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Joshua is the founder of ClickSlice, a results driven SEO agency in London. He has almost a decade of experience as an SEO consultant and has provided SEO training for the British government. Joshua George Founder of ClickSlice Joshua is the founder of ClickSlice , a results driven SEO agency in London. He has almost a decade of experience as an SEO consultant and has provided SEO training for the British government. Articles & Resources 8 Oct 2024 Technical SEO for eCommerce: A step-by-step guide to getting your online store crawled and indexed 1 Feb 2024 On-page SEO for eCommerce: Increase your online store’s organic traffic and sales 15 Jun 2023 How to find and fix keyword cannibalization for your eCommerce website Resources Joshua George SEO agency project proposal template Create proposals for potential clients efficiently with this adaptable template. 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

Anastasia Kotsiubynska is the Head of SEO at SE Ranking. She is passionate about online marketing, analytics, and the technical aspects of SEO. Thanks to her extensive background in content marketing, technical SEO, and link building, she confidently handles both on-page and off-page strategies. Anastasia Kotsiubynska Head of SEO at SE Ranking Anastasia Kotsiubynska is the Head of SEO at SE Ranking. She is passionate about online marketing, analytics, and the technical aspects of SEO. Thanks to her extensive background in content marketing, technical SEO, and link building, she confidently handles both on-page and off-page strategies. She also explores how innovative technologies and AI are transforming SEO and applies this knowledge in her work. Beyond her professional life, Anastasia is an avid traveler and a language enthusiast. Articles & Resources 28 Jul 2025 How to conduct a competitor backlink analysis 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

Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, an award-winning 50-person digital agency, focused on web development and website optimization for B2B lead generation websites. Andy Crestodina Co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media , an award-winning 50-person digital agency, focused on web development and website optimization for B2B lead generation websites. Over the past 25 years, Andy has provided digital marketing advice to 1000+ businesses. Andy has written 600+ articles on content strategy, SEO, GA4, AI and visitor psychology. These articles reach more than three million marketers each year. Articles & Resources 9 Sept 2025 Audience research vs. keyword research: which wins for lead generation? Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Your resource is ready Use this blog Optimization Collaborative Google Doc for a smoother SEO process. We’ve emailed you a link so it’s easy to access. Make a copy Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back UX for SEO checklist Consult this checklist to ensure you’re considering all aspects of user experience and creating people-first content. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this checklist to: Create people-first content Increase conversion rates Attract more qualified traffic Improve user experience Ola King SEO and UX Consultant LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram A multi-disciplinary problem-solver, Ola King uses design-thinking to make digital spaces more accessible. He's applied his SEO and UX expertise on Moz’s product team as a consultant and by creating the Notion SEO Growth Kit. He’s also contributed to Moz's Whiteboard Friday series, hosted 2 MozCon conferences, and presented at several SEO conferences. More about this topic Read this post on getting more from your SEO by improving UX and conversions for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Looking to grow and build upon what you've already accomplished in your SEO career? Feeling like your SEO career is stagnant? Looking for a new edge? Hungry to try something new and different? Wix's Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter share their experience when looking to revitalize your SEO career and journey. Annie-Mai Hodge and Crystal Waddell join the show so you can get started with fresh strategies for career growth. Find out what can lead to new and unexpected career opportunities in SEO and digital marketing on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Revitalize & Refresh Your SEO Career! Looking to grow and build upon what you've already accomplished in your SEO career? Feeling like your SEO career is stagnant? Looking for a new edge? Hungry to try something new and different? Wix's Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter share their experience when looking to revitalize your SEO career and journey. Annie-Mai Hodge and Crystal Waddell join the show so you can get started with fresh strategies for career growth. Find out what can lead to new and unexpected career opportunities in SEO and digital marketing on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 108 | October 30,2024 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 34:59 This week’s guests Annie-Mai Hodge Annie-Mai Hodige is the founder of Girl Power Marketing, a community for women, girls and allies to create their own path, supercharge their career and build confidence. Crystal Waddell Crystal Waddell is the host of the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast, where she empowers business owners with actionable, easy-to-understand strategies for optimizing their online presence. With a passion for simplifying SEO, Crystal helps entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of digital marketing, offering valuable insights drawn from her extensive experience working with local businesses and handmade brands. When she's not podcasting, Crystal provides SEO strategy and support through her business, CW Media, Inc., helping clients build strong digital foundations to grow their brands. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha, Mahalo, Welcome to SERPs Up!. 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. I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fascinating, I don't think I've ever called you fascinating before, but you are fascinating, the head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello Internet people. I hope everybody's feeling good. Mordy Oberstein: And fascinating. Crystal Carter: And fascinating. I'm fascinated by how everyone's feeling. Mordy Oberstein: It's like Spock, "Fascinating." Crystal Carter: Anytime we can mention Star Trek, I'm here for it. Mordy Oberstein: Same. Crystal Carter: All day, every day. Mordy Oberstein: All day, every day we're trekking. We're trekking through SEO. As the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also refresh and revitalize your content with our content management system and content marketing tools for you in Wix Studio, as today we're talking about how to refresh and revitalize your SEO career. Looking to grow and build upon what you've already accomplished? Should you go further down the SEO wormhole, broaden that to new areas of digital marketing, or dive into new and emerging tech. We'll explore the possibilities as Crystal Waddell shares her processes for keeping things fresh. Plus Annie-Mai Hodge of Girl Power Marketing talks how you can breathe new life into your social media efforts. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So pop a Mentos, Tic-Tac, Altoid, or pull an old Ace Ventura and spray some Binaca as episode number 107 of the SERPs Up podcast freshens up the SEO air. That's an old pull. Ace Ventura is super old now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it is. Mordy Oberstein: Like I've completely ... But for me, it still feels like it came out yesterday. Crystal Carter: Right. I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: Laces out, Dan. Laces out. Crystal Carter: “I likee!” Doesn't he say that? Mordy Oberstein: Right, right, right. He's like, "If I'm not back in five minutes, wait a little longer." "Do not go in there." There's so many lines, and I haven't seen the movie in 25 years. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't watched it in a little while. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's had a lasting impression on my life. Crystal Carter: You know what? That tracks. Mordy Oberstein: It's all on-brand. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But there we go. I think that that's somebody who he had refreshed his career and became a bit of a painter. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. He really did refresh his career. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of. Crystal Carter: Speaking of, one of the reasons why it's worth thinking about, and one of the reasons why we brought it up is that I think that SEO has so much to offer in terms of career trajectory and career viability because there are so many different facets of all of the different elements. So if I think about some of the SEOs that I know and their career journey, I'm thinking of Dana DiTomaso who now runs Kick Point, and she is an analytic person, but she started off doing SEO as her core discipline, but she steadily moved over to analytics, and that's something that's become really, really, really, really valuable to her. There's other people who start up in SEO and then they go into podcasting, for instance, There's some people that started off in SEO and then they move into project management. There's some people that start off in SEO and they move into growth. There's some people who start off in technical SEO and end up doing more content or who start off with more content and end up doing more technical. Dale Bertrand, who's somebody who was involved with our webinars recently, we've got a great webinar with him that I reference a lot talking about AI content, and he started off as a developer and moved into SEO similarly, and I think Joe Hall and also Areej AbuAli also did this as well. So I think that there's a lot of scope, and one of the things that drives, in my experience, that drives the growth and change of your SEO career as far as I can tell, is emerging technologies and also emerging opportunities and probably also your clients. So if you're looking at your career, you're looking at things you can do, when you see new emerging technologies, that's an opportunity for you to become the go-to person for that, whether that's when you're in an agency or whether that's within the agency team, for instance, or whether that's you have a client offering or something. So when we think about GA4, for instance, when GA4 came in- Mordy Oberstein: I was just say that. I was just going to say GA4. Crystal Carter: Right? Lots of people didn't know how to use GA4. If you are the kind of person- Mordy Oberstein: People still don't know. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: People still don't know how to use GA4. Crystal Carter: Right. If you're the kind of person who's happy to just get stuck in with it, then you can help guide people through the mire that is this emerging tech with AI. We've seen a lot of people who have really risen to the challenge of that. Aleyda Solis started sharing lots of stuff about AI. Mordy Oberstein: Maria Haynes totally dived from SEO into AI. Crystal Carter: And another person is Brittany Mueller. Brittany Mueller started off at Moz, and I remember watching the Whiteboard Friday when she was like, "I'm interested in machine learning. I'm interested in AI. I'm still learning this at the moment, and here's what I know." And I remember watching that Whiteboard Friday way back in the day, and now she's fully invested in all of that sort of AI machine learning, all of those sorts of elements. So new tech will drive you personally. I was sort of doing general SEO and I got way into technical SEO as I had a client who needed something that was tech driven. I literally today just finished coding up some stuff for somebody because that was something that we needed for a project. And sometimes I like to think of it in The Matrix, they have that scene where he says, "Oh, can you drive a helicopter?" And he goes, "I can now." And I think that those skills, every time you add a new skill to your skill set that helps you grow and helps make you more bankable as either a consultant or as a member of your agency team, or as an in-house person, or whatever you're doing, but think about the skills that will differentiate you from other folks and allow you to cut through the fray. If you're looking at a lot of skills that are well established, don't get me wrong, it's really, really important to know how to do keyword research and to know how to do well-established things that will sort out your foundations. But if you're going into new territory, then there's going to be less competition, which makes you more indispensable, and it also gives you the ability to learn how to teach yourself, which means that you can literally do anything. Mordy Oberstein: I know Kung Fu. Crystal Carter: See, that's the movie that's burned into my brain. Mordy Oberstein: That's also not a very new movie, by the way. Crystal Carter: No, it's not. Yeah. I remember watching the DVD with the director's cut and director's information on it- Mordy Oberstein: my kids are not asking me about this, "What's this Matrix thing?" As if it's like this old movie that came out like an old Clint Eastwood movie, which is that, for me, is old. I'm just making myself feel old. I'm totally with you on this. I feel like SEO is almost like a gateway drug in a lot of ways. My best advice is follow where things speak to you naturally and go down that rabbit hole. So for me, I came from the content side of things, and when you're coming from SEO, from the content side of things, you naturally overlap with marketing stuff, wider marketing stuff, because that content is usually not just an SEO play, it's usually a broader play or other plays that come with that piece of content, whether it's via repurposing it, whether it comes promoting it in a social media. It very easily becomes a facilitator to getting into a wider marketing strategy. And because of my various roles, that kind of developed very naturally for me, whereas now I kind of went down the brand marketing world because as my career developed, it kind of followed and it spoke to me. It's something that I really enjoy, and now I feel like have a unique perspective on it because you don't have a lot of people doing brand who also came from the performance side of marketing. So that's an interesting little intersect. So it speaks to me, it's differentiated, it's unique, it builds on my previous skillsets, it builds on my personality, yada, yada, yada. And it's not something a lot of people are doing. And there's a lot of different pathways like that that come out from SEO more like, I don't know, have your ear to the ground kind of thing and just be open to it as it comes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that particularly if you're thinking of how can I pivot to make myself more marketable, like you were saying, not a lot of people are doing that. That's a really important thing to think about. Think about skills gaps. So if you're in a team at an agency or if you're in an in-house team, or if you're in a team on a project, then think about where is the gap and how can I close that gap with my skills with the things that I have? And that is something that can propel you forward. I think Helen Pollitt shares a skills gap matrix. There's other tools as well that you can do to assess your skills and your skills gaps. It's probably also something you could do with a ChatGPT sort of thing to help you what are some skills that a digital marketer should have, et cetera, et cetera. And then you could go through and you can say, "Oh no, I have this." "I have this." "I have this." "Oh, I don't have that." And that's worth looking at as well. And I think that in terms of you were saying the follow the things that interest you. Absolutely, absolutely. Particularly because you're going to need to be a little bit self-taught, or you're at least going to need to guide your own learning journey. Even if you go and do a course, you're going to need to find that course and you're going to need to complete the course yourself. So if it's something that you're not interested in, if it's not something that you can go down a wormhole quite happily, fall down a rabbit hole or whatever quite happily, then it's not going to work for you. So you really, really have to find something that speaks to you and that connects with the core of who you are. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And what's cool is that you can either go broader or you can go more specifically. SEO is really kind of like, it's one of those things that's in the intersection of so many things that you can really decide where you want to go with it. I'll just say, because I've had this, don't be afraid to pivot. I think there's a fear like, "Oh, this is what I've always done." This is kind of my personal brand. Personal brands can change. Your career paths can change. It's all okay. It is scary, I get it. But if you feel like there's something that really speaks to you, don't let that fear hold you back. Crystal Carter: No, no, absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. And I think that don't worry if you don't see other people doing it. That's fine too. Mordy Oberstein: Be ahead of the curve. That's what you want anyway. You want to look at, okay, what's happening out there in the ecosystem? What's happening out there across the way? What's happening out there with other disciplines? What's happening out there with SEO? And try to get ahead of all that. Crystal Carter: And also, don't be afraid to challenge existing norms. I started speaking about ... In 2022, I spoke at MozCon about visual search. One of the reasons why I wanted to speak about that was because Google was talking about it at Google.io loads, all over the place, but I wasn't seeing very much writing about it. And the writing that I was seeing didn't seem to align with what Google's documentation was saying about what you needed to do to optimize for visual search. And so I started speaking about this and I got loads of people, I still get people asking me about this now because there weren't a lot of people talking about that. And then more people started talking about it afterwards. Even though if you're in a situation where you don't hear people talking about something, it doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't talk about it. Like you said, don't be afraid to stick your head out above the parapet. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. I think back, I don't know, back in the older days of SEO, like growth marketing was first becoming a thing. And now I look at a guy like Kevin Indig. In the beginning it was weird. Like, "Oh, what's growth marketing? What's growth marketing and SEO?" But now growth marketing and SEO, yeah, I really see the overlap. But that people who are now big in growth marketing, at least within the SEO space, when they first started talking about it was very new and it was very, I don't want to say weird, but it was out of the box terminology, but now it's not. Crystal Carter: No. And I think that the web is such an ever-evolving beast that it absolutely speaks to people that want to have a dynamic career. And I think the other thing is that just because you shift around in your discipline, just because you sort of focus on more growth marketing or maybe you're focusing more on analytics, it doesn't change the core of what you do, for instance. So I like to solve problems. I like to solve puzzles. I generally try to be fairly solutions led, and that's whether I'm doing technical SEO, whether I'm doing on-page SEO, whether I'm doing schema, Whatever I'm doing, that's what I apply it to. That's the angle I'm coming at it from. And I think that you will be present in whatever you do, and you don't forget any of those skills if you pivot. And in fact, a lot of times it'll come with you as well and will very often come in handy. So I think if you are thinking that you're feeling bored or you're thinking that you're feeling a little bit stuck, look around at some potential things and have a go and try something new that is distinct and that might position you more competitively in the market. Mordy Oberstein: Dip that toe into the pond. And if you're looking about how do I go about doing this? And what's the process for changing your approach? Well, here's Crystal Waddell on her process for changing her approach to SEO and marketing and keeping things fresh. Crystal Waddell: Hey guys, Crystal Waddell here from the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast. Thank you Crystal and Mordy for letting me weigh in on this conversation. I feel like I have a unique perspective because I like to consider my SEO practice a business-first approach, where I'm more concerned about business outcomes than I am the optimization practices themselves. Also, being willing to pivot and change is necessary because things are moving so quickly. The faster you can inject that shift into your business and into your workflows, the easier it is to just keep things moving forward. I would say the big things that help me change my approach to SEO and marketing are data-driven adjustments. Mordy was actually the one that pointed out to me that the Google Search Console Insights come out every month at the same time. I was like, "Oh, that makes sense." So after that, I started doing an SEO day where I would specifically reflect on the Google Search Console data. I teach a small group and we compare what is going on in each of our search consoles. So it's really neat to be in a small group that has a bunch of different eyes on the same type of data. The other thing I like to do, I like to interview people for the Simple and Smart SEO Show, but I started my podcast just so that I could learn how to do SEO better. My podcast has really given me the opportunity to talk to experts like the wonderful Crystal Carter. So it's been awesome to talk to people who've been doing SEO longer than I have, and that can also shed light on what advice that even though it's really loud, may not be the best advice to listen to. I've taken it very seriously to find a few people that I trust within the industry to test some of my theories in my small group. I will create gamified elements to see if these are SEO tasks that the average Joe can take on and be successful. That's my litmus test, because if I do something that's too complicated for the average business owner to implement, then I have to find a different way. I have to find a better way. Really trying to make SEO fun and engaging is the challenge for me. The other thing I've realized about SEO is it really is so dependent on the client. If you've got a local lawn service, that's going to be completely different than a content creator that makes their money selling online memberships. So you really have to think about all of the opportunities that are available with marketing and with optimization strategies and create a plan that makes the most sense. The last thing that I've really found that I do well is leveraging different platforms. Searchers jump from platform to platform. And so as a brand, I think it's so important that when a person is searching for you on a platform like Pinterest, and then they jump over to Instagram or TikTok, they find the same you wherever they go. Those strategies help my customers be agile in their marketing while still maintaining this sense of cohesiveness, right? At the end of the day, what's most important are your business's core values. What you stand for, what you do, how you do it, and how your customer feels about it. Be the same you wherever people can find you. Thanks again guys. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. Make sure you check out the Simple and Smart SEO Podcast. She's has, forgot what I was going to say, she has an amazing radio voice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's great. She's great. She's really fantastic. She's also super nice. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure you follow Crystal, other Crystal, Crystal Waddell, and this Crystal, on social media. Has so many gems out there. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And she shared some great insights. One of the things she was talking about was platforms. Oh my days. I think SEO sometimes, if you're somebody who's thinking about your SEO career and you're feeling stuck in a rut, guess what? Your search optimization skills can be applied to other platforms, not just Google, also YouTube, also Pinterest, Instagram, whatever, what have you, like TikTok, TikTok SEO is a huge thing as well. So that's a great one as well. The other one she was talking about, the other thing she was saying was about how she started our podcast to learn from folks. That's really great as well. So learning from people, following people who are in a space that maybe you want to go into that maybe you're not an expert on just yet, but you're interested in, that's a great way to see if a new area of your career might be viable. And if a new topic or subject might be a viable skill set for you, that's really great as well. And I think also her general approach of actively learning. She was talking about testing and being in a group as well. That's a really, really great thing. So I think that if you are feeling stuck and you feel like you need to rejuvenate your career or you need to rejuvenate your skill set, then thinking about how you can learn and what's new skills you can learn is so, so valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Even if you don't want to start a podcast, it's a whole rigmarole of time and investment and resources and whatever. Find a group. Find a group of people you can talk to. You wanted to talk about your career, what you're thinking. I'll tell you personally, shout out to Andrew Optimisey, Nick Leroy, Kevin Indig. These are people. When I have ideas like what I want to do, I talk to them and I get feedback. And you can start to get not just feedback, but sometimes you'll start feeling more confident. Like, "You know what? Maybe I should do this now." But having that group, having that tight-knit group of people you can talk to and brainstorm with is a huge part of being able to effectively move your career or revitalize your career or pivot to something a little bit different. Find those people, they're out there, them probably already. Crystal Carter: Yeah, think trust network, group chat so that you can say, "Does this make sense? Is this okay? Is this a good idea?" And also they'll recommend you for things as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Crystal Carter: For things that you don't even think that you should be doing. They'll be like, "I saw this job and it's perfect for you." "I saw this opportunity and it's perfect for you." And you're like, "Really?" And they go, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely." Mordy Oberstein: Referral. This is the way. Crystal Carter: This is the way. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of things that need to be refreshed outside of careers or bad breath, the only thing that really, actually, you know what the truth is, the only thing that needs to be refreshed more than bad breath right now is social media, which is basically worse than halitosis right now. As this shifting sands of social fall out from under you, don't fret as we'll hear how to freshen up your social presence from Girl Power Marketing's own Annie-Mai Hodge as we move into the great beyond. So in case you haven't noticed, social is not the same as it once was. Social is different. Social has gotten very different. And I think the way we need to approach social might need a little bit of a refresh, and it might be time to get some new perspective. At least for me, I'm speaking to myself new perspective on how to think about and approach social media. So that's why we're here. We're going to hear from Annie-Mai Hodge on her approach to refreshing her social media presence. Annie-Mai Hodge: So there's three main ways that I refresh my social media activities and content to give them a bit more life. And the first one is a content graveyard. And I'll be honest, I never heard about this until last year when I was really struggling with content ideation, and I wish I could remember who told me, but if you are somehow listening to this, thank you. And basically what it is that any ideas that don't make it to the light of day, you pop into your content graveyard because if you don't, you will naturally forget about them. And just because they shouldn't see the light of day now doesn't mean that they won't work in three months or six months time, or perhaps even next week. But I go one step further and I also add content that flopped and I'm using flopped with quote-marks there or didn't perform as well as I'd hoped so that I can rework it at a later day or perhaps when it's a bit more topical in a few months time. And I also add content that performed really, really well. And I'll add some notes about why I think it worked particularly well and how I can potentially rework it in a few months time to really maximize getting the most out of that content. Because just because it's worked once really well doesn't mean that you can't keep getting good use out of it and reaching new people that haven't seen that content before. And that is one of the best and main ways that I refresh my content. But also, there's two other simple things that you can do. You can simply ask the audience, because sometimes I think it's really easy to guess what they want and we can get caught up in actually what we want to post or what we think is best, but that's not necessarily the right way to do it, and it's not necessarily the most accurate way to do it. It can be a little bit biased, but if you don't particularly have an engaged audience yet, I'd really recommend using a tool called Also Asked, which gathers people also asked data so you can see the questions that are being asked by people on Google. And I made that sound really complicated, but you won't regret it. Also Asked, I absolutely butchered that explanation, but it's an excellent tool. You get free searches per day and it will just be a great tool to have in your arsenal. And the final thing that I do is I have a really hard long look at the content that I've done over the last month to see what's working and what isn't. And it kind of goes back to the content graveyard there too, because if there's something that hasn't worked well at all, I'll pop it in there, and if something has worked, then I will analyze why it's worked as I do with the content that goes in my content graveyard, and I'll see how I can do that again with the content that I want to post the next month. But ultimately, I think as long as you are analyzing your content and using the data that's coming from social media and your audience, that is the best way to inform updating your social media content strategy. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Annie-Mai. Make sure you give Annie-Mai a big follow on social media. We'll link to our profiles in the show notes. By the way, content graveyard. I use that. I actually learned that from the Wix content writers because they use that when they write anything, basically. If you go, insider tip, should I share this? Hey, why not? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. When we work in a piece of content with a marketing team, the writing team rather at the bottom of the dock, there's always a graveyard of all the different ideas that they had, and that's where I learned that from, and I use it all the time. It's a great idea to keep your old ideas around because you want to save them for later. Graveyard is kind of a bad name for it, by the way. You don't want to actually kill them. You just want to have them there to see the progression of things and maybe to save them for a different time. Crystal Carter: Maybe it's the dugout. Mordy Oberstein: The dugout. Yeah. It's on the bench. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's on the bench. And you can bring them back in maybe or maybe not. Mordy Oberstein: Or no, or if they stink, you leave them on the bench and that's fine. There's always those players. Crystal Carter: But sometimes you're like, "Oh, this is your time to shine, man. It's you. It's you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what recently got revitalized and refreshed. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Seoroundtable.com. And I miss the old version. I'll tell that old version was nostalgia sometimes. Not all refreshes are for the best, by the way. Well, well-designed and good, but from a nostalgia point of view, I miss the old seoroundtable.com's design. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Okay. I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not trying to bash the berry. I'm just trying to say I like the old one also. Crystal Carter: I'll tell you, the one that I'm hanging on to is SEM Rush. Mordy Oberstein: SEM Rush. I always called it SemRush. Crystal Carter: I always called it SEM Rush, because SEM is a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: SemRush is not. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm all about saving syllables. I'm like Kevin from the office, why speak more words when less words do? Why have more syllables than fewer will do? Okay, time now snappy news, go. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. A little bit of an SEO dramatic saga for you. First from Barry Schwartz on October 23rd, Google hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty over site reputation abuse. So Fortune Recommends is a subfolder of fortune.com, and it actually says on that page, "Fortune Recommends is editorially independent. We may earn affiliate revenue." We may, we will. We do. "Earn affiliate from links in this content." It's your, I don't know, typical internet schlock, the 10 best CD rates for October, 2024, which are probably the 10 best CD rates for October, 2023 with a new title for 2024. Maybe not, maybe I'm just being a little bit spicy, but probably the same thing, whatever. Anyway, I digress. I digress. So Glenn Gabe notice that there was a huge drop in his subfolder's visibility, which seems to align with something that we, I think report on this very podcast before about Forbes' own affiliate content getting what seemed like an actual manual action a few weeks ago. Is this the same thing? This looks like it got hit on October, around October 11th per Glenn Gabe. What makes this more dramatic is on social media, Glenn Gabe the next day, I believe, started seeing all other sorts of sites, and he wrote up a post for his own website, G-Squared Interactive, which we'll link to in the show notes here, A Nightmare on Affiliate Street. Love that, by the way. How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its site reputation abuse spam policy. So Glenn saw this for all sorts of sites. For example, AP News, which is so odd to me, they have this has a subfolder for personal finance called AP Byline, where again, you have the same kind of things, like literally, I'm looking at an article, Why Are Groceries So Expensive? Are Medical Expenses Tax-Deductible? Shocked At The Pump: 11 Ways To Save Money On Gas, with number one being buy less gas. I'm making that up. That's not actually true. I mean, it is actually true. You would save money on gas players are spending less money on gas, but you need gas. Anyway, Glenn went through a whole list of sites like this and the sub folders that are getting picked off by Google, and he actually asked Google, "Hey, is this the algorithmic version of the site reputation abuse update?" And Google said, "No, it's not." It's not them testing the site reputation abuse algorithm. Google then also, Danny then also told Glenn, "Our systems aim to understand of a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites." So what it seems like, and this, I talked with Glenn back channel about this, and I completely agree, seems to be like they're targeting subfolders or subdomains that they can clearly see, Google can clearly see, are not actually aligned with what the website actually does. I have a very spicy take on Google's previous statements about this on It's New, I don't know which episode. Hold on, hold on. I'll find it. If you right now, actually, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. We can edit this part out or we can keep it in here. It is from the, wait for it, it is from three weeks ago. That doesn't help you very much. I'll link to it in the show notes. I'll link to the episode in the show notes where I have very spicy take on my thoughts on this and Google's previous statements about this. What it basically looks like is that if you're blatantly creating a subfolder or a subdomain, that has nothing to do with your website, but it's all about affiliate content. It looks like Google seems to have gotten more aggressive about identifying that and demoting that content and their rankings. I have been on a soapbox. I'll end on this point, because I'm not being so snappy. I have been on a soapbox about this point. I literally spoke about this at SMX West in 2019, 2020. I don't remember something like that. Stay in your lane. From an SEO point of view, now more than ever, you can see what Google's doing. Staying in your lane from a brand point of view. If you're doing these kind of things, if you're, again, I always go back, we had a whole episode about this. You're Rolling Stone and you're talking about best fridges of 2024 and not best folk albums of 1964, you have a brand problem, and I understand why sites are doing this for the revenue. I'm not critiquing necessarily. I understand at least why they're doing it. I do think it's not good for the internet. So that's my personal take, which is stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. And this week, that's this week's snappy news, right in your lane. That's what we do here. You know what? And I think Barry should write like that. Write the news story. Barry, you're too wordy. Take out all of the gap words. Just, "John Mueller say, ranking this." Just go full on, go for it, Barry. As condensed as possible. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I don't want any filler words anymore. Crystal Carter: Who needs them? Who needs them? Mordy Oberstein: No one needs them. I understand. I understand good. All this, no words needed. I'm going off the rails on this. Oh, boy. Okay. If you're talking about revitalizing your career and you want to find someone on social media who has revitalized their career in multiple ways in shapes and forms, we recommend that you follow Petra Kis-Herczegh out there on social media, on X and on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah. She has written a recent article about this very topic, and she thinks very critically about all of this and has gone on a journey. I think she started as a dev herself and then moved into technical SEO, and I think she's been moving into other parts of her career as well, so it's worth thinking about this. It's worth thinking about this, and she's a great follow for that. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure you follow her out there on social media. Crystal Carter: Are you feeling revitalized now? Mordy Oberstein: You stole my mojo. You stole my thought. I was going to say that. We should leave this whole thing in. Crystal Carter: Are you feeling refreshed? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Super refreshed and revitalized. It's like Head and Shoulders for my soul. Crystal Carter: You can be a brand new you. Mordy Oberstein: Do you remember those, what was it called? I'm sure it's still a product. It's like the Head and Shoulders, but it's way more medicinal. It started with a D. Oh, man. Crystal Carter: I don't remember. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Denorex, I think it was called. Something like that. They would have commercials where they would compare the person using the Head and Shoulders and their product. This product tingles. Head and Shoulders doesn't. As if the tingling effect showed you that it was getting the dandruff, but it always made me feel like my head, I used to use it because my grandfather had it, and when I would go to my grandfather's house, that's the shampoo. I'm getting way too into the rabbit hole of this, but it did make my head feel revitalized. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's the connection. I don't know if it helped with dandruff or not, but it tingled. It made my head feel revitalized. Crystal Carter: And electric. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this episode made me feel like that. Crystal Carter: Well, if you need to- Mordy Oberstein: TMI? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think I need to go talk to somebody about this. Anyway, thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into merging your on and offline marketing activities. Yes, there's an offline world. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio 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 Crystal Waddell Annie-Mai Hodge Petra Kis-Herczegh Glenn Gabe Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Girl Power Marketing Crystal Waddell Consulting & Podcast News: It's New on Forbes Penalty Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty Over Site Reputation Abuse? A Nightmare on Affiliate Street – How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its ‘Site reputation abuse’ spam policy Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Crystal Waddell Annie-Mai Hodge Petra Kis-Herczegh Glenn Gabe Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Girl Power Marketing Crystal Waddell Consulting & Podcast News: It's New on Forbes Penalty Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty Over Site Reputation Abuse? A Nightmare on Affiliate Street – How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its ‘Site reputation abuse’ spam policy Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha, Mahalo, Welcome to SERPs Up!. 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. I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fascinating, I don't think I've ever called you fascinating before, but you are fascinating, the head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello Internet people. I hope everybody's feeling good. Mordy Oberstein: And fascinating. Crystal Carter: And fascinating. I'm fascinated by how everyone's feeling. Mordy Oberstein: It's like Spock, "Fascinating." Crystal Carter: Anytime we can mention Star Trek, I'm here for it. Mordy Oberstein: Same. Crystal Carter: All day, every day. Mordy Oberstein: All day, every day we're trekking. We're trekking through SEO. As the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also refresh and revitalize your content with our content management system and content marketing tools for you in Wix Studio, as today we're talking about how to refresh and revitalize your SEO career. Looking to grow and build upon what you've already accomplished? Should you go further down the SEO wormhole, broaden that to new areas of digital marketing, or dive into new and emerging tech. We'll explore the possibilities as Crystal Waddell shares her processes for keeping things fresh. Plus Annie-Mai Hodge of Girl Power Marketing talks how you can breathe new life into your social media efforts. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So pop a Mentos, Tic-Tac, Altoid, or pull an old Ace Ventura and spray some Binaca as episode number 107 of the SERPs Up podcast freshens up the SEO air. That's an old pull. Ace Ventura is super old now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it is. Mordy Oberstein: Like I've completely ... But for me, it still feels like it came out yesterday. Crystal Carter: Right. I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: Laces out, Dan. Laces out. Crystal Carter: “I likee!” Doesn't he say that? Mordy Oberstein: Right, right, right. He's like, "If I'm not back in five minutes, wait a little longer." "Do not go in there." There's so many lines, and I haven't seen the movie in 25 years. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't watched it in a little while. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's had a lasting impression on my life. Crystal Carter: You know what? That tracks. Mordy Oberstein: It's all on-brand. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But there we go. I think that that's somebody who he had refreshed his career and became a bit of a painter. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. He really did refresh his career. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of. Crystal Carter: Speaking of, one of the reasons why it's worth thinking about, and one of the reasons why we brought it up is that I think that SEO has so much to offer in terms of career trajectory and career viability because there are so many different facets of all of the different elements. So if I think about some of the SEOs that I know and their career journey, I'm thinking of Dana DiTomaso who now runs Kick Point, and she is an analytic person, but she started off doing SEO as her core discipline, but she steadily moved over to analytics, and that's something that's become really, really, really, really valuable to her. There's other people who start up in SEO and then they go into podcasting, for instance, There's some people that started off in SEO and then they move into project management. There's some people that start off in SEO and they move into growth. There's some people who start off in technical SEO and end up doing more content or who start off with more content and end up doing more technical. Dale Bertrand, who's somebody who was involved with our webinars recently, we've got a great webinar with him that I reference a lot talking about AI content, and he started off as a developer and moved into SEO similarly, and I think Joe Hall and also Areej AbuAli also did this as well. So I think that there's a lot of scope, and one of the things that drives, in my experience, that drives the growth and change of your SEO career as far as I can tell, is emerging technologies and also emerging opportunities and probably also your clients. So if you're looking at your career, you're looking at things you can do, when you see new emerging technologies, that's an opportunity for you to become the go-to person for that, whether that's when you're in an agency or whether that's within the agency team, for instance, or whether that's you have a client offering or something. So when we think about GA4, for instance, when GA4 came in- Mordy Oberstein: I was just say that. I was just going to say GA4. Crystal Carter: Right? Lots of people didn't know how to use GA4. If you are the kind of person- Mordy Oberstein: People still don't know. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: People still don't know how to use GA4. Crystal Carter: Right. If you're the kind of person who's happy to just get stuck in with it, then you can help guide people through the mire that is this emerging tech with AI. We've seen a lot of people who have really risen to the challenge of that. Aleyda Solis started sharing lots of stuff about AI. Mordy Oberstein: Maria Haynes totally dived from SEO into AI. Crystal Carter: And another person is Brittany Mueller. Brittany Mueller started off at Moz, and I remember watching the Whiteboard Friday when she was like, "I'm interested in machine learning. I'm interested in AI. I'm still learning this at the moment, and here's what I know." And I remember watching that Whiteboard Friday way back in the day, and now she's fully invested in all of that sort of AI machine learning, all of those sorts of elements. So new tech will drive you personally. I was sort of doing general SEO and I got way into technical SEO as I had a client who needed something that was tech driven. I literally today just finished coding up some stuff for somebody because that was something that we needed for a project. And sometimes I like to think of it in The Matrix, they have that scene where he says, "Oh, can you drive a helicopter?" And he goes, "I can now." And I think that those skills, every time you add a new skill to your skill set that helps you grow and helps make you more bankable as either a consultant or as a member of your agency team, or as an in-house person, or whatever you're doing, but think about the skills that will differentiate you from other folks and allow you to cut through the fray. If you're looking at a lot of skills that are well established, don't get me wrong, it's really, really important to know how to do keyword research and to know how to do well-established things that will sort out your foundations. But if you're going into new territory, then there's going to be less competition, which makes you more indispensable, and it also gives you the ability to learn how to teach yourself, which means that you can literally do anything. Mordy Oberstein: I know Kung Fu. Crystal Carter: See, that's the movie that's burned into my brain. Mordy Oberstein: That's also not a very new movie, by the way. Crystal Carter: No, it's not. Yeah. I remember watching the DVD with the director's cut and director's information on it- Mordy Oberstein: my kids are not asking me about this, "What's this Matrix thing?" As if it's like this old movie that came out like an old Clint Eastwood movie, which is that, for me, is old. I'm just making myself feel old. I'm totally with you on this. I feel like SEO is almost like a gateway drug in a lot of ways. My best advice is follow where things speak to you naturally and go down that rabbit hole. So for me, I came from the content side of things, and when you're coming from SEO, from the content side of things, you naturally overlap with marketing stuff, wider marketing stuff, because that content is usually not just an SEO play, it's usually a broader play or other plays that come with that piece of content, whether it's via repurposing it, whether it comes promoting it in a social media. It very easily becomes a facilitator to getting into a wider marketing strategy. And because of my various roles, that kind of developed very naturally for me, whereas now I kind of went down the brand marketing world because as my career developed, it kind of followed and it spoke to me. It's something that I really enjoy, and now I feel like have a unique perspective on it because you don't have a lot of people doing brand who also came from the performance side of marketing. So that's an interesting little intersect. So it speaks to me, it's differentiated, it's unique, it builds on my previous skillsets, it builds on my personality, yada, yada, yada. And it's not something a lot of people are doing. And there's a lot of different pathways like that that come out from SEO more like, I don't know, have your ear to the ground kind of thing and just be open to it as it comes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that particularly if you're thinking of how can I pivot to make myself more marketable, like you were saying, not a lot of people are doing that. That's a really important thing to think about. Think about skills gaps. So if you're in a team at an agency or if you're in an in-house team, or if you're in a team on a project, then think about where is the gap and how can I close that gap with my skills with the things that I have? And that is something that can propel you forward. I think Helen Pollitt shares a skills gap matrix. There's other tools as well that you can do to assess your skills and your skills gaps. It's probably also something you could do with a ChatGPT sort of thing to help you what are some skills that a digital marketer should have, et cetera, et cetera. And then you could go through and you can say, "Oh no, I have this." "I have this." "I have this." "Oh, I don't have that." And that's worth looking at as well. And I think that in terms of you were saying the follow the things that interest you. Absolutely, absolutely. Particularly because you're going to need to be a little bit self-taught, or you're at least going to need to guide your own learning journey. Even if you go and do a course, you're going to need to find that course and you're going to need to complete the course yourself. So if it's something that you're not interested in, if it's not something that you can go down a wormhole quite happily, fall down a rabbit hole or whatever quite happily, then it's not going to work for you. So you really, really have to find something that speaks to you and that connects with the core of who you are. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And what's cool is that you can either go broader or you can go more specifically. SEO is really kind of like, it's one of those things that's in the intersection of so many things that you can really decide where you want to go with it. I'll just say, because I've had this, don't be afraid to pivot. I think there's a fear like, "Oh, this is what I've always done." This is kind of my personal brand. Personal brands can change. Your career paths can change. It's all okay. It is scary, I get it. But if you feel like there's something that really speaks to you, don't let that fear hold you back. Crystal Carter: No, no, absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. And I think that don't worry if you don't see other people doing it. That's fine too. Mordy Oberstein: Be ahead of the curve. That's what you want anyway. You want to look at, okay, what's happening out there in the ecosystem? What's happening out there across the way? What's happening out there with other disciplines? What's happening out there with SEO? And try to get ahead of all that. Crystal Carter: And also, don't be afraid to challenge existing norms. I started speaking about ... In 2022, I spoke at MozCon about visual search. One of the reasons why I wanted to speak about that was because Google was talking about it at Google.io loads, all over the place, but I wasn't seeing very much writing about it. And the writing that I was seeing didn't seem to align with what Google's documentation was saying about what you needed to do to optimize for visual search. And so I started speaking about this and I got loads of people, I still get people asking me about this now because there weren't a lot of people talking about that. And then more people started talking about it afterwards. Even though if you're in a situation where you don't hear people talking about something, it doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't talk about it. Like you said, don't be afraid to stick your head out above the parapet. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. I think back, I don't know, back in the older days of SEO, like growth marketing was first becoming a thing. And now I look at a guy like Kevin Indig. In the beginning it was weird. Like, "Oh, what's growth marketing? What's growth marketing and SEO?" But now growth marketing and SEO, yeah, I really see the overlap. But that people who are now big in growth marketing, at least within the SEO space, when they first started talking about it was very new and it was very, I don't want to say weird, but it was out of the box terminology, but now it's not. Crystal Carter: No. And I think that the web is such an ever-evolving beast that it absolutely speaks to people that want to have a dynamic career. And I think the other thing is that just because you shift around in your discipline, just because you sort of focus on more growth marketing or maybe you're focusing more on analytics, it doesn't change the core of what you do, for instance. So I like to solve problems. I like to solve puzzles. I generally try to be fairly solutions led, and that's whether I'm doing technical SEO, whether I'm doing on-page SEO, whether I'm doing schema, Whatever I'm doing, that's what I apply it to. That's the angle I'm coming at it from. And I think that you will be present in whatever you do, and you don't forget any of those skills if you pivot. And in fact, a lot of times it'll come with you as well and will very often come in handy. So I think if you are thinking that you're feeling bored or you're thinking that you're feeling a little bit stuck, look around at some potential things and have a go and try something new that is distinct and that might position you more competitively in the market. Mordy Oberstein: Dip that toe into the pond. And if you're looking about how do I go about doing this? And what's the process for changing your approach? Well, here's Crystal Waddell on her process for changing her approach to SEO and marketing and keeping things fresh. Crystal Waddell: Hey guys, Crystal Waddell here from the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast. Thank you Crystal and Mordy for letting me weigh in on this conversation. I feel like I have a unique perspective because I like to consider my SEO practice a business-first approach, where I'm more concerned about business outcomes than I am the optimization practices themselves. Also, being willing to pivot and change is necessary because things are moving so quickly. The faster you can inject that shift into your business and into your workflows, the easier it is to just keep things moving forward. I would say the big things that help me change my approach to SEO and marketing are data-driven adjustments. Mordy was actually the one that pointed out to me that the Google Search Console Insights come out every month at the same time. I was like, "Oh, that makes sense." So after that, I started doing an SEO day where I would specifically reflect on the Google Search Console data. I teach a small group and we compare what is going on in each of our search consoles. So it's really neat to be in a small group that has a bunch of different eyes on the same type of data. The other thing I like to do, I like to interview people for the Simple and Smart SEO Show, but I started my podcast just so that I could learn how to do SEO better. My podcast has really given me the opportunity to talk to experts like the wonderful Crystal Carter. So it's been awesome to talk to people who've been doing SEO longer than I have, and that can also shed light on what advice that even though it's really loud, may not be the best advice to listen to. I've taken it very seriously to find a few people that I trust within the industry to test some of my theories in my small group. I will create gamified elements to see if these are SEO tasks that the average Joe can take on and be successful. That's my litmus test, because if I do something that's too complicated for the average business owner to implement, then I have to find a different way. I have to find a better way. Really trying to make SEO fun and engaging is the challenge for me. The other thing I've realized about SEO is it really is so dependent on the client. If you've got a local lawn service, that's going to be completely different than a content creator that makes their money selling online memberships. So you really have to think about all of the opportunities that are available with marketing and with optimization strategies and create a plan that makes the most sense. The last thing that I've really found that I do well is leveraging different platforms. Searchers jump from platform to platform. And so as a brand, I think it's so important that when a person is searching for you on a platform like Pinterest, and then they jump over to Instagram or TikTok, they find the same you wherever they go. Those strategies help my customers be agile in their marketing while still maintaining this sense of cohesiveness, right? At the end of the day, what's most important are your business's core values. What you stand for, what you do, how you do it, and how your customer feels about it. Be the same you wherever people can find you. Thanks again guys. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. Make sure you check out the Simple and Smart SEO Podcast. She's has, forgot what I was going to say, she has an amazing radio voice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's great. She's great. She's really fantastic. She's also super nice. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure you follow Crystal, other Crystal, Crystal Waddell, and this Crystal, on social media. Has so many gems out there. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And she shared some great insights. One of the things she was talking about was platforms. Oh my days. I think SEO sometimes, if you're somebody who's thinking about your SEO career and you're feeling stuck in a rut, guess what? Your search optimization skills can be applied to other platforms, not just Google, also YouTube, also Pinterest, Instagram, whatever, what have you, like TikTok, TikTok SEO is a huge thing as well. So that's a great one as well. The other one she was talking about, the other thing she was saying was about how she started our podcast to learn from folks. That's really great as well. So learning from people, following people who are in a space that maybe you want to go into that maybe you're not an expert on just yet, but you're interested in, that's a great way to see if a new area of your career might be viable. And if a new topic or subject might be a viable skill set for you, that's really great as well. And I think also her general approach of actively learning. She was talking about testing and being in a group as well. That's a really, really great thing. So I think that if you are feeling stuck and you feel like you need to rejuvenate your career or you need to rejuvenate your skill set, then thinking about how you can learn and what's new skills you can learn is so, so valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Even if you don't want to start a podcast, it's a whole rigmarole of time and investment and resources and whatever. Find a group. Find a group of people you can talk to. You wanted to talk about your career, what you're thinking. I'll tell you personally, shout out to Andrew Optimisey, Nick Leroy, Kevin Indig. These are people. When I have ideas like what I want to do, I talk to them and I get feedback. And you can start to get not just feedback, but sometimes you'll start feeling more confident. Like, "You know what? Maybe I should do this now." But having that group, having that tight-knit group of people you can talk to and brainstorm with is a huge part of being able to effectively move your career or revitalize your career or pivot to something a little bit different. Find those people, they're out there, them probably already. Crystal Carter: Yeah, think trust network, group chat so that you can say, "Does this make sense? Is this okay? Is this a good idea?" And also they'll recommend you for things as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Crystal Carter: For things that you don't even think that you should be doing. They'll be like, "I saw this job and it's perfect for you." "I saw this opportunity and it's perfect for you." And you're like, "Really?" And they go, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely." Mordy Oberstein: Referral. This is the way. Crystal Carter: This is the way. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of things that need to be refreshed outside of careers or bad breath, the only thing that really, actually, you know what the truth is, the only thing that needs to be refreshed more than bad breath right now is social media, which is basically worse than halitosis right now. As this shifting sands of social fall out from under you, don't fret as we'll hear how to freshen up your social presence from Girl Power Marketing's own Annie-Mai Hodge as we move into the great beyond. So in case you haven't noticed, social is not the same as it once was. Social is different. Social has gotten very different. And I think the way we need to approach social might need a little bit of a refresh, and it might be time to get some new perspective. At least for me, I'm speaking to myself new perspective on how to think about and approach social media. So that's why we're here. We're going to hear from Annie-Mai Hodge on her approach to refreshing her social media presence. Annie-Mai Hodge: So there's three main ways that I refresh my social media activities and content to give them a bit more life. And the first one is a content graveyard. And I'll be honest, I never heard about this until last year when I was really struggling with content ideation, and I wish I could remember who told me, but if you are somehow listening to this, thank you. And basically what it is that any ideas that don't make it to the light of day, you pop into your content graveyard because if you don't, you will naturally forget about them. And just because they shouldn't see the light of day now doesn't mean that they won't work in three months or six months time, or perhaps even next week. But I go one step further and I also add content that flopped and I'm using flopped with quote-marks there or didn't perform as well as I'd hoped so that I can rework it at a later day or perhaps when it's a bit more topical in a few months time. And I also add content that performed really, really well. And I'll add some notes about why I think it worked particularly well and how I can potentially rework it in a few months time to really maximize getting the most out of that content. Because just because it's worked once really well doesn't mean that you can't keep getting good use out of it and reaching new people that haven't seen that content before. And that is one of the best and main ways that I refresh my content. But also, there's two other simple things that you can do. You can simply ask the audience, because sometimes I think it's really easy to guess what they want and we can get caught up in actually what we want to post or what we think is best, but that's not necessarily the right way to do it, and it's not necessarily the most accurate way to do it. It can be a little bit biased, but if you don't particularly have an engaged audience yet, I'd really recommend using a tool called Also Asked, which gathers people also asked data so you can see the questions that are being asked by people on Google. And I made that sound really complicated, but you won't regret it. Also Asked, I absolutely butchered that explanation, but it's an excellent tool. You get free searches per day and it will just be a great tool to have in your arsenal. And the final thing that I do is I have a really hard long look at the content that I've done over the last month to see what's working and what isn't. And it kind of goes back to the content graveyard there too, because if there's something that hasn't worked well at all, I'll pop it in there, and if something has worked, then I will analyze why it's worked as I do with the content that goes in my content graveyard, and I'll see how I can do that again with the content that I want to post the next month. But ultimately, I think as long as you are analyzing your content and using the data that's coming from social media and your audience, that is the best way to inform updating your social media content strategy. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Annie-Mai. Make sure you give Annie-Mai a big follow on social media. We'll link to our profiles in the show notes. By the way, content graveyard. I use that. I actually learned that from the Wix content writers because they use that when they write anything, basically. If you go, insider tip, should I share this? Hey, why not? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. When we work in a piece of content with a marketing team, the writing team rather at the bottom of the dock, there's always a graveyard of all the different ideas that they had, and that's where I learned that from, and I use it all the time. It's a great idea to keep your old ideas around because you want to save them for later. Graveyard is kind of a bad name for it, by the way. You don't want to actually kill them. You just want to have them there to see the progression of things and maybe to save them for a different time. Crystal Carter: Maybe it's the dugout. Mordy Oberstein: The dugout. Yeah. It's on the bench. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's on the bench. And you can bring them back in maybe or maybe not. Mordy Oberstein: Or no, or if they stink, you leave them on the bench and that's fine. There's always those players. Crystal Carter: But sometimes you're like, "Oh, this is your time to shine, man. It's you. It's you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what recently got revitalized and refreshed. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Seoroundtable.com. And I miss the old version. I'll tell that old version was nostalgia sometimes. Not all refreshes are for the best, by the way. Well, well-designed and good, but from a nostalgia point of view, I miss the old seoroundtable.com's design. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Okay. I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not trying to bash the berry. I'm just trying to say I like the old one also. Crystal Carter: I'll tell you, the one that I'm hanging on to is SEM Rush. Mordy Oberstein: SEM Rush. I always called it SemRush. Crystal Carter: I always called it SEM Rush, because SEM is a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: SemRush is not. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm all about saving syllables. I'm like Kevin from the office, why speak more words when less words do? Why have more syllables than fewer will do? Okay, time now snappy news, go. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. A little bit of an SEO dramatic saga for you. First from Barry Schwartz on October 23rd, Google hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty over site reputation abuse. So Fortune Recommends is a subfolder of fortune.com, and it actually says on that page, "Fortune Recommends is editorially independent. We may earn affiliate revenue." We may, we will. We do. "Earn affiliate from links in this content." It's your, I don't know, typical internet schlock, the 10 best CD rates for October, 2024, which are probably the 10 best CD rates for October, 2023 with a new title for 2024. Maybe not, maybe I'm just being a little bit spicy, but probably the same thing, whatever. Anyway, I digress. I digress. So Glenn Gabe notice that there was a huge drop in his subfolder's visibility, which seems to align with something that we, I think report on this very podcast before about Forbes' own affiliate content getting what seemed like an actual manual action a few weeks ago. Is this the same thing? This looks like it got hit on October, around October 11th per Glenn Gabe. What makes this more dramatic is on social media, Glenn Gabe the next day, I believe, started seeing all other sorts of sites, and he wrote up a post for his own website, G-Squared Interactive, which we'll link to in the show notes here, A Nightmare on Affiliate Street. Love that, by the way. How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its site reputation abuse spam policy. So Glenn saw this for all sorts of sites. For example, AP News, which is so odd to me, they have this has a subfolder for personal finance called AP Byline, where again, you have the same kind of things, like literally, I'm looking at an article, Why Are Groceries So Expensive? Are Medical Expenses Tax-Deductible? Shocked At The Pump: 11 Ways To Save Money On Gas, with number one being buy less gas. I'm making that up. That's not actually true. I mean, it is actually true. You would save money on gas players are spending less money on gas, but you need gas. Anyway, Glenn went through a whole list of sites like this and the sub folders that are getting picked off by Google, and he actually asked Google, "Hey, is this the algorithmic version of the site reputation abuse update?" And Google said, "No, it's not." It's not them testing the site reputation abuse algorithm. Google then also, Danny then also told Glenn, "Our systems aim to understand of a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites." So what it seems like, and this, I talked with Glenn back channel about this, and I completely agree, seems to be like they're targeting subfolders or subdomains that they can clearly see, Google can clearly see, are not actually aligned with what the website actually does. I have a very spicy take on Google's previous statements about this on It's New, I don't know which episode. Hold on, hold on. I'll find it. If you right now, actually, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. We can edit this part out or we can keep it in here. It is from the, wait for it, it is from three weeks ago. That doesn't help you very much. I'll link to it in the show notes. I'll link to the episode in the show notes where I have very spicy take on my thoughts on this and Google's previous statements about this. What it basically looks like is that if you're blatantly creating a subfolder or a subdomain, that has nothing to do with your website, but it's all about affiliate content. It looks like Google seems to have gotten more aggressive about identifying that and demoting that content and their rankings. I have been on a soapbox. I'll end on this point, because I'm not being so snappy. I have been on a soapbox about this point. I literally spoke about this at SMX West in 2019, 2020. I don't remember something like that. Stay in your lane. From an SEO point of view, now more than ever, you can see what Google's doing. Staying in your lane from a brand point of view. If you're doing these kind of things, if you're, again, I always go back, we had a whole episode about this. You're Rolling Stone and you're talking about best fridges of 2024 and not best folk albums of 1964, you have a brand problem, and I understand why sites are doing this for the revenue. I'm not critiquing necessarily. I understand at least why they're doing it. I do think it's not good for the internet. So that's my personal take, which is stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. And this week, that's this week's snappy news, right in your lane. That's what we do here. You know what? And I think Barry should write like that. Write the news story. Barry, you're too wordy. Take out all of the gap words. Just, "John Mueller say, ranking this." Just go full on, go for it, Barry. As condensed as possible. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I don't want any filler words anymore. Crystal Carter: Who needs them? Who needs them? Mordy Oberstein: No one needs them. I understand. I understand good. All this, no words needed. I'm going off the rails on this. Oh, boy. Okay. If you're talking about revitalizing your career and you want to find someone on social media who has revitalized their career in multiple ways in shapes and forms, we recommend that you follow Petra Kis-Herczegh out there on social media, on X and on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah. She has written a recent article about this very topic, and she thinks very critically about all of this and has gone on a journey. I think she started as a dev herself and then moved into technical SEO, and I think she's been moving into other parts of her career as well, so it's worth thinking about this. It's worth thinking about this, and she's a great follow for that. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure you follow her out there on social media. Crystal Carter: Are you feeling revitalized now? Mordy Oberstein: You stole my mojo. You stole my thought. I was going to say that. We should leave this whole thing in. Crystal Carter: Are you feeling refreshed? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Super refreshed and revitalized. It's like Head and Shoulders for my soul. Crystal Carter: You can be a brand new you. Mordy Oberstein: Do you remember those, what was it called? I'm sure it's still a product. It's like the Head and Shoulders, but it's way more medicinal. It started with a D. Oh, man. Crystal Carter: I don't remember. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Denorex, I think it was called. Something like that. They would have commercials where they would compare the person using the Head and Shoulders and their product. This product tingles. Head and Shoulders doesn't. As if the tingling effect showed you that it was getting the dandruff, but it always made me feel like my head, I used to use it because my grandfather had it, and when I would go to my grandfather's house, that's the shampoo. I'm getting way too into the rabbit hole of this, but it did make my head feel revitalized. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's the connection. I don't know if it helped with dandruff or not, but it tingled. It made my head feel revitalized. Crystal Carter: And electric. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this episode made me feel like that. Crystal Carter: Well, if you need to- Mordy Oberstein: TMI? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think I need to go talk to somebody about this. Anyway, thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into merging your on and offline marketing activities. Yes, there's an offline world. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio 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. 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Where do we stand with AI overviews on the SERP? What does the data show and what doesn't it show?  How are these overviews reshaping the search results by including more sources, introducing subtopics beyond the main SERP content, and why do certain sites consistently appear in these overviews while others don’t? And let’s not forget the all-important question: How stable are those URLs in AI overviews, and what does it mean for your SEO strategy?33 Wix Studio’s dynamic duo, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, team up with Mark Traphagen from seoClarity to break down the intricacies of Google’s AI Overviews.  Plus, Rich Singer’s eye-opening study on the overlap between organic search results and AI-Overview comes under the microscope, along with juicy details and practical tips for staying ahead.  Plus, learn how to sift the SERP’s most recent feature and track AI Overviews!  So join us as we summarize the AI summaries on the SERP and sum up what it all means for your SEO practices on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Where are we at with AI Overviews? Where do we stand with AI overviews on the SERP? What does the data show and what doesn't it show? How are these overviews reshaping the search results by including more sources, introducing subtopics beyond the main SERP content, and why do certain sites consistently appear in these overviews while others don’t? And let’s not forget the all-important question: How stable are those URLs in AI overviews, and what does it mean for your SEO strategy?33 Wix Studio’s dynamic duo, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, team up with Mark Traphagen from seoClarity to break down the intricacies of Google’s AI Overviews. Plus, Rich Singer’s eye-opening study on the overlap between organic search results and AI-Overview comes under the microscope, along with juicy details and practical tips for staying ahead. Plus, learn how to sift the SERP’s most recent feature and track AI Overviews! So join us as we summarize the AI summaries on the SERP and sum up what it all means for your SEO practices on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 106 | October 16, 2024 | 39 MIN 00:00 / 39:54 This week’s guests Mark Traphagen Mark Traphagen is Vice President of Product Marketing and Training for seoClarity. His previous careers as a salesman and then a teacher were excellent preparations for what he does now. Mark's deep dive into online marketing began about 14 years ago when he was tasked with turning around a failing independent bookstore. He took the store online and developed practices of content marketing, influencer relationships, exceptional customer service, and community building that brought the store to profitability in two years. Since that time he has dedicated himself to learning what really works for online business success. He is a sought after speaker at conferences such as PubCon, State of Search, and SMX, and a featured writer for major online publications such as the Moz Blog, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and a VIP Columnist for Search Engine Journal. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredibly uncompromisingly unparalleled head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: That was very kind of you to say, thank you, and yeah, you too. Mordy Oberstein: You're welcome. Crystal Carter: Back at you. Back at you. How about that? Mordy Oberstein: Go for it. Repeat it right back at me. Crystal Carter: I can't say it back. I don't remember. People have different ways of processing things. I find if people talk at me for too long, my brain goes a little fuzzy. I'm not going to lie. So I have to- Mordy Oberstein: I have that with my kids. Sometimes they just go on, I'm like, "I lost you like five minutes ago, dude." Crystal Carter: I need it very, very structured, so I find these are the things. Everybody learns in different ways. It makes the world a many splendorous thing, that's my opinion. Mordy Oberstein: And thus the SERP'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 track search performance with our deep integration with Google Search Console. Get immediate insights and dive deep into large quantities of Google Search Console data with our Google Search Console Analytics Report. This as we pick the data on AI Overviews apart to help you make actionable sense of it all. Where do we stand with AI Overviews on the SERP? What does the data show and what doesn't it show? And what do you actually do with all of this data? To help us sift through the data itself, Mark Traphagen of seoClarity will clue us in on where things stand on the SERP as AI Overviews, I'm going to just call them AIOs at this point, AIOs are concerned. We'll also sort through some tools that help you track the AIOs, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So generating, generating, generating. If I'm not done generating in five seconds, wait a little longer. And here's our generative sum up on the surmising of the SEO tool providers and what they've done on Google AI SERP Summaries on this the 106th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. This is a deep pull, by the way, the if I'm not done generating in five seconds, wait a little longer. That's an Ace Ventura, if I'm not back in five minutes- Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: ... wait a little longer. Crystal Carter: There we go. Yes, yes. That's a good one. Mordy Oberstein: Woo, do not go in there. We were just talking about Ace Ventura, weren't we? Crystal Carter: I know, but I can't quote it chapter and verse, I'll be honest. Mordy Oberstein: It's like gospel to me. Crystal Carter: I remember all righty then. That I got. That's there. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, I was just, I don't know, 10 when it came out. When you're a 10-year-old boy, that thing is like gold. Gold. Anywho. You know what's gold? AI Overviews. They're gold for tracking. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Or not, who knows? No one really knows. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: The AI Overviews, which produce a summary of whatever you're searching for with theoretically a bunch of URLs, pulling the data on this stuff is really, really tricky. I know firsthand, I'm not going to get into it, it's super tricky. And it's really hard to get a deep look and there's a whole lot of limitations and it's hard to know. When you're looking at a piece of data or a study about the AI Overviews, it's hard to really know what to do with it, what's accurate, there's so many numbers all over the place, what's what, and whatever. And then of course, what do you do, actionably speaking, with all of this data, which is why we're going to go with a little bit of a different format. Usually, Crystal and I wax poetic on the topic a little while. We talk, we schmooze, we have insights, then we go to a guest. This time though, we are going to get right to our guest, seoClarity's own Mark Traphagen because he's had a deep dive on the data around AI Overviews as he tells us where we stand with AI Overviews and the data itself. Here's Mark. Mark Traphagen: Here at seoClarity, as an enterprise-level SEO platform, we've been keeping a close eye on Google's AI Overviews since their infancy as Search Generative Experience in Google Labs. So we were completely ready in our platform when Google went full public with AIOs in the U.S. in August to track them and report on them in greater detail than any other enterprise platform. That also meant we had access to unprecedented levels of data on AIOs. And our data science team has been hard at work on covering them. Let me cover just a few of the most interesting insights. First and most importantly, in a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago, we were the first to break to the world the news that Google had shifted sometime recently to including more sources in AIOs that matched those on the first page of Google. We saw that almost always now, 99.5% of the time, at least one top 10 organic source appears in an AIO for the same query. Now that alone is a dramatic shift as all agreed prior to this there was almost no correlation between top rankings in traditional Google and appearing in an AIO. But it gets better. Over half of all AIOs contain the number one organic ranked source, and wait for it, over three-fourths of the time, all of the AIO sources are now from the top 10 organic results. And what that means should be obvious: AIO SEO is now just SEO. Improving rankings for your content where an AIO is shown is your best shot at getting mentioned in that AIO. We also recently revealed that 96% of all AI Overviews have informational search intent. That's relevant if you're using top-of-funnel content as part of your marketing strategy but means that e-comm and local business sites can breathe a sigh of relief for now. Now we'll have plenty more insights about AIOs in the weeks ahead. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much, Mark. Check out seoClarity and all the work that Mark's done there around AIO Overviews. We'll link to a bunch of this stuff in the show notes. Okay, so it's really interesting. Okay, so first off, when he put out that data that 99% of AIO Overviews contain at least one result from the organic results, people misunderstood that. I saw around the web people... They were saying, "Oh, the AIO Overviews, the links overlap 99% of the time with the organic results." It's one result is in there in 99% of the AIO Overviews. So that nuance in all of this stuff is so tricky. Just nice piece of data, by the way, and then 96% of all AIOs being informational, yada, yada, yada, yada. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, I think that's really important to think about as well, in my own, and I think that that's really, really useful. And I think that what we see is that sometimes the AI Overviews aren't generating in real-time, that's the other thing. They're pulling from something already, so you go to the page and it's not generating in real-time, it's just has an AI Overview on the thing already. Which tells you that they're pulling from some stored data, and all of these machine learning systems, they have a training set. And the training set for an AIO Overview of the SERP, it would stand to reason that the training set would be the SERP, would be Google's repository of search results. So they have search data for years on content and it makes sense that they would pull at least some of the information from it. And I think that there's a lot of different data around there, and I think it's really fascinating as a topic for search researchers right now because it's rapidly changing. Since they've added AI Overviews into the EMEA space, we're going to see a lot more people chiming in on that data, which is really great to see. My first initial hunch is that it's building on the featured snippet data set. Because what I very often see is that you have an AI Overview for something that has predictive text. Like the predictive search will have an AI Overview because they know that search and they can make an AI Overview for it. And as I said, they're not always generating it. But the way that the featured snippets work, that system is slightly different from the core plain blue links system. That system has always included an AI element and has always included a remixing element. So you'd have places where on the page it would show bullet points, but on the list on the SERP it would show numbers, or it would show numbers on the page and then it would show bullet points on the SERP for instance. So to me, it would make sense, and certainly coming from a SaaS angle, from working with a SaaS team, it would make sense for Google to not completely reinvent the wheel. For Google to use some of their existing frameworks in order to build out their AI Overviews, especially if they're trying to do it at a pace. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and that's what's interesting. So you have so much data on this. You had Rick Sanger who partnered with Authoritas looking at the overlap between the organic results and the AI Overview links, and something around, I think it was 45% of the URLs in the AI Overview are also ranking in the top organic results. I think he looked at the first page, top eight or so. And then when he clicked through to the related search features, people also ask, people also search for, related searches, that number jumps up to 64%. I think that makes a lot of sense because... I can't remember who I was talking to about this. It might've been Garrett Sussman. It doesn't matter, either way. When you're looking at the topic, let's say you're searching for how to build a log cabin... It was Garrett. You're going to get, let's say on that SERP, you're going to get, I don't know, eight or so results on how to build the best log cabin. Let's say just for argument's sake, they're all about how to build a log cabin. There's no other search intent. All of those URLs about how to build a log cabin. When you now have the AI Overview telling you how to build the log cabin, yes, it's going to include some of those URLs, but how to build a log cabin because what that content's talking about, but the AI Overview breaks into a subtopical breakdown. So for example, it might say, "Step one, select the right material, use whatever, maple wood or birch wood," and it might link out to what birch wood is. That URL is not going to be on the main SERP because what birch wood is has nothing to do with that main SERP. So when you go subtopic inside of the AI Overview, it's going to link out naturally to things that should not even be on the actual SERP itself. So when I see numbers like 50 or so percent, that to me makes a heck of a lot of sense because there is alignment. But when you go subtopically, there's not alignment. You're pulling in topics from somewhere else. Crystal Carter: Well, absolutely, and I think that the other thing that the AI Overviews, I think, certainly, in the long run, maybe not in this first iteration, but certainly, in the long run, are hoping to do, is hoping to solve some of the challenges that Google has been trying to address for years. So Google have said themselves that very often if somebody makes a query, they have to make eight questions before they can get to an answer. And the multidimensional search that you're talking about where they would also have some of the subcategories in that question, and whether it's birch or oak or pine or whatever on the log cabin, what kind of log, for instance. When you're thinking about those questions, these are things that Google have been thinking about for ages. So this was something they were trying to address with MUM, for instance. This is something that they've been trying to address with lots of different ways with some of the disambiguation they've added to the knowledge graphs and the featured snippets where you have the drop-down where you'd say somebody would search for blogging and they'd say more about this topic, things you should consider, all of those sorts of things. Google have been trying to address this in a lot of ways, and I think that they're trying to see if they can address it with the AI Overviews. And it stands to reason that yeah, you would have a more rich collection of search results. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to switch topics really quick because I want to talk about why there are so many data discrepancies among the AI Overview data. You have certain tools saying X, certain tools saying Y. So first off, one of the things to look for is consensus. So for example, generally speaking, most of the data studies that have come out, there are obviously outliers, are basically saying as of the time of this recording, by the way, that AI Overviews appear at around or anywhere between 10 and 20% of all SERPs. I think SEO ranking had it at 12%. I could be misremembering, but it's generally around there. So look for a trend. I wouldn't rely on the exact data from the exact study the exact way you normally would with an SEO study because I feel like pulling the data here is very, very difficult and the tools aren't really built for you doing multiple click-throughs. And then Google's also changing formats all the time and getting it right is incredibly difficult. So while the tools may be built to scrape rank, they're not built to scrape AI Overviews the same way. I'll prove it to you. If you look at how when AI Overviews came out, at least in Search Labs, and you look at when the SEO tools started, actually being able to track them we're talking months later, which meant they had to do months of development in order to change how they're tracking things. So I think that one of the reasons why you're seeing a little bit of discrepancies is A, because the AI Overviews are changing all the time, and B, pulling this data is just wonky. It's a little bit tricky, so look for trends. Crystal Carter: It's also tricky too because there are so many different... I think that we're not seeing how consistent it is. So sometimes I think you've been looking at how often the AI Overviews are switching links, and certainly, for some of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get to that. Crystal Carter: And some of the AI Overviews that I've been tracking, which includes some of my own content, I've been seeing those, and there's not entirely consistent on some of those. So for instance, one of the things that I've seen is that they'll have the core AI Overview and then they'll have a few topical links, a few recommended links on the right. And sometimes what you see is that the recommended links on the right aren't referenced in the AI Overview. So in the AI Overview, they have links within that, then they have links on the side and they're not necessarily the same links. So that's interesting, and I think that also what I'm starting to see is that on some of the search results they'll say, or sorry, on some of the search tools on their cache, they're saying, "Oh, this is an AI Overview." And then you go to the SERP and then it isn't. And so I think that it's still early days in terms of the data, which makes it tricky to track and it's still early days in terms of Google figuring out how they want to roll this out. So it's really a live space at the moment. Mordy Oberstein: That's totally true, and I want to get the URL thing, okay? That's the next thing I want to cover really quickly is that what do you do with all this data? Okay. Oh, AI Overviews are in 10% of all SERPs, I don't know, 15% of all SERPs, or 95% of all information queries, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. But there's two fundamental questions. One, I have absolutely no clue about what I'm trying to get a clue about. One is how often are users engaging with the AI Overview, how often are they not? Or subset of that, how often are they engaging with it, bouncing out of it, and going to the organic results? So even if they are engaging with it, are they still going to the organic results anyway? And if they are engaging with the AI Overviews, what's the stability of URLs? In other words, is it Google swapping out URLs all the time and there's no stability? In other words, what's the real impact of AI Overviews on traffic and then what's the real necessity of trying to optimize, whatever that means, for an AI Overview? Even if they are impacting traffic, but Google's swapping out the URLs on a daily basis, you have no market share. That's a waste of time. Crystal Carter: Right. Because if people aren't clicking on them, which we don't know what the click-through rate is on it, if people aren't clicking on them, should you optimize for them if you are getting straight to the SERP and things? So then it's a question of whether or not Google's taking the share of the click or whether or not there's a click at all, which we don't know if there's a click at all, or whether or not somebody else who's in the AI Overview is taking it. And I think that if we think about the featured snippets element, featured snippets are really, it's very much a similar evolution from when we didn't have featured snippets to when we do have featured snippets. Because in some cases, the featured snippet gives you enough information so that you don't need to make a click. That is true. It is true. Mordy Oberstein: And that's when the format of featured snippet matters most. The paragraph featured snippet you might have the answer right there. List is usually not the full list, so you usually get a higher click-through rate. Crystal Carter: Right. So these things will change, but the visibility is very important. So if people are constantly seeing your content in the featured snippet, then they'll go, "Okay, this is a great source." Mordy Oberstein: Totally, 100%. Crystal Carter: And I can just go straight there and get the information rather than having to go to Google to find the thing, they'll probably have it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think you always want to be in the AI... If there's one there, you always want to be there, which brings the question: what about that URL stability? For example, I just did a study... I didn't just do a study. I did a study 10 years ago, maybe less, maybe seven or eight. I don't remember what I ate for breakfast, so I don't remember what year it was when I did the study. And it was featured snippet URL market share. If you're in the featured snippet, how long do you tend to last in the featured snippet? And basically, the pattern that I saw years ago, I don't know if this holds true, is that there's generally speaking, two URLs: a dominant URL, and a secondary URL. The dominant URL stands in the featured snippet around 75% of the time, and then the non-dominant URL is in there 25% of the time. So that's pretty good. If you could be one of those two URLs either way, that's at least decent market share, 25%. With the URLs inside of AI Overviews, what's that pattern look like? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, this is it. So it'd be interesting to see how that develops and it's so fresh, it's so new, particularly in different markets as well that we'll have to carry out the data and I think it's going to have to be a little bit manual for a while. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little wonky because a little peek behind the curtains, I've been working with Semrush to try to do something like this. And we did one version, had to redo it because Google changed the format of the URLs inside the AI Overviews, they don't want that data. And even then, it's still a little bit tricky. When I'm telling you it's tricky, I'm not telling you because I think it's tricky. I'm working with companies and I'm telling you it's tricky. I don't know if I could spill the tea or not. I don't know when this episode is coming out. I don't know when the study's going to come out. I will tell you- Crystal Carter: Spill the tea, Mordy. It's your podcast, it's your study. Me too. You do what you want. Mordy Oberstein: I already drank all the tea. I'm literally holding my tea mug upside down. Oh, I just actually... There was one drop left and I just dropped it on my keyboard. Crystal Carter: You can't tell us about all this juicy stuff and then hold back. That's just- Mordy Oberstein: I'll say it's less stable than you think it is. And I'll throw one stat at you. If you're out of there over a 31-day period, and this is only for AI Overviews where the AI Overview showed for at least 20 out of 30, 31 days. So you're talking about AI Overviews that are already consistent. If they're not consistent, then what's the point of URL consistency? The whole thing's not consistent, right? So I guess I'm saying all this data is so layered, so let's now only look at AI Overviews that are consistent. They show up 20 out of 30, 31 days, whatever we looked at. If you're out, you're out. Only 45% or so of the URLs that got kicked out ever came back in over that data period. Crystal Carter: Over the course of how long? Mordy Oberstein: 31 days, Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, maybe they come back after 60 days. I don't know. Secondary data point, I don't remember this exactly off the top of my head, but it's not like Google... Because maybe you'll say, "Okay." When Google's swapping the URL out... That's how my brain works. It's why I'm good at data studies. Maybe it's... And it takes out the Wix SEO Hub and it puts in another URL from the Wix SEO. All right, that's fine, right? I still have the market share. I think 100% of these AI Overviews that were in this category saw domain changes, meaning Google's not just saying, "Oh, one URL for one website." It's swapping, I don't know to the extent, but significantly so, swapping out domains. And when you add it all together that very few AI Overviews have the level of consistency that you're looking for. Very few URLs are returning, and a lot of domains are switching. It doesn't paint a very stable picture as of right now, as of the time of this recording. It could all change tomorrow. Who knows? Crystal Carter: See, this is interesting because I think this plays back into what Mark's talking about is that the SERP right now is a little bit unstable. We do a weekly or a daily news thing with Barry, and he's constantly like SERP volatility, SERP volatility, SERP volatility. If it is the case that the AI Overview optimization is essentially SEO, then it would stand to reason that the URLs would switch around in a volatile SERP. That would make sense. I think that this also points to, if you're thinking about AI Overviews, thinking about some of the information around... Or some of the fact that there are still some big, big players in terms of the AI Overviews of who has the most visibility. So Kevin Indig shared who's got the biggest share of AI Overviews, and he was saying that the biggest one is YouTube. Again, that's really similar to featured snippets. Then followed by Wikipedia, followed by YouTube mobile, followed by LinkedIn, and then followed by a few others, including usual suspects like Healthline, and WebMD, and Mayo Clinic, and things like that. We also see that those same folks see a big share on the SERP, and those same folks will have a fairly stable level of visibility on the SERP. They have fairly stable rankings in terms of where Google shows their domain and how often that Google shows their domain. But yeah, I think it's a really fascinating time in research and looking at this particular part of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. But you were saying what Mark is saying, "Do good SEO." Crystal Carter: Yo. Mordy Oberstein: Just do good SEO. That will get you there. Crystal Carter: Right? Everybody wants some fancy thing, but it's like people are like, "How do I lose weight?" It's like, "Eat better and do some exercise." It's nothing complicated. Mordy Oberstein: Just the execution part, that's the hard part. Crystal Carter: That's true. That's true. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Some of it gets a little tricky. Crystal Carter: Because I love donuts, so if I could just have a delete donut. Have donut, delete donut, if I could just have that, that would be great. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love donuts so much. Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts. Crystal Carter: Oh, I love Dunkin'. Mordy Oberstein: I love Dunkin' flavors. They have better flavors, but the donut itself, I think Krispy. Crystal Carter: Krispy Kreme is great, but I find Krispy Kreme to be very expensive, and also, they don't oblige my dietary requirements, whereas Dunkin' Donuts comes in better for me. So it's not a flavor thing. It's not explicitly flavor, it's for other considerations. Mordy Oberstein: Either way, donuts for the win. You know what else for the win? Tracking your AI Overviews. Global AI Overview data is great, super interesting, super informative, super everything, but how do you track your own AI Overviews? Well, find out as we look at the data providers as we go tool time on the SERP's Up Podcast. All right, so there's a whole heap of tools that do different things. I don't know, like Semrush and SE Ranking. Let's start with them maybe. I found them. They both have it in position tracking and then they were like organic research so you can see how stable your AI Overviews are and what keywords you have. And you can also analyze the competitor and see how many overviews they have, which I think is cool for looking at brand power for example. If I look at, I don't know, Nike versus New Balance, which brand is more powerful? Or the one that has a ton of AI Overviews kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. I think it's interesting to see that and I think that it's great to see some of these different tools showing this because people need to know. So I think that what is their general summary for the overall visibility on AI Overviews? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, if you run it through the organic research tool and then you can filter out by SERP feature, you can see all of the AI Overviews that that website or that domain is grabbing. Crystal Carter: And on their Semrush sensor, they also have included it under their SERP feature there so you can get an idea of the general trend. So according to- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but that data set is super normalized. I think that data set is... Because you're looking... I think now they're showing 2 or 3%, something like that. I know that data set because I work with it when I'm doing their algorithm update stuff. It's not reflective of what you do every day. The Moz data set would be. The MozCast is very much high search volume keywords, assuming that they're informational kind of thing. That would align with AI Overviews. I think that the Semrush data is just more normalized across the board, which is what I mean. This data, looking at the numbers, it's so hard. So hard. Crystal Carter: So then help me understand this. So according to their Semrush sensor, they're currently saying that for the US, on desktop, it's showing at 1.23% of search results and on 1.63% of search results. So what are you saying when you're giving that information? Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is, okay, that's interesting because you compare this to say, I don't know like what Mark was talking about, or SE Ranking, and BrightEdge, and their data. The Semrush data set is lower, but I think it's because they're using their volatility data set to track it. When they track the volatility of SERP features, they have your featured snippets, and local packs, and images, they're not creating a separate data set that targets that feature or aligns with that feature. It's a universal data set to track all volatility. So it's not built... The way I search, I search mostly for informational keywords. That data set is not built to function the way I or most people search. It's meant to try to track the web. But AI Overview, so you're trying to track those. If you wanted to really see that you would have to include more things like how people actually search, in which case you would probably see a higher number. So I would look at the trend, not at the actual number in that one, and the trend's up. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and the other thing I think is interesting on the trend is that the Semrush sensor, for instance, filters by categories. And if you look at arts and entertainment, for instance, it's showing AI Overviews for 0.14%. But if you look at health, and this goes, again, back to some of the data that Kevin was showing, that some of the top AI Overviews include Healthline, WebMD, Mayo Clinic. That's three out of 10 for the top 10. And this is saying that health is showing 3.63% of the time. So again, maybe the numbers, maybe the number percentage might not be hard fast- Mordy Oberstein: But the trends, yeah. Crystal Carter: Exactly, but the trend that, on average, it's showing 1.63%. On average, it's showing a certain amount, but it's showing three times as much in the health sectors is interesting. And that also follows with some of the data that Lily's been sharing around that particular sector. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's so many tools like the seoClarity tool, for example. They show you the actual AI Overview content itself so you can actually see the snapshot of the AI Overview and what's actually in there. So you can see, obviously, where you're being impacted or where your competitors are being impacted, but you can get an actual sense what does that actually mean by looking at the actual content and the snapshot of the AI Overview. Which is great if you are, for example... If you're not in the U.S. and your clients are in the U.S. and you want to see what that actually looks like without using a VPN. You can use a VPN also, but you can use seoClarity and it's right there. Crystal Carter: Right. And another one that's got some is ZipTie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ZipTie is interesting. I checked them out. Crystal Carter: So ZipTie.dev is detecting AI Overviews. They are claiming that they're detecting 17 times more AI Overviews than certain other tools. So they were checking us. According to ziptie.com, wix.com is showing a 27% of AI Overviews, which is interesting. Yeah, so they've got various different tools. I think they've got a freemium setup as well and they've been putting out some reports around that. So shout out to Tomasz Rudzki for some of his data there because that's really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's cool because they'll tell you with AI Overview, remember there was one where there was automatically triggered, and then one format where it wasn't automatically triggered. They'll tell you which one it was, or they'll tell you if you have the AI Overview and the featured snippet, or just the AI Overview, or just the featured snippet. They'll tell you what AI Overview features are inside of it. Is there a topic breakdown? Are there pros and cons lists? Are there bullet points? Is there a shopping list? They'll actually break it down for you. So it's a really interesting tool. It seems like a really powerful tool for tracking AI Overviews for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely, and they've got their... On their blog, they're sharing a lot of data. So for instance, they were saying that, in June, it rose from 8% in June to 11% in August, which is interesting over things. And again, this goes back to your trend point, so just like it's on the up. How much? It's difficult to quantify exactly, but yeah, they are also breaking it down on their blog as to how many... What types of terms people are seeing it on and things like that, so yeah, interesting times in SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. We'll link to all those tools in the show notes. Check them all out, see which one is best for you. We are agnostic here on the SERP's Up Podcast, so pick what is best for you. You know what is a great place to learn about AI Overviews and the latest news happening around AI Overviews? I find that to be such a tongue twister, by the way, AI Overviews. Crystal Carter: It just makes me think of Old McDonald. I'm not going to lie. Mordy Oberstein: The what? Crystal Carter: Old McDonald, like A-I-A-I-O, like E-I-E-I-O, come on. Mordy Oberstein: That’s a great connection. That's great. Crystal Carter: Yeah, like << On the SERP there was a... And Google had a SERP, A-I-A-I-O. And you get a link, and a link over here, everyone link, link, link, link, link >> Mordy Oberstein: By the way, no one actually... We should have a separate conversation about the actual impact CTR-wise. Side note, I see a bunch of cases where a lot of rankings in AI Overviews and not real traffic change. Crystal Carter: As a user, I very often skip over it. As a user, I very often skip over it. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if they check it out and come back, maybe then I click... I'm interested if they click on it and just don't even see the links and just go back and click on the links in the SERP, that would be interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's interesting. But also, I find that sometimes the AI Overview doesn't make any sense for what I'm searching. I'll search for one thing and then it's- Mordy Oberstein: Eat glue! Crystal Carter: Well, yeah, I'm searching for one thing and then it shows up with something else, and I'm like, it's not what I'm talking about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's very broad. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think the other thing with the AI Overviews, they're trying to make a cohesive statement in the AI Overview, and they're trying to make a cohesive statement about whatever it is you're looking at. And sometimes if you were to look up Bluetooth speaker connectivity, right? Now, I might be looking for how I can connect all of the Bluetooth speakers in my house, so I don't have to find each individual one. I can just play Shakira on all of them. I might be thinking about how would I do that, but I've only typed in Bluetooth connectivity. And they might be like, "Oh, Bluetooth works like this, and this, and this, and this, and that, and that, and that." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Not what you wanted. Crystal Carter: And I'm like, "Y'all, that's not what I'm interested in." And so sometimes what's on the SERP is more aligned with what I'm interested in. And sometimes it's not, but I think that the nature of the beast means that sometimes it doesn't align, and it'll be interesting to see how they get better. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we digressed, by the way. I was trying to get into the Snappy News by saying, "You should try..." No, that's my bad. I did that. If you're trying to keep up on the news on AIOs, you always want to check out what Barry Schwartz is doing over at SE Roundtable, but until then, check out this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two from Barry Schwartz, both from seroundtable.com. First Google AI Overviews not linking to sites hit by helpful content update. This is from, per report, this got started by Lily Ray who reported on X, "Hey, when you type, who is XYZ's site?" And insert site affected by the HCU, the Google AI Overview result seems to not include links to that site, yada, yada, yada, yada. Glenn Gabe tested the same thing, and he says, "Yeah, it looks that way." He said even for the sites that, quote, "bounce back a bit with the August core update, and they don't show up in the AI Overviews for their own brand site." It's fascinating. It feels to me like that's like a glitch in the matrix, especially if it's a website that yes, got hit by one of the previous core updates, or the initial... Not the initial, but the last of the HCU. That should be the name of a movie, the Last of the HCUs, back in September 2023. If it's your own website, if people are particularly specifically Googling, "What is name of website.com?" I feel like you should show up there regardless of what Google thinks of you algorithmically in terms of ranking for informational navigation... I mean informational, commercial transactional searches related to your queries. It's a navigational search. Would you not rank navigationally? If someone typed in, "What is blah, blah blah website.com," you would show up number one regardless of any algorithm. I mean, unless you're like manual action kind of stuff, but so why not in the AI Overview? Then there's a little bit of speculation on X about Barry's own website, seroundtable.com, which I check out each and every day, and which you should too. And if you want, you can also get a dose of seroundtable.com on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub where we have It's New, our daily dose of SEO News with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn. Plugging is over. Barry's site didn't seem to show up in the AI Overviews, which is just weird. I did a few of these searches related to seroundtable.com myself. Sometimes Barry does show up there, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes it's just his X handle. Sometimes it is the actual website. I found one where you search for what is seroundtable.com. So then Barry does get the link in the AIO overview, but Apple gets the featured snippet for some kind of search engine round table thing that they have in the app store that who the heck knows. That's not this. That's not the real Search Engine Roundtable. Barry is. But for example, if you search for what is search engine around table website, seroundtable.com does not show up in there as of the recording of this recording. The recording of this recording, that's not redundant. Only Barry's X profile shows up, so that's interesting. So again, it just seems wonky, for lack of a better word, or glitch in the matricky, for lack of a better word. Anyway, on to the second article. Also, again, reminding you from Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com, which you may or may not find in an AIO overview near you. DOJ may break up Google as remedy to monopoly ruling. I see this on It's New. First, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez break up, and now Google. How many breakups can I handle? I can't. I just can't. This is reporting... A lot of it was reported on CNBC, which Barry links to in the article. I don't want to get into the whole 32-page document issued by the DOJ. You could read that on your own time because that's not snappy. Anything 32 pages is not snappy. But Barry did pull out some highlights and Barry writes, what is proposed is not just a break-up, which could split off Chrome, Android, and many other things. "But also," says Barry, "Google will make available its competitors' data within its search index and models. Google will make available its AI-assisted search features." Again, whoa. "Google to make available its ad ranking data, policy regulations about retaining its data, limitations on its partnership with Apple and others," that does make sense, "and more." So some of that is just like, "Wow, just take everything." It's a full-on garage sale. We're taking everything. So that's really interesting. I'll link to Barry's article in the show notes, which links to all the other links that you need. If you want to deep dive into 32 pages of this stuff. I do not. The minute I hear law and legal, I'm out. So I'm out. That's this week's Snappy News. I'd like to see AI Overview Barry. You ask Barry and it just spits out a summary, but the summary is two words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right? Mordy Oberstein: Reads. Crystal Carter: Not new. Mordy Oberstein: How do I connect my Bluetooth speaker, AI Overview Barry? With a plug. Crystal Carter: Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. With electricity. Complete brevity. Brevity AI Overviews by Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: And efficiency. Mordy Oberstein: Efficiency. I had a pocket in my shirt. I put my phone in it. For reference, go look at an old episode of It's New for that. Which brings us to our follow of the week, and our follow of the week is someone we already mentioned this week, so you should be following him anyway by this point. You should have listened to the episode and clicked follow on this person's profile because we mentioned their name. That's a little much. It's Rich Sanger. Rich was one of the folks who, first off, we met him a few times at our New York City digital marketing meetup at the SEOFOMO meetup we did in New York City at the Wix Playground. So Rich is a great guy. I think he's a Red Sox fan, so I won't hold that against him, but that's fine too. But he did the study with Authoritas on how often the overlap is between the organic results and the AI Overviews. Again, we'll link to that study in the show notes, but he puts out a lot of really thought-provoking blog posts that he writes. So it was a great follow out there on X and on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's worth checking out folks who are doing good content like that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and they're just good people even if they're Red Sox fans. Crystal Carter: It's not all about baseball. Mordy Oberstein: Is it? Is it not all about baseball? I'm literally wearing a baseball jersey. I feel like it is. Crystal Carter: If you build it, they will come. Mordy Oberstein: Ease my pain. That's what I tell my kids when they're making me crazy, "Ease his pain." When I say his, I mean mine. Crystal Carter: I try to think of... But literally, if they build it, they will come. I think that's the only baseball quote I got. No, no, no. There's that, what is it? Yeah, I don't know. To be fair, I think of the Sandlot when I'm putting together a content strategy because in the Sandlot, he points at where he is going to hit it, and I feel like that's what you're doing when you're doing a content strategy, or a campaign strategy, or any kind of marketing thing. Because you don't know what's going to happen, but you're like, "I'm going to put it right there, and it's going to do the thing." And I think of the Sandlot when I'm doing that. Mordy Oberstein: Also, a great movie. A lot of great baseball movies, but the first movie, in case you not a baseball nut or a movie nut, is Field of Dreams, which is one of the best movies, I think, ever made. Crystal Carter: It's a good movie. It's a good movie. Mordy Oberstein: That last thing, the last line, "Hey Dad, do you want to have a catch?" Bawling every time. Every time. Every time. You go on YouTube, by the way, I've actually done this. You watch reaction videos of people who... And you just see them bawling, it's crazy. Check that out. Anyway, that was off-topic and off the rails. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to do SEO for a sub-brand. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, and webinars, and SEO courses on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Mark Traphagen Rich Sanger Kevin Indig Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course seoClarity AI Overview Data Study Google AI Overview Study: Link Selection Based on Related Queries SE Ranking AI Overview Data Study AI on Innovation SE Ranking AI Overview Tracking Semrush AI Overview Tracking seoClarity AI Overview Tracking ZipTie AI Overview Tracking News: DOJ May Breakup Google As Remedy To Monopoly Ruling Google AI Overviews Not Linking To Sites Hit By Helpful Content Update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Mark Traphagen Rich Sanger Kevin Indig Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course seoClarity AI Overview Data Study Google AI Overview Study: Link Selection Based on Related Queries SE Ranking AI Overview Data Study AI on Innovation SE Ranking AI Overview Tracking Semrush AI Overview Tracking seoClarity AI Overview Tracking ZipTie AI Overview Tracking News: DOJ May Breakup Google As Remedy To Monopoly Ruling Google AI Overviews Not Linking To Sites Hit By Helpful Content Update Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredibly uncompromisingly unparalleled head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: That was very kind of you to say, thank you, and yeah, you too. Mordy Oberstein: You're welcome. Crystal Carter: Back at you. Back at you. How about that? Mordy Oberstein: Go for it. Repeat it right back at me. Crystal Carter: I can't say it back. I don't remember. People have different ways of processing things. I find if people talk at me for too long, my brain goes a little fuzzy. I'm not going to lie. So I have to- Mordy Oberstein: I have that with my kids. Sometimes they just go on, I'm like, "I lost you like five minutes ago, dude." Crystal Carter: I need it very, very structured, so I find these are the things. Everybody learns in different ways. It makes the world a many splendorous thing, that's my opinion. Mordy Oberstein: And thus the SERP'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 track search performance with our deep integration with Google Search Console. Get immediate insights and dive deep into large quantities of Google Search Console data with our Google Search Console Analytics Report. This as we pick the data on AI Overviews apart to help you make actionable sense of it all. Where do we stand with AI Overviews on the SERP? What does the data show and what doesn't it show? And what do you actually do with all of this data? To help us sift through the data itself, Mark Traphagen of seoClarity will clue us in on where things stand on the SERP as AI Overviews, I'm going to just call them AIOs at this point, AIOs are concerned. We'll also sort through some tools that help you track the AIOs, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So generating, generating, generating. If I'm not done generating in five seconds, wait a little longer. And here's our generative sum up on the surmising of the SEO tool providers and what they've done on Google AI SERP Summaries on this the 106th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. This is a deep pull, by the way, the if I'm not done generating in five seconds, wait a little longer. That's an Ace Ventura, if I'm not back in five minutes- Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: ... wait a little longer. Crystal Carter: There we go. Yes, yes. That's a good one. Mordy Oberstein: Woo, do not go in there. We were just talking about Ace Ventura, weren't we? Crystal Carter: I know, but I can't quote it chapter and verse, I'll be honest. Mordy Oberstein: It's like gospel to me. Crystal Carter: I remember all righty then. That I got. That's there. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, I was just, I don't know, 10 when it came out. When you're a 10-year-old boy, that thing is like gold. Gold. Anywho. You know what's gold? AI Overviews. They're gold for tracking. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Or not, who knows? No one really knows. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: The AI Overviews, which produce a summary of whatever you're searching for with theoretically a bunch of URLs, pulling the data on this stuff is really, really tricky. I know firsthand, I'm not going to get into it, it's super tricky. And it's really hard to get a deep look and there's a whole lot of limitations and it's hard to know. When you're looking at a piece of data or a study about the AI Overviews, it's hard to really know what to do with it, what's accurate, there's so many numbers all over the place, what's what, and whatever. And then of course, what do you do, actionably speaking, with all of this data, which is why we're going to go with a little bit of a different format. Usually, Crystal and I wax poetic on the topic a little while. We talk, we schmooze, we have insights, then we go to a guest. This time though, we are going to get right to our guest, seoClarity's own Mark Traphagen because he's had a deep dive on the data around AI Overviews as he tells us where we stand with AI Overviews and the data itself. Here's Mark. Mark Traphagen: Here at seoClarity, as an enterprise-level SEO platform, we've been keeping a close eye on Google's AI Overviews since their infancy as Search Generative Experience in Google Labs. So we were completely ready in our platform when Google went full public with AIOs in the U.S. in August to track them and report on them in greater detail than any other enterprise platform. That also meant we had access to unprecedented levels of data on AIOs. And our data science team has been hard at work on covering them. Let me cover just a few of the most interesting insights. First and most importantly, in a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago, we were the first to break to the world the news that Google had shifted sometime recently to including more sources in AIOs that matched those on the first page of Google. We saw that almost always now, 99.5% of the time, at least one top 10 organic source appears in an AIO for the same query. Now that alone is a dramatic shift as all agreed prior to this there was almost no correlation between top rankings in traditional Google and appearing in an AIO. But it gets better. Over half of all AIOs contain the number one organic ranked source, and wait for it, over three-fourths of the time, all of the AIO sources are now from the top 10 organic results. And what that means should be obvious: AIO SEO is now just SEO. Improving rankings for your content where an AIO is shown is your best shot at getting mentioned in that AIO. We also recently revealed that 96% of all AI Overviews have informational search intent. That's relevant if you're using top-of-funnel content as part of your marketing strategy but means that e-comm and local business sites can breathe a sigh of relief for now. Now we'll have plenty more insights about AIOs in the weeks ahead. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much, Mark. Check out seoClarity and all the work that Mark's done there around AIO Overviews. We'll link to a bunch of this stuff in the show notes. Okay, so it's really interesting. Okay, so first off, when he put out that data that 99% of AIO Overviews contain at least one result from the organic results, people misunderstood that. I saw around the web people... They were saying, "Oh, the AIO Overviews, the links overlap 99% of the time with the organic results." It's one result is in there in 99% of the AIO Overviews. So that nuance in all of this stuff is so tricky. Just nice piece of data, by the way, and then 96% of all AIOs being informational, yada, yada, yada, yada. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, I think that's really important to think about as well, in my own, and I think that that's really, really useful. And I think that what we see is that sometimes the AI Overviews aren't generating in real-time, that's the other thing. They're pulling from something already, so you go to the page and it's not generating in real-time, it's just has an AI Overview on the thing already. Which tells you that they're pulling from some stored data, and all of these machine learning systems, they have a training set. And the training set for an AIO Overview of the SERP, it would stand to reason that the training set would be the SERP, would be Google's repository of search results. So they have search data for years on content and it makes sense that they would pull at least some of the information from it. And I think that there's a lot of different data around there, and I think it's really fascinating as a topic for search researchers right now because it's rapidly changing. Since they've added AI Overviews into the EMEA space, we're going to see a lot more people chiming in on that data, which is really great to see. My first initial hunch is that it's building on the featured snippet data set. Because what I very often see is that you have an AI Overview for something that has predictive text. Like the predictive search will have an AI Overview because they know that search and they can make an AI Overview for it. And as I said, they're not always generating it. But the way that the featured snippets work, that system is slightly different from the core plain blue links system. That system has always included an AI element and has always included a remixing element. So you'd have places where on the page it would show bullet points, but on the list on the SERP it would show numbers, or it would show numbers on the page and then it would show bullet points on the SERP for instance. So to me, it would make sense, and certainly coming from a SaaS angle, from working with a SaaS team, it would make sense for Google to not completely reinvent the wheel. For Google to use some of their existing frameworks in order to build out their AI Overviews, especially if they're trying to do it at a pace. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and that's what's interesting. So you have so much data on this. You had Rick Sanger who partnered with Authoritas looking at the overlap between the organic results and the AI Overview links, and something around, I think it was 45% of the URLs in the AI Overview are also ranking in the top organic results. I think he looked at the first page, top eight or so. And then when he clicked through to the related search features, people also ask, people also search for, related searches, that number jumps up to 64%. I think that makes a lot of sense because... I can't remember who I was talking to about this. It might've been Garrett Sussman. It doesn't matter, either way. When you're looking at the topic, let's say you're searching for how to build a log cabin... It was Garrett. You're going to get, let's say on that SERP, you're going to get, I don't know, eight or so results on how to build the best log cabin. Let's say just for argument's sake, they're all about how to build a log cabin. There's no other search intent. All of those URLs about how to build a log cabin. When you now have the AI Overview telling you how to build the log cabin, yes, it's going to include some of those URLs, but how to build a log cabin because what that content's talking about, but the AI Overview breaks into a subtopical breakdown. So for example, it might say, "Step one, select the right material, use whatever, maple wood or birch wood," and it might link out to what birch wood is. That URL is not going to be on the main SERP because what birch wood is has nothing to do with that main SERP. So when you go subtopic inside of the AI Overview, it's going to link out naturally to things that should not even be on the actual SERP itself. So when I see numbers like 50 or so percent, that to me makes a heck of a lot of sense because there is alignment. But when you go subtopically, there's not alignment. You're pulling in topics from somewhere else. Crystal Carter: Well, absolutely, and I think that the other thing that the AI Overviews, I think, certainly, in the long run, maybe not in this first iteration, but certainly, in the long run, are hoping to do, is hoping to solve some of the challenges that Google has been trying to address for years. So Google have said themselves that very often if somebody makes a query, they have to make eight questions before they can get to an answer. And the multidimensional search that you're talking about where they would also have some of the subcategories in that question, and whether it's birch or oak or pine or whatever on the log cabin, what kind of log, for instance. When you're thinking about those questions, these are things that Google have been thinking about for ages. So this was something they were trying to address with MUM, for instance. This is something that they've been trying to address with lots of different ways with some of the disambiguation they've added to the knowledge graphs and the featured snippets where you have the drop-down where you'd say somebody would search for blogging and they'd say more about this topic, things you should consider, all of those sorts of things. Google have been trying to address this in a lot of ways, and I think that they're trying to see if they can address it with the AI Overviews. And it stands to reason that yeah, you would have a more rich collection of search results. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to switch topics really quick because I want to talk about why there are so many data discrepancies among the AI Overview data. You have certain tools saying X, certain tools saying Y. So first off, one of the things to look for is consensus. So for example, generally speaking, most of the data studies that have come out, there are obviously outliers, are basically saying as of the time of this recording, by the way, that AI Overviews appear at around or anywhere between 10 and 20% of all SERPs. I think SEO ranking had it at 12%. I could be misremembering, but it's generally around there. So look for a trend. I wouldn't rely on the exact data from the exact study the exact way you normally would with an SEO study because I feel like pulling the data here is very, very difficult and the tools aren't really built for you doing multiple click-throughs. And then Google's also changing formats all the time and getting it right is incredibly difficult. So while the tools may be built to scrape rank, they're not built to scrape AI Overviews the same way. I'll prove it to you. If you look at how when AI Overviews came out, at least in Search Labs, and you look at when the SEO tools started, actually being able to track them we're talking months later, which meant they had to do months of development in order to change how they're tracking things. So I think that one of the reasons why you're seeing a little bit of discrepancies is A, because the AI Overviews are changing all the time, and B, pulling this data is just wonky. It's a little bit tricky, so look for trends. Crystal Carter: It's also tricky too because there are so many different... I think that we're not seeing how consistent it is. So sometimes I think you've been looking at how often the AI Overviews are switching links, and certainly, for some of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get to that. Crystal Carter: And some of the AI Overviews that I've been tracking, which includes some of my own content, I've been seeing those, and there's not entirely consistent on some of those. So for instance, one of the things that I've seen is that they'll have the core AI Overview and then they'll have a few topical links, a few recommended links on the right. And sometimes what you see is that the recommended links on the right aren't referenced in the AI Overview. So in the AI Overview, they have links within that, then they have links on the side and they're not necessarily the same links. So that's interesting, and I think that also what I'm starting to see is that on some of the search results they'll say, or sorry, on some of the search tools on their cache, they're saying, "Oh, this is an AI Overview." And then you go to the SERP and then it isn't. And so I think that it's still early days in terms of the data, which makes it tricky to track and it's still early days in terms of Google figuring out how they want to roll this out. So it's really a live space at the moment. Mordy Oberstein: That's totally true, and I want to get the URL thing, okay? That's the next thing I want to cover really quickly is that what do you do with all this data? Okay. Oh, AI Overviews are in 10% of all SERPs, I don't know, 15% of all SERPs, or 95% of all information queries, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. But there's two fundamental questions. One, I have absolutely no clue about what I'm trying to get a clue about. One is how often are users engaging with the AI Overview, how often are they not? Or subset of that, how often are they engaging with it, bouncing out of it, and going to the organic results? So even if they are engaging with it, are they still going to the organic results anyway? And if they are engaging with the AI Overviews, what's the stability of URLs? In other words, is it Google swapping out URLs all the time and there's no stability? In other words, what's the real impact of AI Overviews on traffic and then what's the real necessity of trying to optimize, whatever that means, for an AI Overview? Even if they are impacting traffic, but Google's swapping out the URLs on a daily basis, you have no market share. That's a waste of time. Crystal Carter: Right. Because if people aren't clicking on them, which we don't know what the click-through rate is on it, if people aren't clicking on them, should you optimize for them if you are getting straight to the SERP and things? So then it's a question of whether or not Google's taking the share of the click or whether or not there's a click at all, which we don't know if there's a click at all, or whether or not somebody else who's in the AI Overview is taking it. And I think that if we think about the featured snippets element, featured snippets are really, it's very much a similar evolution from when we didn't have featured snippets to when we do have featured snippets. Because in some cases, the featured snippet gives you enough information so that you don't need to make a click. That is true. It is true. Mordy Oberstein: And that's when the format of featured snippet matters most. The paragraph featured snippet you might have the answer right there. List is usually not the full list, so you usually get a higher click-through rate. Crystal Carter: Right. So these things will change, but the visibility is very important. So if people are constantly seeing your content in the featured snippet, then they'll go, "Okay, this is a great source." Mordy Oberstein: Totally, 100%. Crystal Carter: And I can just go straight there and get the information rather than having to go to Google to find the thing, they'll probably have it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think you always want to be in the AI... If there's one there, you always want to be there, which brings the question: what about that URL stability? For example, I just did a study... I didn't just do a study. I did a study 10 years ago, maybe less, maybe seven or eight. I don't remember what I ate for breakfast, so I don't remember what year it was when I did the study. And it was featured snippet URL market share. If you're in the featured snippet, how long do you tend to last in the featured snippet? And basically, the pattern that I saw years ago, I don't know if this holds true, is that there's generally speaking, two URLs: a dominant URL, and a secondary URL. The dominant URL stands in the featured snippet around 75% of the time, and then the non-dominant URL is in there 25% of the time. So that's pretty good. If you could be one of those two URLs either way, that's at least decent market share, 25%. With the URLs inside of AI Overviews, what's that pattern look like? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, this is it. So it'd be interesting to see how that develops and it's so fresh, it's so new, particularly in different markets as well that we'll have to carry out the data and I think it's going to have to be a little bit manual for a while. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little wonky because a little peek behind the curtains, I've been working with Semrush to try to do something like this. And we did one version, had to redo it because Google changed the format of the URLs inside the AI Overviews, they don't want that data. And even then, it's still a little bit tricky. When I'm telling you it's tricky, I'm not telling you because I think it's tricky. I'm working with companies and I'm telling you it's tricky. I don't know if I could spill the tea or not. I don't know when this episode is coming out. I don't know when the study's going to come out. I will tell you- Crystal Carter: Spill the tea, Mordy. It's your podcast, it's your study. Me too. You do what you want. Mordy Oberstein: I already drank all the tea. I'm literally holding my tea mug upside down. Oh, I just actually... There was one drop left and I just dropped it on my keyboard. Crystal Carter: You can't tell us about all this juicy stuff and then hold back. That's just- Mordy Oberstein: I'll say it's less stable than you think it is. And I'll throw one stat at you. If you're out of there over a 31-day period, and this is only for AI Overviews where the AI Overview showed for at least 20 out of 30, 31 days. So you're talking about AI Overviews that are already consistent. If they're not consistent, then what's the point of URL consistency? The whole thing's not consistent, right? So I guess I'm saying all this data is so layered, so let's now only look at AI Overviews that are consistent. They show up 20 out of 30, 31 days, whatever we looked at. If you're out, you're out. Only 45% or so of the URLs that got kicked out ever came back in over that data period. Crystal Carter: Over the course of how long? Mordy Oberstein: 31 days, Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, maybe they come back after 60 days. I don't know. Secondary data point, I don't remember this exactly off the top of my head, but it's not like Google... Because maybe you'll say, "Okay." When Google's swapping the URL out... That's how my brain works. It's why I'm good at data studies. Maybe it's... And it takes out the Wix SEO Hub and it puts in another URL from the Wix SEO. All right, that's fine, right? I still have the market share. I think 100% of these AI Overviews that were in this category saw domain changes, meaning Google's not just saying, "Oh, one URL for one website." It's swapping, I don't know to the extent, but significantly so, swapping out domains. And when you add it all together that very few AI Overviews have the level of consistency that you're looking for. Very few URLs are returning, and a lot of domains are switching. It doesn't paint a very stable picture as of right now, as of the time of this recording. It could all change tomorrow. Who knows? Crystal Carter: See, this is interesting because I think this plays back into what Mark's talking about is that the SERP right now is a little bit unstable. We do a weekly or a daily news thing with Barry, and he's constantly like SERP volatility, SERP volatility, SERP volatility. If it is the case that the AI Overview optimization is essentially SEO, then it would stand to reason that the URLs would switch around in a volatile SERP. That would make sense. I think that this also points to, if you're thinking about AI Overviews, thinking about some of the information around... Or some of the fact that there are still some big, big players in terms of the AI Overviews of who has the most visibility. So Kevin Indig shared who's got the biggest share of AI Overviews, and he was saying that the biggest one is YouTube. Again, that's really similar to featured snippets. Then followed by Wikipedia, followed by YouTube mobile, followed by LinkedIn, and then followed by a few others, including usual suspects like Healthline, and WebMD, and Mayo Clinic, and things like that. We also see that those same folks see a big share on the SERP, and those same folks will have a fairly stable level of visibility on the SERP. They have fairly stable rankings in terms of where Google shows their domain and how often that Google shows their domain. But yeah, I think it's a really fascinating time in research and looking at this particular part of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. But you were saying what Mark is saying, "Do good SEO." Crystal Carter: Yo. Mordy Oberstein: Just do good SEO. That will get you there. Crystal Carter: Right? Everybody wants some fancy thing, but it's like people are like, "How do I lose weight?" It's like, "Eat better and do some exercise." It's nothing complicated. Mordy Oberstein: Just the execution part, that's the hard part. Crystal Carter: That's true. That's true. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Some of it gets a little tricky. Crystal Carter: Because I love donuts, so if I could just have a delete donut. Have donut, delete donut, if I could just have that, that would be great. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love donuts so much. Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts. Crystal Carter: Oh, I love Dunkin'. Mordy Oberstein: I love Dunkin' flavors. They have better flavors, but the donut itself, I think Krispy. Crystal Carter: Krispy Kreme is great, but I find Krispy Kreme to be very expensive, and also, they don't oblige my dietary requirements, whereas Dunkin' Donuts comes in better for me. So it's not a flavor thing. It's not explicitly flavor, it's for other considerations. Mordy Oberstein: Either way, donuts for the win. You know what else for the win? Tracking your AI Overviews. Global AI Overview data is great, super interesting, super informative, super everything, but how do you track your own AI Overviews? Well, find out as we look at the data providers as we go tool time on the SERP's Up Podcast. All right, so there's a whole heap of tools that do different things. I don't know, like Semrush and SE Ranking. Let's start with them maybe. I found them. They both have it in position tracking and then they were like organic research so you can see how stable your AI Overviews are and what keywords you have. And you can also analyze the competitor and see how many overviews they have, which I think is cool for looking at brand power for example. If I look at, I don't know, Nike versus New Balance, which brand is more powerful? Or the one that has a ton of AI Overviews kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. I think it's interesting to see that and I think that it's great to see some of these different tools showing this because people need to know. So I think that what is their general summary for the overall visibility on AI Overviews? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, if you run it through the organic research tool and then you can filter out by SERP feature, you can see all of the AI Overviews that that website or that domain is grabbing. Crystal Carter: And on their Semrush sensor, they also have included it under their SERP feature there so you can get an idea of the general trend. So according to- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but that data set is super normalized. I think that data set is... Because you're looking... I think now they're showing 2 or 3%, something like that. I know that data set because I work with it when I'm doing their algorithm update stuff. It's not reflective of what you do every day. The Moz data set would be. The MozCast is very much high search volume keywords, assuming that they're informational kind of thing. That would align with AI Overviews. I think that the Semrush data is just more normalized across the board, which is what I mean. This data, looking at the numbers, it's so hard. So hard. Crystal Carter: So then help me understand this. So according to their Semrush sensor, they're currently saying that for the US, on desktop, it's showing at 1.23% of search results and on 1.63% of search results. So what are you saying when you're giving that information? Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is, okay, that's interesting because you compare this to say, I don't know like what Mark was talking about, or SE Ranking, and BrightEdge, and their data. The Semrush data set is lower, but I think it's because they're using their volatility data set to track it. When they track the volatility of SERP features, they have your featured snippets, and local packs, and images, they're not creating a separate data set that targets that feature or aligns with that feature. It's a universal data set to track all volatility. So it's not built... The way I search, I search mostly for informational keywords. That data set is not built to function the way I or most people search. It's meant to try to track the web. But AI Overview, so you're trying to track those. If you wanted to really see that you would have to include more things like how people actually search, in which case you would probably see a higher number. So I would look at the trend, not at the actual number in that one, and the trend's up. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and the other thing I think is interesting on the trend is that the Semrush sensor, for instance, filters by categories. And if you look at arts and entertainment, for instance, it's showing AI Overviews for 0.14%. But if you look at health, and this goes, again, back to some of the data that Kevin was showing, that some of the top AI Overviews include Healthline, WebMD, Mayo Clinic. That's three out of 10 for the top 10. And this is saying that health is showing 3.63% of the time. So again, maybe the numbers, maybe the number percentage might not be hard fast- Mordy Oberstein: But the trends, yeah. Crystal Carter: Exactly, but the trend that, on average, it's showing 1.63%. On average, it's showing a certain amount, but it's showing three times as much in the health sectors is interesting. And that also follows with some of the data that Lily's been sharing around that particular sector. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's so many tools like the seoClarity tool, for example. They show you the actual AI Overview content itself so you can actually see the snapshot of the AI Overview and what's actually in there. So you can see, obviously, where you're being impacted or where your competitors are being impacted, but you can get an actual sense what does that actually mean by looking at the actual content and the snapshot of the AI Overview. Which is great if you are, for example... If you're not in the U.S. and your clients are in the U.S. and you want to see what that actually looks like without using a VPN. You can use a VPN also, but you can use seoClarity and it's right there. Crystal Carter: Right. And another one that's got some is ZipTie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ZipTie is interesting. I checked them out. Crystal Carter: So ZipTie.dev is detecting AI Overviews. They are claiming that they're detecting 17 times more AI Overviews than certain other tools. So they were checking us. According to ziptie.com, wix.com is showing a 27% of AI Overviews, which is interesting. Yeah, so they've got various different tools. I think they've got a freemium setup as well and they've been putting out some reports around that. So shout out to Tomasz Rudzki for some of his data there because that's really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's cool because they'll tell you with AI Overview, remember there was one where there was automatically triggered, and then one format where it wasn't automatically triggered. They'll tell you which one it was, or they'll tell you if you have the AI Overview and the featured snippet, or just the AI Overview, or just the featured snippet. They'll tell you what AI Overview features are inside of it. Is there a topic breakdown? Are there pros and cons lists? Are there bullet points? Is there a shopping list? They'll actually break it down for you. So it's a really interesting tool. It seems like a really powerful tool for tracking AI Overviews for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely, and they've got their... On their blog, they're sharing a lot of data. So for instance, they were saying that, in June, it rose from 8% in June to 11% in August, which is interesting over things. And again, this goes back to your trend point, so just like it's on the up. How much? It's difficult to quantify exactly, but yeah, they are also breaking it down on their blog as to how many... What types of terms people are seeing it on and things like that, so yeah, interesting times in SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. We'll link to all those tools in the show notes. Check them all out, see which one is best for you. We are agnostic here on the SERP's Up Podcast, so pick what is best for you. You know what is a great place to learn about AI Overviews and the latest news happening around AI Overviews? I find that to be such a tongue twister, by the way, AI Overviews. Crystal Carter: It just makes me think of Old McDonald. I'm not going to lie. Mordy Oberstein: The what? Crystal Carter: Old McDonald, like A-I-A-I-O, like E-I-E-I-O, come on. Mordy Oberstein: That’s a great connection. That's great. Crystal Carter: Yeah, like << On the SERP there was a... And Google had a SERP, A-I-A-I-O. And you get a link, and a link over here, everyone link, link, link, link, link >> Mordy Oberstein: By the way, no one actually... We should have a separate conversation about the actual impact CTR-wise. Side note, I see a bunch of cases where a lot of rankings in AI Overviews and not real traffic change. Crystal Carter: As a user, I very often skip over it. As a user, I very often skip over it. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if they check it out and come back, maybe then I click... I'm interested if they click on it and just don't even see the links and just go back and click on the links in the SERP, that would be interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's interesting. But also, I find that sometimes the AI Overview doesn't make any sense for what I'm searching. I'll search for one thing and then it's- Mordy Oberstein: Eat glue! Crystal Carter: Well, yeah, I'm searching for one thing and then it shows up with something else, and I'm like, it's not what I'm talking about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's very broad. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think the other thing with the AI Overviews, they're trying to make a cohesive statement in the AI Overview, and they're trying to make a cohesive statement about whatever it is you're looking at. And sometimes if you were to look up Bluetooth speaker connectivity, right? Now, I might be looking for how I can connect all of the Bluetooth speakers in my house, so I don't have to find each individual one. I can just play Shakira on all of them. I might be thinking about how would I do that, but I've only typed in Bluetooth connectivity. And they might be like, "Oh, Bluetooth works like this, and this, and this, and this, and that, and that, and that." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Not what you wanted. Crystal Carter: And I'm like, "Y'all, that's not what I'm interested in." And so sometimes what's on the SERP is more aligned with what I'm interested in. And sometimes it's not, but I think that the nature of the beast means that sometimes it doesn't align, and it'll be interesting to see how they get better. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we digressed, by the way. I was trying to get into the Snappy News by saying, "You should try..." No, that's my bad. I did that. If you're trying to keep up on the news on AIOs, you always want to check out what Barry Schwartz is doing over at SE Roundtable, but until then, check out this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two from Barry Schwartz, both from seroundtable.com. First Google AI Overviews not linking to sites hit by helpful content update. This is from, per report, this got started by Lily Ray who reported on X, "Hey, when you type, who is XYZ's site?" And insert site affected by the HCU, the Google AI Overview result seems to not include links to that site, yada, yada, yada, yada. Glenn Gabe tested the same thing, and he says, "Yeah, it looks that way." He said even for the sites that, quote, "bounce back a bit with the August core update, and they don't show up in the AI Overviews for their own brand site." It's fascinating. It feels to me like that's like a glitch in the matrix, especially if it's a website that yes, got hit by one of the previous core updates, or the initial... Not the initial, but the last of the HCU. That should be the name of a movie, the Last of the HCUs, back in September 2023. If it's your own website, if people are particularly specifically Googling, "What is name of website.com?" I feel like you should show up there regardless of what Google thinks of you algorithmically in terms of ranking for informational navigation... I mean informational, commercial transactional searches related to your queries. It's a navigational search. Would you not rank navigationally? If someone typed in, "What is blah, blah blah website.com," you would show up number one regardless of any algorithm. I mean, unless you're like manual action kind of stuff, but so why not in the AI Overview? Then there's a little bit of speculation on X about Barry's own website, seroundtable.com, which I check out each and every day, and which you should too. And if you want, you can also get a dose of seroundtable.com on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub where we have It's New, our daily dose of SEO News with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn. Plugging is over. Barry's site didn't seem to show up in the AI Overviews, which is just weird. I did a few of these searches related to seroundtable.com myself. Sometimes Barry does show up there, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes it's just his X handle. Sometimes it is the actual website. I found one where you search for what is seroundtable.com. So then Barry does get the link in the AIO overview, but Apple gets the featured snippet for some kind of search engine round table thing that they have in the app store that who the heck knows. That's not this. That's not the real Search Engine Roundtable. Barry is. But for example, if you search for what is search engine around table website, seroundtable.com does not show up in there as of the recording of this recording. The recording of this recording, that's not redundant. Only Barry's X profile shows up, so that's interesting. So again, it just seems wonky, for lack of a better word, or glitch in the matricky, for lack of a better word. Anyway, on to the second article. Also, again, reminding you from Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com, which you may or may not find in an AIO overview near you. DOJ may break up Google as remedy to monopoly ruling. I see this on It's New. First, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez break up, and now Google. How many breakups can I handle? I can't. I just can't. This is reporting... A lot of it was reported on CNBC, which Barry links to in the article. I don't want to get into the whole 32-page document issued by the DOJ. You could read that on your own time because that's not snappy. Anything 32 pages is not snappy. But Barry did pull out some highlights and Barry writes, what is proposed is not just a break-up, which could split off Chrome, Android, and many other things. "But also," says Barry, "Google will make available its competitors' data within its search index and models. Google will make available its AI-assisted search features." Again, whoa. "Google to make available its ad ranking data, policy regulations about retaining its data, limitations on its partnership with Apple and others," that does make sense, "and more." So some of that is just like, "Wow, just take everything." It's a full-on garage sale. We're taking everything. So that's really interesting. I'll link to Barry's article in the show notes, which links to all the other links that you need. If you want to deep dive into 32 pages of this stuff. I do not. The minute I hear law and legal, I'm out. So I'm out. That's this week's Snappy News. I'd like to see AI Overview Barry. You ask Barry and it just spits out a summary, but the summary is two words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right? Mordy Oberstein: Reads. Crystal Carter: Not new. Mordy Oberstein: How do I connect my Bluetooth speaker, AI Overview Barry? With a plug. Crystal Carter: Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. With electricity. Complete brevity. Brevity AI Overviews by Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: And efficiency. Mordy Oberstein: Efficiency. I had a pocket in my shirt. I put my phone in it. For reference, go look at an old episode of It's New for that. Which brings us to our follow of the week, and our follow of the week is someone we already mentioned this week, so you should be following him anyway by this point. You should have listened to the episode and clicked follow on this person's profile because we mentioned their name. That's a little much. It's Rich Sanger. Rich was one of the folks who, first off, we met him a few times at our New York City digital marketing meetup at the SEOFOMO meetup we did in New York City at the Wix Playground. So Rich is a great guy. I think he's a Red Sox fan, so I won't hold that against him, but that's fine too. But he did the study with Authoritas on how often the overlap is between the organic results and the AI Overviews. Again, we'll link to that study in the show notes, but he puts out a lot of really thought-provoking blog posts that he writes. So it was a great follow out there on X and on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's worth checking out folks who are doing good content like that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and they're just good people even if they're Red Sox fans. Crystal Carter: It's not all about baseball. Mordy Oberstein: Is it? Is it not all about baseball? I'm literally wearing a baseball jersey. I feel like it is. Crystal Carter: If you build it, they will come. Mordy Oberstein: Ease my pain. That's what I tell my kids when they're making me crazy, "Ease his pain." When I say his, I mean mine. Crystal Carter: I try to think of... But literally, if they build it, they will come. I think that's the only baseball quote I got. No, no, no. There's that, what is it? Yeah, I don't know. To be fair, I think of the Sandlot when I'm putting together a content strategy because in the Sandlot, he points at where he is going to hit it, and I feel like that's what you're doing when you're doing a content strategy, or a campaign strategy, or any kind of marketing thing. Because you don't know what's going to happen, but you're like, "I'm going to put it right there, and it's going to do the thing." And I think of the Sandlot when I'm doing that. Mordy Oberstein: Also, a great movie. A lot of great baseball movies, but the first movie, in case you not a baseball nut or a movie nut, is Field of Dreams, which is one of the best movies, I think, ever made. Crystal Carter: It's a good movie. It's a good movie. Mordy Oberstein: That last thing, the last line, "Hey Dad, do you want to have a catch?" Bawling every time. Every time. Every time. You go on YouTube, by the way, I've actually done this. You watch reaction videos of people who... And you just see them bawling, it's crazy. Check that out. Anyway, that was off-topic and off the rails. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to do SEO for a sub-brand. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, and webinars, and SEO courses on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. 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SEO shouldn’t be siloed. Mordy and Crystal discuss how SEOs should think about social media teams, branding, and other marketing channels. Organic search is just one channel to bring traffic and revenue to a website. What works for one channel may or may not work on another, but you’ll never know if you don’t communicate with the rest of the marketing team. Your website should be considered the HQ for all digital activities, and its user experience should be consistent no matter the channel a user arrives from. As a result, SEO, social media, PPC, etc., should align with consistent messaging, content, and imagery. Depending on the size of your organization and how many hats you have to wear as a marketer, prioritization can be critical, according to iPullRank’s Garrett Sussman, featured guest on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. SEO may take six to 12 months to move the revenue needle, while PPC or social may be doing it today. Prioritize based on what’s driving revenue now while making time investments in other tactics for the future. Knowing your audience is crucial when it comes to an omnichannel approach to marketing. A good way to understand who your audience is online is by using tools like SparkToro. With it, you can not only identify your audience but discover where they’re at and what they like. We’ll dive into how you can use the tool to fuel all of your marketing efforts from SEO to social! Back The need for an all-channels approach to SEO SEO shouldn’t be siloed. Mordy and Crystal discuss how SEOs should think about social media teams, branding, and other marketing channels. Organic search is just one channel to bring traffic and revenue to a website. What works for one channel may or may not work on another, but you’ll never know if you don’t communicate with the rest of the marketing team. Your website should be considered the HQ for all digital activities, and its user experience should be consistent no matter the channel a user arrives from. As a result, SEO, social media, PPC, etc., should align with consistent messaging, content, and imagery. Depending on the size of your organization and how many hats you have to wear as a marketer, prioritization can be critical, according to iPullRank’s Garrett Sussman, featured guest on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. SEO may take six to 12 months to move the revenue needle, while PPC or social may be doing it today. Prioritize based on what’s driving revenue now while making time investments in other tactics for the future. Knowing your audience is crucial when it comes to an omnichannel approach to marketing. A good way to understand who your audience is online is by using tools like SparkToro. With it, you can not only identify your audience but discover where they’re at and what they like. We’ll dive into how you can use the tool to fuel all of your marketing efforts from SEO to social! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 16 | December 7, 2022 | 29 MIN 00:00 / 29:14 This week’s guests Garrett Sussman Garrett Sussman is the Demand Generation Manager at SEO Agency iPullRank. He’s been in the content marketing and SEO game for the past 10+ years. He's the host of The SEO Weekly and the Rankable Podcast. Iced coffee, comic book movies, and Philly sports fuel his soul. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Surfs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the Surfs Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the wonderful, the fabulous, the incredible Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. It is I. I am here. I am awake, even though I had one hour of sleep last night. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'm totally jet lagged. I have no idea what's going on right now. Crystal Carter: This is going to be a completely manic episode, people. Strap in. It's about to get crazy because we're both pretty much delirious. Mordy Oberstein: Either that or I'm going to fall asleep in the middle of recording. Crystal Carter: It's fine, it's fine. Some people are really into that. They call it ASMR and people, they'll just find something and they'll crinkle it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, crinkly noises. My kids are like books and they're babies, like the crinkle noise. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and it's a thing. People really like it. Or it's when people eat ice or something. Mordy Oberstein: I always found that annoying to be around people eating the ice because they're chewing on it and it's so loud. Crystal Carter: Oh. Oh man, oh. Mordy Oberstein: That wasn't going where you thought it was going. Crystal Carter: That's incredibly annoying. Mordy Oberstein: It's so annoying, right? Crystal Carter: I find it annoying, other people making noises. However, I do sometimes post on my Instagram, I just post pictures of waves going back and forth, for my own personal ASMR. So, yeah. I also have one of jellyfish just floating around. Mordy Oberstein: They are just very relaxing. It's like- Crystal Carter: It's very relaxing. So sometimes I just look at it. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well on that note, the Surf's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can manage so much of your entire digital marketing presence under one roof with Ascend by Wix, create videos for social, curate newsletters, set up social banners and schedule posts, plus a whole slew of marketing integrations. It's omni channel marketing with Ascend by Wix, which is very appropriate for today's show because we're talking about multiple channels and SEO. Crystal Carter: So all the channels- Mordy Oberstein: See what I did there. Crystal Carter: The plug, I see it. Mordy Oberstein: And this show's topic. Bringing you together- Crystal Carter: Look at that. It's almost as if you knew we would do it. Mordy Oberstein: Right there. Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: Next level. That's right. Today's show we're talking about the vital need for an all channel approach to SEO. Why you should think about your site as your HQ for all digital activity. How to be consistent across all channels. How to align your SEO work with your other digital marketing activities and the need to consider other channels. What? Yes, to support your SEO efforts. Plus I pull ranks Garrett Sussman stops by to share how he prioritizes all of these cross channel activities and his SEO all at the same time because there's so much prioritization to do. Legit. Also, we'll share a tool that can help you maximize your wider digital efforts. And of course we have your snappy news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO, nay more marketing awesomeness. Let's cross the channel together as episode 16 of the Surf's Up podcast has arrived. Each week I feel like adding that last little line there, let's cross the channel together. I'm getting better and better. Crystal Carter: I feel like that crossing the channel, because living in England, I'm like, oh yeah, people swim across the channel and they're like, yay. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I was literally thinking about the English channel when I wrote that. And I'm not from England. Crystal Carter: Right. That's what I'm thinking. It's like, yeah, I feel like, I don't know. It was the best of search. It was the worst of search. We're getting literary people. This is high brow podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: My association to all this is back in, I don't know, 1920s or thirties or forties or fifties, whatever it was, people swimming across the- Crystal Carter: Just sometime in the 20th century. Mordy Oberstein: Sometime when they had black and white images and people, the people are about to jump into swim across the channel. This is my association. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And they've all got the long swimming suits and the caps. Mordy Oberstein: The caps. Crystal Carter: And they're like, oh, here I go into the sea. Mordy Oberstein: And here we go into cross channel SEO. SEO is amazing. We're all here for SEO. SEO is stable, long lasting organic growth, and it provides, it is good. SEO is good. However, it's really important to have a larger digital strategy that works cohesively. I think, possibly. Your sites or the sites that you work with, they all have goals and they, all those goals go well beyond Google, for example. Every site has an intended audience. And as such, you need to think about how you present yourself to them. Whether it be the tone you take on the site, how your site is constructed, the design of the website, whether it be you speak to them on social media, whether you speak to them, organic search, you have to consider all this. We know this by the way, is brand marketing and your SEO needs to align. Check this out to how the brand thinks about itself and presents itself overall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Crazy thought, right? Yes. So there's no sense in wasting time focusing on keyword opportunity if it's completely off brand or whatnot for that site. Crystal Carter: Indeed. And also I think that with the keywords, think about how your keywords apply to other channels as well. So people are going to be searching for those keywords. So some of the keywords that people are searching for on certain different social media platforms or other platforms might also apply to what you have on your website. If there's a hashtag that you're doing really well on TikTok or Twitter or wherever, then you might want to have a section that says, what is the hashtag about? Or include it somewhere in your copy so that people know what it is and so that people can connect it. Mordy Oberstein: Which is exactly the point. There's so much you need to consider for your online visibility and it all needs to work hand in hand together, SEO included. And I think it all starts with the idea or the mindset that you site is a hub or a headquarters for all of your digital activity. It's not just a place that's send traffic to Google to or from, but it's a core of everything you do with your online presence. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I mean, your symbol on the mountain in terms of SEO, everything the light touches is SEO. You should be thinking about all of it as part of it, and it might seem overwhelming or something, but the way that users use the internet, it comes across from lots of different channels. So users might find you in other places, but you need to make sure that whether they find you on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Reddit or Twitch or wherever, or even the Amazon Marketplace for instance, that they have a place to land on that is your website. And there's lots of different ways that you can do that. So when you think about your website, one of the things that I thinks really useful, for instance, that if you think about it particularly is at HQ, is your data feeds. So a lot of times when people think about data feeds, they think about eCommerce sites because an eCommerce site will have a feed of their products. And that's one of the ways that you can distribute it to lots of different channels. So you can distribute it to Instagram, to Facebook, you can distribute it to Amazon, wherever, where you're selling products, Google Merchant, et cetera. But there's also other content that also uses feeds. And if you organize the content on your website in that way, you can spread your net far and wide but consistently. So for instance, an RSS is a kind of data feed. It's old school, but it's a kind of data feed. Mordy Oberstein: I used to use it all the time. People rely on it all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time for podcasts. This podcast is distributed via an RSS feed. There's also Java feeds, Java sports will use a Java feed for instance, anything for other content, there's also things like that as well. So don't just think about, and you'll also, your YouTube videos. Those will also be distributed via an RSS feed. So there's lots of different things there. So that's one that's really important. But also I think it's important to think about, if you Google now how search works, you'll actually get a little bar at the top that breaks it down and they say, what do you mean how search works on Google? Or how it works on Bing or how it works on Amazon or how it works on Meta or how it works on Yahoo because they know that users are searching in lots of different ways. And depending on which vertical you're in, it might not just be Google. That's their first port of call. I think for eCommerce in America, Amazon is actually the first place that people look for content or people look for shopping information. So if you're thinking about your brand as only being one channel, you're going to be missing a lot of opportunities Mordy Oberstein: For sure and it goes both ways. It goes in distributing out and pulling in. So the tldr, when you think of your website, not just as a way, okay, they're going from Google to my website, I need a place for them to land. I need something for Google to rank. But when you think of it a little more holistically, you're thinking about, this is the epicenter of all my digital marketing activity. So as you mentioned, right when it goes out, you need to have a place, you need to be able to distribute it out. But also when they come back in from the various channels, let's say you've done your distribution, now people are coming in from Instagram, they're coming in from YouTube, they're coming from the RSS feed, making sure that your website is constructed in a way that it speaks to those audiences the right way. For example, if you're pulling in tons of people from Instagram and they get to your website and it's essentially text based- Crystal Carter: Right, or not mobile first. Mordy Oberstein: Right, it's a complete disconnect. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's complete disconnect. It's a complete waste of your efforts. Mordy Oberstein: But it happens all the time because people just think of their websites. Okay, my website is my website and I'm getting people from Google and social media is social media. It's not. Social media should connect back to your website and the audience that you're pulling in from searchall, from social. So I said, I just said search all that's amazing. Crystal Carter: You just invented that. Mordy Oberstein: But from social, not from searchall, but from social, it could be very different. The audience you're pulling in from search and you need to make sure that the website speaks to both at the same time, which goes back to a previous episode. You will link to the show notes of dealing with multiple intents on the same page and the same website. Crystal Carter: But it also goes back to the idea of thinking about the user journey. So I think that if you're planning to do multiple channels, make sure that you've explored what the journey is like for the customer coming from those different channels. We talked about Google Search Console recently. It's worth looking at your back links in Google Search Console. They aggregate them into different groups. So for instance, they'll say their top linking sites. And I looked on a site that wasn't commercial and for instance they had a bunch from Amazon and I was like, why do they have a bunch from Amazon? Well actually because their podcast was on Amazon Prime and it was being distributed that way. And also because other people were talking about their content or talking about their product on Amazon in different ways. So look into your back links and Google Search Console, you can see a trend and you might see that there's a lot of people coming from channels that you weren't expecting them to be coming from. And if that's the case, then you can follow that journey, see where they're coming from and see whether they're letting on to something that's appropriate, whether they're landing on something that makes sense for them, makes sense for you, helps you build your brand. Mordy Oberstein: And that is consistent across the board. I think the second point we'll call that to consider where you're doing all of this, which you should be doing, is that whatever your messaging is, whatever your design is, where all the language that you're putting out, whether it be latent or manifest content, not to get too Freudian there needs to be consistent across all channels. So if you're posting on something on YouTube or on Instagram and it looks completely or sounds completely different once they get to the website, that's an enormous disconnect. And I think it's a problem when you are so focused just on SEO, just on search, where you're writing in a certain way, which again, you shouldn't be doing it all together, but it kind of sometimes does happen where you're kind of writing for the search engine. One of the problems outside the fact that's not what gets you to rank well. My opinion is that when people are coming from other channels and other mediums, it sounds off. Not only is it a negative and it sounds off, but it doesn't let you do a positive, which is to build an identity, to build a brand, to build up branding. So you have to be consistent and you have to think about how whatever from whatever channel and all channels, you should be consistent across the board in how you speak and how you present yourself, whether it be on social, whether it be on YouTube, or whether it be on the site itself through Google search, Crystal Carter: Even on Google, when people search for your brand, they are going to get lots of the content from these different channels pulling through at the same time. So if you are inconsistent, people will see it straight away. If you look up a restaurant review on Google for instance, you'll get content from the restaurant. You'll get content from Google business profile. You'll get content from TripAdvisor. You'll get content from other restaurant thing, Yelp. Things like that. You'll also get content from your Instagram, from your Facebook from that sort of thing. So if you have consistent brand positioning that will help you to be consistent across those things. And also help ensure that customers are having a consistent experience with you across both your digital and your IRL spaces. And it can be difficult to do, but it's almost like when I talk about visual search, for instance, I say consistency is key. If somebody says, oh, let's change up the logo, don't. Is this the same with your branding? Pick something, stick with it, go with it for a while. If you think about Coca-Cola, they haven't changed your branding in years. If you think about Apple, I mean they changed their logo, but their vibe has been pretty much the same for, I don't know, 20 years. Mordy Oberstein: And it's not that you can't do it, but it's very much an uphill battle, which is really the point before you do SEO, before you do social media marketing, what you really fundamentally need to do is decide who you are, what you do, and how you go about doing it so that now you can just do all the things automatically. I've seen it so many times where on social, the brand position itself is one way. They're rather fun, they're vibrant and whatever. And then you get to the website and it looks very almost too professional for what they're trying to do and how they're trying to speak. And there's an enormous disconnect there. And I think that comes about because you have a social strategy, you have an SEO strategy, but you don't have an overall brand strategy. And that the brand strategy should be the other thing that should feed what you talk about and how you talk about it in a lot of ways. And there's tremendous amount of overlap between SEO, social, whatever it is, and what you're doing in the brand side. Crystal Carter: And I don't necessarily think that this means that SEO should take over social media from the social media managers. Social media managers have a very complicated job. But not all heroes wear capes. But social media managers really do the business. And I don't think we should necessarily take over, but we should be in conversation. The people who set the brand guidelines, who are doing the branding, designing, that sort of thing, who are putting together your brand kit, whatever, that sort of thing, they should be having a conversation. We shouldn't be siloed. These channels shouldn't be siloed. We should be working together. Mordy Oberstein: It should all be together. It all be about who you're targeting, how you're targeting them. So everybody needs to be on that from the get go, the SEO, the social media manager, the branding marketing manager, brand marketing manager, whatever, making it up as I go along here. Doesn't matter. That's how we roll. Crystal Carter: Is that your title? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Which I guess, actually, anyway. But it should all work together. And especially because, and this goes back to I guess how SEO works. It's a slow burn, especially when you're starting off. So you may get more traction initially on social media, on paid advertising on whatever platform it is. And then SEO only comes into in terms of earning into the picture six months to a year later. So you want to make sure you're consistent across the board because the social might be your main channel of income while you're waiting to start putting out more content and be able to start actually ranking. Crystal Carter: You can use one to support the other. If you see something that works well on your SEO, then you can put it on your social. If you see something that works well on your social, you can put it on your SEO, like on your content stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, bring it. Mordy Oberstein: But if you can't do it if it's not consistent, by the way, right, if it's not consistent. You can't repurpose it. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. So I think there's lots of opportunities and Google's giving users a much more holistic, much more multimedia, much richer content experience all the time. So the more you are connected to multiple channels and that you are managing and actively involved in those multiple channels, the better you'll be positioned in this multimodal world that we're going into. Mordy Oberstein: Totally true. So if you're in SEO and you're listening to this, it's all one song. There's a famous story with Neil Young who's a singer back from the seventies, and there's a story where he was at a concert it was his concert, and someone yells out all your songs sound the same and he yells back, it's all one song. It's all one song. So you as an SEO need to be involved with what's happening on social. You need to be how it's happening on the brand side. You need to be involved in what's happening on the content side. It should be obvious at this point because it's all one song. You need to understand how it's all working. What the messaging is going out is so that you can incorporate, repurpose, and deal with what you do the right way. Which brings us to prioritization because that's a lot. Crystal Carter: That's a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Now all of a sudden you started some little SEO corner over here and do my little SEO thing, but you're telling me, wait wait, it's more than that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Do everything. Mordy Oberstein: Now do everything. All of a sudden now how do you prioritize it to help you? I pull ranks on one of my own personal SEO faves, Garrett Sussman. Garrett's going to answer for us, how do you prioritize your digital activity when working with multiple channels? Because he can't do it all at once. Take it away, Garrett. Garrett Sussman: Okay, so prioritizing your digital marketing activity is like this herculean task. I mean like SEO, it depends, right? You really have to understand because there's so many different types of businesses out there in terms of what your priority should be for an eCommerce site versus a news publisher versus a financial services or healthcare, your money, your life type of site. And then you have to take into consideration the size. We're talking like enterprise, where you have so many moving parts or if you have a one-person marketing team where you're doing everything, then you have to think about your integrated strategy. How are you working with the other channels? Where does SEO fit in your organization when it comes to ppc, social media, email marketing, you name it. Then working with your budget and your resources. Well, when you're talking about prioritization, it all comes back to revenue, right? What is first going to require the least amount of work and resources and drive the biggest revenue or the biggest needle movers or the biggest KPI? The other thing to consider is long term strategy. You have to be flexible and agile. You can put a strategy in place and you want to knock it out piece by piece, but you also need to be able to move and flex and do whatever it takes. If market conditions change, like say, I don't know, a pandemic or I don't know a recession. Ultimately it's all tied back to your buyer's journey. Hitting all those different pieces of the funnel where it comes to awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, and ultimately retention. Well, purchase and retention. So when it comes to how do you prioritize, because you can't do it all, think about what's going to move the needle, right? Think about your specific organization and your specific business metrics. Where is the revenue, and how can you impact it both in the short term and the long term? Because you're going to be making the business case and you're going to have to think about what's going to help your business the most. It's not easy and it depends. Context, planning, flexibility, move the needle revenue. Boom. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Garrett. And that's a really good point by the way. We also want to think about not just getting the people in but also retaining them and what all goes into that in terms of messaging and SEO and beyond SEO. So definitely consider not just bringing people in the leads, but also what you need to do across channel to retain them and maintain. Crystal Carter: He's absolutely talking on the money about money. I think time is money and money is money. So to do all of the omnichannel stuff, it can take a lot of time. And he talked about businesses on different sites. He talked about marketers who wear many, many hats and who might have to do lots of the channels themselves, who might be building it themselves or might be managing the marketing themselves. And that situation, yeah time is absolutely money, even if it doesn't cost you necessarily to work on the content and move all of the things around. It's time that you could be spending doing other things. So think about what's going to get you in front of customers that matter. What's going to get you the reach that you need to do. If you're starting from nowhere, just go. If you've got nothing, then just go get things out. Like test, try again, try again, try again. His focus on commercial priorities is really, really important I think. Mordy Oberstein: And sometimes when you're starting out, just real quick point, you have the least resistance in getting some momentum and cadence might be the best way to go sometimes where you might think, okay, I need to do a ton of work to get a big thing out and then I'll eventually maybe earn some money from it. Whatever it is. That's one way to think about it. But thinking back, I need to get some momentum, I need to get rolling, I need to get started here. Let me take a smaller task and then a smaller, maybe slightly bigger then slightly bigger just to get momentum just to get going. There's something to consider also, not just what's the immediate value in terms of monetary income anyway. Okay, speaking of prioritizing, one of the best ways to help you prioritize is to better understand your audience, which in today's day and age, it's quite complicated. Well, to me it does start with empathizing and understanding intuitively who your audience is and what they're all about. You almost always want to have something there to help you just a little bit. One of the best tools out there around helping you better understand your audience is called SparkToro. So here's a little tool time around Spark Toro for your audience insights. So SparkToro was founded by Rand Fishkin. Rand Fishkin, you may know him from Moz. He's the founder of Moz, which is one of the predominant SEO tools out there. So you'll start a tool called SparkToro which is an absolutely fabulous tool. They have a bunch of free tools and they have a paid subscription, obviously. And what they'll basically do is they'll give you insights to what is your audience talking about? Who a podcast of your audience listening to, what hashtags are they following, the people who follow the hashtags that are important to your audience, what are some of the things that are in their top words or in their bios on social media? All sorts of ways of go in and segment out who are the people that are interested in your product and what are they talking about and what are they interested in so you can better target them. And they have some really cool free things. For example, they have a cool Twitter tool which is totally free, that helps you better understand someone. So if you're doing influencer marketing, you want to better understand who that person is in terms of are people engaging with them? They might have a million followers, but are they actually engaging with anybody? Is anybody engaging with them? So they have a great tool there that'll help you better understand who those people are for your influencer marketing, which is one of the gazillion data insights that they have there. Crystal Carter: They're a great place to start if you're looking to do some outreach across different channels. Because I think that one of the other things that's particularly when we're talking about omnichannel marketing, when you think about social media, influencers are a big, big part of that. So if you are looking for influencers or even looking to see which channels are most important. So for instance, I've been working on a little project about women in space for instance, and if I wanted to find out where people are talking about that, which social accounts they're talking about, that I could type in that keyword and I can find hashtags that people are using hashtag Women history month for instance, and I could find different podcasts that they're looking at. I could find accounts that they follow. There's something called Huff Post Women. There's also Forbes Women. I didn't know that Forbes had a whole thing that. They've got Reddit accounts, they've got podcasts, they've got YouTube channels for instance, that people are talking about. And they have a sort of freemium version where you can use their tool to see a few bits of insights. You can pay for more, but you can definitely get into it and get some really good insights for it. And actually there were tools that preceded this that I used previously whilst working agency side for building personas and things like that. But honestly, SparkToro is the tool to roll them all. It's much more holistic and it gives you lots of audience insights, for instance, very quickly. So you can see whether it's a big audience or whether it's very niche, you can also see some things about demographics around age and region for instance as well. Mordy Oberstein: I'll run it through for you so you get a better idea of what's actually in this. So let's say you search for drones, so you'll get top words and bios. So you'll have actual words that are in the bios of the people who are engine and drones. For example, 2.8% of these people and their bios have aerial photography. Which hashtags are used around drones? Hashtag drone photography 12% of the time you can see people are being engaged with. So for example, wish people have high engagement rates around drones or wish people have the most followers around drones. What websites are these people visiting? So you can really get a sort of 360 degree understanding of who your audience is and what they're interested in, which I think is the most important part, what this tool does differently than a lot of the other tools that have been out there in the past. So definitely check out SparkToro at SparkToro.com. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Hey, if SparkToro is news to you. Here's some actual SEO news as we get into Snappy News. Snappy News, snappy News, Snappy News. Google Discover is amazing. If you don't know what Google Discover is, well Google it and check it out. But now the reporting inside of Google's search console on Discover is getting more amazing as well per Barry Schwartz seoroundtable.com. Google improved the search console, discover Performance Reports. This goes back to November 28th. As of November 28th, your data inside of Google's search console on Google Discover is more accurate. So if you saw a spike with regards to Discover performance around November 28th, it might not be because you're showing up more often in the Discover Feed, but because the data is simply better. Which by the way just goes to show you no data source is, as I always say, 100% accurate. Data is a trend first and foremost. By the way, discovery is a great source of clicks if you get in and did a whole study on what shows up inside of Discover on so much a while back. So I'll link to that has shown us as well, definitely dive into Discover if you haven't, and it's a very cool option for you. Okay, next up, local SEO legend, Joy Hawkins over at Sterling Sky did a little study asking, does the length of a Google Review matter? Turns out there is a strong correlation between how long the review is and how long Google shows it at the top of the business profile. So try to encourage longer reviews from your audience because the longer reviews tend to be the negative reviews. Because when we're angry, we write a lot. But when we're happy, we don't write a lot. So someone's happy with your business, try to find a way to incentivize them to leave as long of a review as possible. And with that, that is the snappiest of Snappy News. Before we wrap up and to go kind of full circle, not really full circle, well I guess kind of full circle, the whole episode is full circle. We talked about multiple channels and SEO considering multiple channels and how to prioritize and a tool to help you find your audiences and what they're dealing with for multiple channels. And here's a great person- Crystal Carter: To bring us full circle in this holistic experience- Mordy Oberstein: Who is also part of SparkToro, amazingly enough. Right? Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: This week's follow of the week, is the one of the only Amanda Natuda over at Twitter on A M A N D A N A T over on Twitter? So Amanda, Nat. Crystal Carter: Yes. You should absolutely follow her. She is fantastic. She's super smart, shares some incredibly smart insights. She's also really nice. I met her at MozCon in the summer and she's incredibly nice and just also very down to earth and amazing. And she's great because she talks a lot about how to grow your following on Twitter, for instance. So she's very strategic about it and she also makes sure that she shares lots of great insights. So she shares really good threads about content management. Yeah, about content management, about thinking about your audience, about that sort of thing. She's also really funny. So she talks about, I remember there was something she tweeted about things I knew or things I've mastered since growing older, and one of them was like, how to eat a chicken bone without leaving any meat on it or something like that. They're really, really good conversation starters. She's not doing this for no reason. Like it's good, but it's, they're also really good conversation starters, and it's a way to keep connecting with your audience and to make sure that there's that human element to your branding and to the conversations that you have. And she's great. Mordy Oberstein: And that's all we're going to say about that for today, because what other way to end off with than she's great. Crystal Carter: She's Great. Great. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you for joining us on the Surf's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of duplicate content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed at wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO Crystal Carter: SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Garrett Sussman iPullRank Amanda Natvidad Joy Hawkins Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Blog Distribution Strategies for Growth More intents more problems: SEO for multiple user intents Sparktoro What Kind of Content Appears in Google Discover [Case Study] News: Google Improved The Search Console Discover Performance Report Does the Length of a Google Review Matter? Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Garrett Sussman iPullRank Amanda Natvidad Joy Hawkins Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Blog Distribution Strategies for Growth More intents more problems: SEO for multiple user intents Sparktoro What Kind of Content Appears in Google Discover [Case Study] News: Google Improved The Search Console Discover Performance Report Does the Length of a Google Review Matter? Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Surfs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the Surfs Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the wonderful, the fabulous, the incredible Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. It is I. I am here. I am awake, even though I had one hour of sleep last night. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'm totally jet lagged. I have no idea what's going on right now. Crystal Carter: This is going to be a completely manic episode, people. Strap in. It's about to get crazy because we're both pretty much delirious. Mordy Oberstein: Either that or I'm going to fall asleep in the middle of recording. Crystal Carter: It's fine, it's fine. Some people are really into that. They call it ASMR and people, they'll just find something and they'll crinkle it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, crinkly noises. My kids are like books and they're babies, like the crinkle noise. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and it's a thing. People really like it. Or it's when people eat ice or something. Mordy Oberstein: I always found that annoying to be around people eating the ice because they're chewing on it and it's so loud. Crystal Carter: Oh. Oh man, oh. Mordy Oberstein: That wasn't going where you thought it was going. Crystal Carter: That's incredibly annoying. Mordy Oberstein: It's so annoying, right? Crystal Carter: I find it annoying, other people making noises. However, I do sometimes post on my Instagram, I just post pictures of waves going back and forth, for my own personal ASMR. So, yeah. I also have one of jellyfish just floating around. Mordy Oberstein: They are just very relaxing. It's like- Crystal Carter: It's very relaxing. So sometimes I just look at it. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well on that note, the Surf's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can manage so much of your entire digital marketing presence under one roof with Ascend by Wix, create videos for social, curate newsletters, set up social banners and schedule posts, plus a whole slew of marketing integrations. It's omni channel marketing with Ascend by Wix, which is very appropriate for today's show because we're talking about multiple channels and SEO. Crystal Carter: So all the channels- Mordy Oberstein: See what I did there. Crystal Carter: The plug, I see it. Mordy Oberstein: And this show's topic. Bringing you together- Crystal Carter: Look at that. It's almost as if you knew we would do it. Mordy Oberstein: Right there. Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: Next level. That's right. Today's show we're talking about the vital need for an all channel approach to SEO. Why you should think about your site as your HQ for all digital activity. How to be consistent across all channels. How to align your SEO work with your other digital marketing activities and the need to consider other channels. What? Yes, to support your SEO efforts. Plus I pull ranks Garrett Sussman stops by to share how he prioritizes all of these cross channel activities and his SEO all at the same time because there's so much prioritization to do. Legit. Also, we'll share a tool that can help you maximize your wider digital efforts. And of course we have your snappy news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO, nay more marketing awesomeness. Let's cross the channel together as episode 16 of the Surf's Up podcast has arrived. Each week I feel like adding that last little line there, let's cross the channel together. I'm getting better and better. Crystal Carter: I feel like that crossing the channel, because living in England, I'm like, oh yeah, people swim across the channel and they're like, yay. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I was literally thinking about the English channel when I wrote that. And I'm not from England. Crystal Carter: Right. That's what I'm thinking. It's like, yeah, I feel like, I don't know. It was the best of search. It was the worst of search. We're getting literary people. This is high brow podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: My association to all this is back in, I don't know, 1920s or thirties or forties or fifties, whatever it was, people swimming across the- Crystal Carter: Just sometime in the 20th century. Mordy Oberstein: Sometime when they had black and white images and people, the people are about to jump into swim across the channel. This is my association. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And they've all got the long swimming suits and the caps. Mordy Oberstein: The caps. Crystal Carter: And they're like, oh, here I go into the sea. Mordy Oberstein: And here we go into cross channel SEO. SEO is amazing. We're all here for SEO. SEO is stable, long lasting organic growth, and it provides, it is good. SEO is good. However, it's really important to have a larger digital strategy that works cohesively. I think, possibly. Your sites or the sites that you work with, they all have goals and they, all those goals go well beyond Google, for example. Every site has an intended audience. And as such, you need to think about how you present yourself to them. Whether it be the tone you take on the site, how your site is constructed, the design of the website, whether it be you speak to them on social media, whether you speak to them, organic search, you have to consider all this. We know this by the way, is brand marketing and your SEO needs to align. Check this out to how the brand thinks about itself and presents itself overall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Crazy thought, right? Yes. So there's no sense in wasting time focusing on keyword opportunity if it's completely off brand or whatnot for that site. Crystal Carter: Indeed. And also I think that with the keywords, think about how your keywords apply to other channels as well. So people are going to be searching for those keywords. So some of the keywords that people are searching for on certain different social media platforms or other platforms might also apply to what you have on your website. If there's a hashtag that you're doing really well on TikTok or Twitter or wherever, then you might want to have a section that says, what is the hashtag about? Or include it somewhere in your copy so that people know what it is and so that people can connect it. Mordy Oberstein: Which is exactly the point. There's so much you need to consider for your online visibility and it all needs to work hand in hand together, SEO included. And I think it all starts with the idea or the mindset that you site is a hub or a headquarters for all of your digital activity. It's not just a place that's send traffic to Google to or from, but it's a core of everything you do with your online presence. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I mean, your symbol on the mountain in terms of SEO, everything the light touches is SEO. You should be thinking about all of it as part of it, and it might seem overwhelming or something, but the way that users use the internet, it comes across from lots of different channels. So users might find you in other places, but you need to make sure that whether they find you on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Reddit or Twitch or wherever, or even the Amazon Marketplace for instance, that they have a place to land on that is your website. And there's lots of different ways that you can do that. So when you think about your website, one of the things that I thinks really useful, for instance, that if you think about it particularly is at HQ, is your data feeds. So a lot of times when people think about data feeds, they think about eCommerce sites because an eCommerce site will have a feed of their products. And that's one of the ways that you can distribute it to lots of different channels. So you can distribute it to Instagram, to Facebook, you can distribute it to Amazon, wherever, where you're selling products, Google Merchant, et cetera. But there's also other content that also uses feeds. And if you organize the content on your website in that way, you can spread your net far and wide but consistently. So for instance, an RSS is a kind of data feed. It's old school, but it's a kind of data feed. Mordy Oberstein: I used to use it all the time. People rely on it all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time for podcasts. This podcast is distributed via an RSS feed. There's also Java feeds, Java sports will use a Java feed for instance, anything for other content, there's also things like that as well. So don't just think about, and you'll also, your YouTube videos. Those will also be distributed via an RSS feed. So there's lots of different things there. So that's one that's really important. But also I think it's important to think about, if you Google now how search works, you'll actually get a little bar at the top that breaks it down and they say, what do you mean how search works on Google? Or how it works on Bing or how it works on Amazon or how it works on Meta or how it works on Yahoo because they know that users are searching in lots of different ways. And depending on which vertical you're in, it might not just be Google. That's their first port of call. I think for eCommerce in America, Amazon is actually the first place that people look for content or people look for shopping information. So if you're thinking about your brand as only being one channel, you're going to be missing a lot of opportunities Mordy Oberstein: For sure and it goes both ways. It goes in distributing out and pulling in. So the tldr, when you think of your website, not just as a way, okay, they're going from Google to my website, I need a place for them to land. I need something for Google to rank. But when you think of it a little more holistically, you're thinking about, this is the epicenter of all my digital marketing activity. So as you mentioned, right when it goes out, you need to have a place, you need to be able to distribute it out. But also when they come back in from the various channels, let's say you've done your distribution, now people are coming in from Instagram, they're coming in from YouTube, they're coming from the RSS feed, making sure that your website is constructed in a way that it speaks to those audiences the right way. For example, if you're pulling in tons of people from Instagram and they get to your website and it's essentially text based- Crystal Carter: Right, or not mobile first. Mordy Oberstein: Right, it's a complete disconnect. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's complete disconnect. It's a complete waste of your efforts. Mordy Oberstein: But it happens all the time because people just think of their websites. Okay, my website is my website and I'm getting people from Google and social media is social media. It's not. Social media should connect back to your website and the audience that you're pulling in from searchall, from social. So I said, I just said search all that's amazing. Crystal Carter: You just invented that. Mordy Oberstein: But from social, not from searchall, but from social, it could be very different. The audience you're pulling in from search and you need to make sure that the website speaks to both at the same time, which goes back to a previous episode. You will link to the show notes of dealing with multiple intents on the same page and the same website. Crystal Carter: But it also goes back to the idea of thinking about the user journey. So I think that if you're planning to do multiple channels, make sure that you've explored what the journey is like for the customer coming from those different channels. We talked about Google Search Console recently. It's worth looking at your back links in Google Search Console. They aggregate them into different groups. So for instance, they'll say their top linking sites. And I looked on a site that wasn't commercial and for instance they had a bunch from Amazon and I was like, why do they have a bunch from Amazon? Well actually because their podcast was on Amazon Prime and it was being distributed that way. And also because other people were talking about their content or talking about their product on Amazon in different ways. So look into your back links and Google Search Console, you can see a trend and you might see that there's a lot of people coming from channels that you weren't expecting them to be coming from. And if that's the case, then you can follow that journey, see where they're coming from and see whether they're letting on to something that's appropriate, whether they're landing on something that makes sense for them, makes sense for you, helps you build your brand. Mordy Oberstein: And that is consistent across the board. I think the second point we'll call that to consider where you're doing all of this, which you should be doing, is that whatever your messaging is, whatever your design is, where all the language that you're putting out, whether it be latent or manifest content, not to get too Freudian there needs to be consistent across all channels. So if you're posting on something on YouTube or on Instagram and it looks completely or sounds completely different once they get to the website, that's an enormous disconnect. And I think it's a problem when you are so focused just on SEO, just on search, where you're writing in a certain way, which again, you shouldn't be doing it all together, but it kind of sometimes does happen where you're kind of writing for the search engine. One of the problems outside the fact that's not what gets you to rank well. My opinion is that when people are coming from other channels and other mediums, it sounds off. Not only is it a negative and it sounds off, but it doesn't let you do a positive, which is to build an identity, to build a brand, to build up branding. So you have to be consistent and you have to think about how whatever from whatever channel and all channels, you should be consistent across the board in how you speak and how you present yourself, whether it be on social, whether it be on YouTube, or whether it be on the site itself through Google search, Crystal Carter: Even on Google, when people search for your brand, they are going to get lots of the content from these different channels pulling through at the same time. So if you are inconsistent, people will see it straight away. If you look up a restaurant review on Google for instance, you'll get content from the restaurant. You'll get content from Google business profile. You'll get content from TripAdvisor. You'll get content from other restaurant thing, Yelp. Things like that. You'll also get content from your Instagram, from your Facebook from that sort of thing. So if you have consistent brand positioning that will help you to be consistent across those things. And also help ensure that customers are having a consistent experience with you across both your digital and your IRL spaces. And it can be difficult to do, but it's almost like when I talk about visual search, for instance, I say consistency is key. If somebody says, oh, let's change up the logo, don't. Is this the same with your branding? Pick something, stick with it, go with it for a while. If you think about Coca-Cola, they haven't changed your branding in years. If you think about Apple, I mean they changed their logo, but their vibe has been pretty much the same for, I don't know, 20 years. Mordy Oberstein: And it's not that you can't do it, but it's very much an uphill battle, which is really the point before you do SEO, before you do social media marketing, what you really fundamentally need to do is decide who you are, what you do, and how you go about doing it so that now you can just do all the things automatically. I've seen it so many times where on social, the brand position itself is one way. They're rather fun, they're vibrant and whatever. And then you get to the website and it looks very almost too professional for what they're trying to do and how they're trying to speak. And there's an enormous disconnect there. And I think that comes about because you have a social strategy, you have an SEO strategy, but you don't have an overall brand strategy. And that the brand strategy should be the other thing that should feed what you talk about and how you talk about it in a lot of ways. And there's tremendous amount of overlap between SEO, social, whatever it is, and what you're doing in the brand side. Crystal Carter: And I don't necessarily think that this means that SEO should take over social media from the social media managers. Social media managers have a very complicated job. But not all heroes wear capes. But social media managers really do the business. And I don't think we should necessarily take over, but we should be in conversation. The people who set the brand guidelines, who are doing the branding, designing, that sort of thing, who are putting together your brand kit, whatever, that sort of thing, they should be having a conversation. We shouldn't be siloed. These channels shouldn't be siloed. We should be working together. Mordy Oberstein: It should all be together. It all be about who you're targeting, how you're targeting them. So everybody needs to be on that from the get go, the SEO, the social media manager, the branding marketing manager, brand marketing manager, whatever, making it up as I go along here. Doesn't matter. That's how we roll. Crystal Carter: Is that your title? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Which I guess, actually, anyway. But it should all work together. And especially because, and this goes back to I guess how SEO works. It's a slow burn, especially when you're starting off. So you may get more traction initially on social media, on paid advertising on whatever platform it is. And then SEO only comes into in terms of earning into the picture six months to a year later. So you want to make sure you're consistent across the board because the social might be your main channel of income while you're waiting to start putting out more content and be able to start actually ranking. Crystal Carter: You can use one to support the other. If you see something that works well on your SEO, then you can put it on your social. If you see something that works well on your social, you can put it on your SEO, like on your content stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, bring it. Mordy Oberstein: But if you can't do it if it's not consistent, by the way, right, if it's not consistent. You can't repurpose it. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. So I think there's lots of opportunities and Google's giving users a much more holistic, much more multimedia, much richer content experience all the time. So the more you are connected to multiple channels and that you are managing and actively involved in those multiple channels, the better you'll be positioned in this multimodal world that we're going into. Mordy Oberstein: Totally true. So if you're in SEO and you're listening to this, it's all one song. There's a famous story with Neil Young who's a singer back from the seventies, and there's a story where he was at a concert it was his concert, and someone yells out all your songs sound the same and he yells back, it's all one song. It's all one song. So you as an SEO need to be involved with what's happening on social. You need to be how it's happening on the brand side. You need to be involved in what's happening on the content side. It should be obvious at this point because it's all one song. You need to understand how it's all working. What the messaging is going out is so that you can incorporate, repurpose, and deal with what you do the right way. Which brings us to prioritization because that's a lot. Crystal Carter: That's a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Now all of a sudden you started some little SEO corner over here and do my little SEO thing, but you're telling me, wait wait, it's more than that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Do everything. Mordy Oberstein: Now do everything. All of a sudden now how do you prioritize it to help you? I pull ranks on one of my own personal SEO faves, Garrett Sussman. Garrett's going to answer for us, how do you prioritize your digital activity when working with multiple channels? Because he can't do it all at once. Take it away, Garrett. Garrett Sussman: Okay, so prioritizing your digital marketing activity is like this herculean task. I mean like SEO, it depends, right? You really have to understand because there's so many different types of businesses out there in terms of what your priority should be for an eCommerce site versus a news publisher versus a financial services or healthcare, your money, your life type of site. And then you have to take into consideration the size. We're talking like enterprise, where you have so many moving parts or if you have a one-person marketing team where you're doing everything, then you have to think about your integrated strategy. How are you working with the other channels? Where does SEO fit in your organization when it comes to ppc, social media, email marketing, you name it. Then working with your budget and your resources. Well, when you're talking about prioritization, it all comes back to revenue, right? What is first going to require the least amount of work and resources and drive the biggest revenue or the biggest needle movers or the biggest KPI? The other thing to consider is long term strategy. You have to be flexible and agile. You can put a strategy in place and you want to knock it out piece by piece, but you also need to be able to move and flex and do whatever it takes. If market conditions change, like say, I don't know, a pandemic or I don't know a recession. Ultimately it's all tied back to your buyer's journey. Hitting all those different pieces of the funnel where it comes to awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, and ultimately retention. Well, purchase and retention. So when it comes to how do you prioritize, because you can't do it all, think about what's going to move the needle, right? Think about your specific organization and your specific business metrics. Where is the revenue, and how can you impact it both in the short term and the long term? Because you're going to be making the business case and you're going to have to think about what's going to help your business the most. It's not easy and it depends. Context, planning, flexibility, move the needle revenue. Boom. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Garrett. And that's a really good point by the way. We also want to think about not just getting the people in but also retaining them and what all goes into that in terms of messaging and SEO and beyond SEO. So definitely consider not just bringing people in the leads, but also what you need to do across channel to retain them and maintain. Crystal Carter: He's absolutely talking on the money about money. I think time is money and money is money. So to do all of the omnichannel stuff, it can take a lot of time. And he talked about businesses on different sites. He talked about marketers who wear many, many hats and who might have to do lots of the channels themselves, who might be building it themselves or might be managing the marketing themselves. And that situation, yeah time is absolutely money, even if it doesn't cost you necessarily to work on the content and move all of the things around. It's time that you could be spending doing other things. So think about what's going to get you in front of customers that matter. What's going to get you the reach that you need to do. If you're starting from nowhere, just go. If you've got nothing, then just go get things out. Like test, try again, try again, try again. His focus on commercial priorities is really, really important I think. Mordy Oberstein: And sometimes when you're starting out, just real quick point, you have the least resistance in getting some momentum and cadence might be the best way to go sometimes where you might think, okay, I need to do a ton of work to get a big thing out and then I'll eventually maybe earn some money from it. Whatever it is. That's one way to think about it. But thinking back, I need to get some momentum, I need to get rolling, I need to get started here. Let me take a smaller task and then a smaller, maybe slightly bigger then slightly bigger just to get momentum just to get going. There's something to consider also, not just what's the immediate value in terms of monetary income anyway. Okay, speaking of prioritizing, one of the best ways to help you prioritize is to better understand your audience, which in today's day and age, it's quite complicated. Well, to me it does start with empathizing and understanding intuitively who your audience is and what they're all about. You almost always want to have something there to help you just a little bit. One of the best tools out there around helping you better understand your audience is called SparkToro. So here's a little tool time around Spark Toro for your audience insights. So SparkToro was founded by Rand Fishkin. Rand Fishkin, you may know him from Moz. He's the founder of Moz, which is one of the predominant SEO tools out there. So you'll start a tool called SparkToro which is an absolutely fabulous tool. They have a bunch of free tools and they have a paid subscription, obviously. And what they'll basically do is they'll give you insights to what is your audience talking about? Who a podcast of your audience listening to, what hashtags are they following, the people who follow the hashtags that are important to your audience, what are some of the things that are in their top words or in their bios on social media? All sorts of ways of go in and segment out who are the people that are interested in your product and what are they talking about and what are they interested in so you can better target them. And they have some really cool free things. For example, they have a cool Twitter tool which is totally free, that helps you better understand someone. So if you're doing influencer marketing, you want to better understand who that person is in terms of are people engaging with them? They might have a million followers, but are they actually engaging with anybody? Is anybody engaging with them? So they have a great tool there that'll help you better understand who those people are for your influencer marketing, which is one of the gazillion data insights that they have there. Crystal Carter: They're a great place to start if you're looking to do some outreach across different channels. Because I think that one of the other things that's particularly when we're talking about omnichannel marketing, when you think about social media, influencers are a big, big part of that. So if you are looking for influencers or even looking to see which channels are most important. So for instance, I've been working on a little project about women in space for instance, and if I wanted to find out where people are talking about that, which social accounts they're talking about, that I could type in that keyword and I can find hashtags that people are using hashtag Women history month for instance, and I could find different podcasts that they're looking at. I could find accounts that they follow. There's something called Huff Post Women. There's also Forbes Women. I didn't know that Forbes had a whole thing that. They've got Reddit accounts, they've got podcasts, they've got YouTube channels for instance, that people are talking about. And they have a sort of freemium version where you can use their tool to see a few bits of insights. You can pay for more, but you can definitely get into it and get some really good insights for it. And actually there were tools that preceded this that I used previously whilst working agency side for building personas and things like that. But honestly, SparkToro is the tool to roll them all. It's much more holistic and it gives you lots of audience insights, for instance, very quickly. So you can see whether it's a big audience or whether it's very niche, you can also see some things about demographics around age and region for instance as well. Mordy Oberstein: I'll run it through for you so you get a better idea of what's actually in this. So let's say you search for drones, so you'll get top words and bios. So you'll have actual words that are in the bios of the people who are engine and drones. For example, 2.8% of these people and their bios have aerial photography. Which hashtags are used around drones? Hashtag drone photography 12% of the time you can see people are being engaged with. So for example, wish people have high engagement rates around drones or wish people have the most followers around drones. What websites are these people visiting? So you can really get a sort of 360 degree understanding of who your audience is and what they're interested in, which I think is the most important part, what this tool does differently than a lot of the other tools that have been out there in the past. So definitely check out SparkToro at SparkToro.com. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Hey, if SparkToro is news to you. Here's some actual SEO news as we get into Snappy News. Snappy News, snappy News, Snappy News. Google Discover is amazing. If you don't know what Google Discover is, well Google it and check it out. But now the reporting inside of Google's search console on Discover is getting more amazing as well per Barry Schwartz seoroundtable.com. Google improved the search console, discover Performance Reports. This goes back to November 28th. As of November 28th, your data inside of Google's search console on Google Discover is more accurate. So if you saw a spike with regards to Discover performance around November 28th, it might not be because you're showing up more often in the Discover Feed, but because the data is simply better. Which by the way just goes to show you no data source is, as I always say, 100% accurate. Data is a trend first and foremost. By the way, discovery is a great source of clicks if you get in and did a whole study on what shows up inside of Discover on so much a while back. So I'll link to that has shown us as well, definitely dive into Discover if you haven't, and it's a very cool option for you. Okay, next up, local SEO legend, Joy Hawkins over at Sterling Sky did a little study asking, does the length of a Google Review matter? Turns out there is a strong correlation between how long the review is and how long Google shows it at the top of the business profile. So try to encourage longer reviews from your audience because the longer reviews tend to be the negative reviews. Because when we're angry, we write a lot. But when we're happy, we don't write a lot. So someone's happy with your business, try to find a way to incentivize them to leave as long of a review as possible. And with that, that is the snappiest of Snappy News. Before we wrap up and to go kind of full circle, not really full circle, well I guess kind of full circle, the whole episode is full circle. We talked about multiple channels and SEO considering multiple channels and how to prioritize and a tool to help you find your audiences and what they're dealing with for multiple channels. And here's a great person- Crystal Carter: To bring us full circle in this holistic experience- Mordy Oberstein: Who is also part of SparkToro, amazingly enough. Right? Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: This week's follow of the week, is the one of the only Amanda Natuda over at Twitter on A M A N D A N A T over on Twitter? So Amanda, Nat. Crystal Carter: Yes. You should absolutely follow her. She is fantastic. She's super smart, shares some incredibly smart insights. She's also really nice. I met her at MozCon in the summer and she's incredibly nice and just also very down to earth and amazing. And she's great because she talks a lot about how to grow your following on Twitter, for instance. So she's very strategic about it and she also makes sure that she shares lots of great insights. So she shares really good threads about content management. Yeah, about content management, about thinking about your audience, about that sort of thing. She's also really funny. So she talks about, I remember there was something she tweeted about things I knew or things I've mastered since growing older, and one of them was like, how to eat a chicken bone without leaving any meat on it or something like that. They're really, really good conversation starters. She's not doing this for no reason. Like it's good, but it's, they're also really good conversation starters, and it's a way to keep connecting with your audience and to make sure that there's that human element to your branding and to the conversations that you have. And she's great. Mordy Oberstein: And that's all we're going to say about that for today, because what other way to end off with than she's great. Crystal Carter: She's Great. Great. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you for joining us on the Surf's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of duplicate content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed at wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO Crystal Carter: 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

Is eCommerce SEO really a separate discipline? If so, how does it differ from “regular SEO?” Yes, no, maybe? The answer may surprise you. Over the past few years, Google has gotten better and better at delivering custom SERP features for eCommerce, with new elements being released and tested consistently. These features alone are differential factors between eCommerce SEO and regular website SEO. Navigating the requirements of these features is a skill on its own. Mordy and Crystal dive into some of the latest eCommerce changes to the SERP and what they mean for your SEO strategy and outlook. Kristina Azarenko of MarketingSyrup SEO Academy stops by to explore the importance of internal linking and possible permutations for eCommerce SEO. This and more as you “check out” the latest episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Show me the money with eCommerce SEO Is eCommerce SEO really a separate discipline? If so, how does it differ from “regular SEO?” Yes, no, maybe? The answer may surprise you. Over the past few years, Google has gotten better and better at delivering custom SERP features for eCommerce, with new elements being released and tested consistently. These features alone are differential factors between eCommerce SEO and regular website SEO. Navigating the requirements of these features is a skill on its own. Mordy and Crystal dive into some of the latest eCommerce changes to the SERP and what they mean for your SEO strategy and outlook. Kristina Azarenko of MarketingSyrup SEO Academy stops by to explore the importance of internal linking and possible permutations for eCommerce SEO. This and more as you “check out” the latest episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 18 | December 21, 2022 | 35 MIN 00:00 / 35:03 This week’s guests Kristina Azarenko Kristina has over a decade of hands-on SEO experience. She is the founder of MarketingSyrup Academy which trains smart SEOs. Over 1200+ people have gone through her courses, including Tech SEO Pro and eCommerce SEO Mastery. 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, where we're pushing out groovy, new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the fabulous, the wonderful, the incredible Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: At Wix. Isn't that a coincidence? Mordy Oberstein: It is. I feel like I know you from somewhere. Crystal Carter: It's from ... Mordy Oberstein: Have I seen you? You look so familiar, it's from Wix. Crystal Carter: From Wix, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: From Wix. Crystal Carter: That's very funny. Mordy Oberstein: That's funny. I've seen you in the hallway a couple of times. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And strangely enough, not at the hallways at Wix. Mordy Oberstein: Because we don't physically work together. Crystal Carter: No, but that's a wonderful thing about the modern world. I literally see you every day. Mordy Oberstein: Which reminds us, since you're talking about Wix, that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can now edit all of your SEO stuff. You know, robots, meta tags, title tags, meta-description, structure data and so forth, SEO stuff, with far greater ease than ever before. Check out the new Wix edit by page feature where you can get a look at all of the pages in the folder all at once and update all of the SEO stuff right there, without bouncing from page to page in the editor or dashboard. It's Wix SEO, where we make working on your larger sites easier than ever. All the SEO stuff. Crystal Carter: All the SEO stuff for all of y'all. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love the word y'all, by the way. So, I adopted that when I moved to Baltimore. My wife's in Baltimore. We lived there for a few years. I never knew what y'all was, because I'm from New York City. We don't have y'all, but y'all is amazing. Crystal Carter: It's a great word. And actually, actually people talk about it not being grammatically correct. However, it exists in lots of other languages. So, if you study Spanish for instance, [foreign language 00:02:03] is the plural you and that is what y'all is. Mordy Oberstein: Y'all. Crystal Carter: It's the plural you. It's also genderless, which is good. So, it's inclusive for everybody. Mordy Oberstein: It's wonderful. I love sending it out in email to people who are not from America. "Hey, y'all." As if they have any clue what I'm talking about. It's really a money word. Crystal Carter: Right, this is true. Mordy Oberstein: And you know what's money? This episode is going to be money. Not because there's any sort of cash transactions involved or anything… Yeah, it's disappointing, I know. But because talking eCommerce, SEO and- Crystal Carter: Cha-ching. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to make that sound effect, but you beat me to it. And the question is, how different is eCommerce SEO from regular SEO, really? Listen in as Crystal and I debate, go back and forth. Crystal Carter: Discuss. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe, we'll see. Between whether or not eComm SEO is really a separate discipline while we dive into the ins and out of eCommerce, SEO along the way, with tips to make sure that you get your eCommerce SEO, right. Kristina Azarenko also will stop by to share her tips around eCommerce, SEO and what moves the needle. Plus we'll dive into what's new on the eCommerce SERP. And of course, some snapping SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Are you bought in? Because episode number 18 of the SERP's Up podcast is open for business. Crystal Carter: Oh, I like that. That was good. That was good. Mordy Oberstein: So many. Crystal Carter: That was good. Have you brought lots of SEO receipts? Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I like that. I like that we're getting cornier by the minute. Crystal Carter: There's no stopping us. There's no stopping until we have completed the transaction. Mordy Oberstein: Each week it's going to ... Oh, you got me, I didn't really ... take a second, like whoosh right over my head. That exchange didn't go the way I thought it would. Crystal Carter: Well, but maybe we should lay it away for another day. Mordy Oberstein: We're really shipping it out here. Anyway, in SEO, so let me introduce this, because in SEO there are all sorts of disciplines. There's tech SEO and the people in tech SEO, they focus on crawlability and indexability. There are link builders or outreach specialists and they spend a whole lot of time building links and doing all other sorts of spammy things. Crystal Carter: They do lots of nice things as well. Mordy Oberstein: They do lots of nice things too. I'm really being not the greatest with that. There's also local SEO. Now, that's probably the most famous segment of SEO, and that makes a great deal of sense why there's a separate discipline and separate group of people who are local SEOs because, well, the algorithm is different. It's a whole separate area specialization. There's Google Business Profile, you have to know the ins and outs of that. There's getting your profile, your business listing, suspended accidentally and then reinstated. That's a whole separate discipline of SEO. So, it makes a great deal of sense why there is a separate discipline called local SEO and local SEOs who do local SEO. Now, once such area of SEO that's emerged over the last few years is eComm SEO or eCommerce SEO. Question is should eComm SEO be a separate area of SEO? I recall having a conversation with Tory Gray over at Gray Dot, and her take was, Well, eComm SEO, it's pretty much not that different from regular SEO, just more focused on the regular SEO tasks and greater concentration. So, I don't know, I guess you could slice ... I mean, you could break it down like this. Does eCommerce mean, eCommerce SEO, mean that you just need to be better at certain more common SEO tasks? Or is it a totally different mindset and a totally different outlook, with its own unique considerations? Crystal? Crystal Carter: I think it is. I think it's very unique. I think there's a reason why people look for SEOs who have eCommerce specialty. I think that it has to do with the type of content that you're dealing with. So, for instance, if you have an eCommerce website that is selling popcorn, like different varieties of popcorn, for instance, since we were talking about being corny, then I think that you're going to have lots of different products that are pretty much the same. So, a lot of your content is going to be very, very similar and you're going to need to differentiate them, but also make sure that they show in a sort of similar category of products at the same time. And so, you have to deal with categorization in a different way. You have to deal with duplicate content in a different way. You also have the responsibility of managing lots of user transactions. So, users need to be able to complete a purchase on an eCommerce site. So, this is great for SEOs because it's really easy to show ROI. If you do something on the blog, then you can track it to a basket somewhere. You can say, "Right, well that blog had an assisted conversion for this campaign," et cetera, et cetera. And that's all great. But it also means that from a technical point of view, you have to think about making sure that all of those things are tracked correctly and are linking up and working through, in a way that you don't have to think about when you're, say working in a lead gen space, or working in a publishing space, where there are no transactions that are taking place on the website. There's also the security factor. So people don't think about it, but eCommerce sites are essentially YMYL sites, your money or your life, because people are putting in their credit card details on your website. And if you have a loyalty scheme for instance, and they're also storing those details, people will have ... they'll store content and they'll store information about people and things like that. So, there's lots of things to consider. Lots of moving parts within an eCommerce website, which doesn't necessarily exist on a site that is purely more of brochure site where you're, say, publishing blogs about, I don't know, philosophy, or the stars, or whatever it may be. And you're essentially publishing content and you're looking at your traffic and that's it. That's all people are doing, people are looking at content or consuming content when people are actually carrying out a transaction. There's a whole different set of SEO responsibilities involved. Mordy Oberstein: So, this will be a good lesson for the SEO community as a whole. I respectfully disagree. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. Well, I agree a lot. Wait, let me ... being hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of what you just said. I pretty much agree with everything you just said from a different point of view. Well, accept for one thing. I agree that there's a lot of different things that are going to come up because you're working on an eComm site. There's things you're going to have to deal with from anything from page fast and fast navigation to, as you mentioned, to tracking what's happening differently than you would say, with a blog. Although that's possible that a lot of those things also come up if you're working on a blog site, but probably not with the same frequency, or focus, or complexity. So, I agree with what you're saying, but I think, okay, to what extent is it really that different except for the YMYL thing, then I really disagree. Yes, I agree, it's YMYL. I have to agree. Google said it's YMYL. However, if you look at the rank fluctuation data going way back from all the data providers, you have health, you have finance, and you have shopping. Shopping doesn't show the same level of fluctuations as let's say, health or finance. Because content-wise, it's not YMYL. I think Google, to throw a John Mueller at you, has actually said that, but I got to find that for you, otherwise I'm talking out of my ... So, I agree with you. I think though that yes, if you're saying that in eComm, these things are way more in focus, but is that totally different than regular SEO? Crystal Carter: Yes, because of the moving parts. So, I agree that there's absolutely fundamentals that are transferrable. However, if you don't know how to manage product feeds, for instance, and if you don't know how to deal with Google Merchant and you don't know how to manage all of the images that are required for every single product and have to manage the schema markup for that. Mordy Oberstein: That was my next point. I was going to come around and say, I used to really disagree with this. I used to be like with Tory Gray, where like, eComm is the same, what are you talking about? Whatever. However, because you have things like Google Merchant Center and because the SERP itself is fundamentally changed on the eComm side, I am tending to move to your camp on this. Crystal Carter: Right, yeah. And I think that Google has- Mordy Oberstein: SERP is fundamentally different. Crystal Carter: Well, and also think the SERP is fundamentally different, there's an entirely different dedicated feed. Google treats it differently. So, they've created new shopping experiences online that have trends and all sorts of things. And also, the sites are configured differently. So, they're configured for distribution, with data feeds and things like that. And Google has an entirely separate, unique set of guidelines, specifically around eCommerce because of all of these different requirements. And with regards to the ranking fluctuations, I think probably most websites that are trading online, if you think about a big retailer, like a say, Zara, or Walmart, or Amazon, a lot of the baseline requirements for YMYL in place just in order to comply with legal requirements for selling online and locally as well. So, I think that that element of the YMYL part of it, is this an actually a safe place to put in your credit card details, I think should be fairly standard for most websites. I think that dodgy sellers will tend not to rank very well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and that is the fundamental difference, where shopping and say health are both YMYL and from the shopping point of view, getting the YMYL is, as you mentioned, relatively not that difficult, but on a health site it is. And that's because on a health site, the content is the YMYL. Where in the eComm site, it's the shopping experience that's the YMYL. So, you need to get the content right on the health site at a way different level, more detailed level than you would want to say on the shopping site. Because the shopping site, there is a product description and the product header, it's the shopping experience and how that functions that's the YMYL part. But yeah, and just to go back to the SERP part, in case you're not familiar, if you search for, I don't know, buy a new laptop, the SERP for that looks fundamentally different than, I don't know, what are the stars in Orion's Belt? And it looks very similar to a way the local SERP would look, where if you search for a pizza near me, where that SERP is very unique, the eComm SERP has become extremely unique. Whereas now, and in the past, by the way, you had PLAs, you had product listing ads and they're still there, but now you have organic carousels, even on desktop, it's Google pulling in, listing some Google's Merchant Center, Google Shopping onto the main SERP. So, if you're ranking 789 for buy new jeans, no one's seeing you because that shows underneath that massive carousel product listings. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And I think that this has to do with Google trying to make sure that the eCommerce experience on the SERP is very similar to an eCommerce experience for shopping, so that it's easy for people to see which things they can buy and so that the people think of it as a destination. I think with Google's appeal for this, has to do with some of the ways that people are searching. People have done a lot of studies around this and people don't always go to Google first for eCommerce queries. People will sometimes go to other websites for eCommerce queries. And so, Google is looking to be competitive with those sites and they're trying to make their SERP more like those sites. And in order to do that, they have a lot of mechanics behind them, different feeds and different category classifications, and different information behind the content, in order to make sure that they can serve it locally, so they can serve it on Google Shopping. So they can serve it in lots of different ways. And you have to configure your website in a certain way in order to be eligible for those features. Google has specific requirements so that you can show in Google Shopping and so that you can show in local inventory ads as well, that sort of thing. And making your website eligible for that is a specific tactic that you have to do as an eCommerce SEO. And it's something that's almost essential for eCommerce websites, in order to perform. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so that's why fundamentally, I think I'm moving more to your camp because the SERP is fundamentally shifted in a way where you have to have a specialization in eComm to really understand what's happening in that space and to understand how to utilize the SERP because, and to what you mentioned, I think it's important people to realize Google's probably biggest competitor at this point in my personal opinion is Amazon. The web is becoming more eComm-centric. Google realizes that people are going and bypassing Google, they're going to Amazon and Google's doing whatever it can to take away that dynamic and things are going to be ... We're going to be talking about this in a few moments in our what's ... is this new section? Because this SERP is fundamentally shifting very, very quickly because of this. So honestly, if I had to offer you my top eComm SEO tip, if we watch what's happening on the results page itself, see what's there. If you're, I don't know, you're selling jeans, type in buy new jeans or whatever it is that you're selling, and actually look at what's showing up and how the SERP is formatted, because that's going to clue you in as to what you should be doing and if whether or not rankings are actually meaningful or not. Oh by the way, another point of order before we wrap this up and just a mistake I see all the time, all, all, all the time, Google can't read your texts and images. Google can only read text, text. So, if you have a really nice image, that's got really fancy calligraphy or whatever, and it's all talking about your products. And I've seen this by the way, with shipping details, order specifications instead of having actual text, it's in an image that you just upload to the page. Google can't read any of that. So please, if you're operating an eComm site, you're ... Yeah, eComm SEO, I'm going to dive into that, get rid of all your images, use actual text. Crystal Carter: And PDFs. They can read PDFs but they don't call them in the same way. So absolutely, make sure that any of your things are available on there as well. I think that Google's definitely moving towards visual search, but certainly not for understanding texts, but certainly not for your Ts and Cs at all. Mordy Oberstein: You have to write it out. You can have the image there also fine, whatever, looks nice, but you have to have text. But who also knows a lot about what moves the needle for eCommerce SEO, Kristina Azarenko, which is why she's here to tell us what moves the needle for eCommerce SEO. Kristina Azarenko: Well, I'd say that when it comes to technical SEO for eCommerce, there are many things in play. But what I see that works really well is internal linking. And many people just focus on building external links only and they don't control them, but they forget about internal links that they have full control of. Internal links are super, super important. They help to show hierarchy of the website and also distribute authority properly. Plus, they help Google to faster discover and index or re-index internal pages of the website. And it's especially critical for eCommerce because especially if you have dynamic stock with products going in stock and going out of stock, you want Google to pick this up real quickly. So, implementing internal linking is one of the best technical SEO tactics that will bring online stores results. Now, how do you do this at scale? Because we don't want to spend lots of time on implementing this manually on every single page. That's just not sustainable. So, we want to do this at scale. And when it comes to internal linking, what you can do, you can use link blocks depending on your page template. For example, level one category links to other level one categories as well as to the level two categories that belong to it. Then the level two category links back to level one category it belongs to, plus to other level two categories under this umbrella. So, think about it as a spider web that links all relevant pages of the website. And let's take a product page as an example. Then on a product page, you can have breadcrumbs linking to the categories and subcategories this product belongs to. And it's super cool for user experience as well because people want to know where they are, when they land on a product page. Then you can have link blocks featuring upsells and related products and I don't know, other products in this category, the imagination is endless honestly. So, it's a win-win situation here because it helps with internal linking on the one hand. And on the other hand, it helps to increase the average card value as well. So, use power of internal linking for sure. When it comes to eCommerce SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Kristina Azarenko, follow her on Twitter. Thank you so much, Kristina. She's at A-Z-A-R-C-H-I-C-K on Twitter. Will link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. She's a wonderful SEO, always putting out tons of insights and we really appreciate her taking the time to share her thoughts in eCommerce SEO with us. Crystal Carter: Thanks, Kristina. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Kristina. Well, speaking of eCommerce, SEO and the SERP, like we mentioned before, I know we hinted at what we're going to talk about now earlier. Well, here it is, everything ... Back in the day, when I used to really track SERP features very, very heavily as part of my job at the time, and a lot of what Google was changing back in the day, so we're saying, I don't know, circa 2016, 2017, even through 2018, was all about local SEO, local pack changes, local knowledge panel changes, local finder changes, a test over here, a test over there, hotel listings, testing that out and keeping track of all these things that Google was updating and changing, whether it was this button or this feature on the results page, was a way of understanding, hey, this is where Google's focused. Well, that focus has changed because today the focus seems to be all in on eComm. Google keeps testing this and updating that, and announcing this. And it's all really ... Not all, but a very large majority, in my opinion, is about eCommerce. So, this is a very special or fun little version of a segment we call Is this new? Because none of it's new. I mean, right now, none of it is new. Crystal Carter: It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: It's all been around for a little bit, but it's all been reported on. But a lot of us might not be familiar, unless you're a ... I'll call it an SEO geek who's keeping up on this particular stuff regularly. And it's very particular type of SEO geek who's doing it, such as myself. Crystal Carter: His name is Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: His name is Mordy. There are people out like Brian Fresberland, Brodie Clark, Glenn Gabe, Lily Ray, Marie Haynes. There are people out there- Mordy Oberstein: ... who are really into this stuff. It's like SEO voyeurism. What's changing on the SERP? Aha! Crystal Carter: It's like a little scavenger hunt and yeah, it's like- Mordy Oberstein: Love it, so much fun. Is this new? Is this new? But in this case it's not. But unless you're really keeping up on it, you may not know about it, but it's really important to know about. So it's a special eComm version of is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: So, as mentioned, none of it's new. However, I want to point out a few really cool things that have been announced or talked about in the relatively recent pass around eComm. For example, Brian Fresberland caught this one. If it's carousel of items that's pre-owned, check this out. Google was testing a little green icons like a leaf. With pre-owned next to it. Crystal Carter: Right, which I think is actually really good. And I think this is probably them looking at how to compete with say, Facebook Marketplace. And there's a lot of pre-owned marketplaces, like Vinted is another one that is an app that does that sort of thing. I think they've given a green leaf to encourage people from an environmental point of view, but it's also useful, so people can understand that it's a secondhand thing, but it's still great. Mordy Oberstein: And it's also good if you're somebody who's selling something secondhand, instead of going to whatever you were going to before, I don't know, I've never really selled stuff secondhand in a long time. I guess, Facebook would be the main place for this. Oh, maybe I'll go and put it on ... I'll think of Google as a way to bring in traffic to sell my product. So, it's a signal to people selling stuff at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. I think it's a great opportunity and I think it's something that should help with the SERP and should help people to filter as well. It's a nice option to have it to be able to filter. If you think on eBay for instance, you can see brand new or you can see secondhand and that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: And Google's done this before, they have the ... for example, in hotel listings, you can see a separate filter for rentals, like Airbnb rentals. So, it's not a new thing for Google as a concept. Another one, Google announces officially that they're going to have coupon codes and you can copy and paste within a Google Business profile. So, if you're Macy's and you have a coupon code, you can list it there you there'll be a special button. It's already been live in some markets, where you just click on it, put in the coupon. It's a way of advertising your coupons on Google. Crystal Carter: Love coupons. I am entirely- Mordy Oberstein: Do you remember going to the store and cutting them out? Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. You'd get the newspaper and they was always like ... Pillsbury was always like, "Oh yeah." Right, Pillsbury were like, "You want cinnamon muffins?" I'm like, "Yes, I would love a cinnamon roll." It's just like you can get that cinnamon roll for really cheap. You're like, "Okay, well thank you very ... " Mordy Oberstein: But it's again, it's another way. Oh, the coupon code's right there. I'm not going to go to Amazon. I'm going to go to Google, check out, see if there's a coupon there. I'll clip it, use it. Good to go. Crystal Carter: I think this is another example of how eCommerce SEO often includes an ad element. So for instance, Google Merchant Center, they change around the requirements, but for a while it was a case where if you wanted to get on Google Merchant and have free shopping listings, you'd have to essentially make your site compliant for ads. Even if you weren't serving ads, you'd have to make your site compliant for ads in order to be active on Google Merchant. I think that elements like this, the coupon codes, you said it would go through Google Business profile for instance, that is essentially something that's a bit advertisingy but is going to help you get clicks, help you get conversions. And it's something that eCommerce SEOs would need to think about. I think it also is an example of some of the overlap between the disciplines. So in SEO, very often you won't stay in one lane as an SEO, you'll do a little bit of eComm, you'll do a little bit of local as well because I've done it before where I've worked with eComm clients and we were looking at both their local activity to drive in-store traffic, and also their online activity at the same time. And one supports the other. And those coupons, for instance, if they're adding it to Google Business profile, that means that they, they'll have a bricks and mortar location and that's something that will give them some visibility. And so, that's something where you would see an overlap. And it's also a great example of some of the elements that you have to think about as an eCommerce SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so the last one I want to talk about is Google announced Price Insights. Price Insights are coming for products. I actually like this, I love this because I think this is where Google's going to beat Amazon. Not that I'm rooting for one over the other, but if I'm watching Google try to do this and they're not being as successful as I think they want to be yet, maybe this is where it's going to come from. And you've seen price insights all over the SERP before. For example, flights. You search for a flight, Google will tell you that this is generally cheaper than it usually is. Or for hotels, the same kind of thing. And that's going to be coming for products, where you'll be able to see, yep, it's usually a thousand dollars but now it's here on Walmart for 700. That's a deal. And this is how Google took down, by the way, sites like Expedia, they didn't take them down. This is how Google won that battle. Sites like Expedia, Travelocity, or whatever, they're all about getting you to convert, get that flight in, book the ticket through us, we're going to get the money. And Google's like, "You know what we should do? Let's offer tons of insights around travel." And Expedia must have data about this, but they don't show it and Google are like, "We're just going to show it. We're going to use that." And they fill the need that no one was doing. And I think with products, it's the same thing. You go to Amazon, I don't know how much this normally costs. I don't know if it's a good price. I mean, I kind of know because I've been looking for a while, if I'm tracking it mentally, intuitively. But here's Google's going to do it and they're already doing it a little bit. So if you Google something, I don't know, Dell Inspiron 15, Google will list a model there and it'll have a whole ... a mobile, a whole bunch of listings where you can get it Amazon, Office Depot, Walmart, and it'll put in green the lowest price and it'll say usually X. So in this case it's saying in green on Amazon, it's $466 and it's usually $479. Those insights, the more they do, it's going to get people to go, "You know what, maybe I will buy it from Amazon, but first I'm going to go to Google and check out what the price insights are." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that this is them using the data that they have. So, they'll be able to see what's going on across the web overall in a way that other folks will not be able to see. And they'll also have the information about the RRP from the SEO markup, because this is the other thing, within eCommerce for certain products, they'll have certain specifications. So, for instance, if you have apparel, if you're selling clothes, you have to categorize things in a certain way. You have to tag things in a certain way. You have to have certain attributes present on your page and they'll make those standard, so that they can enable these kinds of features. So they'll have that information available. And it's something that consumers love that saves you so much time of having to go back and forth to 17 different, sites rather than just being able to see it all in one place. That's going to save me a lot of time. I'm totally the kind of person who would shop around for three hours before making that decision. And so, if I can see it on one tab, that's really, really useful. Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at it right here. My Apple MacBook Pro 16. Google's telling me typically is $2,099 to $2,699. And it lists a bunch of places where I can get it and the prices. Crystal Carter: Right, and it looks like you can sort it, move things up and down as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you could dive in deeper. So here I'm clicking on Best Buy it's telling me what the normal ... there's free shipping from December 5th through December 7th and what the taxes are and there's whatever. And yeah, you can expand each one of these and get more information. It looks like it's an up down, so it's an expansion. There we go. Really, it's only going to get deeper and it's only going to get more prolific is one of my favorite words. Crystal Carter: It's a good word. Mordy Oberstein: Is a good word. It's a money word. Crystal Carter: It's a money word. It's a $5 word. Mordy Oberstein: Cha-ching. So is it new? None of this is new. It's going to be new with the Price Insights, it's going to be more and more and more. We're just seeing the very, very beginning of this, so I would keep a ... If you're in the eComm space, I would keep an eye on that. So it's new, but it's not new. But you may not have known about it. So for you, it's new. Crystal Carter: New to you, which is true. Mordy Oberstein: So this is new. Speaker 5: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else is new? News. News is always new. Otherwise, it wouldn't be news? It'd be old news, not news. Crystal Carter: Olds. It would be olds not news. Mordy Oberstein: Olds, Not new. So, here is a very new, it is new. The snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. I don't know where to start. There's so much news this week. Or in pop culture terms you might say, "Holy abundance of SEO news, Batman." Where do I even start? Well, let's start with this from Barry Schwartz over his search engine Roundtable. Google gives official names, some of SERP features with visual elements gallery. I love this thing. It's basically a visual breakdown of the Google results page, thereby introducing official and new terminology. For example, what we've always called an organic result, is now being called a text result. I have been screaming about this since literally 2019 when I interviewed Barry Schwartz on another SEO podcast. There needs to be formal names for these things because what I call it and what you call it, what that person calls it may actually be different. But now there are official names for these things. Check out the link of the show notes so you can see the visual gallery and understand what Google is calling all of the things. Okay, onwards on our path towards SEO news glory, this one from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google December 2022 link spam update rolling out now. I mean, it might be complete by the time you hear this, but time of the recording it's rolling out now. Yes, another spam update. No, you're not wrong. Google did release one in October and this however, is really interesting because this time Google says quote, "SpamBrain is our AI-based spam prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links." Does this have teeth? I don't know. I really hope so. The tracking tools have been pretty quiet, but with the spam update, that makes a lot of sense. So, the jury is still out. I would love to see this have some teeth. Either way, don't buy links. Last up. An update to the quality reader's guidelines, the guidelines given to manual evaluators so that Google can use it to check its algo against some real human input. This time Google has added another E to E-A-T. So E-A-T is expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. But now it's not E-A-T, it's E-E-A-T. So it's not eat, it's eeat. I'm sorry for that. From the Lily Ray over Search Engine Land, E-E-A-T. Oh, it's a mouthful. E-E-A-T. And major updates to Google's quality radar guidelines. The new E here, by the way, is for experience, as in having some. Google has already added having firsthand experience to the guidelines around its product review update, the algorithm guidelines around the product review update, which makes me personally feel that Google is looking to see how well some of its algorithmic abilities are as compared to real human input. That's just my theory. That's just my theory. Anyway, have a look over the show notes. See what Lily wrote up. She really compares the old guidelines to the new guidelines. Take away some insights, create your own theories, and that'll do it for this week's snappy news. And we're back from the snappiest of snappiest news, wasn't that snappy? Crystal Carter: It's so snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely snappy. Crystal Carter: That's literally the snappiest news I've ever heard. Mordy Oberstein: Other than last week's snappy news. Crystal Carter: Yes, which was also snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Also snappy. Crystal Carter: And it might be snappy next week, I'm guessing? Mordy Oberstein: I love snapping. Crystal Carter: Snap, like the Jets and the Sharks. (singing) Mordy Oberstein: Right, the teachers ... I used to applaud the other teachers when they said something at school-wide meetings, you do the little snap thing. Crystal Carter: Did you go to a school for poetry? Mordy Oberstein: No, I was teaching at a public school in Baltimore. Crystal Carter: Well, was everyone poets? Because that's how poets clap, with snaps. Mordy Oberstein: I know. I don't know, it was a thing. Teachers are weird, we're just weird to be honest with you. Anyway, before we wrap it all up, and because we're talking about eCommerce and when it comes to talking about eCommerce and SEO. This week's follow of the week, so you can learn more about SEO awesomeness would be, the one, the only member of Wix's own SEO advisory board, Luke Carthy, @MrLukeCarthy over on Twitter. Crystal Carter: And Luke is fantastic. He's a great person to follow. He does talks, he does podcasts, he does these great deep dives into things that he would like to see from big retailers around eCommerce. And he's a fount of knowledge with regards to eCommerce. And yeah, he's a fantastic follow on Twitter and all of the other social media channels as well. Mordy Oberstein: And what I like about Luke is he talks about SEO and we'll talk about eComm at the same time. So, if you go to his website, which will link to his show notes obviously, he'll talk about SEO stuff but also talk about general eComm stuff. It's a nice follow-up because you're getting the best of both worlds. For example, on the actual Wix SEO Hub, he wrote about product descriptions, not from SEO point of view per se, but in general, about writing the best product description. So, that's why I think he's a great follow. Crystal Carter: He's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: He's a great follow. So follow Luke @ MrLukeCarthy, M-R-L-U-K-E-C-A-R-T-H-Y. We'll link to another show notes, over on Twitter. And that's going to do it for this week's SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: Thanks for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that was money, right? Crystal Carter: That was money. I think we secured the bag. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the bag. Crystal Carter: It's in the bag. Mordy Oberstein: This episode is in the bag. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: More jokes, all the time. It never stops. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with new episode. We dive into the deep dive, or not deep dive depending on how you look at it, that are site audits. How far down the wormhole do you need to go when auditing your next site? We'll talk about next week. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts. Or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes, or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Ka-ching. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Kristina Azarenko Luke Carthy Tory Gray of Gray Dot Company Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Marketing Syrup News: Google Gives Official Names Of Some Search Features With Visual Elements Gallery Google December 2022 Link Spam Update Rolling Out Now E-E-A-T and major updates to Google’s quality rater guidelines Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Kristina Azarenko Luke Carthy Tory Gray of Gray Dot Company Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Marketing Syrup News: Google Gives Official Names Of Some Search Features With Visual Elements Gallery Google December 2022 Link Spam Update Rolling Out Now E-E-A-T and major updates to Google’s quality rater guidelines Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast, where we're pushing out groovy, new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the fabulous, the wonderful, the incredible Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: At Wix. Isn't that a coincidence? Mordy Oberstein: It is. I feel like I know you from somewhere. Crystal Carter: It's from ... Mordy Oberstein: Have I seen you? You look so familiar, it's from Wix. Crystal Carter: From Wix, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: From Wix. Crystal Carter: That's very funny. Mordy Oberstein: That's funny. I've seen you in the hallway a couple of times. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And strangely enough, not at the hallways at Wix. Mordy Oberstein: Because we don't physically work together. Crystal Carter: No, but that's a wonderful thing about the modern world. I literally see you every day. Mordy Oberstein: Which reminds us, since you're talking about Wix, that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can now edit all of your SEO stuff. You know, robots, meta tags, title tags, meta-description, structure data and so forth, SEO stuff, with far greater ease than ever before. Check out the new Wix edit by page feature where you can get a look at all of the pages in the folder all at once and update all of the SEO stuff right there, without bouncing from page to page in the editor or dashboard. It's Wix SEO, where we make working on your larger sites easier than ever. All the SEO stuff. Crystal Carter: All the SEO stuff for all of y'all. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love the word y'all, by the way. So, I adopted that when I moved to Baltimore. My wife's in Baltimore. We lived there for a few years. I never knew what y'all was, because I'm from New York City. We don't have y'all, but y'all is amazing. Crystal Carter: It's a great word. And actually, actually people talk about it not being grammatically correct. However, it exists in lots of other languages. So, if you study Spanish for instance, [foreign language 00:02:03] is the plural you and that is what y'all is. Mordy Oberstein: Y'all. Crystal Carter: It's the plural you. It's also genderless, which is good. So, it's inclusive for everybody. Mordy Oberstein: It's wonderful. I love sending it out in email to people who are not from America. "Hey, y'all." As if they have any clue what I'm talking about. It's really a money word. Crystal Carter: Right, this is true. Mordy Oberstein: And you know what's money? This episode is going to be money. Not because there's any sort of cash transactions involved or anything… Yeah, it's disappointing, I know. But because talking eCommerce, SEO and- Crystal Carter: Cha-ching. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to make that sound effect, but you beat me to it. And the question is, how different is eCommerce SEO from regular SEO, really? Listen in as Crystal and I debate, go back and forth. Crystal Carter: Discuss. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe, we'll see. Between whether or not eComm SEO is really a separate discipline while we dive into the ins and out of eCommerce, SEO along the way, with tips to make sure that you get your eCommerce SEO, right. Kristina Azarenko also will stop by to share her tips around eCommerce, SEO and what moves the needle. Plus we'll dive into what's new on the eCommerce SERP. And of course, some snapping SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Are you bought in? Because episode number 18 of the SERP's Up podcast is open for business. Crystal Carter: Oh, I like that. That was good. That was good. Mordy Oberstein: So many. Crystal Carter: That was good. Have you brought lots of SEO receipts? Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I like that. I like that we're getting cornier by the minute. Crystal Carter: There's no stopping us. There's no stopping until we have completed the transaction. Mordy Oberstein: Each week it's going to ... Oh, you got me, I didn't really ... take a second, like whoosh right over my head. That exchange didn't go the way I thought it would. Crystal Carter: Well, but maybe we should lay it away for another day. Mordy Oberstein: We're really shipping it out here. Anyway, in SEO, so let me introduce this, because in SEO there are all sorts of disciplines. There's tech SEO and the people in tech SEO, they focus on crawlability and indexability. There are link builders or outreach specialists and they spend a whole lot of time building links and doing all other sorts of spammy things. Crystal Carter: They do lots of nice things as well. Mordy Oberstein: They do lots of nice things too. I'm really being not the greatest with that. There's also local SEO. Now, that's probably the most famous segment of SEO, and that makes a great deal of sense why there's a separate discipline and separate group of people who are local SEOs because, well, the algorithm is different. It's a whole separate area specialization. There's Google Business Profile, you have to know the ins and outs of that. There's getting your profile, your business listing, suspended accidentally and then reinstated. That's a whole separate discipline of SEO. So, it makes a great deal of sense why there is a separate discipline called local SEO and local SEOs who do local SEO. Now, once such area of SEO that's emerged over the last few years is eComm SEO or eCommerce SEO. Question is should eComm SEO be a separate area of SEO? I recall having a conversation with Tory Gray over at Gray Dot, and her take was, Well, eComm SEO, it's pretty much not that different from regular SEO, just more focused on the regular SEO tasks and greater concentration. So, I don't know, I guess you could slice ... I mean, you could break it down like this. Does eCommerce mean, eCommerce SEO, mean that you just need to be better at certain more common SEO tasks? Or is it a totally different mindset and a totally different outlook, with its own unique considerations? Crystal? Crystal Carter: I think it is. I think it's very unique. I think there's a reason why people look for SEOs who have eCommerce specialty. I think that it has to do with the type of content that you're dealing with. So, for instance, if you have an eCommerce website that is selling popcorn, like different varieties of popcorn, for instance, since we were talking about being corny, then I think that you're going to have lots of different products that are pretty much the same. So, a lot of your content is going to be very, very similar and you're going to need to differentiate them, but also make sure that they show in a sort of similar category of products at the same time. And so, you have to deal with categorization in a different way. You have to deal with duplicate content in a different way. You also have the responsibility of managing lots of user transactions. So, users need to be able to complete a purchase on an eCommerce site. So, this is great for SEOs because it's really easy to show ROI. If you do something on the blog, then you can track it to a basket somewhere. You can say, "Right, well that blog had an assisted conversion for this campaign," et cetera, et cetera. And that's all great. But it also means that from a technical point of view, you have to think about making sure that all of those things are tracked correctly and are linking up and working through, in a way that you don't have to think about when you're, say working in a lead gen space, or working in a publishing space, where there are no transactions that are taking place on the website. There's also the security factor. So people don't think about it, but eCommerce sites are essentially YMYL sites, your money or your life, because people are putting in their credit card details on your website. And if you have a loyalty scheme for instance, and they're also storing those details, people will have ... they'll store content and they'll store information about people and things like that. So, there's lots of things to consider. Lots of moving parts within an eCommerce website, which doesn't necessarily exist on a site that is purely more of brochure site where you're, say, publishing blogs about, I don't know, philosophy, or the stars, or whatever it may be. And you're essentially publishing content and you're looking at your traffic and that's it. That's all people are doing, people are looking at content or consuming content when people are actually carrying out a transaction. There's a whole different set of SEO responsibilities involved. Mordy Oberstein: So, this will be a good lesson for the SEO community as a whole. I respectfully disagree. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. Well, I agree a lot. Wait, let me ... being hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of what you just said. I pretty much agree with everything you just said from a different point of view. Well, accept for one thing. I agree that there's a lot of different things that are going to come up because you're working on an eComm site. There's things you're going to have to deal with from anything from page fast and fast navigation to, as you mentioned, to tracking what's happening differently than you would say, with a blog. Although that's possible that a lot of those things also come up if you're working on a blog site, but probably not with the same frequency, or focus, or complexity. So, I agree with what you're saying, but I think, okay, to what extent is it really that different except for the YMYL thing, then I really disagree. Yes, I agree, it's YMYL. I have to agree. Google said it's YMYL. However, if you look at the rank fluctuation data going way back from all the data providers, you have health, you have finance, and you have shopping. Shopping doesn't show the same level of fluctuations as let's say, health or finance. Because content-wise, it's not YMYL. I think Google, to throw a John Mueller at you, has actually said that, but I got to find that for you, otherwise I'm talking out of my ... So, I agree with you. I think though that yes, if you're saying that in eComm, these things are way more in focus, but is that totally different than regular SEO? Crystal Carter: Yes, because of the moving parts. So, I agree that there's absolutely fundamentals that are transferrable. However, if you don't know how to manage product feeds, for instance, and if you don't know how to deal with Google Merchant and you don't know how to manage all of the images that are required for every single product and have to manage the schema markup for that. Mordy Oberstein: That was my next point. I was going to come around and say, I used to really disagree with this. I used to be like with Tory Gray, where like, eComm is the same, what are you talking about? Whatever. However, because you have things like Google Merchant Center and because the SERP itself is fundamentally changed on the eComm side, I am tending to move to your camp on this. Crystal Carter: Right, yeah. And I think that Google has- Mordy Oberstein: SERP is fundamentally different. Crystal Carter: Well, and also think the SERP is fundamentally different, there's an entirely different dedicated feed. Google treats it differently. So, they've created new shopping experiences online that have trends and all sorts of things. And also, the sites are configured differently. So, they're configured for distribution, with data feeds and things like that. And Google has an entirely separate, unique set of guidelines, specifically around eCommerce because of all of these different requirements. And with regards to the ranking fluctuations, I think probably most websites that are trading online, if you think about a big retailer, like a say, Zara, or Walmart, or Amazon, a lot of the baseline requirements for YMYL in place just in order to comply with legal requirements for selling online and locally as well. So, I think that that element of the YMYL part of it, is this an actually a safe place to put in your credit card details, I think should be fairly standard for most websites. I think that dodgy sellers will tend not to rank very well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and that is the fundamental difference, where shopping and say health are both YMYL and from the shopping point of view, getting the YMYL is, as you mentioned, relatively not that difficult, but on a health site it is. And that's because on a health site, the content is the YMYL. Where in the eComm site, it's the shopping experience that's the YMYL. So, you need to get the content right on the health site at a way different level, more detailed level than you would want to say on the shopping site. Because the shopping site, there is a product description and the product header, it's the shopping experience and how that functions that's the YMYL part. But yeah, and just to go back to the SERP part, in case you're not familiar, if you search for, I don't know, buy a new laptop, the SERP for that looks fundamentally different than, I don't know, what are the stars in Orion's Belt? And it looks very similar to a way the local SERP would look, where if you search for a pizza near me, where that SERP is very unique, the eComm SERP has become extremely unique. Whereas now, and in the past, by the way, you had PLAs, you had product listing ads and they're still there, but now you have organic carousels, even on desktop, it's Google pulling in, listing some Google's Merchant Center, Google Shopping onto the main SERP. So, if you're ranking 789 for buy new jeans, no one's seeing you because that shows underneath that massive carousel product listings. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And I think that this has to do with Google trying to make sure that the eCommerce experience on the SERP is very similar to an eCommerce experience for shopping, so that it's easy for people to see which things they can buy and so that the people think of it as a destination. I think with Google's appeal for this, has to do with some of the ways that people are searching. People have done a lot of studies around this and people don't always go to Google first for eCommerce queries. People will sometimes go to other websites for eCommerce queries. And so, Google is looking to be competitive with those sites and they're trying to make their SERP more like those sites. And in order to do that, they have a lot of mechanics behind them, different feeds and different category classifications, and different information behind the content, in order to make sure that they can serve it locally, so they can serve it on Google Shopping. So they can serve it in lots of different ways. And you have to configure your website in a certain way in order to be eligible for those features. Google has specific requirements so that you can show in Google Shopping and so that you can show in local inventory ads as well, that sort of thing. And making your website eligible for that is a specific tactic that you have to do as an eCommerce SEO. And it's something that's almost essential for eCommerce websites, in order to perform. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so that's why fundamentally, I think I'm moving more to your camp because the SERP is fundamentally shifted in a way where you have to have a specialization in eComm to really understand what's happening in that space and to understand how to utilize the SERP because, and to what you mentioned, I think it's important people to realize Google's probably biggest competitor at this point in my personal opinion is Amazon. The web is becoming more eComm-centric. Google realizes that people are going and bypassing Google, they're going to Amazon and Google's doing whatever it can to take away that dynamic and things are going to be ... We're going to be talking about this in a few moments in our what's ... is this new section? Because this SERP is fundamentally shifting very, very quickly because of this. So honestly, if I had to offer you my top eComm SEO tip, if we watch what's happening on the results page itself, see what's there. If you're, I don't know, you're selling jeans, type in buy new jeans or whatever it is that you're selling, and actually look at what's showing up and how the SERP is formatted, because that's going to clue you in as to what you should be doing and if whether or not rankings are actually meaningful or not. Oh by the way, another point of order before we wrap this up and just a mistake I see all the time, all, all, all the time, Google can't read your texts and images. Google can only read text, text. So, if you have a really nice image, that's got really fancy calligraphy or whatever, and it's all talking about your products. And I've seen this by the way, with shipping details, order specifications instead of having actual text, it's in an image that you just upload to the page. Google can't read any of that. So please, if you're operating an eComm site, you're ... Yeah, eComm SEO, I'm going to dive into that, get rid of all your images, use actual text. Crystal Carter: And PDFs. They can read PDFs but they don't call them in the same way. So absolutely, make sure that any of your things are available on there as well. I think that Google's definitely moving towards visual search, but certainly not for understanding texts, but certainly not for your Ts and Cs at all. Mordy Oberstein: You have to write it out. You can have the image there also fine, whatever, looks nice, but you have to have text. But who also knows a lot about what moves the needle for eCommerce SEO, Kristina Azarenko, which is why she's here to tell us what moves the needle for eCommerce SEO. Kristina Azarenko: Well, I'd say that when it comes to technical SEO for eCommerce, there are many things in play. But what I see that works really well is internal linking. And many people just focus on building external links only and they don't control them, but they forget about internal links that they have full control of. Internal links are super, super important. They help to show hierarchy of the website and also distribute authority properly. Plus, they help Google to faster discover and index or re-index internal pages of the website. And it's especially critical for eCommerce because especially if you have dynamic stock with products going in stock and going out of stock, you want Google to pick this up real quickly. So, implementing internal linking is one of the best technical SEO tactics that will bring online stores results. Now, how do you do this at scale? Because we don't want to spend lots of time on implementing this manually on every single page. That's just not sustainable. So, we want to do this at scale. And when it comes to internal linking, what you can do, you can use link blocks depending on your page template. For example, level one category links to other level one categories as well as to the level two categories that belong to it. Then the level two category links back to level one category it belongs to, plus to other level two categories under this umbrella. So, think about it as a spider web that links all relevant pages of the website. And let's take a product page as an example. Then on a product page, you can have breadcrumbs linking to the categories and subcategories this product belongs to. And it's super cool for user experience as well because people want to know where they are, when they land on a product page. Then you can have link blocks featuring upsells and related products and I don't know, other products in this category, the imagination is endless honestly. So, it's a win-win situation here because it helps with internal linking on the one hand. And on the other hand, it helps to increase the average card value as well. So, use power of internal linking for sure. When it comes to eCommerce SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Kristina Azarenko, follow her on Twitter. Thank you so much, Kristina. She's at A-Z-A-R-C-H-I-C-K on Twitter. Will link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. She's a wonderful SEO, always putting out tons of insights and we really appreciate her taking the time to share her thoughts in eCommerce SEO with us. Crystal Carter: Thanks, Kristina. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Kristina. Well, speaking of eCommerce, SEO and the SERP, like we mentioned before, I know we hinted at what we're going to talk about now earlier. Well, here it is, everything ... Back in the day, when I used to really track SERP features very, very heavily as part of my job at the time, and a lot of what Google was changing back in the day, so we're saying, I don't know, circa 2016, 2017, even through 2018, was all about local SEO, local pack changes, local knowledge panel changes, local finder changes, a test over here, a test over there, hotel listings, testing that out and keeping track of all these things that Google was updating and changing, whether it was this button or this feature on the results page, was a way of understanding, hey, this is where Google's focused. Well, that focus has changed because today the focus seems to be all in on eComm. Google keeps testing this and updating that, and announcing this. And it's all really ... Not all, but a very large majority, in my opinion, is about eCommerce. So, this is a very special or fun little version of a segment we call Is this new? Because none of it's new. I mean, right now, none of it is new. Crystal Carter: It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: It's all been around for a little bit, but it's all been reported on. But a lot of us might not be familiar, unless you're a ... I'll call it an SEO geek who's keeping up on this particular stuff regularly. And it's very particular type of SEO geek who's doing it, such as myself. Crystal Carter: His name is Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: His name is Mordy. There are people out like Brian Fresberland, Brodie Clark, Glenn Gabe, Lily Ray, Marie Haynes. There are people out there- Mordy Oberstein: ... who are really into this stuff. It's like SEO voyeurism. What's changing on the SERP? Aha! Crystal Carter: It's like a little scavenger hunt and yeah, it's like- Mordy Oberstein: Love it, so much fun. Is this new? Is this new? But in this case it's not. But unless you're really keeping up on it, you may not know about it, but it's really important to know about. So it's a special eComm version of is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: So, as mentioned, none of it's new. However, I want to point out a few really cool things that have been announced or talked about in the relatively recent pass around eComm. For example, Brian Fresberland caught this one. If it's carousel of items that's pre-owned, check this out. Google was testing a little green icons like a leaf. With pre-owned next to it. Crystal Carter: Right, which I think is actually really good. And I think this is probably them looking at how to compete with say, Facebook Marketplace. And there's a lot of pre-owned marketplaces, like Vinted is another one that is an app that does that sort of thing. I think they've given a green leaf to encourage people from an environmental point of view, but it's also useful, so people can understand that it's a secondhand thing, but it's still great. Mordy Oberstein: And it's also good if you're somebody who's selling something secondhand, instead of going to whatever you were going to before, I don't know, I've never really selled stuff secondhand in a long time. I guess, Facebook would be the main place for this. Oh, maybe I'll go and put it on ... I'll think of Google as a way to bring in traffic to sell my product. So, it's a signal to people selling stuff at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. I think it's a great opportunity and I think it's something that should help with the SERP and should help people to filter as well. It's a nice option to have it to be able to filter. If you think on eBay for instance, you can see brand new or you can see secondhand and that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: And Google's done this before, they have the ... for example, in hotel listings, you can see a separate filter for rentals, like Airbnb rentals. So, it's not a new thing for Google as a concept. Another one, Google announces officially that they're going to have coupon codes and you can copy and paste within a Google Business profile. So, if you're Macy's and you have a coupon code, you can list it there you there'll be a special button. It's already been live in some markets, where you just click on it, put in the coupon. It's a way of advertising your coupons on Google. Crystal Carter: Love coupons. I am entirely- Mordy Oberstein: Do you remember going to the store and cutting them out? Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. You'd get the newspaper and they was always like ... Pillsbury was always like, "Oh yeah." Right, Pillsbury were like, "You want cinnamon muffins?" I'm like, "Yes, I would love a cinnamon roll." It's just like you can get that cinnamon roll for really cheap. You're like, "Okay, well thank you very ... " Mordy Oberstein: But it's again, it's another way. Oh, the coupon code's right there. I'm not going to go to Amazon. I'm going to go to Google, check out, see if there's a coupon there. I'll clip it, use it. Good to go. Crystal Carter: I think this is another example of how eCommerce SEO often includes an ad element. So for instance, Google Merchant Center, they change around the requirements, but for a while it was a case where if you wanted to get on Google Merchant and have free shopping listings, you'd have to essentially make your site compliant for ads. Even if you weren't serving ads, you'd have to make your site compliant for ads in order to be active on Google Merchant. I think that elements like this, the coupon codes, you said it would go through Google Business profile for instance, that is essentially something that's a bit advertisingy but is going to help you get clicks, help you get conversions. And it's something that eCommerce SEOs would need to think about. I think it also is an example of some of the overlap between the disciplines. So in SEO, very often you won't stay in one lane as an SEO, you'll do a little bit of eComm, you'll do a little bit of local as well because I've done it before where I've worked with eComm clients and we were looking at both their local activity to drive in-store traffic, and also their online activity at the same time. And one supports the other. And those coupons, for instance, if they're adding it to Google Business profile, that means that they, they'll have a bricks and mortar location and that's something that will give them some visibility. And so, that's something where you would see an overlap. And it's also a great example of some of the elements that you have to think about as an eCommerce SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so the last one I want to talk about is Google announced Price Insights. Price Insights are coming for products. I actually like this, I love this because I think this is where Google's going to beat Amazon. Not that I'm rooting for one over the other, but if I'm watching Google try to do this and they're not being as successful as I think they want to be yet, maybe this is where it's going to come from. And you've seen price insights all over the SERP before. For example, flights. You search for a flight, Google will tell you that this is generally cheaper than it usually is. Or for hotels, the same kind of thing. And that's going to be coming for products, where you'll be able to see, yep, it's usually a thousand dollars but now it's here on Walmart for 700. That's a deal. And this is how Google took down, by the way, sites like Expedia, they didn't take them down. This is how Google won that battle. Sites like Expedia, Travelocity, or whatever, they're all about getting you to convert, get that flight in, book the ticket through us, we're going to get the money. And Google's like, "You know what we should do? Let's offer tons of insights around travel." And Expedia must have data about this, but they don't show it and Google are like, "We're just going to show it. We're going to use that." And they fill the need that no one was doing. And I think with products, it's the same thing. You go to Amazon, I don't know how much this normally costs. I don't know if it's a good price. I mean, I kind of know because I've been looking for a while, if I'm tracking it mentally, intuitively. But here's Google's going to do it and they're already doing it a little bit. So if you Google something, I don't know, Dell Inspiron 15, Google will list a model there and it'll have a whole ... a mobile, a whole bunch of listings where you can get it Amazon, Office Depot, Walmart, and it'll put in green the lowest price and it'll say usually X. So in this case it's saying in green on Amazon, it's $466 and it's usually $479. Those insights, the more they do, it's going to get people to go, "You know what, maybe I will buy it from Amazon, but first I'm going to go to Google and check out what the price insights are." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that this is them using the data that they have. So, they'll be able to see what's going on across the web overall in a way that other folks will not be able to see. And they'll also have the information about the RRP from the SEO markup, because this is the other thing, within eCommerce for certain products, they'll have certain specifications. So, for instance, if you have apparel, if you're selling clothes, you have to categorize things in a certain way. You have to tag things in a certain way. You have to have certain attributes present on your page and they'll make those standard, so that they can enable these kinds of features. So they'll have that information available. And it's something that consumers love that saves you so much time of having to go back and forth to 17 different, sites rather than just being able to see it all in one place. That's going to save me a lot of time. I'm totally the kind of person who would shop around for three hours before making that decision. And so, if I can see it on one tab, that's really, really useful. Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at it right here. My Apple MacBook Pro 16. Google's telling me typically is $2,099 to $2,699. And it lists a bunch of places where I can get it and the prices. Crystal Carter: Right, and it looks like you can sort it, move things up and down as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you could dive in deeper. So here I'm clicking on Best Buy it's telling me what the normal ... there's free shipping from December 5th through December 7th and what the taxes are and there's whatever. And yeah, you can expand each one of these and get more information. It looks like it's an up down, so it's an expansion. There we go. Really, it's only going to get deeper and it's only going to get more prolific is one of my favorite words. Crystal Carter: It's a good word. Mordy Oberstein: Is a good word. It's a money word. Crystal Carter: It's a money word. It's a $5 word. Mordy Oberstein: Cha-ching. So is it new? None of this is new. It's going to be new with the Price Insights, it's going to be more and more and more. We're just seeing the very, very beginning of this, so I would keep a ... If you're in the eComm space, I would keep an eye on that. So it's new, but it's not new. But you may not have known about it. So for you, it's new. Crystal Carter: New to you, which is true. Mordy Oberstein: So this is new. Speaker 5: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else is new? News. News is always new. Otherwise, it wouldn't be news? It'd be old news, not news. Crystal Carter: Olds. It would be olds not news. Mordy Oberstein: Olds, Not new. So, here is a very new, it is new. The snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. I don't know where to start. There's so much news this week. Or in pop culture terms you might say, "Holy abundance of SEO news, Batman." Where do I even start? Well, let's start with this from Barry Schwartz over his search engine Roundtable. Google gives official names, some of SERP features with visual elements gallery. I love this thing. It's basically a visual breakdown of the Google results page, thereby introducing official and new terminology. For example, what we've always called an organic result, is now being called a text result. I have been screaming about this since literally 2019 when I interviewed Barry Schwartz on another SEO podcast. There needs to be formal names for these things because what I call it and what you call it, what that person calls it may actually be different. But now there are official names for these things. Check out the link of the show notes so you can see the visual gallery and understand what Google is calling all of the things. Okay, onwards on our path towards SEO news glory, this one from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google December 2022 link spam update rolling out now. I mean, it might be complete by the time you hear this, but time of the recording it's rolling out now. Yes, another spam update. No, you're not wrong. Google did release one in October and this however, is really interesting because this time Google says quote, "SpamBrain is our AI-based spam prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links." Does this have teeth? I don't know. I really hope so. The tracking tools have been pretty quiet, but with the spam update, that makes a lot of sense. So, the jury is still out. I would love to see this have some teeth. Either way, don't buy links. Last up. An update to the quality reader's guidelines, the guidelines given to manual evaluators so that Google can use it to check its algo against some real human input. This time Google has added another E to E-A-T. So E-A-T is expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. But now it's not E-A-T, it's E-E-A-T. So it's not eat, it's eeat. I'm sorry for that. From the Lily Ray over Search Engine Land, E-E-A-T. Oh, it's a mouthful. E-E-A-T. And major updates to Google's quality radar guidelines. The new E here, by the way, is for experience, as in having some. Google has already added having firsthand experience to the guidelines around its product review update, the algorithm guidelines around the product review update, which makes me personally feel that Google is looking to see how well some of its algorithmic abilities are as compared to real human input. That's just my theory. That's just my theory. Anyway, have a look over the show notes. See what Lily wrote up. She really compares the old guidelines to the new guidelines. Take away some insights, create your own theories, and that'll do it for this week's snappy news. And we're back from the snappiest of snappiest news, wasn't that snappy? Crystal Carter: It's so snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely snappy. Crystal Carter: That's literally the snappiest news I've ever heard. Mordy Oberstein: Other than last week's snappy news. Crystal Carter: Yes, which was also snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Also snappy. Crystal Carter: And it might be snappy next week, I'm guessing? Mordy Oberstein: I love snapping. Crystal Carter: Snap, like the Jets and the Sharks. (singing) Mordy Oberstein: Right, the teachers ... I used to applaud the other teachers when they said something at school-wide meetings, you do the little snap thing. Crystal Carter: Did you go to a school for poetry? Mordy Oberstein: No, I was teaching at a public school in Baltimore. Crystal Carter: Well, was everyone poets? Because that's how poets clap, with snaps. Mordy Oberstein: I know. I don't know, it was a thing. Teachers are weird, we're just weird to be honest with you. Anyway, before we wrap it all up, and because we're talking about eCommerce and when it comes to talking about eCommerce and SEO. This week's follow of the week, so you can learn more about SEO awesomeness would be, the one, the only member of Wix's own SEO advisory board, Luke Carthy, @MrLukeCarthy over on Twitter. Crystal Carter: And Luke is fantastic. He's a great person to follow. He does talks, he does podcasts, he does these great deep dives into things that he would like to see from big retailers around eCommerce. And he's a fount of knowledge with regards to eCommerce. And yeah, he's a fantastic follow on Twitter and all of the other social media channels as well. Mordy Oberstein: And what I like about Luke is he talks about SEO and we'll talk about eComm at the same time. So, if you go to his website, which will link to his show notes obviously, he'll talk about SEO stuff but also talk about general eComm stuff. It's a nice follow-up because you're getting the best of both worlds. For example, on the actual Wix SEO Hub, he wrote about product descriptions, not from SEO point of view per se, but in general, about writing the best product description. So, that's why I think he's a great follow. Crystal Carter: He's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: He's a great follow. So follow Luke @ MrLukeCarthy, M-R-L-U-K-E-C-A-R-T-H-Y. We'll link to another show notes, over on Twitter. And that's going to do it for this week's SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: Thanks for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that was money, right? Crystal Carter: That was money. I think we secured the bag. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the bag. Crystal Carter: It's in the bag. Mordy Oberstein: This episode is in the bag. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: More jokes, all the time. It never stops. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with new episode. We dive into the deep dive, or not deep dive depending on how you look at it, that are site audits. How far down the wormhole do you need to go when auditing your next site? We'll talk about next week. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts. Or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes, or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Ka-ching. 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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