control, you should. And it makes sense to me to maximize your potential surfaces. And that's Q&A, that's posts, it's all that sort of stuff. Greg Sterling: People are evaluating the credibility of businesses. It's kind of curb appeal. The Google Business Profile, as well as your website, are kind of your brand online. If things are well filled out, well developed, there's a lot of information there. It's going to give people confidence. What people are looking for online very often is confidence to try that business or call that business or include that business in their final consideration set. And so, as you sort of point out, even though somebody's heard that this is a good business, they might be skeptical if they see something that looks very thin or is unclaimed or doesn't have a lot of information. And there are tons and tons of businesses that fall into that category, that may be doing a great job, but they just haven't taken the time to claim their profile or do anything with it. Mike Blumenthal: An example where we saw this very explicitly in consumer research was in physician search. People would come in looking for an OBGYN or a general practitioner and they'd say, "I want the best." They'd go into the Local Finder, which I thought people never went into. They'd scroll 20 deep and pick three or four that had the best reviews, and it was a case where they would skip over people that didn't have pictures or reviews. And they'd go to the ones that did, and it was clear they were willing to scroll. And so, you saw a very long tail in the Local Finder in that industry, in that vertical, because people did take the time to look for more complete profiles. Mordy Oberstein: That totally aligns. It's what I do. It totally aligns with my actual experience. Do you find, because you both are so heavily in local, and there's such a natural tendency to see the connection... Mike Blumenthal: "All local all the time," that's our radio show's motto. Mordy Oberstein: There's a natural bridge between offline and online, I think, is unique to local. Do you find that the local businesses realize that connection more so than, say, like a SaaS platform, that kind of thing? Greg Sterling: Go ahead, Mike. Mike Blumenthal: Well, I was going to say it's very vertically dependent, right? In storage. Most of them get it. In doctors, two-thirds of them didn't get it. It's very vertically dependent, whether they're engaging with Google. Greg Sterling: I think, for the longest time, since the beginning of the internet, the consumer behavior really has been search online, buy offline, and then, that's changed with the rise of e-commerce, but it's still relatively small, 15, 20% of total retail, and at least in the United States. Elsewhere, it may be different. And so, consumers, for 20-plus years, have been using the internet as a tool to do research and get information about often local businesses or things to do in their area or where to buy something or where to find something. And I think business owners do this themselves, but they often don't, this comes back to what I was saying earlier, they often don't generalize and think, "My customers are doing this too." I think they tend to focus on channels as independent of one another. It's like, "This is Google, this is social, this is email, this is my website." And they're not thinking kind of holistically about the relationships of all these things together. I think that that's an unusual small business, a more savvy marketer that is thinking holistically, thinking about the relationship of online to offline, even though these business owners themselves and marketers, however sophisticated, are doing this very thing, they are using the internet, they're interacting with businesses in the world, they're seeing stuff that's happening. I think marketers on TV maybe get it more than others, where they try and connect TV to... Well, TV now is part of online, because it's often streaming, but connect to TV. But things like QR codes and using search volume to measure certain kinds of TV advertising. There are certain pockets where people do really get it and ticket integrated approach, but most small businesses, I don't think do. They don't have that overall view of how these channels work together. Mordy Oberstein: You're basically, in a way, describing Nike. I know Nike doubled down on digital, said, "We're going to go direct to consumer and we're going to bypass the store." And people were like, "I love looking for your shoes online, but I'm going to go try them out in the store before I actually go ahead and buy them." And you can see Nike had major, major problems. They actually opened the door for a bunch of other brands, On, to come in, because they weren't filling... Mike Blumenthal: Hokas. Mordy Oberstein: Hoka, yeah. Mike Blumenthal: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because Nike wasn't filling the stores up and there was shelf space, so foot Locker was putting Hoka up on the shelf and not Nike. And the rankings aren't Nike's problem. Looking at Semrush right now, since 2020, their traffic's been up like crazy. Traffic is great, but the conversions were the issue. Because, "I don't want to buy it online. I want to go to the store," that gap and not realizing the consumers germinating offline and online killed them. Greg Sterling: Yeah, there's also a brand impact there. Ultimately, people are concerned about sales and revenue, but not seeing Nike in the store, not seeing Nike featured prominently does have a kind of degrading impact on the brand. Degrading meaning erosion, as opposed to humiliation, as the case may be. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Mike, last word? Mike Blumenthal: At one of these rare occasions in life, don't have one. Mordy Oberstein: No, really? Do you want me to throw another question out there, so you can have the last word over Greg? Mike Blumenthal: Not necessary. Like I said, I meet with Greg every week, because I like to hear his pearls of wisdom. Mordy Oberstein: Greg does have pearls of wisdom. Greg Sterling: Such as they are. Such as they are. Mike Blumenthal: I don't always agree with them, but... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's the last word right there. Mike Blumenthal: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Where can people find you online? Mike Blumenthal: I'm on Twitter still, unfortunately, mblumenthal Twitter, I'm trying to increase my presence on LinkedIn and at Near Media, where I do the weekly podcast and try to do two or three analysis pieces a month around tactics and strategy in local marketing. Mordy Oberstein: And Greg? Greg Sterling: I'm at gsterling on Twitter, I refuse to call it X, and I don't know what my LinkedIn handle is, but you can find me on LinkedIn and Near Media. And my email, for people that want to harass me or give me death threats, is Greg.Sterling.gmail. Mike Blumenthal: And mine is MBlumenthal@NearMedia.co . Mordy Oberstein: So for the death threats, not on Twitter and not on LinkedIn, specifically email? Greg Sterling: Yeah, it's more effective, I think, if you do it directly in email, because otherwise, it'll be sort of diffused and people may comment and may turn it into something humorous. But if you're really serious, you want to go straight to the email, I think. Mordy Oberstein: All right, great. So link to the show notes, case you want to follow these fine gentlemen. And remember, I won't put their emails in the show notes, but if you want to send them a death threat, just play back the episode and you'll hear their emails again and you can send them a death threat. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. It's a lot of fun. Make sure you check out Near Media and the podcast and the newsletter. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for coming on the show. Greg Sterling: Thank you. Mike Blumenthal: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Greg and Mike, for coming on the show. Make sure you give them a follow. Check out their newsletter, again. I love their newsletters. Again, I told you during the interview, it's one of the only ones I actually open and actually read, which is a rarity, right? Come on, you know what I'm talking about, which is why you don't put too much emphasis on open rates in newsletters. Because I open them so my inbox will be less. Crystal Carter: I always open and read the Searchlight newsletter. That's my favorite newsletter. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, don't do it to Searchlight. No, no, no. Crystal Carter: Of course. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. Crystal Carter: That's my favorite one to open. Mordy Oberstein: It’s about all the other newsletters, other than the ones that we also like, like SEOFOMO, Core Updates by Mike Williams-Cook, #SEOForLunch, Nick LeRoy, those ones you should read. It's the other ones. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's very tricky. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm just trying to talk truth. Anyway. Anyway, your offline marketing impacts what happens on the digital side of things. We've seen this, we've discussed that. We're at a lot of conferences, and if we do a good job, like you mentioned before, engaging with folks, you see it on social very easily. So here's a little dive into a tool that can help you see it on social, as we go tool time on the SERP's Up podcast. So here's a cool tool for you that I came across and we both came across, that looks like it's like, there's a lot of tools that do this kind of thing, but it looks pretty prolific. It's called Brand24. And what it helps you do is basically monitor your mentions across social and beyond social, because a lot of these tools monitor social, but they don't go beyond social. But it helps you see the impact of an offline event and the communications impact of that. It can help you see how you're comparing with your competitors. It can help you track sentiment, which is super helpful, and it has all sorts of topic analysis tools as well. So Brand24 for you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. And I think it's something that seems to be useful for agencies. It's also something that offers things for information on how to measure your share of voice. So they've got a lot of really great resources for helping you to understand that. I've seen marketers who are working across the social space significantly, and this can be really, really important. I think that, if there's a particular product or particular product vertical where it's quite competitive, that share of voice element is so critical in order to cut through. So being able to see that and be able to have some metrics for that, to be able to illustrate the value of that in-person sponsorship, the value of that influencer engagement, the value of that brand activation can be really, really important. Mordy Oberstein: So people always ask, "Oh, well, brand, you can't measure brand, you can't measure offline activity." And it's not true, by the way. It's completely not true. It's just a little bit different than what we're used to on the performance side. You can absolutely track and measure. It's just a little bit correlative. You know correlations equal causation? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. But sometimes, a good correlation ain't nothing like a good correlation. And what this allows you to do is, for example, if you're looking at your trend of negative mentions in the tool, you can kind of correlate, "Oh, wait a second. We launched a new campaign." I will say, North Face launched a new campaign and I did not like it. So if I'm North Face, and all of a sudden, you have these yo-yos like Mordy Oberstein going out there on X and LinkedIn, saying, "I didn't like that campaign," and you start seeing those negative mentions, if it correlates to when you started that campaign, that'll give you a good, "Hey, wait a second. That might be a good indicator of how we measure the success of this new campaign or not." Now, obviously, you need to go deeper and see what are people saying and who is saying it, because maybe I'm not your customer, so who cares that I'm crapping all over it. But having a tool like this helps you better measure brand, because it helps you find those correlative activities and the data that correlates to them. So that you can dive in a little bit deeper. Crystal Carter: And I think that it helps you to sign off, helps you get more funding for the things that you want to do, helps you get more conversions, helps you just move forward with your campaigns. So yeah, it's never bad to have more data. Mordy Oberstein: No, and it's also never bad to have more SEO news from Barry Schwartz, whether it's a small change to a line of a SERP feature that's completely inconsequential or an actual thing like, oh my gosh, search console data has an enormous gap or there's an issue with indexing. Barry Schwartz is your go-to source for the SEO news, and we are your go-to source for covering Barry, even snappier than Barry already writes, which is pretty snappy to be honest with you. Crystal Carter: That's snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So it's like snappy snappiness with our snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, big news this week, as per Search Engine Journal and everybody else covering the story, which is everybody else, SearchGPT launches as ChatGPT's, real-time search feature. So there is a search engine-ish version of ChatGPT, which is called now called SearchGPT, and you can ask it to search for stuff and it'll give you citations and whatnot and whatnot. This is not live, as of this recording, everyone everyone yet for OpenAI. It said all ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist use, will have access today, today being the day they launched this, which was on October 31st. It's interesting. I will say this, it's interesting. On the mobile version, what happens is there's an icon for search, right? You type in your query like, I don't know, like, "Who is Aaron Judge?" or whatever, and you have a little option to search. And on the search, what happens is there's a little button at the end of the summary, you know your typical ChatGPT summary for sources, and you click on sources and up comes a whole list of the URLs. You can pull that panel up, and then, you can see the full list of URLs and click on whatever URL you want to. And of course, there's questions of like, will this replace Google and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of talked this about this, I think, two weeks ago on the episode. It's interesting. Leaving that question aside for a minute, it's interesting. I don't find yet that the URLs are accessible in the way I like them to be accessible, particularly on the mobile side. And I think it's a problem, not just because of SearchGPT. I think it's a problem because there's multiple things happening at one time. For example, social media is kind of a mess right now. A lot of these things create a disincentive to create new content. If I can't get my URLs out there the same way, if I can't get engagement on social, which will drive content to the links that I'm sharing on social, do I still have that same incentive to create content? And I think, it might be a little bit of a hot take, I think the web is in a place right now where that's going to become problematic down the line, unless something changes. The path forward would indicate that there'll be a problem down the line of some sort, and I think it's really problematic for the web ecosystem overall and things like SearchGPT could contribute to that problem. That's my take. That's my personal take. Anyway, onto more AI and search information. This from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. I've always wanted to see this roundtable, by the way, Barry. Where's the roundtable? Do you have a roundtable? If not, I feel like false advertising. There's no roundtable. There is no actual SEO Roundtable. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google AI Answers in Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries, & About This Place." To translate, Google added a bunch of AI stuff to local stuff. One of the things, for example, is, in Google Maps, you can now say like, "Hey, show me things to do with a friend at night in Lower Manhattan," and Gemini will curate a list for you of little cards, carousel of cards, a typical format you've seen for all sorts of carousels on Google with a bunch of places. And they'll categorize them like things to do with live music, I don't know, comedy clubs, whatever it is. I think that's great. I think that's a great way to get your listings in front of people. I think it's a great way to get people to the Google Business Profile, eventually to your website, and to your business like that. To my previous point, this would be using AI to send traffic to an actual business. At the same time, Google has also announced that they're doing review summaries based on AI. So they'll go through your reviews and they'll pull out a summary and it will say, "Summarized with Gemini," basically summarizing all the things in the reviews, so you don't have to look through all the reviews. You just get a, "People say this is a great place for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Obviously, my apprehension here is, if you have negative reviewers or you have negative review spammers or whatever it is, that can influence the AI answer. Also, I like to think of the Google Business Profile as a place where there's more control for the business, not less, and this would seemingly be less control in a way. Okay. At the same time, there's also a feature about ask about this place. So let's say you have a listing, I don't know, like Bob's Comedy Club, and you want to know, does Bob's Comedy Club Serve cocktails? And you can now ask Maps about that place, and Maps will tell you, "Oh yes, they serve wonderful cocktails, yada, yada, yada." Again, great. Could be really, really helpful, but it's because you're directly impacting what someone might do with their money at a particular business or might not do with their money at a particular business, like, "Oh, there's no cocktails here. I'm not going to this comedy club now," but maybe they do offer cocktails. I think it's really, really important for something like this to make sure that the AI answers are as accurate as possible, because you are actually impacting people's livelihoods directly with something like this. Check out the full write up that Barry has over here on SERoundtable.com. Again, is there a roundtable? I would like to know. And that is this week's version of the Snappy News. There are the occasions where I drone on with the Snappy News, and it's not so snappy. Barry actually called one of those instances out on social media. He's like, "You went on too long." Crystal Carter: Barry is the king of efficiency. He's like, "How can we get this done?" Mordy Oberstein: If you watch, It's New, which is our Monday through Thursday new show with Barry and Greg Finn. I'm repeating myself here, but Barry says that he wears his cell phone in his nerd pocket. Crystal Carter: Yeah, front pocket. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, your front pocket, the nerd pocket. Because I'm thinking back of when you have pocket protectors. Crystal Carter: Revenge of the Nerds. Mordy Oberstein: Revenge of the Nerds, exactly. That movie didn't age well, and he puts his phone in there, so that it takes less time to pull out when he has to use it, that fraction of a second. Crystal Carter: Yes. It reminded me of stock changing things. When people buy stuff, there are machines that buy stocks and shares and they make them closer to the server, because they save a fraction of a second and get the share faster or something like that. And that works if you're like, I don't know, some giant stock company or something, but I didn't realize that Barry was working in those milliseconds. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of SEO news to cover. Every fraction of a second counts. Crystal Carter: I think you might be right. But your hands are closer to your pockets, to your hip pockets, right? Mordy Oberstein: Not when you're sitting on a keyboard writing SEO news all day long. Then your hands is actually closer to your front pocket, nerd pocket. Crystal Carter: I suppose so. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Barry thinks of these things. Don't worry. I trust Barry. Crystal Carter: Sure, I'm sure. Mordy Oberstein: In Barry, we trust. Speaking of great personalities out there across the internet, our follow of the week is somebody who does a great job pulling his offline activities and pulling them online for his personal branding. It's Terry Rice, who is actually a part of our meetup in New York City, the digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal. So look at Terry's LinkedIn profile, and you will see a ton of personal things about exercise and fitness. And he leverages it in and pulls it into his profile to create something that has an amazing personal brand for himself. It has so much value, and it has so much personality. And it's a great way of seeing that, if you do great things offline, you can pull those things into online to add value that way. Crystal Carter: Nice. Nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's good stuff. Crystal Carter: I'll check it out. Mordy Oberstein: Please check them out. So Crystal, you going to be offline anywhere? People should come look for you soon. Crystal Carter: I'm offline all the time. I'm offline all the time, probably at a conference near you. Mordy Oberstein: Look for Crystal at a conference near you. By the way, I'm surprised that there's not an SEO conference out there called Conference Near You. Crystal Carter: They totally should do that. Mordy Oberstein: They should totally do that. Crystal Carter: We just did a conference with the team at LocalU and the team at Sterling Sky. They were fantastic. Guys, Joy Hawkins and co, Conference Near You. Mordy Oberstein: Conference Near You, maybe not a rebrand, because I know LocalU's got a whole brand, but maybe a special event. Conference Near You. Crystal Carter: Local SEOs, y'all need to bring this together. It's just waiting for it. It's like this open goal. Mordy Oberstein: I can't believe it hasn't happened already. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Or, okay, either that or if they do, let's say they did a conference in Boston, but name the conference Boston SEO Conference Near You, Boston Conference, SEO Conference Near You, SEO Conference Boston. Crystal Carter: Greater Metropolitan Boston Area. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Near You. Crystal Carter: Massachusetts. Mordy Oberstein: Massachusetts. So that's a lot of letters. Yeah, it's too much. Crystal Carter: Cannot spell that. I can't spell that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, not a clue. Crystal Carter: I can spell Mississippi, but that's because it's like... Mordy Oberstein: Is there a thing like a song like M-I-S-S letter? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Sorry, Massachusetts. Well, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we'll be next week with a new episode, as we dive into doing SEO for a sub-brand. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars and whatnot on the Wix Studio SEO Learning over 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 of 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 operational processes should you follow as a marketing agency? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss how processes are the backbone of a good digital marketing agency. Hosts of The Long Game Podcast and owners of Omniscient Digital, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett join the show to share their own operation tactics. Perfecting an operational structure is one of the biggest challenges for any digital marketing agency. Tune in as we share the fundamental processes needed to help you and your clients thrive. Step-by-step, day-by-day, get the operations know-how your agency needs on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Building the processes for marketing agency efficiency What operational processes should you follow as a marketing agency? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss how processes are the backbone of a good digital marketing agency. Hosts of The Long Game Podcast and owners of Omniscient Digital, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett join the show to share their own operation tactics. Perfecting an operational structure is one of the biggest challenges for any digital marketing agency. Tune in as we share the fundamental processes needed to help you and your clients thrive. Step-by-step, day-by-day, get the operations know-how your agency needs on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 81 | April 3, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 53:22 This week’s guests Alex Birkett Alex Birkett is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps ambitious B2B brands drive attributable organic outcomes. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his dog Biscuit and enjoys scuba diving, skiing, and jiu jitsu. Allie Decker Allie Decker is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps marketing leaders at B2B software companies turn SEO and content into growth channels. She previously scaled content programs at HubSpot and Shopify and currently lives in Chicago. David Khim David Ly Khim is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps ambitious B2B software companies drive organic growth. He previously led growth initiatives as a Product Manager at HubSpot and Head of Growth at People.ai and lives in Boston, MA. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: Its 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 overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a smooth operator, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I am not sure if I could possibly claim that title, because I never figured out how to do that thing from that music video with the leaning, where they lean all the way over. But apparently after spending much of my childhood trying desperately to do that and falling on my face, I realized that actually what they had was nails in their shoes. There was nail on the floor. Mordy Oberstein: Really, that's how they do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was a nail on the floor, and he had a thing in the shoe and basically they latched into it and then they did the lean and that's how they didn't fall. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Crystal Carter: Basically. Basically. Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they pull the cheese on a pizza in the commercials and it's glue. Crystal Carter: No, no, no. They're not allowed to use glue. They basically, they use some special kind of cheese. Well, at least in the UK at least. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever, it's not real. I've eaten plenty of pizzas, has your pizza ever done that? No. Ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Never done that. Mordy Oberstein: We fall for it though, because you watch the TV, you're like, "Oh, that pizza looks so good." And you know when you go there, it's not going to be anything like that whatsoever, but we do it anyway. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That's how marketing works. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the world we're living in. Mordy Oberstein: Lies. You know what's not a lie? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/newsletter. Got all those slashes, but where you can also collaborate on websites uniquely with Wix Studio, make your agency's processes more efficient with collaboration freedom that Wix Studio offers you. Check it out wix.com/studio. Because today we're talking about building the operations for content and SEO to increase team effectiveness. That's right. At the backbone of any good SEO and content game is a set of mundane operations that pushes your boat to shore. And to help us, we will be welcoming the entire crew of The Long Game podcast over at Omniscient Digital. Plus, we'll get a thorough and explore what fundamentally makes for good operations. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So jump in your shell, place your oars into your oar locks and get ready to roam perfect harmony as the Wix and Long Game crew help your crew power through to an efficient SEO and operations game in one seamless glide of grace on episode 81 of the SERP's podcast. In case you can't tell, I just watched that movie with the people on the boats, the crew movie with the boats. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's lots of movies like that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a new one in the Olympics. Crystal Carter: Oh, an actual crew? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, an actual crew. Crystal Carter: Not the crew, actual people doing crew? Mordy Oberstein: No crew, the boat, you're rowing the boat with all the people. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I'm aware of crew. I have never done that. I don't have the core strength for that. Mordy Oberstein: I like rowing boats, but I can never do that. Crystal Carter: Can you do it in the round? You start rowing and then I'll row row the boat. No? Mordy Oberstein: I want to be the guy who just screams at people while the people row. Crystal Carter: The drums, the drums are good as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That guy's gotten the best job, to be honest with you. Row faster. Anyway, so fun fact, about three or four years, I'm going to mention this later again in the podcast, I was a COO of a mid-sized property management company in New York City, which people don't know. And it's a weird Mordy, fun fact. So when I say operations are nitty-gritty and boring and mundane processes, I speak from experience and that's what they are. But they're also the core of everything you do when you're working as part of a huge team and a huge content team and a huge SEO team, it all in my mind comes down to operations. So it's not a little bit weird that we're talking about SEO and content and operations because fundamentally, if you're working on a team, it is the backbone of everything you do. Everything needs to work methodically towards one goal. And that's all based on good-strong operations, which is why I am so very happy to introduce the crew of the Long Game podcasts. Welcome to SERP's Up, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett. Welcome. Alex Birkett: Thank you. Thank you. Allie Decker: Thanks, Mordy. David Khim: Hello. Hello. Alex Birkett: Good to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first things first, markers going to market. Plug away. What do you got? Alex Birkett: Well, we have a podcast too called The Long Game that you mentioned, and we run an SEO and content marketing agency called, Omniscient Digital. It's beomniscient.com. I think that's all we've got, right? Are we selling anything else? David Khim: So we work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. We've worked with companies like SAP, Adobe, Loom, Jasper, Vendor, Order, I can keep going, but I think that gives an idea of the type of companies. They're typically quite ambitious, growing quickly or want to grow faster. And we typically are the team that they go to either build their content SEO engine from zero to one, or in some cases even scale it from one to 10 or even a hundred and just work with us instead of hiring an in-house team. Alex Birkett: Well, and that's an interesting angle too, because we've seen the backsides of both sides of the spectrum in terms of precedes startups all the way up through the biggest companies in the world and everybody struggles with operations. It's just in different ways. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people forget how much it can, particularly when you're thinking about SEO projects and stuff. How much you can have the best campaign in the world, but if somebody hasn't remembered to have somebody answer the phone or have somebody pick up all those leads or have enough capacity or make sure that the servers can take all of the traffic. Maybe we need to upgrade our site at the back end so that it can take all the traffic, those kinds of things can make your best campaign fall completely flat. David Khim: What I've found is I think of operations very simply. It's what needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done and how is it going to be done? And typically when we meet with prospects or start work with clients, one or more of those things are not defined. A lot of the case, what needs to be done is never defined. Sometimes we'll even ask, well, who do we talk to if we have any questions? That's also not defined, which we in some cases don't realize until down the line that we've been talking to the wrong person. And we also help them define, here's how things are going to happen. Here's when we'll do it by, here's what we can do, here's what we need from you and so on. And once those things are defined, things start rolling and things are smooth like butter. And we find that a lot of clients, because those things aren't defined internally, a lot of times they know what to do, but they're like, "We don't know how to actually get this done," because they bought our likes internally or we don't have resources and things like that. Crystal Carter: And I think it can happen a lot in large organizations and I think that one of the things that's tricky, it's like when someone says in first aid they tell you if somebody is bleeding, if there's an emergency, you don't say someone call an ambulance. You say, "You call an ambulance and then that one person will call the ambulance," because otherwise everyone will assume that somebody else did it. I mean, do you find that a lot of the times somebody assumes that someone else has done or handled whatever it is that needs to be handled? Allie Decker: Yeah, absolutely. It's even more prevalent in a fully distributed team like ours, because not together day to day. Even more so, because our clients are all over the world. So having set responsibilities and ownership designated out the gate really helps the projects once the emergencies arise as they always do. There's a lot of our work that is unpredictable or things change in the middle of the projects and having the infrastructure set up, the operational infrastructure helps, whatever happens, it continues smoothly. Alex Birkett: I would say that's a bigger problem in larger enterprises too, especially with multiple business units. As you sort of absolve responsibility or certain steps in the process to, say, getting a piece of content published. If you can describe how does a piece of content get published, you realize there's so many different stakeholders at each step and sometimes it's unclear who's responsible for each phase in that process and what their incentives are. So in the early stages it's you have one person or maybe one person in a freelancer or an agency. Things are simpler at that stage. As you scale operations, it becomes much less clear who's doing what, when and why, what their incentive structure is. Mordy Oberstein: And I find that either means in best case scenario, a bottleneck until you figure it out or absolute total communication breakdown, which is your probably worst case scenario. David Khim: You touched on an important thing there that I kind of jokingly say to a lot of people that it's communication. As a personal belief, I think if we all as individuals and humans worked on our communication skills, the world would be a better. And if we just zoom in on the workplace, there would probably be less headbutting and more collaboration going on in workspace. But even being able to define a communication cadence of we're going to check in on this once a week, or let's aim to have these things done by a certain deadline and check in at these checkpoints. Having that laid out explicitly is also very helpful, because then you have regular checkpoints to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've been on the other side where I've hired agencies and that hasn't been in place, and what inevitably happens is the whole thing kind of falls apart and you as the consumer feel like, "What is going on here? Why are they not doing this? I'm paying all this money and nothing's happening." Whereas you've built in that operations, those processes from the outset and the expectations are there. And there's checks and balances to the system to make sure that if something falls through the cracks, it'll eventually get picked up again or there's opportunity for it to come up in discussion again. Then that solves a lot of the problems that you really as an agency, I feel like if you don't have that in place, you're basically just setting yourself up to have a lot of angry, resentful customers. Alex Birkett: I think a nightmare scenario for us, one that we actively try to avoid and are constantly iterating on is having a whole list of actions and having it just sit in draft mode or feedback mode or a backlog. Whether that's, we produce content for clients and that's probably the most palpable example. Where it's like you could produce 50 pieces of content and they just sit there in draft mode without being published. Our best case scenario, outcome wise is a great case study for a client, a great outcome for a client. That's a flywheel. That's how we build a reputation and it's not possible unless things get done. Same is true in technical SEO, if you've got a bunch of issues. My background is in experimentation, you could have all the ideas in the world, but if there's no throughput, nothing happens on the outcome side. So that's something we actively try to avoid. Crystal Carter: And I think also with that, you can't grow unless you, you talked about experimentation, you have to publish otherwise, you can't see what the market thinks of what you've done. You can't get customer feedback, user feedback off... David, David's nodding. And those bottlenecks aren't just bottlenecks for you getting your case study, they're bottlenecks for us doing better the next time, because there is no next time if there isn't a first time. I don't know if you have any top tips for being able to push through those bottlenecks that are so frustrating, because I've definitely been in the place where we've had a stack of content. We were commissioned for content, we got all the content through to the client, and then it sat there until it was no longer relevant and then you're going to have to start again. Allie Decker: Yeah, oftentimes I've learned setting those operational expectations of the client. We're a partnership, we're working on this together, really having them understand what their responsibilities would be, which we would do our best to ease those responsibilities. But if we don't have CMS access or if there is a certain point where we need them to review content for accuracy or their brand perspective or point of view, they're going to be inherently involved. So setting the expectation out the gate, even as early as the sales process, was like, "This is what we would need from you. How does this sound? Is this a commitment you can make? Who would be the main point of contact for this?" I think it helps then when it does become an active action for them to own, they know it's coming. They've set this time aside and it's our job to hold them accountable, so it doesn't come as a surprise. We found that that really helps starting the conversation early. Alex Birkett: With any sort of behavioral change. I always go back to this model, I think it's called B=MAP, it's BJ Fogg's behavior model. And it's, you have two axes, one is motivation, so how excited somebody is to do something. And then you have ease or effort and it's like how hard it is to do that thing. So if somebody needs a new driver's license, their motivation is extremely high, so they'll put up with all the BS at the DMV, whatever to get that done. And there's varying levels of motivation in terms of clients, but we try to pick the ones like David said earlier, who are ambitious and have high motivation levels to get content out there to do SEO. So then our job is to make it as easy as possible for those things to go through, and we learn different ways to do that. If we're doing high velocity, sometimes that involves bashing content feedback cycles. So instead of giving somebody 200 things to review and saying, "Get after it." We'll do 10, 20, 30 at a time and be very specific about what we need. Do we need legal approval? Do we need actual structural subject matter expert feedback? We'll be very specific about those things. So it's not this overwhelming cognitive burden that it just sits there on somebody's desk, because it's, "Where do I even start?" Mordy Oberstein: That sounds really interesting, because it sounds almost like you're very agile in how you're approaching the client and the scenario and the ask. How do you set yourselves up your own processes to be set up where it's not overly rigid so that when you have a client, when you have a situation, when you have an ask or a need or a scenario, that you're able to set up the processes that align to that particular given scenario? And not, "Hey, this is how we do things, here's our process." And just blinders on, "Here's how we usually go with it. So that's what we're going to do," and not be agile enough to adapt to the current situation? Allie Decker: Yeah, we're really lucky to have a brilliant editorial team. Our managing editor is Lean Six Sigma certified, so he's brought a lot of those inputs into how he structured the team and our editorial process. A lot of our editorial process is 'rigid'. We have a default set up and we'll iterate on that if necessary. But for the most part, again, it's all about setting expectations right out the gate. We communicate this as early as the first or second sales calls, "Here's what our editorial process looks like," so we can leave a lot of wiggle room for input. SME interviews, SME editors coming in and contributing to really technical pieces. I think ultimately having the tooling in place is really helpful. So we use tools like Airtable. We have a multi-step editorial process. We have a lot of shared communication. So plus one to what David said about just staying as in touch as possible. So we share a Slack channel with our clients and we have really repeatable communication connections, so bi-weekly calls. All of this infrastructure, which is rigid per se, allows for the time in between those calls, the time in between those assignments and the content creation process to take shape as it might. And a lot of what we do is equal parts arts and science, so some of it needs that artistic space to come together. Other times it's a little bit more scientific, so a little bit more repeatable, collecting the data, iterating on the data, using it to inform our next strategy. But I think actually having some of the infrastructure remain rigid, setting the expectation out the gate. And then if push comes to shove and something happens with the client or after a couple times we're like, "Actually, this isn't the best fit for this specific project," then we're able to tweak. So I'd actually argue that maybe having a repeatable process to begin is the best, and then picking and choosing those puzzle pieces as you get to know the project. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a case of managing yourself. If your team, the client or the project, folks that you're working with are the variable, you want to control as much on your side as you possibly can. Allie Decker: Yeah. I think one good thing we did last year was build a lot of our process, build a really strong foundation. And as every agency does, we have projects that don't go according to plan. And we were able to, because our process was so clear, we were able to clearly see where the problem was, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But having a really clear foundation infrastructure, I'll just use that word again, allowed us to within days pinpoint what was breaking. And that was why it was so valuable to have that rigid, repeatable process to begin with. And we were able to have a postmortem of sorts and iterate as we needed on specific projects. David Khim: I'd love to get a little bit more into weeds too, just like tactily, what that means, not just for us, but even for folks in-house. Because whether it's Sam or managing editor's Lean Six Sigma certified. I come from a growth background. Alex comes from experimentation. We have a mix of what some people have called, this is the mathy side of things, and then there's also the creative and that form of thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to say you read my mind, because I was going to talk about our in-house and how we do that.So you go ahead, take it. David Khim: Yeah. But one of the things that the team did really well was build out a mirror board of every single step of our workflows, from the first sales call with a prospect all the way down to delivery. And we did that for our hiring process too, and then that allowed us to be able to say, "Hey, this client engagement broke down. Where in this workflow did it break down? Okay, we identified it. Now let's figure out how to actually... What do we need to do to adapt?" Without that, we wouldn't be able to do that sort of diagnostic and actually adapt. And then I think part of it's the culture of, hey, we use a lot of automations, we use ClickUp and a lot of checklists, even if it's a silly thing like, "Send a follow-up to the client after the meeting." Those things help me, because sometimes I forget, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I forgot to do this." So we're just very regimented in how we approach a lot of our work, and that lets us think about more of the strategic and creative things and not have to worry about the more administrative, straightforward things like that. Mordy Oberstein: We literally have that on our SEO Hub. I mean, we have a great head of SEO editorial, George Winn, he has some really strong processes in place. He's very methodical about it. He's very regimented about it. And I find personally, I don't want to speak for Crystal, but I find that because of those processes, I know that when we want to get a little bit creative with it. I know that sometimes I worry about, if we get a little bit too creative, will the quality still be there, will the targeting still be there? But because we have the processes in place, I know that no matter how wild and crazy I get with it, it'll all come back to a place where there's a check and control of how well-targeted and how well-produced the content actually is. I don't need to worry. Hey, I'm being a little bit maybe too off the deep end here, and the quality of the content and the targeting of the content won't come out the way I want it to, but because I know I'm going to be checked in place by the processes our editorial has put in place, I'm good to go. I can do what I want. Crystal Carter: I think that those processes are so important. I think one of the other thing I wanted to pick up on, because I think David and Allie, you both mentioned this was as part of your sales process. Certainly in my experience of speaking with clients, one of the first things I ask, particularly if I'm giving an SEO audit or something is, and I think Alex, I think you also mentioned the who in the team as well. If you're working with someone and you're trying to figure out your process with someone, the first thing I'm doing is, who's on your team? What resources do you have? So that if I give you 45 articles, if there's one person there, then I can expect that that's going to take this long. Or they might say, "I want 400 articles," but they have one person reviewing and you're just like, "No, that's too many. That's too many for you." How does vetting clients and matching clients to your process, how do you match clients to your process and how do you identify whether or not they're going to work well in your framework that you've got? Alex Birkett: I think what you said there around having a DRI basically is the main issue. It's not always that simple. Earlier stage companies may have one person, typically if it's a founder, that's a little tough because they're going to have so many other competing priorities that it's hard to get their time. But as you scale, one thing that I've realized working with much larger clients is that you'll have a DRI, but then there'll be other stakeholders. And finding how to partition those different roles for the different parts of the feedback cycles is important. So one client that I'm thinking about that I talked to earlier today, they've got a strategic editorial person thinking about things from the content side. But then there's legal too, they're decently regulated and there's a heavy legal presence. And then there's product marketing, and that's how they're speaking about the products in the content that we're producing. So how we delineate those stages of feedback instead of just giving it all at once, giving it to our single point of contact and saying, "Do all of this." We can go in phases with each of these, and it is just, I think, important to me to identify and to find who each person is and which part of the process they're taking. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's a really important part. Mordy Oberstein: David, I wanted to get back to, you weren't about to ask a question? I don't want to gloss over it. David Khim: Okay. I'm very curious. I can share the context on our end, but I'm very curious how you all think about it. Not even just with the pod, but maybe your editorial team too. But one of the things around process and breaking bottlenecks is, I found that we run into bottlenecks when someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do, they don't have the bandwidth, or I'll bucket the rest in fear, uncertainty, doubt. And in that bucket, it's, what if it doesn't work? What if it's not the right content? Or I think the one that is my favorite is, I'm worried about the quality. And quality tends to be a big thing that comes up, and there can be a discussion of, "Hey, maybe we'll get to 90% of what you're expecting, but we need to get it published to get data and iterate." But then I know, and I think this comes a lot from Alex and Allie mainly, but the idea that quality can be made objective, and a lot of folks kind of say it's subjective and move on. But that doesn't enable things to move forward sometimes, because if you can't agree on what quality is. So I'll let Allie and Alex add anything to that, but I'm curious how you all handle that at Wix. Crystal Carter: I think that certainly within our teams, we have various different objectives for different audiences. So at the SEO Hub, we have different objectives for what we want to do with our content and how we want educational value and brand value and things like that. There are other parts of the team that have other parts of, it's a very big company, working in 17 different languages and globally, et cetera. So there's different parts of the company that have different objectives. And I think that we, as a company overall, I think we try to make sure that it's very clear what the objectives are for each piece of content that somebody or each channel that someone's engaging with, for instance. So if they're on, we have our Wix Studio blog, for instance, which has one type of focus, and we have our Wix SEO blog, which has a different focus, for instance, I think there's things like that. And I think that when people think about working with a big company like Adobe or Wix or something like that, I think what people forget is that very often you're working on a project within that. There'll be a project within that specific thing, and that project will be dedicated to a certain thing. If you were think about, if you, "Oh, you work at McDonald's." Well, there's going to be a team that's dedicated just to Happy Meals, just to Happy Meals, and even within that team there'll be somebody who's just dedicated to the toys that go in the Happy Meals, for instance. They're going to be in subsections as well. So I think that we try to focus on the audiences that it's going for and the intent of the audience. Mordy Oberstein: For your quality point, I think what inevitably happens is that, first of all, I personally think there is an objective ideal of quality, and I think it's on a spectrum, but there is an ideal, there's an objective ideal of something that is or is not quality. Either something is or is not soda. There's a definition of what it is, and if there's no definition of what it is and it's completely arbitrary, we might as well not talk about it. But I think though that quality is contextualized. For example, the Wix Studio blog is very much geared towards trends, thought leadership and what quality means in that context is different than let's say our SEO Hub, which is more we want to just educate you about how to do SEO and how to do marketing kind of thing. So it's much more straightforward, informational, and less on the thought leadership side sometimes, or sometimes it is very thought leadershippy. But the quality is in context of what is the nature of the content, because what's quality for a straight-up informational piece and what's quality for an acquisition piece or what's quality for a thought leadership piece are just very, very different things. Alex Birkett: Yeah, I look at it as this bi-directional thing. The word quality is so nebulous that if you get bogged down on definitions, I think it just, to your point, it is a little bit of a waste of time. But there's a quality in the reader of the content, and you can't ever truly control that. I post on LinkedIn quite a bit and things that I think are the best posts in the world get crickets, and then some pithy little fortune cookie thing goes viral, and I'm like, "I guess I can't predict quality." But that doesn't mean, I think conflating that outcome quality with the input quality is where people get bogged down with the definitions. So in pursuit of the goal, like you had mentioned Crystal, it's like you want to define that to the best of your ability, objectively speaking. It's more specs, it's more thinking, does this hit specs, giving the outcome that we want? And then after you see the outcome, you get more data and you can iterate. That can inform those specs too. So to me, it's very bi-directional and both inform the other, but I don't want to confuse the two. I think they're two different things. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think David also touched on people getting bogged down with quality this or quality that and not publishing because of that, and what did they say is done is better than perfect. Sometimes the- Mordy Oberstein: The enemy of good is great, something like that, Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. That sort of thing. And I think that sometimes they say delivering customer value. So something that is good is something that is valuable to the customer and if that's valuable to the customer, there's lots of things that people find valuable. And I think that I was interested in the idea of making it objective, making quality objective. You'll have a baseline of this must do this. A table must have legs and it must be level and it must not be sharp. There's a baseline of what a table must do, and you have to absolutely hit all of those things. And once you can absolutely hit all of those things, if you can't make your table level, then we're not doing anything for instance. Whereas after that you can go, "Oh, we're going to make this heirloom this, we're going to make it hand, et cetera, et cetera. You can get all of the extra lovely stuff on top of that, but you need to be able to do the very, very baseline thing in the first place, whatever it is that is. And I think that part of operations is making things that are very qualitative, very subjective more regimented and more quantitative I guess you would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think what the issue though is, so with something like a table, it's very easy to define what is a table. It's a flat service that has... But when you deal with quality, it's very thorough. You're starting to deal with very, I'm going to get philosophical, existential concepts. What is valid? What does it mean for a thing to exist in a certain context? And it's, define value and importance. I can define words somewhere really easily. When you try to define other concepts, it gets very lofty very quickly. And quality, for something we talk about all the time happens to be one of those very thorough kind concepts. So I think there's a danger in trying to define it, and I would go on a limb and say, you know it, when you see it, you can try to describe it and describe certain attributes of it. But you can never really define it per se. So I think it's all of it equals a very layered and complex equation of what is quality, how do you produce quality content? And we're not going to answer in this podcast, unfortunately. David Khim: But we can do it. Alex Birkett: Something I've been thinking about is that maybe quality, we want to make it as objective as possible in terms of our processes and inputs, but there's no universal quality. So you mentioned McDonald's before. Something I think about a lot is McDonald's quality versus say Michelin Star chefs. Both of those actually hit quality specs with what they're aiming to do. And people will smack talk McDonald's and be like, "You don't want to be the McDonald's of this." But I'm reading that book that, 'Grinded out' by Ray Kroc, and the amount of attention to detail that he put into the potatoes, that oil, every piece of it is remarkable. It's like this guy really had an eye for quality, it's just a different shape. It's not the same universal definition that your Michelin Star restaurant in New York City has. Mordy Oberstein: It's a different purpose. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's what I mean by customer value. So a Michelin Star restaurant, what somebody values about that is part of the whole experience, the whole sensory thing, the quality of all the ingredients, all of the other things. What someone values at a McDonald's is that they can get food within five minutes and they can have a certain number of calories and they can have all of it. They can feed their whole family very, very, very quickly and at a reasonable affordable price. That is something that sometimes that is high value, sometimes in some cases that is extremely high value. And sometimes the Michelin Star thing is a high value in different contexts, they will be more or less important. But in both of those cases, what the person ultimately wants to do is to eat edible food. So if that is the baseline. Mordy Oberstein: So abstract question for the crowd. Abstract question for the crowd and we can end on this point. Is usefulness part of quality or is it a layer that quality has to depend on? In other words, something could be quality. I have a Michelin Star burger, it's a hundred dollars for the burger, it's definitely quality. If I have $5, I'm in a huge rush, it's not useful. So is usefulness a separate concept than quality, or is it really part of the same thing? We just went way too deep. Every time we do a conversation, this happens. We always go into the abstract, philosophical. Crystal Carter: It always does. Allie Decker: I don't think usefulness applies to food Mordy, but I would say for content it does. So I would definitely have it as a quality input for the specific work that we do. Alex Birkett: But utility does factor into food too. If everything in the world was a Michelin Star expensive meal, I mean that wouldn't be a great world. Crystal Carter: Equally, I love cotton candy, but I couldn't eat cotton candy every day all the time. I would enjoy it, but it's not useful to my health. If I just ate cotton candy. Allie Decker: I think there's probably someone out there, Crystal, that would disagree with you. Mordy Oberstein: I can eat a Michelin Star hamburger every meal, every day. I'd be fine. I mean, I'd probably die relatively soon, but I'd be fine. Allie Decker: Yeah. Skewed utility, tastes very bad for you. Mordy Oberstein: Who defines what's actually utility? Alex Birkett: It's us, we're doomed. Allie Decker: Doomed. Mordy Oberstein: Doomed. You know what's not doomed? You are not doomed if you follow these great people out there on the ether that is social media. Where can we find all of you? Allie Decker: Mordy, you're so smooth. We're all on LinkedIn, as Alex and David mentioned. We have a lot of fun on there. And check us out on beomniscient.com. You can find all of our work, all of our team. We have some great podcast episodes of our own, blog post resources on there. Yeah, The Long Game. Mordy Oberstein: We'll put links in the show notes, but you can just Google The Long Game podcast and you'll find it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Allie Decker: Thank you. Alex Birkett: Thank you. David Khim: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, well, since we're talking about operations, not the game, not the game operation, which confounded me as a child, I do not have surgeon's hands. I killed that poor fellow many a times. Crystal Carter: I think he was smiling the whole time, the poor guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just jabbed you in the ribs, he's still smiling. Crystal Carter: Just trying to put your spleen in your elbow, "Sir, I don't think this is going to work out for you." Mordy Oberstein: We might be dating ourselves. I don't know if that game still exists, so just for- Crystal Carter: It does. I saw one for Grogu from the Mandalorian, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, fine. So in that case, you understand what the game operation is, and we're not dating ourselves. I'm dating myself by not being sure if I'm dating myself or not. Got it. Okay, since we're talking about operations. I have a ton to say about operations, mainly because no one talks to me, no one asks about operations because no one thinks I have any experience around operations. But I actually used to be a COO of a company with 300 people for four years. Little fun fact about Mordy, a long time ago. And again, dating myself that I could say that and it being a long time ago. By the way, I'm channeling my inner saltiness with that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I would like to, so salty, like Dead Sea salty. I would like to talk about operations in a deeper way, because I have al to say about operations. So Crystal and I are going to take a very deep thought into what makes a good operator with a deep thought from Crystal and a Mordy. So I think there's a universal concept around being good at operations that exist across the board, that sometimes when we get stuck in the marketing or SEO conversation, operations in that context we don't talk about, because we're talking about operations from an SEO team point of view or operations from a digital marketing team point of view. But let's perhaps zoom out and talk about just what does it mean to be good at operations. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that this is something, particularly within an SEO team, within an SEO agency, it's hard. It's hard. Mordy Oberstein: Operations is the hardest thing in my opinion. Crystal Carter: It's really difficult. It's really hard. And I know folks who said, I was in a conversation and someone was saying, "I admire this agency owner, because it's really hard running an agency." It's really hard. You've got to think about making sure you can keep the lights on. You have to make sure that everybody's learning stuff. You have to make sure that you're keeping your clients happy. You have to think about all of those sorts of things. And essentially with an agency, what you have is a knowledge-based business. You have something where the knowledge that you have as a team is your bread and butter, that is what people are paying for is what you know. And so you have to make sure that you're keeping those folks happy and that you're keeping everybody clever and all of that sort of stuff, and that they have all the tools that they need and all of that. And so you spend a lot of time deciding, do we need this tool? Is this training module that we're investing in really useful? Is this particular operational tool going to help us make the difference? Because for instance, when people get those team management tools, there's a learning curve. You have to invest months in training your entire team to learn this new operational tool like a Monday or that sort of thing or Asana or whatever. So you have to spend all the time investing and you're like, "Is this going to be worth it, going to be worth it down the line? Are we going to be able to make the money back on this?" All of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: I think you can even zoom out from there, because there's a part of operations where you're trying to make it all go and make it all work. And then I think there's a part of operations where you're basically a gatekeeper. And I think this is the part of operations that no one likes to talk about because it's not very fun. It's super complicated and it has less to do with the sexy part of growth, and more to do with the things that are really super annoying. Which is, so you have a new tool, let's say. You're going to use a new tool. So one part of the operator is like, "Okay, do they have the new tool? Do they have the onboarding to understand the new tool? Are they able to succeed?" And that's the part of operating where you feel good about yourself, I'm helping people succeed. Then this is the part of operating where you feel bad about yourself, and that's the part of making sure they're actually doing the things that you ask them to do. Or making sure that the vendor did all the things that you ask them to do. And making sure that the vendor and the people who are on your team are both doing the things together that you ask them to do. And that part's not as fun. And that part is just, it's just following. It's an insane level of detail. I'll tell you. So when I used to do operations, it was for a property manager company. They had like 3000 apartment units in New York City, and they had all sorts of legal cases going on. Which is, well, the worst part of my job actually. And I, every month would audit out of hundreds of legal cases every month to make sure that the attorneys were doing what they were supposed to do. And it was super tedious and super annoying, and it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect a COO to do. That doesn't seem important. Because all the things that you don't see a COO do are the things that are super minute, super detailed that they have to do that they don't really want to talk about, and that are not really fun to talk about. There's an insane level of detail, and I'll tell you that being a mild control freak helps. And that's the hard part, because you have to be a control freak, but you can't let that freakiness show at all. Because then your team's going to be really annoyed that you're being a control freak or you're micromanaging them. So you need to report back to either the board or the CEO or whoever it is that's running the company and know all of the answers. Which means following up on all of the insane level of detail without making your team feel like you're micromanaging them. And that's the hard part of operations, is being a good operator means balancing every stupid little thing, knowing every stupid little thing. But not passing on that level of micromanagement to the people who are working under you. You have to keep that to yourself. Crystal Carter: And I think that that team cohesion point is super important. So I've been, it's award season. I've been judging a lot of SEO awards and including like SEO agency over the year kind of things. And one of the things people always put in the criteria, or one of the things that comes in as a criteria is, what about your team? How are you managing your team? And if you're a good operations manager, then you're doing all that nuts and bolts stuff. You're doing all of the things that keep everything ticking over, even if it's boring, even if it's not glamorous. You're doing all of those things to keep everyone ticking over and you're making sure that your team are in a good state of mind to be able to do good work. And that is something that is, that's gold dust. That's gold dust. I've worked with good operations managers who were able to do that and seen incredible results, because when people feel good job satisfaction and they feel they're in a safe and stable place. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the hard balance, is that you have to be able to do that while also being all up in their business at the same time and knowing everything that's going on. It's super hard. I think one thing that you can try, it just really is having good relationships. It's knowing how to ask for things. It's knowing how to follow up for things. It's knowing when to follow up with things and letting things go. The person, for whatever reason, the company structure where I used to work, this is almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Wow, I'm old. The CFO worked under the COO, which is a weird way of running it, but that's for whatever reason, CEO, a lot of Cs going on. That's how they wanted to do it. Which I always felt was awkward, because normally the CFO would not be under the COO, it would kind of be a co-relationship, at the same level. How the heck do I navigate this? And my last day there, the CFO came in and said, "Whoever you bring in, you need to make sure that they know they're not my boss, because Mordy wasn't my boss. Mordy and I just worked together." And she walked out of the room and she was like, "How the hell did you pull that off? She didn't think you were her boss this whole time, it's four years? I'm like, "No, I just made it seem like everything we're doing is part of our cooperation together. I knew when to push, when not to push, when to follow up, when not to follow up and when to let things that were going wrong, just let them go for the sake of the team environment kind of thing." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's super important. I think nowadays there's a lot of tools that allow you to do that with fewer touch points. So particularly there's a lot of agency management tools like we talked about, I mentioned Monday, other ones I've used their Teamwork. I've also seen, there's Asana, there's a few other things like that, some people use, what's the one with the cards? It's got all those cards all the way along. There's one that has, it's really big - Mordy Oberstein: I only know Monday and Asana. Crystal Carter: So there's a few different ones. There's all these different flavors of all of these different things. And also even in Wix, with Wix Studio we have some great tools that allow you to do this, for instance, that allow you to set tasks and set workflows and things like that. And those are really great for real time reporting so that the COO who needs to have a bird's eye view of what everybody's doing can go and check those things without going, "Hey, what you doing? Hey, what you doing? Hey, what's this?" That sort of thing. So using tools like that can help you to get the information you need and also help you to not drive everyone crazy. The other thing that's great about tools like this is they can also give you information on stuff that can help you help clients, help you help your team as well. So some of these tools will give you information on how much time you've been spending on a client. And sometimes clients will be like, "Oh, I want this and this and this and this." And because they ask a lot of questions, they get a lot of time, but they might not necessarily be paying for all of that time. And that's something that people have to be very mindful of, particularly when you're billing on a monthly, daily, hourly basis. That's something that a COO really has to keep track of for the whole team, and that's something that can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a tip on this, I putting myself back in those shoes, what I would do in that situation. Let's say I notice there's way too much time being spent on clients that I can tell this is not billed time. So instead of going in and saying, "Hey you, we can't be doing this," make it great sympathy. If you're an operator or your operations, you go to the person and you say, "Hey, look, I get what you're doing. We should be doing this. I have a problem though because the CEO is down my back saying, "Hey, why is so much time being spent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And ask them, "What can we do here?" And get their solutions on it. But don't make it about they're messing up. Sometimes the way you want to leverage it is that you have a problem that you have to figure out because your neck is on the line. And it's not like I'm coming after you, I don't care that you do this. From my point of view, go ahead, keep talking to the client all day long. But I'm going to get nailed on it and I'm going to get asked about it, so what could we do to figure this out together? So you give an understanding of the fact that, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I personally don't care, and also help me out because I'm going to get nailed if we don't figure this out. Because at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure we're not doing this." Crystal Carter: I think that the good operations managers will definitely foster that kind of team mentality, that we're a team and we all need to move this needle. We all need to make sure that this makes sense for everyone so that we can all get some good results. And I think that that's really core to the operations aspect of SEO management. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's great at managing their news output and getting operating all of the news content for the entire industry on a daily basis? He might be a one-man show, but he sure knows how to operate. It's Barry Schwartz, which brings us to the SEO News. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. The last week's episode was all about AI and ranking, but this week's news is all about AI and maybe ranking, I don't know. First up, from Barry Schwartz and search engine land, Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE. Some have speculated that Google's going to announce the launch of SGE at Google's IO event on May 14th. Google has said to Barry, "We have not confirmed that. We have not said anything like that. There is no date set yet." Many speculate that not going to do anything until they figure out how to deal with the ad revenue and whatnot. Anyway, so I guess it's a public service announcement more than anything. The SGE has no official date to go live yet. Onwards from Barry Schwartz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable, new Google Shopping and Maps search features. So a lot of these, okay, backtrack. Google announced a whole heap of features related to Maps and AI, and shopping and AI, and stuff and AI, and a lot of it, to quote Barry, is old, not new. And if you follow Barry on seroundtable.com, which you should check out each and every day for the SEO News. Barry's covered a bunch of these announcements already. This is why it's fun to track what Barry tracks, because you can see when people say, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And Barry's like, "Oh yeah, that's new." And it's a test and it finally rolls out. Barry's already covered it. So officially though, Google's announced some of these features that Barry has caught over the past couple of months, such as, for example, you can now have, well, you've had it for a while I guess. But in the U.S., you could swipe left, swipe right to get style recommendations. Google has its feature for movie recommendations, so you can kind of refine what Google shows you. So it'll show you get style recommendations and you can, it shows you a picture of a polo shirt and with stripes on it, you give it a thumbs up and you swipe to the next one. It's a polo shirt with polka dots. You're like, "No, that's ugly. Thumbs down." And this way you can get more catered or more tasteful to your liking, at least shopping recommendations on the Google SERP, right from Google. Another shopping thing that, again, Barry covered this, I think back in February, was that you can ask AI on Google to generate an image of an article of clothing. So you say, I don't know, "Pants with stripes and purple polka dots," which I think only clowns would wear. But anyway, that's your thing, or if you're a clown. You can now have the AI generate it and then say, "Great. Now show me similar looking products," and you can find the product that you want that way. So that's also rolled out. I don't know if that's, I think it's only... Yeah, that one's only in the U.S. And then there's some interesting things around local. So for example, Google, you can click on an image in a Google business profile. So you go to your favorite pizza place in New York, Joe's Pizza, which is actually a real place. I'm not making that up. And you see the image of, I don't know, a Sicilian pizza, and you click on it. You'll now be able to see reviews related to that particular item of food and a whole bunch of other review summaries and that sort of thing in the Google Business profile. So that's interesting. Another one just run through, there's a whole heap of these, I'll link to the articles so you can see all of them. But just another one that stuck out to me was, Google is using SGE to give you a trip itinerary. So you search for something like, "Create a three-Day trip itinerary for me that shows the history of Philadelphia," and it'll create a whole three-day itinerary of what you should do on day one, day two and day three. I think that's a little interesting, little Mordy commentary for you here. Some of these are great. I guess the shopping styles thing, I guess that's really helpful, you shop a lot online or whatever. The reviews for the particular item on the menu and then the Google business profile, that seems helpful. Three-day itinerary where you're just like, "Yeah, show me an itinerary. I am not going to explore anymore. I'll just do what you say, Google." That doesn't really seem to be a good use of AI in my opinion. This is just my take. This is pure Mordy take. It just feels like, this is really fun, but it's not really helpful. And I wonder if sometimes the big tech brands, Google and Bing swing and miss on this kind of stuff with the approach of like, "Yeah, people don't want to actually explore anything. We'll just give you the answer and you'll just take what we give you." I don't think that's how it works. I think human beings are always going to want to explore. If I'm taking a week off of work, I'm taking my family to Philadelphia, I'm going to explore the city. I'm not going to say, "Hey, Google, just create an itinerary for me. I'm going to invest in that. I'm going to look at each option. I'm going to say, "You know what? That doesn't look so much fun. That does look fun. My kids are going to freak out if I go to this one. That one looks way better or more interactive."" I'm going to put the effort in to explore and research for myself what I think is best for me and my family when we go on vacation to spend all that money. Maybe if I'm like, I'm blowing a day in Philadelphia, "Google, give me five things to do in Philadelphia today." All right, maybe I would do that. So in some of these instances where I think the Google and the Bings of the world are basically saying, "We'll give you the information and you'll just take it I think that works with smaller things perhaps, but I think you're never going to get past the need for the human being to want to explore and see things for themselves and make their own decisions. So I think when they take these things like an itinerary for a vacation, they're like, "Yeah, take this. Use it. Go for it. SGE output, AI output." I'm not sure that works and I think the Googles and the Bings of the world, again, I think they're still trying to figure that out. But again, I think they'll see, my prediction at least, they'll see for those kinds of things. People, maybe they'll create the itinerary, but you'll see the next thing they do is start researching each one of those things and creating their own itinerary. That's just my take, and that's this week's snappy news. It really must be an operation to produced so much news content on a day-by-day basis. Crystal Carter: I thought he went into real surgical detail with it. That's what I thought. Mordy Oberstein: See what you did there. He's a smooth operator, that Barry. Speaking of smooth operators, you know who operates an SEO agency with a ton of SEOs? It's Blake Denman over to RicketyRoo, which means that our follower of the week this week is Blake Denman from RicketyRoo. Spoiler alert from here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, Blake is a great follower. He's got a fantastic, fantastic cohort of some wonderful, wonderful SEOs on his team, Amanda Jordan, Celeste Gonzalez, Melissa Popp, some amazing, amazing, incredible people. Mordy Oberstein: And they have a great vibe. Crystal Carter: A great vibe. Mordy Oberstein: And they get stuff done. Crystal Carter: Great team, and I think that, again, you're as good as your team, particularly from an SEO point of view, and when you've got a great team, then you're able to do incredible things. I also forgot to shout out VP of operations at RicketyRoo, Tess, who's fantastic. Tess, Voecks, who's amazing as well. Mordy Oberstein: The problem with RicketyRoo is that we're going to be here all day naming them. Crystal Carter: All day saying how great they are, because we love, shout out to the full Roo crew. Mordy Oberstein: I like that, the Roo crew. But if you have questions around, "Hey, how do I manage and operate an SEO team?" I think Blake would be a great person for you to talk to because he's clearly doing a great job with it. Crystal Carter: Right. Because he's got so many great folks on his team, so he must be doing a great job. Mordy Oberstein: He must be, and you can follow Blake over on X @blakedenman. That's B-L-A-K-E D-E-N-M-A-N on X, formerly known as Twitter, currently known as Twitter in my mind. We have to do an outro now. I need to say something charismatic. Crystal Carter: Thank you all for joining us today on this great episode of SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking of, hey, let's cut that out and retry that, but now we're not doing that. Now we're going to go with it. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: I don't know, whatever. It's fine. We're a team. We're a team. That's something we do, we support each other. Mordy Oberstein: That's how we operate. Crystal Carter: Exactly. We just bring it back in and deal the deal, get the job done. Mordy Oberstein: I freely admit, I had an absolute brain fart there, I'm like, "Wait, what comes next? Oh, yeah. We need to end the show now." Crystal Carter: It's fine, we can end it. I think we've done a great job and we hit all our KPIs and our targets and our goals and our aims and objectives, and well done everyone. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You'd think after 81 episodes, I'd know how to operate this thing, but clearly not. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the maturation process of SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, 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 over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter David Khim Allie Decker Alex Birkett Blake Denman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Be Omniscient Digital The Long Game Podcast News: Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter David Khim Allie Decker Alex Birkett Blake Denman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Be Omniscient Digital The Long Game Podcast News: Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features Transcript Mordy Oberstein: Its 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 overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a smooth operator, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I am not sure if I could possibly claim that title, because I never figured out how to do that thing from that music video with the leaning, where they lean all the way over. But apparently after spending much of my childhood trying desperately to do that and falling on my face, I realized that actually what they had was nails in their shoes. There was nail on the floor. Mordy Oberstein: Really, that's how they do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was a nail on the floor, and he had a thing in the shoe and basically they latched into it and then they did the lean and that's how they didn't fall. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Crystal Carter: Basically. Basically. Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they pull the cheese on a pizza in the commercials and it's glue. Crystal Carter: No, no, no. They're not allowed to use glue. They basically, they use some special kind of cheese. Well, at least in the UK at least. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever, it's not real. I've eaten plenty of pizzas, has your pizza ever done that? No. Ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Never done that. Mordy Oberstein: We fall for it though, because you watch the TV, you're like, "Oh, that pizza looks so good." And you know when you go there, it's not going to be anything like that whatsoever, but we do it anyway. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That's how marketing works. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the world we're living in. Mordy Oberstein: Lies. You know what's not a lie? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/newsletter. Got all those slashes, but where you can also collaborate on websites uniquely with Wix Studio, make your agency's processes more efficient with collaboration freedom that Wix Studio offers you. Check it out wix.com/studio. Because today we're talking about building the operations for content and SEO to increase team effectiveness. That's right. At the backbone of any good SEO and content game is a set of mundane operations that pushes your boat to shore. And to help us, we will be welcoming the entire crew of The Long Game podcast over at Omniscient Digital. Plus, we'll get a thorough and explore what fundamentally makes for good operations. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So jump in your shell, place your oars into your oar locks and get ready to roam perfect harmony as the Wix and Long Game crew help your crew power through to an efficient SEO and operations game in one seamless glide of grace on episode 81 of the SERP's podcast. In case you can't tell, I just watched that movie with the people on the boats, the crew movie with the boats. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's lots of movies like that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a new one in the Olympics. Crystal Carter: Oh, an actual crew? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, an actual crew. Crystal Carter: Not the crew, actual people doing crew? Mordy Oberstein: No crew, the boat, you're rowing the boat with all the people. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I'm aware of crew. I have never done that. I don't have the core strength for that. Mordy Oberstein: I like rowing boats, but I can never do that. Crystal Carter: Can you do it in the round? You start rowing and then I'll row row the boat. No? Mordy Oberstein: I want to be the guy who just screams at people while the people row. Crystal Carter: The drums, the drums are good as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That guy's gotten the best job, to be honest with you. Row faster. Anyway, so fun fact, about three or four years, I'm going to mention this later again in the podcast, I was a COO of a mid-sized property management company in New York City, which people don't know. And it's a weird Mordy, fun fact. So when I say operations are nitty-gritty and boring and mundane processes, I speak from experience and that's what they are. But they're also the core of everything you do when you're working as part of a huge team and a huge content team and a huge SEO team, it all in my mind comes down to operations. So it's not a little bit weird that we're talking about SEO and content and operations because fundamentally, if you're working on a team, it is the backbone of everything you do. Everything needs to work methodically towards one goal. And that's all based on good-strong operations, which is why I am so very happy to introduce the crew of the Long Game podcasts. Welcome to SERP's Up, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett. Welcome. Alex Birkett: Thank you. Thank you. Allie Decker: Thanks, Mordy. David Khim: Hello. Hello. Alex Birkett: Good to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first things first, markers going to market. Plug away. What do you got? Alex Birkett: Well, we have a podcast too called The Long Game that you mentioned, and we run an SEO and content marketing agency called, Omniscient Digital. It's beomniscient.com. I think that's all we've got, right? Are we selling anything else? David Khim: So we work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. We've worked with companies like SAP, Adobe, Loom, Jasper, Vendor, Order, I can keep going, but I think that gives an idea of the type of companies. They're typically quite ambitious, growing quickly or want to grow faster. And we typically are the team that they go to either build their content SEO engine from zero to one, or in some cases even scale it from one to 10 or even a hundred and just work with us instead of hiring an in-house team. Alex Birkett: Well, and that's an interesting angle too, because we've seen the backsides of both sides of the spectrum in terms of precedes startups all the way up through the biggest companies in the world and everybody struggles with operations. It's just in different ways. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people forget how much it can, particularly when you're thinking about SEO projects and stuff. How much you can have the best campaign in the world, but if somebody hasn't remembered to have somebody answer the phone or have somebody pick up all those leads or have enough capacity or make sure that the servers can take all of the traffic. Maybe we need to upgrade our site at the back end so that it can take all the traffic, those kinds of things can make your best campaign fall completely flat. David Khim: What I've found is I think of operations very simply. It's what needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done and how is it going to be done? And typically when we meet with prospects or start work with clients, one or more of those things are not defined. A lot of the case, what needs to be done is never defined. Sometimes we'll even ask, well, who do we talk to if we have any questions? That's also not defined, which we in some cases don't realize until down the line that we've been talking to the wrong person. And we also help them define, here's how things are going to happen. Here's when we'll do it by, here's what we can do, here's what we need from you and so on. And once those things are defined, things start rolling and things are smooth like butter. And we find that a lot of clients, because those things aren't defined internally, a lot of times they know what to do, but they're like, "We don't know how to actually get this done," because they bought our likes internally or we don't have resources and things like that. Crystal Carter: And I think it can happen a lot in large organizations and I think that one of the things that's tricky, it's like when someone says in first aid they tell you if somebody is bleeding, if there's an emergency, you don't say someone call an ambulance. You say, "You call an ambulance and then that one person will call the ambulance," because otherwise everyone will assume that somebody else did it. I mean, do you find that a lot of the times somebody assumes that someone else has done or handled whatever it is that needs to be handled? Allie Decker: Yeah, absolutely. It's even more prevalent in a fully distributed team like ours, because not together day to day. Even more so, because our clients are all over the world. So having set responsibilities and ownership designated out the gate really helps the projects once the emergencies arise as they always do. There's a lot of our work that is unpredictable or things change in the middle of the projects and having the infrastructure set up, the operational infrastructure helps, whatever happens, it continues smoothly. Alex Birkett: I would say that's a bigger problem in larger enterprises too, especially with multiple business units. As you sort of absolve responsibility or certain steps in the process to, say, getting a piece of content published. If you can describe how does a piece of content get published, you realize there's so many different stakeholders at each step and sometimes it's unclear who's responsible for each phase in that process and what their incentives are. So in the early stages it's you have one person or maybe one person in a freelancer or an agency. Things are simpler at that stage. As you scale operations, it becomes much less clear who's doing what, when and why, what their incentive structure is. Mordy Oberstein: And I find that either means in best case scenario, a bottleneck until you figure it out or absolute total communication breakdown, which is your probably worst case scenario. David Khim: You touched on an important thing there that I kind of jokingly say to a lot of people that it's communication. As a personal belief, I think if we all as individuals and humans worked on our communication skills, the world would be a better. And if we just zoom in on the workplace, there would probably be less headbutting and more collaboration going on in workspace. But even being able to define a communication cadence of we're going to check in on this once a week, or let's aim to have these things done by a certain deadline and check in at these checkpoints. Having that laid out explicitly is also very helpful, because then you have regular checkpoints to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've been on the other side where I've hired agencies and that hasn't been in place, and what inevitably happens is the whole thing kind of falls apart and you as the consumer feel like, "What is going on here? Why are they not doing this? I'm paying all this money and nothing's happening." Whereas you've built in that operations, those processes from the outset and the expectations are there. And there's checks and balances to the system to make sure that if something falls through the cracks, it'll eventually get picked up again or there's opportunity for it to come up in discussion again. Then that solves a lot of the problems that you really as an agency, I feel like if you don't have that in place, you're basically just setting yourself up to have a lot of angry, resentful customers. Alex Birkett: I think a nightmare scenario for us, one that we actively try to avoid and are constantly iterating on is having a whole list of actions and having it just sit in draft mode or feedback mode or a backlog. Whether that's, we produce content for clients and that's probably the most palpable example. Where it's like you could produce 50 pieces of content and they just sit there in draft mode without being published. Our best case scenario, outcome wise is a great case study for a client, a great outcome for a client. That's a flywheel. That's how we build a reputation and it's not possible unless things get done. Same is true in technical SEO, if you've got a bunch of issues. My background is in experimentation, you could have all the ideas in the world, but if there's no throughput, nothing happens on the outcome side. So that's something we actively try to avoid. Crystal Carter: And I think also with that, you can't grow unless you, you talked about experimentation, you have to publish otherwise, you can't see what the market thinks of what you've done. You can't get customer feedback, user feedback off... David, David's nodding. And those bottlenecks aren't just bottlenecks for you getting your case study, they're bottlenecks for us doing better the next time, because there is no next time if there isn't a first time. I don't know if you have any top tips for being able to push through those bottlenecks that are so frustrating, because I've definitely been in the place where we've had a stack of content. We were commissioned for content, we got all the content through to the client, and then it sat there until it was no longer relevant and then you're going to have to start again. Allie Decker: Yeah, oftentimes I've learned setting those operational expectations of the client. We're a partnership, we're working on this together, really having them understand what their responsibilities would be, which we would do our best to ease those responsibilities. But if we don't have CMS access or if there is a certain point where we need them to review content for accuracy or their brand perspective or point of view, they're going to be inherently involved. So setting the expectation out the gate, even as early as the sales process, was like, "This is what we would need from you. How does this sound? Is this a commitment you can make? Who would be the main point of contact for this?" I think it helps then when it does become an active action for them to own, they know it's coming. They've set this time aside and it's our job to hold them accountable, so it doesn't come as a surprise. We found that that really helps starting the conversation early. Alex Birkett: With any sort of behavioral change. I always go back to this model, I think it's called B=MAP, it's BJ Fogg's behavior model. And it's, you have two axes, one is motivation, so how excited somebody is to do something. And then you have ease or effort and it's like how hard it is to do that thing. So if somebody needs a new driver's license, their motivation is extremely high, so they'll put up with all the BS at the DMV, whatever to get that done. And there's varying levels of motivation in terms of clients, but we try to pick the ones like David said earlier, who are ambitious and have high motivation levels to get content out there to do SEO. So then our job is to make it as easy as possible for those things to go through, and we learn different ways to do that. If we're doing high velocity, sometimes that involves bashing content feedback cycles. So instead of giving somebody 200 things to review and saying, "Get after it." We'll do 10, 20, 30 at a time and be very specific about what we need. Do we need legal approval? Do we need actual structural subject matter expert feedback? We'll be very specific about those things. So it's not this overwhelming cognitive burden that it just sits there on somebody's desk, because it's, "Where do I even start?" Mordy Oberstein: That sounds really interesting, because it sounds almost like you're very agile in how you're approaching the client and the scenario and the ask. How do you set yourselves up your own processes to be set up where it's not overly rigid so that when you have a client, when you have a situation, when you have an ask or a need or a scenario, that you're able to set up the processes that align to that particular given scenario? And not, "Hey, this is how we do things, here's our process." And just blinders on, "Here's how we usually go with it. So that's what we're going to do," and not be agile enough to adapt to the current situation? Allie Decker: Yeah, we're really lucky to have a brilliant editorial team. Our managing editor is Lean Six Sigma certified, so he's brought a lot of those inputs into how he structured the team and our editorial process. A lot of our editorial process is 'rigid'. We have a default set up and we'll iterate on that if necessary. But for the most part, again, it's all about setting expectations right out the gate. We communicate this as early as the first or second sales calls, "Here's what our editorial process looks like," so we can leave a lot of wiggle room for input. SME interviews, SME editors coming in and contributing to really technical pieces. I think ultimately having the tooling in place is really helpful. So we use tools like Airtable. We have a multi-step editorial process. We have a lot of shared communication. So plus one to what David said about just staying as in touch as possible. So we share a Slack channel with our clients and we have really repeatable communication connections, so bi-weekly calls. All of this infrastructure, which is rigid per se, allows for the time in between those calls, the time in between those assignments and the content creation process to take shape as it might. And a lot of what we do is equal parts arts and science, so some of it needs that artistic space to come together. Other times it's a little bit more scientific, so a little bit more repeatable, collecting the data, iterating on the data, using it to inform our next strategy. But I think actually having some of the infrastructure remain rigid, setting the expectation out the gate. And then if push comes to shove and something happens with the client or after a couple times we're like, "Actually, this isn't the best fit for this specific project," then we're able to tweak. So I'd actually argue that maybe having a repeatable process to begin is the best, and then picking and choosing those puzzle pieces as you get to know the project. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a case of managing yourself. If your team, the client or the project, folks that you're working with are the variable, you want to control as much on your side as you possibly can. Allie Decker: Yeah. I think one good thing we did last year was build a lot of our process, build a really strong foundation. And as every agency does, we have projects that don't go according to plan. And we were able to, because our process was so clear, we were able to clearly see where the problem was, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But having a really clear foundation infrastructure, I'll just use that word again, allowed us to within days pinpoint what was breaking. And that was why it was so valuable to have that rigid, repeatable process to begin with. And we were able to have a postmortem of sorts and iterate as we needed on specific projects. David Khim: I'd love to get a little bit more into weeds too, just like tactily, what that means, not just for us, but even for folks in-house. Because whether it's Sam or managing editor's Lean Six Sigma certified. I come from a growth background. Alex comes from experimentation. We have a mix of what some people have called, this is the mathy side of things, and then there's also the creative and that form of thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to say you read my mind, because I was going to talk about our in-house and how we do that.So you go ahead, take it. David Khim: Yeah. But one of the things that the team did really well was build out a mirror board of every single step of our workflows, from the first sales call with a prospect all the way down to delivery. And we did that for our hiring process too, and then that allowed us to be able to say, "Hey, this client engagement broke down. Where in this workflow did it break down? Okay, we identified it. Now let's figure out how to actually... What do we need to do to adapt?" Without that, we wouldn't be able to do that sort of diagnostic and actually adapt. And then I think part of it's the culture of, hey, we use a lot of automations, we use ClickUp and a lot of checklists, even if it's a silly thing like, "Send a follow-up to the client after the meeting." Those things help me, because sometimes I forget, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I forgot to do this." So we're just very regimented in how we approach a lot of our work, and that lets us think about more of the strategic and creative things and not have to worry about the more administrative, straightforward things like that. Mordy Oberstein: We literally have that on our SEO Hub. I mean, we have a great head of SEO editorial, George Winn, he has some really strong processes in place. He's very methodical about it. He's very regimented about it. And I find personally, I don't want to speak for Crystal, but I find that because of those processes, I know that when we want to get a little bit creative with it. I know that sometimes I worry about, if we get a little bit too creative, will the quality still be there, will the targeting still be there? But because we have the processes in place, I know that no matter how wild and crazy I get with it, it'll all come back to a place where there's a check and control of how well-targeted and how well-produced the content actually is. I don't need to worry. Hey, I'm being a little bit maybe too off the deep end here, and the quality of the content and the targeting of the content won't come out the way I want it to, but because I know I'm going to be checked in place by the processes our editorial has put in place, I'm good to go. I can do what I want. Crystal Carter: I think that those processes are so important. I think one of the other thing I wanted to pick up on, because I think David and Allie, you both mentioned this was as part of your sales process. Certainly in my experience of speaking with clients, one of the first things I ask, particularly if I'm giving an SEO audit or something is, and I think Alex, I think you also mentioned the who in the team as well. If you're working with someone and you're trying to figure out your process with someone, the first thing I'm doing is, who's on your team? What resources do you have? So that if I give you 45 articles, if there's one person there, then I can expect that that's going to take this long. Or they might say, "I want 400 articles," but they have one person reviewing and you're just like, "No, that's too many. That's too many for you." How does vetting clients and matching clients to your process, how do you match clients to your process and how do you identify whether or not they're going to work well in your framework that you've got? Alex Birkett: I think what you said there around having a DRI basically is the main issue. It's not always that simple. Earlier stage companies may have one person, typically if it's a founder, that's a little tough because they're going to have so many other competing priorities that it's hard to get their time. But as you scale, one thing that I've realized working with much larger clients is that you'll have a DRI, but then there'll be other stakeholders. And finding how to partition those different roles for the different parts of the feedback cycles is important. So one client that I'm thinking about that I talked to earlier today, they've got a strategic editorial person thinking about things from the content side. But then there's legal too, they're decently regulated and there's a heavy legal presence. And then there's product marketing, and that's how they're speaking about the products in the content that we're producing. So how we delineate those stages of feedback instead of just giving it all at once, giving it to our single point of contact and saying, "Do all of this." We can go in phases with each of these, and it is just, I think, important to me to identify and to find who each person is and which part of the process they're taking. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's a really important part. Mordy Oberstein: David, I wanted to get back to, you weren't about to ask a question? I don't want to gloss over it. David Khim: Okay. I'm very curious. I can share the context on our end, but I'm very curious how you all think about it. Not even just with the pod, but maybe your editorial team too. But one of the things around process and breaking bottlenecks is, I found that we run into bottlenecks when someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do, they don't have the bandwidth, or I'll bucket the rest in fear, uncertainty, doubt. And in that bucket, it's, what if it doesn't work? What if it's not the right content? Or I think the one that is my favorite is, I'm worried about the quality. And quality tends to be a big thing that comes up, and there can be a discussion of, "Hey, maybe we'll get to 90% of what you're expecting, but we need to get it published to get data and iterate." But then I know, and I think this comes a lot from Alex and Allie mainly, but the idea that quality can be made objective, and a lot of folks kind of say it's subjective and move on. But that doesn't enable things to move forward sometimes, because if you can't agree on what quality is. So I'll let Allie and Alex add anything to that, but I'm curious how you all handle that at Wix. Crystal Carter: I think that certainly within our teams, we have various different objectives for different audiences. So at the SEO Hub, we have different objectives for what we want to do with our content and how we want educational value and brand value and things like that. There are other parts of the team that have other parts of, it's a very big company, working in 17 different languages and globally, et cetera. So there's different parts of the company that have different objectives. And I think that we, as a company overall, I think we try to make sure that it's very clear what the objectives are for each piece of content that somebody or each channel that someone's engaging with, for instance. So if they're on, we have our Wix Studio blog, for instance, which has one type of focus, and we have our Wix SEO blog, which has a different focus, for instance, I think there's things like that. And I think that when people think about working with a big company like Adobe or Wix or something like that, I think what people forget is that very often you're working on a project within that. There'll be a project within that specific thing, and that project will be dedicated to a certain thing. If you were think about, if you, "Oh, you work at McDonald's." Well, there's going to be a team that's dedicated just to Happy Meals, just to Happy Meals, and even within that team there'll be somebody who's just dedicated to the toys that go in the Happy Meals, for instance. They're going to be in subsections as well. So I think that we try to focus on the audiences that it's going for and the intent of the audience. Mordy Oberstein: For your quality point, I think what inevitably happens is that, first of all, I personally think there is an objective ideal of quality, and I think it's on a spectrum, but there is an ideal, there's an objective ideal of something that is or is not quality. Either something is or is not soda. There's a definition of what it is, and if there's no definition of what it is and it's completely arbitrary, we might as well not talk about it. But I think though that quality is contextualized. For example, the Wix Studio blog is very much geared towards trends, thought leadership and what quality means in that context is different than let's say our SEO Hub, which is more we want to just educate you about how to do SEO and how to do marketing kind of thing. So it's much more straightforward, informational, and less on the thought leadership side sometimes, or sometimes it is very thought leadershippy. But the quality is in context of what is the nature of the content, because what's quality for a straight-up informational piece and what's quality for an acquisition piece or what's quality for a thought leadership piece are just very, very different things. Alex Birkett: Yeah, I look at it as this bi-directional thing. The word quality is so nebulous that if you get bogged down on definitions, I think it just, to your point, it is a little bit of a waste of time. But there's a quality in the reader of the content, and you can't ever truly control that. I post on LinkedIn quite a bit and things that I think are the best posts in the world get crickets, and then some pithy little fortune cookie thing goes viral, and I'm like, "I guess I can't predict quality." But that doesn't mean, I think conflating that outcome quality with the input quality is where people get bogged down with the definitions. So in pursuit of the goal, like you had mentioned Crystal, it's like you want to define that to the best of your ability, objectively speaking. It's more specs, it's more thinking, does this hit specs, giving the outcome that we want? And then after you see the outcome, you get more data and you can iterate. That can inform those specs too. So to me, it's very bi-directional and both inform the other, but I don't want to confuse the two. I think they're two different things. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think David also touched on people getting bogged down with quality this or quality that and not publishing because of that, and what did they say is done is better than perfect. Sometimes the- Mordy Oberstein: The enemy of good is great, something like that, Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. That sort of thing. And I think that sometimes they say delivering customer value. So something that is good is something that is valuable to the customer and if that's valuable to the customer, there's lots of things that people find valuable. And I think that I was interested in the idea of making it objective, making quality objective. You'll have a baseline of this must do this. A table must have legs and it must be level and it must not be sharp. There's a baseline of what a table must do, and you have to absolutely hit all of those things. And once you can absolutely hit all of those things, if you can't make your table level, then we're not doing anything for instance. Whereas after that you can go, "Oh, we're going to make this heirloom this, we're going to make it hand, et cetera, et cetera. You can get all of the extra lovely stuff on top of that, but you need to be able to do the very, very baseline thing in the first place, whatever it is that is. And I think that part of operations is making things that are very qualitative, very subjective more regimented and more quantitative I guess you would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think what the issue though is, so with something like a table, it's very easy to define what is a table. It's a flat service that has... But when you deal with quality, it's very thorough. You're starting to deal with very, I'm going to get philosophical, existential concepts. What is valid? What does it mean for a thing to exist in a certain context? And it's, define value and importance. I can define words somewhere really easily. When you try to define other concepts, it gets very lofty very quickly. And quality, for something we talk about all the time happens to be one of those very thorough kind concepts. So I think there's a danger in trying to define it, and I would go on a limb and say, you know it, when you see it, you can try to describe it and describe certain attributes of it. But you can never really define it per se. So I think it's all of it equals a very layered and complex equation of what is quality, how do you produce quality content? And we're not going to answer in this podcast, unfortunately. David Khim: But we can do it. Alex Birkett: Something I've been thinking about is that maybe quality, we want to make it as objective as possible in terms of our processes and inputs, but there's no universal quality. So you mentioned McDonald's before. Something I think about a lot is McDonald's quality versus say Michelin Star chefs. Both of those actually hit quality specs with what they're aiming to do. And people will smack talk McDonald's and be like, "You don't want to be the McDonald's of this." But I'm reading that book that, 'Grinded out' by Ray Kroc, and the amount of attention to detail that he put into the potatoes, that oil, every piece of it is remarkable. It's like this guy really had an eye for quality, it's just a different shape. It's not the same universal definition that your Michelin Star restaurant in New York City has. Mordy Oberstein: It's a different purpose. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's what I mean by customer value. So a Michelin Star restaurant, what somebody values about that is part of the whole experience, the whole sensory thing, the quality of all the ingredients, all of the other things. What someone values at a McDonald's is that they can get food within five minutes and they can have a certain number of calories and they can have all of it. They can feed their whole family very, very, very quickly and at a reasonable affordable price. That is something that sometimes that is high value, sometimes in some cases that is extremely high value. And sometimes the Michelin Star thing is a high value in different contexts, they will be more or less important. But in both of those cases, what the person ultimately wants to do is to eat edible food. So if that is the baseline. Mordy Oberstein: So abstract question for the crowd. Abstract question for the crowd and we can end on this point. Is usefulness part of quality or is it a layer that quality has to depend on? In other words, something could be quality. I have a Michelin Star burger, it's a hundred dollars for the burger, it's definitely quality. If I have $5, I'm in a huge rush, it's not useful. So is usefulness a separate concept than quality, or is it really part of the same thing? We just went way too deep. Every time we do a conversation, this happens. We always go into the abstract, philosophical. Crystal Carter: It always does. Allie Decker: I don't think usefulness applies to food Mordy, but I would say for content it does. So I would definitely have it as a quality input for the specific work that we do. Alex Birkett: But utility does factor into food too. If everything in the world was a Michelin Star expensive meal, I mean that wouldn't be a great world. Crystal Carter: Equally, I love cotton candy, but I couldn't eat cotton candy every day all the time. I would enjoy it, but it's not useful to my health. If I just ate cotton candy. Allie Decker: I think there's probably someone out there, Crystal, that would disagree with you. Mordy Oberstein: I can eat a Michelin Star hamburger every meal, every day. I'd be fine. I mean, I'd probably die relatively soon, but I'd be fine. Allie Decker: Yeah. Skewed utility, tastes very bad for you. Mordy Oberstein: Who defines what's actually utility? Alex Birkett: It's us, we're doomed. Allie Decker: Doomed. Mordy Oberstein: Doomed. You know what's not doomed? You are not doomed if you follow these great people out there on the ether that is social media. Where can we find all of you? Allie Decker: Mordy, you're so smooth. We're all on LinkedIn, as Alex and David mentioned. We have a lot of fun on there. And check us out on beomniscient.com. You can find all of our work, all of our team. We have some great podcast episodes of our own, blog post resources on there. Yeah, The Long Game. Mordy Oberstein: We'll put links in the show notes, but you can just Google The Long Game podcast and you'll find it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Allie Decker: Thank you. Alex Birkett: Thank you. David Khim: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, well, since we're talking about operations, not the game, not the game operation, which confounded me as a child, I do not have surgeon's hands. I killed that poor fellow many a times. Crystal Carter: I think he was smiling the whole time, the poor guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just jabbed you in the ribs, he's still smiling. Crystal Carter: Just trying to put your spleen in your elbow, "Sir, I don't think this is going to work out for you." Mordy Oberstein: We might be dating ourselves. I don't know if that game still exists, so just for- Crystal Carter: It does. I saw one for Grogu from the Mandalorian, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, fine. So in that case, you understand what the game operation is, and we're not dating ourselves. I'm dating myself by not being sure if I'm dating myself or not. Got it. Okay, since we're talking about operations. I have a ton to say about operations, mainly because no one talks to me, no one asks about operations because no one thinks I have any experience around operations. But I actually used to be a COO of a company with 300 people for four years. Little fun fact about Mordy, a long time ago. And again, dating myself that I could say that and it being a long time ago. By the way, I'm channeling my inner saltiness with that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I would like to, so salty, like Dead Sea salty. I would like to talk about operations in a deeper way, because I have al to say about operations. So Crystal and I are going to take a very deep thought into what makes a good operator with a deep thought from Crystal and a Mordy. So I think there's a universal concept around being good at operations that exist across the board, that sometimes when we get stuck in the marketing or SEO conversation, operations in that context we don't talk about, because we're talking about operations from an SEO team point of view or operations from a digital marketing team point of view. But let's perhaps zoom out and talk about just what does it mean to be good at operations. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that this is something, particularly within an SEO team, within an SEO agency, it's hard. It's hard. Mordy Oberstein: Operations is the hardest thing in my opinion. Crystal Carter: It's really difficult. It's really hard. And I know folks who said, I was in a conversation and someone was saying, "I admire this agency owner, because it's really hard running an agency." It's really hard. You've got to think about making sure you can keep the lights on. You have to make sure that everybody's learning stuff. You have to make sure that you're keeping your clients happy. You have to think about all of those sorts of things. And essentially with an agency, what you have is a knowledge-based business. You have something where the knowledge that you have as a team is your bread and butter, that is what people are paying for is what you know. And so you have to make sure that you're keeping those folks happy and that you're keeping everybody clever and all of that sort of stuff, and that they have all the tools that they need and all of that. And so you spend a lot of time deciding, do we need this tool? Is this training module that we're investing in really useful? Is this particular operational tool going to help us make the difference? Because for instance, when people get those team management tools, there's a learning curve. You have to invest months in training your entire team to learn this new operational tool like a Monday or that sort of thing or Asana or whatever. So you have to spend all the time investing and you're like, "Is this going to be worth it, going to be worth it down the line? Are we going to be able to make the money back on this?" All of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: I think you can even zoom out from there, because there's a part of operations where you're trying to make it all go and make it all work. And then I think there's a part of operations where you're basically a gatekeeper. And I think this is the part of operations that no one likes to talk about because it's not very fun. It's super complicated and it has less to do with the sexy part of growth, and more to do with the things that are really super annoying. Which is, so you have a new tool, let's say. You're going to use a new tool. So one part of the operator is like, "Okay, do they have the new tool? Do they have the onboarding to understand the new tool? Are they able to succeed?" And that's the part of operating where you feel good about yourself, I'm helping people succeed. Then this is the part of operating where you feel bad about yourself, and that's the part of making sure they're actually doing the things that you ask them to do. Or making sure that the vendor did all the things that you ask them to do. And making sure that the vendor and the people who are on your team are both doing the things together that you ask them to do. And that part's not as fun. And that part is just, it's just following. It's an insane level of detail. I'll tell you. So when I used to do operations, it was for a property manager company. They had like 3000 apartment units in New York City, and they had all sorts of legal cases going on. Which is, well, the worst part of my job actually. And I, every month would audit out of hundreds of legal cases every month to make sure that the attorneys were doing what they were supposed to do. And it was super tedious and super annoying, and it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect a COO to do. That doesn't seem important. Because all the things that you don't see a COO do are the things that are super minute, super detailed that they have to do that they don't really want to talk about, and that are not really fun to talk about. There's an insane level of detail, and I'll tell you that being a mild control freak helps. And that's the hard part, because you have to be a control freak, but you can't let that freakiness show at all. Because then your team's going to be really annoyed that you're being a control freak or you're micromanaging them. So you need to report back to either the board or the CEO or whoever it is that's running the company and know all of the answers. Which means following up on all of the insane level of detail without making your team feel like you're micromanaging them. And that's the hard part of operations, is being a good operator means balancing every stupid little thing, knowing every stupid little thing. But not passing on that level of micromanagement to the people who are working under you. You have to keep that to yourself. Crystal Carter: And I think that that team cohesion point is super important. So I've been, it's award season. I've been judging a lot of SEO awards and including like SEO agency over the year kind of things. And one of the things people always put in the criteria, or one of the things that comes in as a criteria is, what about your team? How are you managing your team? And if you're a good operations manager, then you're doing all that nuts and bolts stuff. You're doing all of the things that keep everything ticking over, even if it's boring, even if it's not glamorous. You're doing all of those things to keep everyone ticking over and you're making sure that your team are in a good state of mind to be able to do good work. And that is something that is, that's gold dust. That's gold dust. I've worked with good operations managers who were able to do that and seen incredible results, because when people feel good job satisfaction and they feel they're in a safe and stable place. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the hard balance, is that you have to be able to do that while also being all up in their business at the same time and knowing everything that's going on. It's super hard. I think one thing that you can try, it just really is having good relationships. It's knowing how to ask for things. It's knowing how to follow up for things. It's knowing when to follow up with things and letting things go. The person, for whatever reason, the company structure where I used to work, this is almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Wow, I'm old. The CFO worked under the COO, which is a weird way of running it, but that's for whatever reason, CEO, a lot of Cs going on. That's how they wanted to do it. Which I always felt was awkward, because normally the CFO would not be under the COO, it would kind of be a co-relationship, at the same level. How the heck do I navigate this? And my last day there, the CFO came in and said, "Whoever you bring in, you need to make sure that they know they're not my boss, because Mordy wasn't my boss. Mordy and I just worked together." And she walked out of the room and she was like, "How the hell did you pull that off? She didn't think you were her boss this whole time, it's four years? I'm like, "No, I just made it seem like everything we're doing is part of our cooperation together. I knew when to push, when not to push, when to follow up, when not to follow up and when to let things that were going wrong, just let them go for the sake of the team environment kind of thing." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's super important. I think nowadays there's a lot of tools that allow you to do that with fewer touch points. So particularly there's a lot of agency management tools like we talked about, I mentioned Monday, other ones I've used their Teamwork. I've also seen, there's Asana, there's a few other things like that, some people use, what's the one with the cards? It's got all those cards all the way along. There's one that has, it's really big - Mordy Oberstein: I only know Monday and Asana. Crystal Carter: So there's a few different ones. There's all these different flavors of all of these different things. And also even in Wix, with Wix Studio we have some great tools that allow you to do this, for instance, that allow you to set tasks and set workflows and things like that. And those are really great for real time reporting so that the COO who needs to have a bird's eye view of what everybody's doing can go and check those things without going, "Hey, what you doing? Hey, what you doing? Hey, what's this?" That sort of thing. So using tools like that can help you to get the information you need and also help you to not drive everyone crazy. The other thing that's great about tools like this is they can also give you information on stuff that can help you help clients, help you help your team as well. So some of these tools will give you information on how much time you've been spending on a client. And sometimes clients will be like, "Oh, I want this and this and this and this." And because they ask a lot of questions, they get a lot of time, but they might not necessarily be paying for all of that time. And that's something that people have to be very mindful of, particularly when you're billing on a monthly, daily, hourly basis. That's something that a COO really has to keep track of for the whole team, and that's something that can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a tip on this, I putting myself back in those shoes, what I would do in that situation. Let's say I notice there's way too much time being spent on clients that I can tell this is not billed time. So instead of going in and saying, "Hey you, we can't be doing this," make it great sympathy. If you're an operator or your operations, you go to the person and you say, "Hey, look, I get what you're doing. We should be doing this. I have a problem though because the CEO is down my back saying, "Hey, why is so much time being spent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And ask them, "What can we do here?" And get their solutions on it. But don't make it about they're messing up. Sometimes the way you want to leverage it is that you have a problem that you have to figure out because your neck is on the line. And it's not like I'm coming after you, I don't care that you do this. From my point of view, go ahead, keep talking to the client all day long. But I'm going to get nailed on it and I'm going to get asked about it, so what could we do to figure this out together? So you give an understanding of the fact that, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I personally don't care, and also help me out because I'm going to get nailed if we don't figure this out. Because at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure we're not doing this." Crystal Carter: I think that the good operations managers will definitely foster that kind of team mentality, that we're a team and we all need to move this needle. We all need to make sure that this makes sense for everyone so that we can all get some good results. And I think that that's really core to the operations aspect of SEO management. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's great at managing their news output and getting operating all of the news content for the entire industry on a daily basis? He might be a one-man show, but he sure knows how to operate. It's Barry Schwartz, which brings us to the SEO News. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. The last week's episode was all about AI and ranking, but this week's news is all about AI and maybe ranking, I don't know. First up, from Barry Schwartz and search engine land, Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE. Some have speculated that Google's going to announce the launch of SGE at Google's IO event on May 14th. Google has said to Barry, "We have not confirmed that. We have not said anything like that. There is no date set yet." Many speculate that not going to do anything until they figure out how to deal with the ad revenue and whatnot. Anyway, so I guess it's a public service announcement more than anything. The SGE has no official date to go live yet. Onwards from Barry Schwartz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable, new Google Shopping and Maps search features. So a lot of these, okay, backtrack. Google announced a whole heap of features related to Maps and AI, and shopping and AI, and stuff and AI, and a lot of it, to quote Barry, is old, not new. And if you follow Barry on seroundtable.com, which you should check out each and every day for the SEO News. Barry's covered a bunch of these announcements already. This is why it's fun to track what Barry tracks, because you can see when people say, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And Barry's like, "Oh yeah, that's new." And it's a test and it finally rolls out. Barry's already covered it. So officially though, Google's announced some of these features that Barry has caught over the past couple of months, such as, for example, you can now have, well, you've had it for a while I guess. But in the U.S., you could swipe left, swipe right to get style recommendations. Google has its feature for movie recommendations, so you can kind of refine what Google shows you. So it'll show you get style recommendations and you can, it shows you a picture of a polo shirt and with stripes on it, you give it a thumbs up and you swipe to the next one. It's a polo shirt with polka dots. You're like, "No, that's ugly. Thumbs down." And this way you can get more catered or more tasteful to your liking, at least shopping recommendations on the Google SERP, right from Google. Another shopping thing that, again, Barry covered this, I think back in February, was that you can ask AI on Google to generate an image of an article of clothing. So you say, I don't know, "Pants with stripes and purple polka dots," which I think only clowns would wear. But anyway, that's your thing, or if you're a clown. You can now have the AI generate it and then say, "Great. Now show me similar looking products," and you can find the product that you want that way. So that's also rolled out. I don't know if that's, I think it's only... Yeah, that one's only in the U.S. And then there's some interesting things around local. So for example, Google, you can click on an image in a Google business profile. So you go to your favorite pizza place in New York, Joe's Pizza, which is actually a real place. I'm not making that up. And you see the image of, I don't know, a Sicilian pizza, and you click on it. You'll now be able to see reviews related to that particular item of food and a whole bunch of other review summaries and that sort of thing in the Google Business profile. So that's interesting. Another one just run through, there's a whole heap of these, I'll link to the articles so you can see all of them. But just another one that stuck out to me was, Google is using SGE to give you a trip itinerary. So you search for something like, "Create a three-Day trip itinerary for me that shows the history of Philadelphia," and it'll create a whole three-day itinerary of what you should do on day one, day two and day three. I think that's a little interesting, little Mordy commentary for you here. Some of these are great. I guess the shopping styles thing, I guess that's really helpful, you shop a lot online or whatever. The reviews for the particular item on the menu and then the Google business profile, that seems helpful. Three-day itinerary where you're just like, "Yeah, show me an itinerary. I am not going to explore anymore. I'll just do what you say, Google." That doesn't really seem to be a good use of AI in my opinion. This is just my take. This is pure Mordy take. It just feels like, this is really fun, but it's not really helpful. And I wonder if sometimes the big tech brands, Google and Bing swing and miss on this kind of stuff with the approach of like, "Yeah, people don't want to actually explore anything. We'll just give you the answer and you'll just take what we give you." I don't think that's how it works. I think human beings are always going to want to explore. If I'm taking a week off of work, I'm taking my family to Philadelphia, I'm going to explore the city. I'm not going to say, "Hey, Google, just create an itinerary for me. I'm going to invest in that. I'm going to look at each option. I'm going to say, "You know what? That doesn't look so much fun. That does look fun. My kids are going to freak out if I go to this one. That one looks way better or more interactive."" I'm going to put the effort in to explore and research for myself what I think is best for me and my family when we go on vacation to spend all that money. Maybe if I'm like, I'm blowing a day in Philadelphia, "Google, give me five things to do in Philadelphia today." All right, maybe I would do that. So in some of these instances where I think the Google and the Bings of the world are basically saying, "We'll give you the information and you'll just take it I think that works with smaller things perhaps, but I think you're never going to get past the need for the human being to want to explore and see things for themselves and make their own decisions. So I think when they take these things like an itinerary for a vacation, they're like, "Yeah, take this. Use it. Go for it. SGE output, AI output." I'm not sure that works and I think the Googles and the Bings of the world, again, I think they're still trying to figure that out. But again, I think they'll see, my prediction at least, they'll see for those kinds of things. People, maybe they'll create the itinerary, but you'll see the next thing they do is start researching each one of those things and creating their own itinerary. That's just my take, and that's this week's snappy news. It really must be an operation to produced so much news content on a day-by-day basis. Crystal Carter: I thought he went into real surgical detail with it. That's what I thought. Mordy Oberstein: See what you did there. He's a smooth operator, that Barry. Speaking of smooth operators, you know who operates an SEO agency with a ton of SEOs? It's Blake Denman over to RicketyRoo, which means that our follower of the week this week is Blake Denman from RicketyRoo. Spoiler alert from here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, Blake is a great follower. He's got a fantastic, fantastic cohort of some wonderful, wonderful SEOs on his team, Amanda Jordan, Celeste Gonzalez, Melissa Popp, some amazing, amazing, incredible people. Mordy Oberstein: And they have a great vibe. Crystal Carter: A great vibe. Mordy Oberstein: And they get stuff done. Crystal Carter: Great team, and I think that, again, you're as good as your team, particularly from an SEO point of view, and when you've got a great team, then you're able to do incredible things. I also forgot to shout out VP of operations at RicketyRoo, Tess, who's fantastic. Tess, Voecks, who's amazing as well. Mordy Oberstein: The problem with RicketyRoo is that we're going to be here all day naming them. Crystal Carter: All day saying how great they are, because we love, shout out to the full Roo crew. Mordy Oberstein: I like that, the Roo crew. But if you have questions around, "Hey, how do I manage and operate an SEO team?" I think Blake would be a great person for you to talk to because he's clearly doing a great job with it. Crystal Carter: Right. Because he's got so many great folks on his team, so he must be doing a great job. Mordy Oberstein: He must be, and you can follow Blake over on X @blakedenman. That's B-L-A-K-E D-E-N-M-A-N on X, formerly known as Twitter, currently known as Twitter in my mind. We have to do an outro now. I need to say something charismatic. Crystal Carter: Thank you all for joining us today on this great episode of SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking of, hey, let's cut that out and retry that, but now we're not doing that. Now we're going to go with it. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: I don't know, whatever. It's fine. We're a team. We're a team. That's something we do, we support each other. Mordy Oberstein: That's how we operate. Crystal Carter: Exactly. We just bring it back in and deal the deal, get the job done. Mordy Oberstein: I freely admit, I had an absolute brain fart there, I'm like, "Wait, what comes next? Oh, yeah. We need to end the show now." Crystal Carter: It's fine, we can end it. I think we've done a great job and we hit all our KPIs and our targets and our goals and our aims and objectives, and well done everyone. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You'd think after 81 episodes, I'd know how to operate this thing, but clearly not. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the maturation process of SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, 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 over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. 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How does the maturity of your site factor into SEO? Ultimately, an SEO strategy without phases of site development is no SEO strategy at all. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter take a look at site maturity and how it factors into SEO, as they help you understand why identifying stages of maturity is so crucial to organic search success. Grace Frohlich of Brain Labs stops by to discuss a framework you can use to determine the maturity of your site and how to build your SEO strategy around it. Plus, take a trip across the Wixverse with Wix’s own Paz Dekel to see how the identity of a product goes through stages of maturity. It’s time to take a seat at the adult table as we assess the stages of maturity that factor into SEO this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back What's your SEO maturity? How does the maturity of your site factor into SEO? Ultimately, an SEO strategy without phases of site development is no SEO strategy at all. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter take a look at site maturity and how it factors into SEO, as they help you understand why identifying stages of maturity is so crucial to organic search success. Grace Frohlich of Brain Labs stops by to discuss a framework you can use to determine the maturity of your site and how to build your SEO strategy around it. Plus, take a trip across the Wixverse with Wix’s own Paz Dekel to see how the identity of a product goes through stages of maturity. It’s time to take a seat at the adult table as we assess the stages of maturity that factor into SEO this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 82 | April 10, 2024 | 48 MIN 00:00 / 47:59 This week’s guests Grace Frohlich Grace is a SEO consultant at Brainlabs. She has extensive knowledge and experience in SEO fundamentals, and leads strategic direction for her clients in the ecommerce space. Grace has spoken at SEO conferences, most recently BrightonSEO and SearchLove. Paz Dekel Paz is a Product Manager on the Wix SEO team. A product manager at Wix for over 5 years on several different teams, Paz recently joined the SEO team to help develop the Wix SEO product. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. [foreign language 00:00:14] For joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, fantastic, the fantastical, that's not a compliment, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Fantastical, I'm not sure about that. Mordy Oberstein: Listen, all that means you're in a fantasy world. I mean, that could be a good thing- Crystal Carter: Like a mermaid. I would love to be a mermaid. That would be fun. I could be friends with dolphins or something. I love dolphins. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you can hang out with my kids. In his mind, he's the first person to walk on Mars, so. Crystal Carter: They don't have mermaids on Mars. Mordy Oberstein: They don't have people on Mars either. Crystal Carter: But they definitely don't have mermaids. There's not enough ocean. There's not enough ocean. Mordy Oberstein: They found water. They found water on Mars. Crystal Carter: It was frozen though. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe there are tiny frozen mermaids. Crystal Carter: Those would be different creatures. Those would be different fantastical creatures, right? They would be ice fairies or something. Mordy Oberstein: In your mind, not mine. In my mind, it all makes sense. Crystal Carter: We need a GenAI to sort this out. We're like, "What would an ice-" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the GenAI will sort this out and not hallucinate more. Crystal Carter: Put it into one of those image generators and show me a picture of an ice mermaid. Mordy Oberstein: At some point during this podcast I'll go. We'll do that. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search light each and every month, where you can subscribe to it one time and you'll get it each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also help your site mature with our native and built apps created together with the likes of Amazon, Google Tech Manager, Google Merchant Center, Bing, Microsoft, and so many more. Look for them in the Wix Dashboard and Wix Studio app markets. We're talking about maturity because, well, I don't have any, but also because we're talking about how site maturity factors into SEO, why knowing where the site is key to doing good SEO, why an SEO strategy without phases of site development is no SEO strategy at all, and how SEO the various status of site development looks a bit different. Brainlabs' own Grace Frolich stops by to share how to assess site maturity from an SEO point of view, and we hop across to Wix Universe, which is also on Mars in a Frozen with the mermaids with our own product manager, Paz Dekel, to discuss how product maturity factors into future development. Plus, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So let the wine flavors seep through the oak barrels of your mind as we let SEO mature in casks of cognition on episode 82 of the SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: I mean, that was like a sharp cave-aged introduction. Mordy Oberstein: I'm getting notes of hints of self-righteousness and slight narcissism. Crystal Carter: Right. I can see the tannins as well. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? Most wine, it's not aged in a barrel. It's aged in a metal vat. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I have a terrible thing. Anybody who's a wine aficionado and Marcus Tober, if you're listening to this, please close your ears now. But I have a general opinion that a bad wine is good by the third glass. Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory, by the way, that white wine doesn't matter, it all tastes the same. Crystal Carter: If it's really cold, you can't really taste very much. Although I do love a Chenin Blanc, and to be fair, I've had some pretty bad. I mean, I know just said that about bad wine Wine, but that was college. I know how to buy a good cheap wine. The price doesn't actually matter. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So okay, let's get started with this. One of the biggest factors that should guide your SEO focus is where this site is currently at, and that includes where the business is currently at. This obviously comes into focus with, I don't know, a brand new website where let's say dealing with some of the more technical issues are going to come into a much stronger focus, but it really deals with any site at any point and anywhere in its stage of evolution. But it even goes beyond that for me. For example, with a newer site or even an older site where you're trying to break across different content verticals or into new content areas or content universes, since we're talking about Mars, there's a unique focus on gaining digital momentum in those cases and the buildup and the awareness of the buildup and therefore the authority around the topic, you're going to need to get that momentum and that buildup brings up a whole slew of new and different kind of SEO focuses and tasks. In that case, by the way, they might not even seem like SEO tasks when you're doing that ramp up. A lot of it might be about getting some of the social media momentum, so you just get digital presence kind of thing. Anyway, all of this goes into what your SEO and content strategy for search should be. So that's why we're talking today about maturity, where the site is, where the ecosystem is, where the business is, so that you can better understand what you should be focusing on from an SEO point of view. Because again, it all depends on what matters now to the website. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that it's really important that people understand you don't have to do everything all at once and nobody expects you to do everything all at once. And your brand and your website- Mordy Oberstein: My mother did, and it was really a hard part of my childhood. Crystal Carter: Really hard. Then you can't do everything all at once. Your goals will be different in the first iteration of your website from what they will be later on. If you're somebody who's an established player, for instance, if you're Salesforce and you're writing content about CRMs, you are established, right? Not only that, but you have a corpus of content that you can reference in your own documentation. So if you write an article about, I don't know, lead generation or whatever it may be, you can reference yourself multiple times throughout your content. However, if you are a brand new challenger in the market necessarily, one of the problems you might have is that actually you're going to have to need to reference some of your competitors, which is like, ah, what do I do there? And that's going to have a different approach to once you're further down the line, because those have different challenges because let's say you are Salesforce and you've written about CRMs for 20 years or 15 years, then you have to worry about cannibalization, duplication, things like that. Mordy Oberstein: Staying there. Crystal Carter: Staying there, all of that sort of stuff. If you're brand new, then you're really just trying to get on the board, really. You're trying to get content out there. Mordy Oberstein: And win any way you can. Just get something going. Crystal Carter: Right. You've got to get on the board, you're trying to get points on the board and stuff. But really, I think in the early days, there's quantity and quality, but quantity is really important in the first element. Of course, you want to make sure you've got quality, of course. Mordy Oberstein: But you need to show you're alive. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And whereas I think that once people get further on, you're really refining for that quality as you get further down the line. Mordy Oberstein: I had somebody ask me the other day, "Send me the best keywords. Send me the best keywords." The best keyword on the planet? I don't know. We were talking about this, the term Google is probably the best keyword with the most search volume. You mean what's the best keyword for your site and business right now? I can send you a list. And a year from now, that should not be the same list. It should be a different list. And to that point, I think when you're developing an SEO strategy, I like to include phases of development. Phase one, we're going to focus on this. In a year from now, we're going to enter phase two. And in phase two, we're going to now focus on this. And ultimately, we're going to enter phase three. And in phase three it's going to look very, very different. Phase three is going to be more about maintenance because we'll have all the rankings, and now we're going to have to go fend off and fight off all the upstarters who were like us two years ago from doing what we already did. So when you're creating an SEO strategy, you should be thinking about where you want to ultimately go and the various stages of the site's development until you get there and creating a sub strategy for each one of those phases. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think we talked to someone recently who was talking about building up their brand and how they started, and they just went in full pelt straight away. And that's definitely one strategy to do that. And yeah, you need to think about how you're going to phase that. What happens after you get to that mountaintop? You don't want to plateau, you want to keep going. And I think we sometimes use the metaphor of training or going to the gym or whatever. If you have not gone to the gym, you've never particularly done any exercise or whatever, and you're starting from nothing, right? The way that you are going to get yourself into shape is going to be very different from somebody who runs a marathon every year. Mordy Oberstein: Right. I first start with fork to mouth. Crystal Carter: So if you're somebody who runs marathons regularly and what you want to do is you want to shave down your time, right? You want to go from being good to being great, that is a very different training path than from somebody who just wants to actually be able to complete the marathon in the first place, a very different training path. But you have to be able to get through that first training path first before you can get to the point where you're trying to shave down a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds and things like that. And you might need different tools. You might need different support. You might need- Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that, you're getting different people, right? To take your example, if you're hiring, let's say a team of trainers to help you, if your team consists only of the first phase, then when you get past that, well, you're just stuck, damn, with your SEO. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. And I think that with SEO, very often the case where you might need to rethink your tools, the tools that you use or your squad, you might think, "Okay. Well, now we've got a lot of content, what we need now is somebody to help us do a lot of distro, or we need somebody to help us get a lot of backlinks to this content, or we need somebody to help us now to organize this content better with the technical infrastructure because now we have so much content that now we need to move around. Maybe we need to think about our site search. Maybe we need to think about our navigation, maybe we need to put things into pillars or that sort of stuff." Whereas when you have nothing, if you have a blog of it, if you're starting with a blank slate, like I said, you want to get some points on the board in that- Mordy Oberstein: And totally from way of thinking and operating, completely different. It's not even close to being the same thing. And that's like if you're planning out these phases of site maturity and SEO development, you should also be thinking of the staff that if you're in an agency, you need to be thinking about the staff that you're going to need and the resources you're going to need in order to pull this off. That should factor into it. If phase two is going to include breaking into five new content verticals, you're going to need a heap of a lot of content. So if your team's not structured for that, now you have to think, "Okay, maybe we need to outsource that. How much is that going to cost? Can we afford that?" Because one phase should lead into the next phase. So if you're in phase one and it's going to lead to phase two, if phase two is not feasible from a resource point of view for you, that should affect how you go about phase one. And maybe you need to pivot and rethink phase one. But what you shouldn't do is not think about the maturity of the site as it goes through stages, plan out one thing and then realize, "Oh, we should never have done that because we can't actually fulfill the full spectrum of what this actually means." So it's way too labor-intensive in the end. Crystal Carter: Right. Also, I think it's important to remember that content maturity and website maturity can happen for a single post as well, right? It might be that you think to yourself, "Okay, we need to have a post on this topic." Right? And maybe you don't have loads of time to go full pelt onto this topic in the first instance, but you want to get something on there. Okay. So you get something on there and maybe you don't even expect it to rank particularly, you just need it to be indexed. And then you can come back to it and maybe you're like, "Okay, in two months we're going to come back to this. We're going to add some more facts and figures. We're going to add some more stats. We're going to add some more expert stuff." Cool, great. Then maybe you get more resources for different media types, and then you can go back and immature that. So again, because your website is a living document, and so you have time. You have time. So don't just think that it's a set it and forget it situation. If you have an article, if you have piece that you think could do with being more robust, go back, make it more robust and that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: You can even plan that out to begin with. I had a case recently where they're using a resource to funnel the audience to a different piece of content. It's a very long resource. It's a master resource. And they're trying to be a little bit aggressive in how they leverage that piece to push you to the other piece where they really want you to go to for whatever reason. And they're relatively not a new website, but they're new to creating content, and they don't have a lot of... I hate to use the word authority, but they don't have a lot of authority. They don't have a lot of oomph to their digital presence. So I'm like, "You know what you should do? This piece should go through multiple phases of maturity. I don't know how Google's going to see you here. You're really trying to break in. I wouldn't be very aggressive in trying to push the user to the next piece." Yet Google might say, "Hey, wait a second, it's an informational piece of content, but we see a commercial intent in here. Are you trying to fool us?" Let Google do its thing. Let's see if it ranks well. Let's see what we need to do to get a ranking. And once the piece is established, then go back and then be a little more aggressive and see what that does to the rankings. Probably not much at that point. So you could probably be a little bit more aggressive in how you're funneling users from that piece to the other pages that you want to actually ultimately get the user on. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that testing, that iteration is really important to how you progress with your maturity of your site. Because it might be that you look at a piece of content and you go, "This is as far as this is going to go." Mordy Oberstein: That's what my wife says about me. "That's as far as your maturity is going to go. I accept it." Crystal Carter: You might say that this is where the train stops. Mordy Oberstein: It's 12. That's about it. Crystal Carter: So I think that there's that and you might say, "This is as far as that's going to go. We'll take this this far and this will serve that purpose. And this next part will take us to the next piece as well." But yeah, the testing and the iteration is super important to understanding the maturity and seeing what things you need to do with that. Because sometimes it might be that you publish two pieces of content that are kind of similar, but maybe from a different perspective, for instance, and maybe Google likes one more than it likes the other and so- Mordy Oberstein: You could understand one one way, another one a different way. Crystal Carter: Right. So then you think, "Okay. Well, we'll consolidate these two. We'll take the bits that Google likes and we'll put that into the main one that it likes more." For instance. And that might be a way that you do that or it might be that... In terms of maturity, another thing that could happen is that you can get more technical expertise. So it might be that your site has more capabilities now. So let's say your site now has the ability to add in FAQ schema or has something like that. I had a client before. And people, don't at me about the FAQ schema. FAQ schema is still useful. Mordy Oberstein: It's not for real anymore. Crystal Carter: It's still a thing, people. It's not massive, but if it's useful, use FAQ. Anyway. So let's say you have more technical capabilities in your team, then that's great. That means that now you can use different formats and you can use different technical tools to make your content more mature. I also want to talk about clients, client maturity. So your relationship with your clients can also mature and can also- Mordy Oberstein: It should mature. Not they can, they should mature. Crystal Carter: They should, right? Right. So on Moz, they've got a great article, it's a couple of years old, but I think that it's still solid. So it's from Heather Physioc. I hope I've said that right. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Physioc. Crystal Carter: Physioc, yes. And she's got a great chart that talks about search capabilities, maturity model, and she talks about client culture and stuff. And she says that in that sense, you go from chaos to culture. So you start with spammy, outdated and harmful behavior. And I've definitely had clients who come to me and they're like, "Yeah, we had somebody help with the SEO." And you go through their backlink profile and it's just wow. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? I don't know if you had this experience, but I have a kid, and hopefully he's not listening to this podcast, but he's a little bit of a mess. He likes to make a mess. It's everything, right? He's in the kitchen, it's a mess. It's a mess. And it's his personality. It's good. We love him. But to get him to not make a mess, you can't be like, "Don't make a mess." You have to start very small. When you're done making eggs and the oil spilled up, take a paper towel, wipe down the counter over here just a little bit. And you start with that and you zoom in. It's the same thing with a client, okay? I had someone come over like, "Yeah, here's my website." It was built for PPC. It was a giant multi-page landing page built literally for PPC. All right, all right. Let's do this first. Let's scale back this. Let's work on this and then let's keep going. And you have to really take it step by step by step to get them because what happens, I think when you start doing that is they start seeing like, "Oh, wait a second. Maybe I'm a mess." And then once they've bought into the idea, "Maybe I'm actually a mess." Now you can start going. Crystal Carter: Right. So Heather talks about you go from chaos to absent, where basically they just don't have anything, to tactical. And what you're talking about is the tactical sort of thing. It's like, "Okay, so we are going to go through these processes. This is how you do this." That sort of thing. And once they figure out the process, once they get it, you can move on to strategic stuff of like, "okay, great, we've got the bases covered, now let's do some strategy. Let's be competitive, let's get involved." And then with practice, she's saying, you're expected. So before they do stuff, they know to come to you to talk to you about their SEO. So they're like, "We're thinking of doing this, what do you think?" "Call Heather. Call Mordy before we do this thing." They're getting into that. And then on this maturity model, I think this is great. She talks about culture. So here she says, "SEO is part of the client's marketing DNA, dedicated resources and processes, knowledgeable, committed to learning more." That sort of stuff. And that's where you're training them. They're the integrated, you're even in the C-suite where you're talking to the MDs and they understand that SEO and being valuable for users as articulated on search is really, really important. And once you've got that kind of relationship with a client, really you're flying. And a lot of the content, technical and other SEO stuff will fall into place once you've gotten to that sort of level. So yeah, there's tons of different layers to it, and I think that for anybody who's feeling like they're in the chaos stage, be patient. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll get there eventually. Crystal Carter: It will get there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, my kid now knows if I cook in the kitchen and I make a mess, they're not going to be happy. So I'll do it anyway. Well, at least he knows we're not going to be happy about it. Speaking about SEO maturity and site maturity and business maturity and how to deal with all this stuff, we talked to Grace Frolich, who is a contributor to Wix SEO and an SEO consultant over at BrainLabs. We asked her, how do you assess the maturity of your site and how does that play into what SEO activity you engage in? Take it away, Grace. Grace Frolich: When we talk about a website's maturity, what we really want to know is how developed it is and how it performs within its industry or its vertical. And we can determine that by auditing a site based on a set of criteria or a framework. An example that I like to use is a taste test. Let's say you own a pizza restaurant and you want to know how you stack up against other pies in your city. So you try a bunch of different pizzas and critique them based on a set of criteria. That could be things like a pizza's taste, the texture, the sauce to crust ratio, and so on. Those results will show you which pizzas are considered the best based on your criteria, and it shows you how your pizzas compare to other pizzas. Based on your scores, you can make improvements where your pizza didn't do as well. So similarly, think of a maturity audit like a rating system where each criteria is given a score from one to five, where five is considered the best in class. Things you would look at here are a site's technical compliance, how your content performs compared to competitors, how your link profile looks compared to competitors and so on. You would score each of these areas and the results from that gives you an idea of what is considered good or mature within your industry. From the results, you can make improvements in areas where you underperformed. Now this is great because it gives you a view of all different areas of your site so that you can then prioritize that based on the results that you see. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Grace. Don't forget to give Grace a follow or a connection, whatever you call it on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that what she was talking about, about the audit relative to your competitors is really, really important. The industry is young, right? There's sometimes where... For instance, with the AI market, for instance, in the last year or so, there've been a big explosion of people working in that space, but there were people who were there further along. And so there's going to be different levels of content maturity around that topic because the topic for the mainstream anyway is fairly new. And so I think that it's really important to think about your maturity relative to other folks. If the market is very young, then that will change the expectations for users in terms of content, in terms of the way the site is, et cetera. And I think it's like when new social media platforms show up, it can be the barrier for entry is a little bit lower. So for instance, I think when Instagram first showed up, you could pretty much just post pictures and that was what you could do. And so people who were able to do that did well. But now there's reels and there's videos, and there's pictures, and there's this, and there's stories, and there's all that sort of stuff. So if you did the same thing that you were doing when the platform was brand new, you wouldn't be as impactful as somebody who's able to do that now. So understanding relative to the rest of the industry is super important as part of your maturity audit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I mean, that's part of a good SEO, understanding where you are relative to what's already ranking, obviously just to do copy and skyscraper or whatever. It's not what I'm saying. Anyway. I'm a big believer that one thing in life should lead to the next thing in life. And actually we, on this podcast, have talked about that in terms of brand marketing, where you are as a brand and how you position yourself as a brand, the next thing you do should be based on where you're at now and should all logically flow together. I don't remember what episode it was, Crystal, but I'll try to remember and we'll link to it in the show notes. Now, I see you racking your brain. You don't remember either. I don't remember any of the episode numbers, by the way. We talked about keyword research. I have no idea what episode number that was. Crystal Carter: I don't know what number it was, I just- Mordy Oberstein: Four. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Four is a good number because you expect to say three, but it's not, you say four. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Crystal Carter: Right. Four can be confusing for aforementioned reasons of things. You see? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, four is confusing. Also, if you're playing golf, it's a whole different meaning to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a whole minefield. It's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All right. So five. Episode five. Anyway. I think that's also true for product as well. And to help us see the truth about product development, we're going across the Wix verse with our very own product manager for SEO, Paz Dekel. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Paz, welcome to the podcast. Paz Dekel: Hello. Thank you. Happy to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do? What do like? What's your favorite color? What's your favorite number actually? What's your favorite number? Is it four? Paz Dekel: My favorite number is seven. I don't know why. Mordy Oberstein: Seven? Paz Dekel: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: People like three, seven. It's a whole Plato thing with numbers. Paz Dekel: Really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Seven is one of those big numbers. Paz Dekel: Also, lucky number seven. Mordy Oberstein: Right. See? I always say lucky number 13, but whatever. Okay. Crystal Carter: They don't put 13s on elevators. That's a whole thing. There's no floor there. Mordy Oberstein: This goes to show you how stupid humanity is, but okay. Crystal Carter: Sorry? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, "What floor am I on?" "Oh, you're on the 14th floor, but it's really the 13th floor. We don't want to tell you the 13th floor because you might have some bad luck." Paz Dekel: So maybe I'll turn my lucky number to foursome. No, no. Hi, I'm Paz. I've been working at Wix for over five years. I've worked in different companies, different products. I'll try everything. Really like Wix, really like its product. And I'm here at SEO now. Mordy Oberstein: And now you're here on the podcast. Now we're going to talk about how you look at product maturity and how that factors in. So when you're thinking about taking the product to the next level, how much or in what way does where the product currently is factor in? How does the product maturity all play a role in your roadmaps? Paz Dekel: Yeah. So I think it has a several way to look at product maturity and how I'm going to decide what I'm going to do next. So the first thing we talk before is actually different user types that I have, right? I have new users that just came to Wix and built the first website. They need a very, very easy setup to understand what they're doing. And we have partners and agencies that are super... I forgot the word. Crystal Carter: Experienced. Paz Dekel: Experienced, exactly and they know what to do and have thousands of sites. So I need to understand in my product, this is a new product or this is a mature product. Who is my user that I want to solve this problem right now? If I want to focus on one of them or to find a wide solution. So I need to look at my user type. Also, if I think about users, I need to understand that in the beginning of the product, when I have a brand new product, I don't have any information about my user. I don't have data, I don't have how to... He used the product. In the past, I was a product of Wix Hotel, which we did a deep integration with a third-party app called Hotel Runner and this was a new app that we wanted to replace the old Wix Hotels. And then we didn't have any user that tried it. We didn't have any data. So we did a usability interviews to understand if the product that we build are clear enough for them and they understand what they're going to do. Once we have the product release and we have users, we can know what are the pain points right now, which opportunities we have, where do we need to improve? So it's really important as a product, first of all, to look at your users to understand who they are and what they need. And it depends if the product is at the early stage of it or already very mature. Crystal Carter: I think the way you talk about users is so important because the journey for the user will totally affect how you discuss it. And I think that it is completely different. If you've invented something completely new and nobody knows what a Furby is or something. I'm dating myself by saying that. Mordy Oberstein: Furby. Holy crap. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. So I'm dating myself. But if nobody knows what it is, then you have got a very different thing. Or if you think about the iPhone, for instance, when the iPhone first came out, they had to explain, oh, it does this and it does that, and it does this and it does that. And now they just have just people having a good day. On their advertising it's just people taking pictures, jumping about or whatever. Everybody knows that it does this and it does that and it does this and it does that, but they're just trying to make you engage in the brand equity and engage in the brand vibes really at that stage. So where you are now, how often do you go through and study how users are currently using your product? Paz Dekel: Constantly. This is part of my work to do user interviews and to look at data all the time and to see how they behave and how they use the product, how much they return to a specific... For example, SEO, it's ongoing work. You can do the SEO and you need always improve it. So you want the user to come back and do additional things. So the user is always in my first priority. We also have the support that has tickets and has feature requests that gives us... And also here, it's divided into different user types because we have feature requests from big partners. They want to do bulk action on the many, many website. And we have the small business they want just to get found on Google very easily. So the user will always be in my first priority. Mordy Oberstein: Question for you. So when I used to work at Rank Ranger, it was a niche SEO software and I think they got bought up by Similarweb. So one of the things that I used to focusing on when going to do work, I used to have a heavy input on the product, was product identity. Because you're in a market where there's so many SEO tools, they all do very similar things. And how do you make the product's identity stand out and differentiate itself? I find that similar to brand identity, do you have a certain brand identity? And then when you're building that brand identity, or in this case a product identity, you build one thing. And then when you're thinking about building the next thing, what you built previously leads you to where the next step is. SEO is just one part of a much, much, much, much, much wider product, do you really feel like there's a product identity for the sub tools within Wix? Paz Dekel: Definitely. I think SEO is a great example for that. If you look a few years ago, people won't come to Wix due to their SEO reputation. We had- Mordy Oberstein: That's why I have a job actually. Paz Dekel: We had a very bad reputation. So the first thing that we did was to align our product with a competitor in the industry to have the wizard, to have the panel, to have the settings. And once we did all of that and we really improved our SEO, I think now we can say that we are leaders in the industry right now. Mordy Oberstein: We could say this. By the way, great job. Paz Dekel: And now we can have advanced product that no one else had because we did all the basics and the infrastructure that we needed. And now we can have advanced integration with big SEO partners like Semrush or SE Ranking or site inspection. Mordy Oberstein: And Google is a- Paz Dekel: And Google. Mordy Oberstein: Throw some names out there at you. Overall. Paz Dekel: No, but I think it's also part of the maturity of the product. In the beginning, we didn't have a good enough product. We need to build all the basics just to be aligned with the industry. And now we can dream big and think about what we want to do with the product. And it's also changes the whole strategy. The long-term strategy in the beginning was to do all the basics so we can have the same thing as our competitors. Now we can, oh my God, okay, what we can do next to be amazing. Crystal Carter: And I think also in that space, once you start getting buy-in from both your users and also your wider team, that people are engaging with this product, people are doing well with this product, does that give you more opportunities to think bigger? Paz Dekel: Definitely. Once they see that they're using the product, for example, the Wizard is amazing. All of the user types, use the Wizard because we help them. And then we can think of that and think bigger. Okay, we can use that. They have the basic now. They're got to a position where they connected to Google. Now I can help them to do the advanced SEO for them. So we needed them to use the basic in order to do advanced features. Mordy Oberstein: And it's really cool because when the products develops, it opens up so many new doors, in my opinion. So for example, in our case, if you go back to when we first started this whole SEO journey and it's 2019, if you were to go to Semrush and say, "Hey, Semrush, let's partner up." Semrush would be like, "What? What are you talking about?" But as the product matures, right? And as the product develops and as you're able to mature the product, you're also able to open up all sorts of new doors that you didn't even think about could even be there. Semrush being inside of Wix is a testimony to the fact that Wix did some really cool stuff with SEO where Semrush is like, "You know what? We should be there too." Paz Dekel: Yeah, definitely. And I think another thing is look at the whole industry, for example, AI, and you see the whole world goes to AI and then you say, "Okay, how can I use AI in our product?" This is also changes the decision that I'm making and the strategy of the product because there's something so big outside that you want, "Okay, let's use it. Super cool. Where can I help the user with that?" Mordy Oberstein: Right. But if you didn't have the basis of having the SEO tools there, you couldn't add on a layer of AI and add on a layer of AI to what? The nothing. Paz Dekel: Exactly. You need to have the basics for the first thing in order to get better. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Speaking of throwback podcast, we have another podcast about doing SEO basics. Mordy Oberstein: What number? Crystal Carter: I don't remember what number it is. But I think that if you do the basics well, I think people forget that... I quote her all the time, but my mom always said common sense ain't that common. And if you're able to do the basics really well, then it gives people confidence that you're able to do complicated things well as well. So if you think about a brand like the Gap or whatever, they specialize in pretty simple stuff. They're like, "We do T-shirts, we do jeans, we do regulars." And people are like, "Great, and you do those really, really well." So when they say, "Oh, we want to do something else." People go, "Oh, okay." You focus on quality and you can focus on doing something that people really appreciate and really leaning into that. And I think that can view a lot of... Yeah, like Morty was saying, opens a lot of doors. Paz Dekel: Definitely. I think another thing that it's important to understand in the product maturity it's on the developer side. Because once you get bigger, you have technical debts suddenly, and you need to think in scalability mode. Okay, so I need to build something that I can build on that. And the beginning of the product, you don't think of, I need to create it some way that it would be easy to get a lot of users. So sometimes you need to go back and improve performance, enhance the infrastructure that it is. So it's also something that you need to think of as a product that sometimes when you are already mature, you need to go back to the code and change it a little bit so it'll fit the product needs for the future. Mordy Oberstein: So if people wanted to pick your brain and ask you all about product development questions, where could they find you? TikTok? Paz Dekel: I have LinkedIn- Mordy Oberstein: LinkedIn. Paz Dekel: And Twitter. Yeah, they can definitely write me there. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so we'll link to those profiles in the show notes. Paz, thank you so much for coming on. Paz Dekel: Thank you so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: See you around the proverbial office. Mordy Oberstein: You just like product sometimes. Development runs on from one thing to the next thing. Sometimes when you're writing something like a news headline around SEO, the words just run on a little bit. A little bit too much sometimes. You ever see that out there? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Sentences as well. Mordy Oberstein: Sentences, yeah. But in specifically titles to SEO news articles. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain charm to that as a tactic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and also lack of grammatical maturity. Crystal Carter: I didn't say that. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, Barry told people to unfollow me on Twitter. He put out a tweet, "If you want to make me happy, subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you want to make me unhappy, follow Mordy." Crystal Carter: That's not exactly telling people to unfollow you. Mordy Oberstein: Why? Crystal Carter: I mean, technically speaking. Mordy Oberstein: So good. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's in the neighborhood. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. It was like, I appreciate controlling. It was really good. I also appreciate really good SEO news and no one does the SEO news as good as Barry. So here's the Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Could somebody please pass the salt? Because I'm feeling salty. Second thought, you don't want to pass the salt because I'm already feeling salty. We just add more salt to my overall saltiness. Either way, from Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, Google AI overviews launch in the UK. So until now, the only folks who have been able to access the SGE, the Search Generative Experience, are the folks living in the US. Now, Google is testing what Danny says is a small slice of SGE to a small slice of logged in users in the UK. At the same time, there have been reports that Google might start charging for using the SGE. Which is interesting because I'm not exactly sure that SGE is at the point where people would actually pay for it. I'm highly skeptical of that. And this comes from a report that was earlier in the week about SGE going perhaps premium. Very skeptical about this. To me, it feels like Google has the SGE, it's not really sure how to monetize it. How do they get the ad revenue from the SGE that they're currently getting without the SGE? Oh no, perhaps we can't. Then maybe we should just charge for it. It feels to me like they're still a little bit all over the place with how to implement this and keep up with the AI wars or the AI race and at the same time, actually earn revenue, which is the point of what Google's trying to do. I don't know. Just my very salty take, which brings me to my next salty take from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine around here. But Google explains why it shows Reddit and forum threads in search so often, and this comes as friend of the show, friend of SEO, defender of SEO, Lily Ray, pointed out that Google is showing discussions and forums, basically Quora and mostly Reddit results at the very, very top of the SERP for very, very much YMYL queries. Your money, your life kind of queries such as weight loss. And instead of getting results from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Health or Johns Hopkins or whoever it is, you're getting information from some random schmo on Reddit is the contention. And it's a bit of an issue. And I will say that I am a little bit not thrilled with this as somebody who has family members who have eating disorder or have had eating disorders in the past. This is something that's a little bit close to my heart. So if I'm feeling a bit salty about this, that's why I just want you to know that. I don't see how this is really beneficial for the user. I know Danny Sullivan got into a back and forth with Lily Ray about why Google does show this and why they don't show, what they're trying to do. And Danny did say that he would report this onto the wider team that maybe this shouldn't actually be what should be showing up here. I dove into this a bit and some of the results, the first results I got was actually from Quora, and the post within that forum thread was basically one of these unsponsored organic listings where the person is peddling their own product. In this case, weight loss pills. That is certainly not what somebody who is susceptible to getting wrong or misusing information found online, maybe a teenager with an eating disorder should be seeing. And I know there's a back and forth with Danny and Lily about what users want and what users are looking for and blah blah, blah. Again, this is a very salty Mordy because I'm a little bit upset about this. I don't care what users want, how's that? What I do care about is what's responsible for that person who may misuse the information and then harm themselves, which is why we have a YMYL category among the Google results, your money, your life category, because there is a obligation to ensure that folks are getting information that will not harm them. And I don't think Google's doing a good job of presenting information that will not harm the most vulnerable of the population here. So I would like to see a change. I usually do put my thumb on the scale on this podcast about these things, but again, it's an issue that's a little bit close to my heart and I'm feeling a little bit salty and I do think that it should change. And I'm not saying that Google is to blame. Oh, no. It's hard to get these things right. There's a balance here. It takes time for Google to refine what it made the change to add more forum content. It is a process and yes, we should be patient with it. And Google has been welcoming to the feedback and that is a very important thing. And a very good thing is something that I actually praised Danny Sullivan on Twitter the other week for about taking the feedback and bringing it to the team. So that is a very good and healthy thing, and I'm not saying that anyone is to blame in particular. Again, I do understand that it is a process of refining these things and getting it just right and it is way harder to get it right than I think we give Google credit for. But I really do think that in this case, the forum content should not rank at all. It's certainly not above the CDC or Harvard Health or the Mayo Clinic and so forth. Again, I'm being a little bit too salty, I apologize, but it's an issue that is close to my heart, so I'm a little bit salty about it. And that is this week's very salty Snappy SEO News. Always, of course, make sure to give Barry a follow on his YouTube channel, we should link it on the show notes just for him. So you subscribe to his YouTube channel because Barry does a lot of good stuff on YouTube. Crystal Carter: And sometimes he wears his Wix hat. Mordy Oberstein: He sometimes wears a Wix hat. It looks like a Raiders hat actually. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've got one of them too. They're great. It's a great hat. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have one, but I'm a Steelers fan, so I don't need to look like I'm a Raiders fan, so that's fine by me. Crystal Carter: Raider Nation. Mordy Oberstein: Raider Nation. It's true. Well, it was true until they moved to Las Vegas. But anyway. Crystal Carter: Still, Raiders are just the Raiders all the time. It doesn't matter where they are. The Raider Nation will just follow them. It's all west side kind of area. Mordy Oberstein: Mainly because the Raider Nation didn't even realize Oakland, Las Vegas. Is there a deck? What happened? Crystal Carter: It's like Oakland, L.A, Las Vegas. They're all pretty much- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's right there. It's all good. Crystal Carter: LA and Las Vegas are like... Mordy Oberstein: It's one giant black hole. Crystal Carter: Of Raider Nation. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the Raider has the black hole. Yeah, whatever. I'm leaning into the whole Raider Nation thing. We know we should also lean into our follow of the week. You should lean into it, but you should follow her over on X and Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and it's Melissa Popp from the RicketyRoo crew @poppupwriter on X. That's at P-O-P-P-U-P-W-R-I-T-E-R. If you can't spell it out as you're listening to this, check out the show notes and just click the link. It's way easier. Melissa Popp on X. She's awesome. Crystal Carter: She's awesome, she's fantastic, and she's been working in the content space for a long time and works with a lot of great clients and is able to guide them through the process. And I think that that's really important. I think when you've got clients and you're with them for the long haul and you're planning to be with them for the long haul, I think if you can help them see the vision of you're starting off here, you're a diamond in the rough, but you're going to be... We can get you shining brightly or whatever. I think that that's something that's really important and I certainly- Mordy Oberstein: And bright like a diamond. Crystal Carter: Right. And I certainly get that if you're somebody who can see that potential, that works really well, and I absolutely get that from Melissa all the time. Mordy Oberstein: She's brilliant. Someone who can take a content strategy and show you like, "Hey, here's where you to start. Here's where you should end off." And understand all the phases of maturity in between the two. So definitely give her a follow. We love her. You will too. Yeah, do that. Do that. Crystal Carter: Do that. That's a good thing to do that. Mordy Oberstein: That's the mature thing to do. Crystal Carter: That's what adults do. Mordy Oberstein: That's what adult they hear like, "Oh, there's a great resource here? I will go get that free great resource and follow Melissa." Crystal Carter: Right. I will do that. I will not dither. I won't procrastinate. Mordy Oberstein: I won't dally. Crystal Carter: I won't dally. I will not lollygag either. People lollygag. It's a thing. Mordy Oberstein: That's a willy-nilly word. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's the kind of thing that someone might do if they were up to shenanigans, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I'm always up to shenanigans. I don't lollygag. Crystal Carter: That's not true. I always enjoy. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I'm mature. Crystal Carter: I'm mature. I'm an adult, really. Mordy Oberstein: I'm an adult. Crystal Carter: We're SEO adults. Definitely. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, that's already an oxymoron. 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 the new episode as we dive into when you should not follow best SEO practices. When not doing the best SEO practice is actually the best SEO practice. Scandalous. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources 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 Grace Frolich Paz Dekel Melissa Popp Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube How to Diagnose Your SEO Client's Search Maturity Brainlabs Positioning Your Brand For the Holiday Season: SERP’s Up EP 66 News: Google AI overviews launch in UK Google Explains Why It Shows Reddit & Forum Threads In Search So Often Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Grace Frolich Paz Dekel Melissa Popp Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube How to Diagnose Your SEO Client's Search Maturity Brainlabs Positioning Your Brand For the Holiday Season: SERP’s Up EP 66 News: Google AI overviews launch in UK Google Explains Why It Shows Reddit & Forum Threads In Search So Often Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. [foreign language 00:00:14] For joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, fantastic, the fantastical, that's not a compliment, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Fantastical, I'm not sure about that. Mordy Oberstein: Listen, all that means you're in a fantasy world. I mean, that could be a good thing- Crystal Carter: Like a mermaid. I would love to be a mermaid. That would be fun. I could be friends with dolphins or something. I love dolphins. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you can hang out with my kids. In his mind, he's the first person to walk on Mars, so. Crystal Carter: They don't have mermaids on Mars. Mordy Oberstein: They don't have people on Mars either. Crystal Carter: But they definitely don't have mermaids. There's not enough ocean. There's not enough ocean. Mordy Oberstein: They found water. They found water on Mars. Crystal Carter: It was frozen though. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe there are tiny frozen mermaids. Crystal Carter: Those would be different creatures. Those would be different fantastical creatures, right? They would be ice fairies or something. Mordy Oberstein: In your mind, not mine. In my mind, it all makes sense. Crystal Carter: We need a GenAI to sort this out. We're like, "What would an ice-" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the GenAI will sort this out and not hallucinate more. Crystal Carter: Put it into one of those image generators and show me a picture of an ice mermaid. Mordy Oberstein: At some point during this podcast I'll go. We'll do that. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search light each and every month, where you can subscribe to it one time and you'll get it each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also help your site mature with our native and built apps created together with the likes of Amazon, Google Tech Manager, Google Merchant Center, Bing, Microsoft, and so many more. Look for them in the Wix Dashboard and Wix Studio app markets. We're talking about maturity because, well, I don't have any, but also because we're talking about how site maturity factors into SEO, why knowing where the site is key to doing good SEO, why an SEO strategy without phases of site development is no SEO strategy at all, and how SEO the various status of site development looks a bit different. Brainlabs' own Grace Frolich stops by to share how to assess site maturity from an SEO point of view, and we hop across to Wix Universe, which is also on Mars in a Frozen with the mermaids with our own product manager, Paz Dekel, to discuss how product maturity factors into future development. Plus, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So let the wine flavors seep through the oak barrels of your mind as we let SEO mature in casks of cognition on episode 82 of the SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: I mean, that was like a sharp cave-aged introduction. Mordy Oberstein: I'm getting notes of hints of self-righteousness and slight narcissism. Crystal Carter: Right. I can see the tannins as well. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? Most wine, it's not aged in a barrel. It's aged in a metal vat. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I have a terrible thing. Anybody who's a wine aficionado and Marcus Tober, if you're listening to this, please close your ears now. But I have a general opinion that a bad wine is good by the third glass. Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory, by the way, that white wine doesn't matter, it all tastes the same. Crystal Carter: If it's really cold, you can't really taste very much. Although I do love a Chenin Blanc, and to be fair, I've had some pretty bad. I mean, I know just said that about bad wine Wine, but that was college. I know how to buy a good cheap wine. The price doesn't actually matter. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So okay, let's get started with this. One of the biggest factors that should guide your SEO focus is where this site is currently at, and that includes where the business is currently at. This obviously comes into focus with, I don't know, a brand new website where let's say dealing with some of the more technical issues are going to come into a much stronger focus, but it really deals with any site at any point and anywhere in its stage of evolution. But it even goes beyond that for me. For example, with a newer site or even an older site where you're trying to break across different content verticals or into new content areas or content universes, since we're talking about Mars, there's a unique focus on gaining digital momentum in those cases and the buildup and the awareness of the buildup and therefore the authority around the topic, you're going to need to get that momentum and that buildup brings up a whole slew of new and different kind of SEO focuses and tasks. In that case, by the way, they might not even seem like SEO tasks when you're doing that ramp up. A lot of it might be about getting some of the social media momentum, so you just get digital presence kind of thing. Anyway, all of this goes into what your SEO and content strategy for search should be. So that's why we're talking today about maturity, where the site is, where the ecosystem is, where the business is, so that you can better understand what you should be focusing on from an SEO point of view. Because again, it all depends on what matters now to the website. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that it's really important that people understand you don't have to do everything all at once and nobody expects you to do everything all at once. And your brand and your website- Mordy Oberstein: My mother did, and it was really a hard part of my childhood. Crystal Carter: Really hard. Then you can't do everything all at once. Your goals will be different in the first iteration of your website from what they will be later on. If you're somebody who's an established player, for instance, if you're Salesforce and you're writing content about CRMs, you are established, right? Not only that, but you have a corpus of content that you can reference in your own documentation. So if you write an article about, I don't know, lead generation or whatever it may be, you can reference yourself multiple times throughout your content. However, if you are a brand new challenger in the market necessarily, one of the problems you might have is that actually you're going to have to need to reference some of your competitors, which is like, ah, what do I do there? And that's going to have a different approach to once you're further down the line, because those have different challenges because let's say you are Salesforce and you've written about CRMs for 20 years or 15 years, then you have to worry about cannibalization, duplication, things like that. Mordy Oberstein: Staying there. Crystal Carter: Staying there, all of that sort of stuff. If you're brand new, then you're really just trying to get on the board, really. You're trying to get content out there. Mordy Oberstein: And win any way you can. Just get something going. Crystal Carter: Right. You've got to get on the board, you're trying to get points on the board and stuff. But really, I think in the early days, there's quantity and quality, but quantity is really important in the first element. Of course, you want to make sure you've got quality, of course. Mordy Oberstein: But you need to show you're alive. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And whereas I think that once people get further on, you're really refining for that quality as you get further down the line. Mordy Oberstein: I had somebody ask me the other day, "Send me the best keywords. Send me the best keywords." The best keyword on the planet? I don't know. We were talking about this, the term Google is probably the best keyword with the most search volume. You mean what's the best keyword for your site and business right now? I can send you a list. And a year from now, that should not be the same list. It should be a different list. And to that point, I think when you're developing an SEO strategy, I like to include phases of development. Phase one, we're going to focus on this. In a year from now, we're going to enter phase two. And in phase two, we're going to now focus on this. And ultimately, we're going to enter phase three. And in phase three it's going to look very, very different. Phase three is going to be more about maintenance because we'll have all the rankings, and now we're going to have to go fend off and fight off all the upstarters who were like us two years ago from doing what we already did. So when you're creating an SEO strategy, you should be thinking about where you want to ultimately go and the various stages of the site's development until you get there and creating a sub strategy for each one of those phases. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think we talked to someone recently who was talking about building up their brand and how they started, and they just went in full pelt straight away. And that's definitely one strategy to do that. And yeah, you need to think about how you're going to phase that. What happens after you get to that mountaintop? You don't want to plateau, you want to keep going. And I think we sometimes use the metaphor of training or going to the gym or whatever. If you have not gone to the gym, you've never particularly done any exercise or whatever, and you're starting from nothing, right? The way that you are going to get yourself into shape is going to be very different from somebody who runs a marathon every year. Mordy Oberstein: Right. I first start with fork to mouth. Crystal Carter: So if you're somebody who runs marathons regularly and what you want to do is you want to shave down your time, right? You want to go from being good to being great, that is a very different training path than from somebody who just wants to actually be able to complete the marathon in the first place, a very different training path. But you have to be able to get through that first training path first before you can get to the point where you're trying to shave down a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds and things like that. And you might need different tools. You might need different support. You might need- Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that, you're getting different people, right? To take your example, if you're hiring, let's say a team of trainers to help you, if your team consists only of the first phase, then when you get past that, well, you're just stuck, damn, with your SEO. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. And I think that with SEO, very often the case where you might need to rethink your tools, the tools that you use or your squad, you might think, "Okay. Well, now we've got a lot of content, what we need now is somebody to help us do a lot of distro, or we need somebody to help us get a lot of backlinks to this content, or we need somebody to help us now to organize this content better with the technical infrastructure because now we have so much content that now we need to move around. Maybe we need to think about our site search. Maybe we need to think about our navigation, maybe we need to put things into pillars or that sort of stuff." Whereas when you have nothing, if you have a blog of it, if you're starting with a blank slate, like I said, you want to get some points on the board in that- Mordy Oberstein: And totally from way of thinking and operating, completely different. It's not even close to being the same thing. And that's like if you're planning out these phases of site maturity and SEO development, you should also be thinking of the staff that if you're in an agency, you need to be thinking about the staff that you're going to need and the resources you're going to need in order to pull this off. That should factor into it. If phase two is going to include breaking into five new content verticals, you're going to need a heap of a lot of content. So if your team's not structured for that, now you have to think, "Okay, maybe we need to outsource that. How much is that going to cost? Can we afford that?" Because one phase should lead into the next phase. So if you're in phase one and it's going to lead to phase two, if phase two is not feasible from a resource point of view for you, that should affect how you go about phase one. And maybe you need to pivot and rethink phase one. But what you shouldn't do is not think about the maturity of the site as it goes through stages, plan out one thing and then realize, "Oh, we should never have done that because we can't actually fulfill the full spectrum of what this actually means." So it's way too labor-intensive in the end. Crystal Carter: Right. Also, I think it's important to remember that content maturity and website maturity can happen for a single post as well, right? It might be that you think to yourself, "Okay, we need to have a post on this topic." Right? And maybe you don't have loads of time to go full pelt onto this topic in the first instance, but you want to get something on there. Okay. So you get something on there and maybe you don't even expect it to rank particularly, you just need it to be indexed. And then you can come back to it and maybe you're like, "Okay, in two months we're going to come back to this. We're going to add some more facts and figures. We're going to add some more stats. We're going to add some more expert stuff." Cool, great. Then maybe you get more resources for different media types, and then you can go back and immature that. So again, because your website is a living document, and so you have time. You have time. So don't just think that it's a set it and forget it situation. If you have an article, if you have piece that you think could do with being more robust, go back, make it more robust and that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: You can even plan that out to begin with. I had a case recently where they're using a resource to funnel the audience to a different piece of content. It's a very long resource. It's a master resource. And they're trying to be a little bit aggressive in how they leverage that piece to push you to the other piece where they really want you to go to for whatever reason. And they're relatively not a new website, but they're new to creating content, and they don't have a lot of... I hate to use the word authority, but they don't have a lot of authority. They don't have a lot of oomph to their digital presence. So I'm like, "You know what you should do? This piece should go through multiple phases of maturity. I don't know how Google's going to see you here. You're really trying to break in. I wouldn't be very aggressive in trying to push the user to the next piece." Yet Google might say, "Hey, wait a second, it's an informational piece of content, but we see a commercial intent in here. Are you trying to fool us?" Let Google do its thing. Let's see if it ranks well. Let's see what we need to do to get a ranking. And once the piece is established, then go back and then be a little more aggressive and see what that does to the rankings. Probably not much at that point. So you could probably be a little bit more aggressive in how you're funneling users from that piece to the other pages that you want to actually ultimately get the user on. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that testing, that iteration is really important to how you progress with your maturity of your site. Because it might be that you look at a piece of content and you go, "This is as far as this is going to go." Mordy Oberstein: That's what my wife says about me. "That's as far as your maturity is going to go. I accept it." Crystal Carter: You might say that this is where the train stops. Mordy Oberstein: It's 12. That's about it. Crystal Carter: So I think that there's that and you might say, "This is as far as that's going to go. We'll take this this far and this will serve that purpose. And this next part will take us to the next piece as well." But yeah, the testing and the iteration is super important to understanding the maturity and seeing what things you need to do with that. Because sometimes it might be that you publish two pieces of content that are kind of similar, but maybe from a different perspective, for instance, and maybe Google likes one more than it likes the other and so- Mordy Oberstein: You could understand one one way, another one a different way. Crystal Carter: Right. So then you think, "Okay. Well, we'll consolidate these two. We'll take the bits that Google likes and we'll put that into the main one that it likes more." For instance. And that might be a way that you do that or it might be that... In terms of maturity, another thing that could happen is that you can get more technical expertise. So it might be that your site has more capabilities now. So let's say your site now has the ability to add in FAQ schema or has something like that. I had a client before. And people, don't at me about the FAQ schema. FAQ schema is still useful. Mordy Oberstein: It's not for real anymore. Crystal Carter: It's still a thing, people. It's not massive, but if it's useful, use FAQ. Anyway. So let's say you have more technical capabilities in your team, then that's great. That means that now you can use different formats and you can use different technical tools to make your content more mature. I also want to talk about clients, client maturity. So your relationship with your clients can also mature and can also- Mordy Oberstein: It should mature. Not they can, they should mature. Crystal Carter: They should, right? Right. So on Moz, they've got a great article, it's a couple of years old, but I think that it's still solid. So it's from Heather Physioc. I hope I've said that right. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Physioc. Crystal Carter: Physioc, yes. And she's got a great chart that talks about search capabilities, maturity model, and she talks about client culture and stuff. And she says that in that sense, you go from chaos to culture. So you start with spammy, outdated and harmful behavior. And I've definitely had clients who come to me and they're like, "Yeah, we had somebody help with the SEO." And you go through their backlink profile and it's just wow. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? I don't know if you had this experience, but I have a kid, and hopefully he's not listening to this podcast, but he's a little bit of a mess. He likes to make a mess. It's everything, right? He's in the kitchen, it's a mess. It's a mess. And it's his personality. It's good. We love him. But to get him to not make a mess, you can't be like, "Don't make a mess." You have to start very small. When you're done making eggs and the oil spilled up, take a paper towel, wipe down the counter over here just a little bit. And you start with that and you zoom in. It's the same thing with a client, okay? I had someone come over like, "Yeah, here's my website." It was built for PPC. It was a giant multi-page landing page built literally for PPC. All right, all right. Let's do this first. Let's scale back this. Let's work on this and then let's keep going. And you have to really take it step by step by step to get them because what happens, I think when you start doing that is they start seeing like, "Oh, wait a second. Maybe I'm a mess." And then once they've bought into the idea, "Maybe I'm actually a mess." Now you can start going. Crystal Carter: Right. So Heather talks about you go from chaos to absent, where basically they just don't have anything, to tactical. And what you're talking about is the tactical sort of thing. It's like, "Okay, so we are going to go through these processes. This is how you do this." That sort of thing. And once they figure out the process, once they get it, you can move on to strategic stuff of like, "okay, great, we've got the bases covered, now let's do some strategy. Let's be competitive, let's get involved." And then with practice, she's saying, you're expected. So before they do stuff, they know to come to you to talk to you about their SEO. So they're like, "We're thinking of doing this, what do you think?" "Call Heather. Call Mordy before we do this thing." They're getting into that. And then on this maturity model, I think this is great. She talks about culture. So here she says, "SEO is part of the client's marketing DNA, dedicated resources and processes, knowledgeable, committed to learning more." That sort of stuff. And that's where you're training them. They're the integrated, you're even in the C-suite where you're talking to the MDs and they understand that SEO and being valuable for users as articulated on search is really, really important. And once you've got that kind of relationship with a client, really you're flying. And a lot of the content, technical and other SEO stuff will fall into place once you've gotten to that sort of level. So yeah, there's tons of different layers to it, and I think that for anybody who's feeling like they're in the chaos stage, be patient. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll get there eventually. Crystal Carter: It will get there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, my kid now knows if I cook in the kitchen and I make a mess, they're not going to be happy. So I'll do it anyway. Well, at least he knows we're not going to be happy about it. Speaking about SEO maturity and site maturity and business maturity and how to deal with all this stuff, we talked to Grace Frolich, who is a contributor to Wix SEO and an SEO consultant over at BrainLabs. We asked her, how do you assess the maturity of your site and how does that play into what SEO activity you engage in? Take it away, Grace. Grace Frolich: When we talk about a website's maturity, what we really want to know is how developed it is and how it performs within its industry or its vertical. And we can determine that by auditing a site based on a set of criteria or a framework. An example that I like to use is a taste test. Let's say you own a pizza restaurant and you want to know how you stack up against other pies in your city. So you try a bunch of different pizzas and critique them based on a set of criteria. That could be things like a pizza's taste, the texture, the sauce to crust ratio, and so on. Those results will show you which pizzas are considered the best based on your criteria, and it shows you how your pizzas compare to other pizzas. Based on your scores, you can make improvements where your pizza didn't do as well. So similarly, think of a maturity audit like a rating system where each criteria is given a score from one to five, where five is considered the best in class. Things you would look at here are a site's technical compliance, how your content performs compared to competitors, how your link profile looks compared to competitors and so on. You would score each of these areas and the results from that gives you an idea of what is considered good or mature within your industry. From the results, you can make improvements in areas where you underperformed. Now this is great because it gives you a view of all different areas of your site so that you can then prioritize that based on the results that you see. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Grace. Don't forget to give Grace a follow or a connection, whatever you call it on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that what she was talking about, about the audit relative to your competitors is really, really important. The industry is young, right? There's sometimes where... For instance, with the AI market, for instance, in the last year or so, there've been a big explosion of people working in that space, but there were people who were there further along. And so there's going to be different levels of content maturity around that topic because the topic for the mainstream anyway is fairly new. And so I think that it's really important to think about your maturity relative to other folks. If the market is very young, then that will change the expectations for users in terms of content, in terms of the way the site is, et cetera. And I think it's like when new social media platforms show up, it can be the barrier for entry is a little bit lower. So for instance, I think when Instagram first showed up, you could pretty much just post pictures and that was what you could do. And so people who were able to do that did well. But now there's reels and there's videos, and there's pictures, and there's this, and there's stories, and there's all that sort of stuff. So if you did the same thing that you were doing when the platform was brand new, you wouldn't be as impactful as somebody who's able to do that now. So understanding relative to the rest of the industry is super important as part of your maturity audit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I mean, that's part of a good SEO, understanding where you are relative to what's already ranking, obviously just to do copy and skyscraper or whatever. It's not what I'm saying. Anyway. I'm a big believer that one thing in life should lead to the next thing in life. And actually we, on this podcast, have talked about that in terms of brand marketing, where you are as a brand and how you position yourself as a brand, the next thing you do should be based on where you're at now and should all logically flow together. I don't remember what episode it was, Crystal, but I'll try to remember and we'll link to it in the show notes. Now, I see you racking your brain. You don't remember either. I don't remember any of the episode numbers, by the way. We talked about keyword research. I have no idea what episode number that was. Crystal Carter: I don't know what number it was, I just- Mordy Oberstein: Four. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Four is a good number because you expect to say three, but it's not, you say four. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Crystal Carter: Right. Four can be confusing for aforementioned reasons of things. You see? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, four is confusing. Also, if you're playing golf, it's a whole different meaning to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a whole minefield. It's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All right. So five. Episode five. Anyway. I think that's also true for product as well. And to help us see the truth about product development, we're going across the Wix verse with our very own product manager for SEO, Paz Dekel. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Paz, welcome to the podcast. Paz Dekel: Hello. Thank you. Happy to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do? What do like? What's your favorite color? What's your favorite number actually? What's your favorite number? Is it four? Paz Dekel: My favorite number is seven. I don't know why. Mordy Oberstein: Seven? Paz Dekel: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: People like three, seven. It's a whole Plato thing with numbers. Paz Dekel: Really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Seven is one of those big numbers. Paz Dekel: Also, lucky number seven. Mordy Oberstein: Right. See? I always say lucky number 13, but whatever. Okay. Crystal Carter: They don't put 13s on elevators. That's a whole thing. There's no floor there. Mordy Oberstein: This goes to show you how stupid humanity is, but okay. Crystal Carter: Sorry? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, "What floor am I on?" "Oh, you're on the 14th floor, but it's really the 13th floor. We don't want to tell you the 13th floor because you might have some bad luck." Paz Dekel: So maybe I'll turn my lucky number to foursome. No, no. Hi, I'm Paz. I've been working at Wix for over five years. I've worked in different companies, different products. I'll try everything. Really like Wix, really like its product. And I'm here at SEO now. Mordy Oberstein: And now you're here on the podcast. Now we're going to talk about how you look at product maturity and how that factors in. So when you're thinking about taking the product to the next level, how much or in what way does where the product currently is factor in? How does the product maturity all play a role in your roadmaps? Paz Dekel: Yeah. So I think it has a several way to look at product maturity and how I'm going to decide what I'm going to do next. So the first thing we talk before is actually different user types that I have, right? I have new users that just came to Wix and built the first website. They need a very, very easy setup to understand what they're doing. And we have partners and agencies that are super... I forgot the word. Crystal Carter: Experienced. Paz Dekel: Experienced, exactly and they know what to do and have thousands of sites. So I need to understand in my product, this is a new product or this is a mature product. Who is my user that I want to solve this problem right now? If I want to focus on one of them or to find a wide solution. So I need to look at my user type. Also, if I think about users, I need to understand that in the beginning of the product, when I have a brand new product, I don't have any information about my user. I don't have data, I don't have how to... He used the product. In the past, I was a product of Wix Hotel, which we did a deep integration with a third-party app called Hotel Runner and this was a new app that we wanted to replace the old Wix Hotels. And then we didn't have any user that tried it. We didn't have any data. So we did a usability interviews to understand if the product that we build are clear enough for them and they understand what they're going to do. Once we have the product release and we have users, we can know what are the pain points right now, which opportunities we have, where do we need to improve? So it's really important as a product, first of all, to look at your users to understand who they are and what they need. And it depends if the product is at the early stage of it or already very mature. Crystal Carter: I think the way you talk about users is so important because the journey for the user will totally affect how you discuss it. And I think that it is completely different. If you've invented something completely new and nobody knows what a Furby is or something. I'm dating myself by saying that. Mordy Oberstein: Furby. Holy crap. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. So I'm dating myself. But if nobody knows what it is, then you have got a very different thing. Or if you think about the iPhone, for instance, when the iPhone first came out, they had to explain, oh, it does this and it does that, and it does this and it does that. And now they just have just people having a good day. On their advertising it's just people taking pictures, jumping about or whatever. Everybody knows that it does this and it does that and it does this and it does that, but they're just trying to make you engage in the brand equity and engage in the brand vibes really at that stage. So where you are now, how often do you go through and study how users are currently using your product? Paz Dekel: Constantly. This is part of my work to do user interviews and to look at data all the time and to see how they behave and how they use the product, how much they return to a specific... For example, SEO, it's ongoing work. You can do the SEO and you need always improve it. So you want the user to come back and do additional things. So the user is always in my first priority. We also have the support that has tickets and has feature requests that gives us... And also here, it's divided into different user types because we have feature requests from big partners. They want to do bulk action on the many, many website. And we have the small business they want just to get found on Google very easily. So the user will always be in my first priority. Mordy Oberstein: Question for you. So when I used to work at Rank Ranger, it was a niche SEO software and I think they got bought up by Similarweb. So one of the things that I used to focusing on when going to do work, I used to have a heavy input on the product, was product identity. Because you're in a market where there's so many SEO tools, they all do very similar things. And how do you make the product's identity stand out and differentiate itself? I find that similar to brand identity, do you have a certain brand identity? And then when you're building that brand identity, or in this case a product identity, you build one thing. And then when you're thinking about building the next thing, what you built previously leads you to where the next step is. SEO is just one part of a much, much, much, much, much wider product, do you really feel like there's a product identity for the sub tools within Wix? Paz Dekel: Definitely. I think SEO is a great example for that. If you look a few years ago, people won't come to Wix due to their SEO reputation. We had- Mordy Oberstein: That's why I have a job actually. Paz Dekel: We had a very bad reputation. So the first thing that we did was to align our product with a competitor in the industry to have the wizard, to have the panel, to have the settings. And once we did all of that and we really improved our SEO, I think now we can say that we are leaders in the industry right now. Mordy Oberstein: We could say this. By the way, great job. Paz Dekel: And now we can have advanced product that no one else had because we did all the basics and the infrastructure that we needed. And now we can have advanced integration with big SEO partners like Semrush or SE Ranking or site inspection. Mordy Oberstein: And Google is a- Paz Dekel: And Google. Mordy Oberstein: Throw some names out there at you. Overall. Paz Dekel: No, but I think it's also part of the maturity of the product. In the beginning, we didn't have a good enough product. We need to build all the basics just to be aligned with the industry. And now we can dream big and think about what we want to do with the product. And it's also changes the whole strategy. The long-term strategy in the beginning was to do all the basics so we can have the same thing as our competitors. Now we can, oh my God, okay, what we can do next to be amazing. Crystal Carter: And I think also in that space, once you start getting buy-in from both your users and also your wider team, that people are engaging with this product, people are doing well with this product, does that give you more opportunities to think bigger? Paz Dekel: Definitely. Once they see that they're using the product, for example, the Wizard is amazing. All of the user types, use the Wizard because we help them. And then we can think of that and think bigger. Okay, we can use that. They have the basic now. They're got to a position where they connected to Google. Now I can help them to do the advanced SEO for them. So we needed them to use the basic in order to do advanced features. Mordy Oberstein: And it's really cool because when the products develops, it opens up so many new doors, in my opinion. So for example, in our case, if you go back to when we first started this whole SEO journey and it's 2019, if you were to go to Semrush and say, "Hey, Semrush, let's partner up." Semrush would be like, "What? What are you talking about?" But as the product matures, right? And as the product develops and as you're able to mature the product, you're also able to open up all sorts of new doors that you didn't even think about could even be there. Semrush being inside of Wix is a testimony to the fact that Wix did some really cool stuff with SEO where Semrush is like, "You know what? We should be there too." Paz Dekel: Yeah, definitely. And I think another thing is look at the whole industry, for example, AI, and you see the whole world goes to AI and then you say, "Okay, how can I use AI in our product?" This is also changes the decision that I'm making and the strategy of the product because there's something so big outside that you want, "Okay, let's use it. Super cool. Where can I help the user with that?" Mordy Oberstein: Right. But if you didn't have the basis of having the SEO tools there, you couldn't add on a layer of AI and add on a layer of AI to what? The nothing. Paz Dekel: Exactly. You need to have the basics for the first thing in order to get better. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Speaking of throwback podcast, we have another podcast about doing SEO basics. Mordy Oberstein: What number? Crystal Carter: I don't remember what number it is. But I think that if you do the basics well, I think people forget that... I quote her all the time, but my mom always said common sense ain't that common. And if you're able to do the basics really well, then it gives people confidence that you're able to do complicated things well as well. So if you think about a brand like the Gap or whatever, they specialize in pretty simple stuff. They're like, "We do T-shirts, we do jeans, we do regulars." And people are like, "Great, and you do those really, really well." So when they say, "Oh, we want to do something else." People go, "Oh, okay." You focus on quality and you can focus on doing something that people really appreciate and really leaning into that. And I think that can view a lot of... Yeah, like Morty was saying, opens a lot of doors. Paz Dekel: Definitely. I think another thing that it's important to understand in the product maturity it's on the developer side. Because once you get bigger, you have technical debts suddenly, and you need to think in scalability mode. Okay, so I need to build something that I can build on that. And the beginning of the product, you don't think of, I need to create it some way that it would be easy to get a lot of users. So sometimes you need to go back and improve performance, enhance the infrastructure that it is. So it's also something that you need to think of as a product that sometimes when you are already mature, you need to go back to the code and change it a little bit so it'll fit the product needs for the future. Mordy Oberstein: So if people wanted to pick your brain and ask you all about product development questions, where could they find you? TikTok? Paz Dekel: I have LinkedIn- Mordy Oberstein: LinkedIn. Paz Dekel: And Twitter. Yeah, they can definitely write me there. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so we'll link to those profiles in the show notes. Paz, thank you so much for coming on. Paz Dekel: Thank you so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: See you around the proverbial office. Mordy Oberstein: You just like product sometimes. Development runs on from one thing to the next thing. Sometimes when you're writing something like a news headline around SEO, the words just run on a little bit. A little bit too much sometimes. You ever see that out there? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Sentences as well. Mordy Oberstein: Sentences, yeah. But in specifically titles to SEO news articles. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain charm to that as a tactic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and also lack of grammatical maturity. Crystal Carter: I didn't say that. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, Barry told people to unfollow me on Twitter. He put out a tweet, "If you want to make me happy, subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you want to make me unhappy, follow Mordy." Crystal Carter: That's not exactly telling people to unfollow you. Mordy Oberstein: Why? Crystal Carter: I mean, technically speaking. Mordy Oberstein: So good. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's in the neighborhood. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. It was like, I appreciate controlling. It was really good. I also appreciate really good SEO news and no one does the SEO news as good as Barry. So here's the Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Could somebody please pass the salt? Because I'm feeling salty. Second thought, you don't want to pass the salt because I'm already feeling salty. We just add more salt to my overall saltiness. Either way, from Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, Google AI overviews launch in the UK. So until now, the only folks who have been able to access the SGE, the Search Generative Experience, are the folks living in the US. Now, Google is testing what Danny says is a small slice of SGE to a small slice of logged in users in the UK. At the same time, there have been reports that Google might start charging for using the SGE. Which is interesting because I'm not exactly sure that SGE is at the point where people would actually pay for it. I'm highly skeptical of that. And this comes from a report that was earlier in the week about SGE going perhaps premium. Very skeptical about this. To me, it feels like Google has the SGE, it's not really sure how to monetize it. How do they get the ad revenue from the SGE that they're currently getting without the SGE? Oh no, perhaps we can't. Then maybe we should just charge for it. It feels to me like they're still a little bit all over the place with how to implement this and keep up with the AI wars or the AI race and at the same time, actually earn revenue, which is the point of what Google's trying to do. I don't know. Just my very salty take, which brings me to my next salty take from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine around here. But Google explains why it shows Reddit and forum threads in search so often, and this comes as friend of the show, friend of SEO, defender of SEO, Lily Ray, pointed out that Google is showing discussions and forums, basically Quora and mostly Reddit results at the very, very top of the SERP for very, very much YMYL queries. Your money, your life kind of queries such as weight loss. And instead of getting results from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Health or Johns Hopkins or whoever it is, you're getting information from some random schmo on Reddit is the contention. And it's a bit of an issue. And I will say that I am a little bit not thrilled with this as somebody who has family members who have eating disorder or have had eating disorders in the past. This is something that's a little bit close to my heart. So if I'm feeling a bit salty about this, that's why I just want you to know that. I don't see how this is really beneficial for the user. I know Danny Sullivan got into a back and forth with Lily Ray about why Google does show this and why they don't show, what they're trying to do. And Danny did say that he would report this onto the wider team that maybe this shouldn't actually be what should be showing up here. I dove into this a bit and some of the results, the first results I got was actually from Quora, and the post within that forum thread was basically one of these unsponsored organic listings where the person is peddling their own product. In this case, weight loss pills. That is certainly not what somebody who is susceptible to getting wrong or misusing information found online, maybe a teenager with an eating disorder should be seeing. And I know there's a back and forth with Danny and Lily about what users want and what users are looking for and blah blah, blah. Again, this is a very salty Mordy because I'm a little bit upset about this. I don't care what users want, how's that? What I do care about is what's responsible for that person who may misuse the information and then harm themselves, which is why we have a YMYL category among the Google results, your money, your life category, because there is a obligation to ensure that folks are getting information that will not harm them. And I don't think Google's doing a good job of presenting information that will not harm the most vulnerable of the population here. So I would like to see a change. I usually do put my thumb on the scale on this podcast about these things, but again, it's an issue that's a little bit close to my heart and I'm feeling a little bit salty and I do think that it should change. And I'm not saying that Google is to blame. Oh, no. It's hard to get these things right. There's a balance here. It takes time for Google to refine what it made the change to add more forum content. It is a process and yes, we should be patient with it. And Google has been welcoming to the feedback and that is a very important thing. And a very good thing is something that I actually praised Danny Sullivan on Twitter the other week for about taking the feedback and bringing it to the team. So that is a very good and healthy thing, and I'm not saying that anyone is to blame in particular. Again, I do understand that it is a process of refining these things and getting it just right and it is way harder to get it right than I think we give Google credit for. But I really do think that in this case, the forum content should not rank at all. It's certainly not above the CDC or Harvard Health or the Mayo Clinic and so forth. Again, I'm being a little bit too salty, I apologize, but it's an issue that is close to my heart, so I'm a little bit salty about it. And that is this week's very salty Snappy SEO News. Always, of course, make sure to give Barry a follow on his YouTube channel, we should link it on the show notes just for him. So you subscribe to his YouTube channel because Barry does a lot of good stuff on YouTube. Crystal Carter: And sometimes he wears his Wix hat. Mordy Oberstein: He sometimes wears a Wix hat. It looks like a Raiders hat actually. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've got one of them too. They're great. It's a great hat. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have one, but I'm a Steelers fan, so I don't need to look like I'm a Raiders fan, so that's fine by me. Crystal Carter: Raider Nation. Mordy Oberstein: Raider Nation. It's true. Well, it was true until they moved to Las Vegas. But anyway. Crystal Carter: Still, Raiders are just the Raiders all the time. It doesn't matter where they are. The Raider Nation will just follow them. It's all west side kind of area. Mordy Oberstein: Mainly because the Raider Nation didn't even realize Oakland, Las Vegas. Is there a deck? What happened? Crystal Carter: It's like Oakland, L.A, Las Vegas. They're all pretty much- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's right there. It's all good. Crystal Carter: LA and Las Vegas are like... Mordy Oberstein: It's one giant black hole. Crystal Carter: Of Raider Nation. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the Raider has the black hole. Yeah, whatever. I'm leaning into the whole Raider Nation thing. We know we should also lean into our follow of the week. You should lean into it, but you should follow her over on X and Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and it's Melissa Popp from the RicketyRoo crew @poppupwriter on X. That's at P-O-P-P-U-P-W-R-I-T-E-R. If you can't spell it out as you're listening to this, check out the show notes and just click the link. It's way easier. Melissa Popp on X. She's awesome. Crystal Carter: She's awesome, she's fantastic, and she's been working in the content space for a long time and works with a lot of great clients and is able to guide them through the process. And I think that that's really important. I think when you've got clients and you're with them for the long haul and you're planning to be with them for the long haul, I think if you can help them see the vision of you're starting off here, you're a diamond in the rough, but you're going to be... We can get you shining brightly or whatever. I think that that's something that's really important and I certainly- Mordy Oberstein: And bright like a diamond. Crystal Carter: Right. And I certainly get that if you're somebody who can see that potential, that works really well, and I absolutely get that from Melissa all the time. Mordy Oberstein: She's brilliant. Someone who can take a content strategy and show you like, "Hey, here's where you to start. Here's where you should end off." And understand all the phases of maturity in between the two. So definitely give her a follow. We love her. You will too. Yeah, do that. Do that. Crystal Carter: Do that. That's a good thing to do that. Mordy Oberstein: That's the mature thing to do. Crystal Carter: That's what adults do. Mordy Oberstein: That's what adult they hear like, "Oh, there's a great resource here? I will go get that free great resource and follow Melissa." Crystal Carter: Right. I will do that. I will not dither. I won't procrastinate. Mordy Oberstein: I won't dally. Crystal Carter: I won't dally. I will not lollygag either. People lollygag. It's a thing. Mordy Oberstein: That's a willy-nilly word. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's the kind of thing that someone might do if they were up to shenanigans, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I'm always up to shenanigans. I don't lollygag. Crystal Carter: That's not true. I always enjoy. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I'm mature. Crystal Carter: I'm mature. I'm an adult, really. Mordy Oberstein: I'm an adult. Crystal Carter: We're SEO adults. Definitely. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, that's already an oxymoron. 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 the new episode as we dive into when you should not follow best SEO practices. When not doing the best SEO practice is actually the best SEO practice. Scandalous. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources 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

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