Search Results

Does AI content rank on the SERP? Can you count on AI content to rank in the future? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate the place of AI content in Google’s ranking algorithm. Join them as they take a deep dive into how successful websites are delivering their content and what others in the SEO community think about AI-generated content. Listen as special guest John Wall, host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, guides you through creating AI content that DOES rank with his generative AI for marketers framework. Please rank responsibly, as this week, we delve into Google’s evolving approach for ranking AI content here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Does AI content rank? Does AI content rank on the SERP? Can you count on AI content to rank in the future? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate the place of AI content in Google’s ranking algorithm. Join them as they take a deep dive into how successful websites are delivering their content and what others in the SEO community think about AI-generated content. Listen as special guest John Wall, host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, guides you through creating AI content that DOES rank with his generative AI for marketers framework. Please rank responsibly, as this week, we delve into Google’s evolving approach for ranking AI content here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 80 | March 27, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 52:35 This week’s guests John Wall "John J. Wall writes and practices at the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology. He is the producer of Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program that discusses marketing and technology. John is also a partner at Trust Insights and has been cited by CBS Evening News, The Associated Press, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, The Boston Globe, DM News, and Featured Apple Podcasts." 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 already overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the ever-constant, the ever-ranking, the ever-green. I say green because you have a plant in your background now. Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: This is an audio-only experience. The people don't know that I have a green thing behind me. Mordy Oberstein: You do. You have a green... I like it because it's not green green. It's sage green. Is that the name of the green? Is that right? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's actually only green because it's a fake olive tree. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I should know that because I have an olive tree right next to my house. Crystal Carter: This is true. But my grandma used to have an orange tree in their backyard. That was nice. Mordy Oberstein: You want to hear a crazy story? I used to live in an apartment and it had a garden. Crystal Carter: That is crazy. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that is crazy, right? Living is crazy. It had an olive tree. And the way the garden was laid out, it was right next to a staircase, a publicly used staircase that went down to the next street. You can imagine the next street was a level lower, you had to go down the staircase. And the branches extended over the fence onto the staircase. And we come home one day, and the olive tree, all the branches are cut down. Some maniac, I guess, got upset that the branches were overhanging onto the stair- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And cut down almost the entire olive tree. Crystal Carter: Just from that side? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he must've climbed over the fence a little bit and... Crystal Carter: Whoa. Wowza. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Psycho, right? Crystal Carter: So I used to work for the parks department for the city, and legally, if it's over your side, that part of the tree is yours. Legally speaking, that side of the tree is yours. So I used to also... Really telling everybody my business here. This is totally relevant, but not. Anyway, basically, I used to forage for free apples and stuff around. And basically, if the apple tree was hanging over the sidewalk, those apples are mine. I can have those apples. They're mine and I'm going to eat them. So that's what I'm doing. You don't like your apples being in the public domain, get your tree out of the public domain. Mordy Oberstein: How do you like them apples? Crystal Carter: Basically. So yeah, it's very complex, trees. Mordy Oberstein: Trees are complex. They are complex. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tag-creator to spit up title tags and meta descriptions in no time flat because time is not flat, time is round. Also, I don't write meta descriptions anymore. I let the AI do it every time because when it comes to meta descriptions, I don't care. Why? Because AI content ranks. And also because meta descriptions, whatever, who cares, right? I'm saying that as Crystal's looking at me like, "Why are you saying that?" Because I don't care. I don't think they are impactful. One of my least important SEO tasks are meta descriptions. I guess it might help with clicks if Google didn't rewrite half of them. I'm real salty about meta descriptions, but you can use your AI meta tag writer to write them. How's that for a pitch? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, that's cool. Okay. So let's just clear this up. I have time for meta descriptions because I've seen them work, right? I've seen them work, but I don't think that you should be hand crafting them artisanally. I don't think- Mordy Oberstein: No, there's no reason. Either way, there's no reason. Just let the AI write that. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you're not using AI, you don't necessarily have to use AI. You can also just do programmatically. So in Wix, you have the option for both. You have the option for either the programmatic setup where you insert keyword for this- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or take product description, make it meta description. Crystal Carter: Right. This is the title of the product, brand new, et cetera. You can set the template for it so that the template does the work for you. That I am all here for and following best practices, et cetera. But I have seen for good pages for your big money pages, putting a good CTA on there. Mordy Oberstein: No. It could be impactful for conversions. Fine. Yeah, I'm with that when Google's not rewriting them 99.9% of the time. I agree. We all agree to disagree. One thing we do agree on is that today we're talking about AI content and does it rank? Insert dramatic music. Why understanding if AI content ranks matters? Why understanding of AI content ranks on the SERP is just the beginning? And will AI content continue to rank on the SERP? Assuming it already does, but I feel like I'm giving it away there that we're telling you that it already does. Because we surveyed you, the SEOs, to see what you think. So y'all are our guests today, but also our guests that'd be Marketing Over Coffee's host, John Wall, who will talk about when and when not to use AI for content generation. Plus we have the Snappy SEO News for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So get out your best AI prompts and put on a funny little cone hat like you went to a birthday party as episode number 80 of the SERP's Up Podcast plays in the AI content on the rankings. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thank you for that exciting introduction. So let's just talk about why we're talking about this. Mordy Oberstein: Exciting introduction. Wow, sarcasm much. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: I was hallucinating because I was using AI. Crystal Carter: Okay. So why are we talking about this? The reason why we're talking about this is because it's been very up-and-down. When AI was in the backburner, Google was like, "Don't use AI, don't use AI everyone. I know you've heard about all these tools, but don't use AI. Be good little SEOs, don't use AI." And then ChatGPT broke virally, it was way more accessible. And then they were like, "Okay, you can use AI as long as it's helpful. You can use helpful AI. If it's helpful, that's fine, we won't penalize you. It's fine." And there's been up and down. People have been testing AI content for years, testing pretty much unedited AI content for years. There's a few people who've been doing a lot of experiments around this. Mark Williams-Cook has a very well-documented experiment that he's been running on this content as well. And for a while, people were saying, "Oh, yeah, it doesn't really rank," or "It ranks for a while and then it will completely tank." And that's something that people have said. However, it's my opinion and it's something that I've observed that basically, if people remember back around this time of year or around the spring of 2023 when Bing was like, "Yo, we have new Bing. We are putting AI in the SERP." And Google was going, "Oh, we also have AI," and they were trying to catch up, I've started to see a lot more content that is AI-generated being openly AI-generated and ranking. And so I'm going to share a couple of examples of that. One is a big example, which is LinkedIn's advice folder, which has been going gangbusters pretty much since they started doing it. They built this up in the springtime of 2023, and they've seen some incredible activities for this. If you haven't seen this, basically you haven't been on LinkedIn. And basically, when you go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will ask you questions, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And they call them collaborative articles in the folders under advice and things like, "What does a production coordinator do? What is regression testing and why is it important? What are the best practices for this?" Now, the way I stumbled upon this wasn't actually through LinkedIn; it was actually through a featured snippet. I found a featured snippet. It was talking about a technical SEO term, and it actually didn't have any contributions. But at the top of every article, it says that this article was created by AI and the LinkedIn community and they're doing incredibly well. So they started building up this folder around March 2023. They peaked with their traffic at 2.8 million globally in about 2023 September. And it went down a little bit, but it's got down to 1.7 million according to Semrush's stats. And I take that traffic. I'll take that. If that's where we're dropping back to, that's fine. And they're not the only ones. Another from a smaller example is a site called Wellnite.com, which is a site that's actually working more in the YMYL space. So they are something that talks about counseling and they've got lots of articles. One of them is bottling up emotions, how to let go, acknowledge your emotions, peaceful mind practice and things like that. And at the bottom, it says, "PS, this blog was created with AI software as a tool to supplement the author accompanied by Wellnite staff overview and supervision." And that is an example of a website that had been going, ticking along through 2020, 2021 at getting around global traffic according to Semrush of about 400 or so. There are lots of blogs that are like that, lots of company blogs that are like that for smaller websites. And theirs started ticking along. But then in 2023, they started adding in these AI-generated contents, and they were able to increase the number of articles that they were ranking. And they've now been able to double their traffic monthly because of that. And again, it's still fairly small traffic, but compared to where they were, that's a very significant jump. And the amount of traffic that they've seen increased between the start of 2023 and where we are in 2024 is significant. It's the most significant growth they've ever seen across their domain. So to my mind, AI content is doing just fine and there's lots of evidence to show that, but there's a few things that people can do to make it better. And I think the people who are doing it well are taking advantage of some of those elements. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I think very much, it depends. The linked articles I think are a great case. First off, the linked articles are from LinkedIn, so you are not LinkedIn. So that's one thing to be careful of. But the second thing is the linked articles are interesting. I actually like them because they make me think because I don't like the answers. I don't like the content that they offer. I find I comment on them, so I get a little badge thing on LinkedIn because I'm being like that. And most of my takes are like, "Nah, that's not how you should actually think about it." But interestingly enough, and I wonder if this plays into it or how it plays into it, you're actually getting first-person experience on those articles in the comments themselves. And that's my point that it all depends with this kind of thing. For example, Mark Williams-Cook has an article on Search Engine Land where he talks about LLMs generating content. And when he ran an experience, he created 10,000 URLs on unsupervised AI. And you see it ranks and it just gets killed off. And there are a bunch of examples like that. So it's using this or thinking about, "Does it rank unequivocally?" The answer is it depends what you mean by that. If you're just spinning up random content or unsupervised content, the answer is it'll rank for a while. I think it's very much spam content in general. It ranks for a while, and then it falls off. So I was reading in Traffic Think Tank recently, was Andy Chapa talking about a case where I think someone all of a sudden got... They must have bought tons of links. And you see this, people buy tons of links, they start ranking for a while and then Google eventually figures it out and gets rid of it. I think it's very similar to that or any other kind of spam practice. If you're using AI in a spammy kind of way, you'll rank two, three, four months and then it'll fall off. And that's been a lot of the consensus around what's been shared in the SEO community about this. And we actually asked the SEO community on January 29th, "Does Google consistently regularly rank AI content?" And out of 120 so votes, 82% of people said yes, and around 70% of people said no. And then the comments are filled with these anecdotes. For example, Kristine Schachinger said, "It does and then it will not." And I think what she's talking about are those kind of cases where what Mark did, where you're just unsupervised, this doesn't make any sense, it's not good content, it's not helpful, it'll get killed off, which is what Google's saying. I think there's a lot of politics behind what Google's saying also, but whatever. We'll leave that aside. It's not for this podcast. Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. He wrote, "Yes, but it's kind of skewed due to the sheer volume of it and the overall scope of AI content. Even if you utterly ignore the spammer flood, legitimate networks are always, if not partially using, so it shows for news, et cetera." So that's a really good point, how you use it, how you go about using it, it's really important. Pedro Diaz wrote, "I anticipate the answers are all going towards experience people had and seen recently within their search bubble," which I think is a very good point to having broader views in a wider spectrum of experiences. And I don't think I've seen a wide study on AI content ranking. And I think that would be fascinating to see to address that point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that there's so many different variations in the ways that people are using it because the other thing is that there's lots of people who aren't ranking with AI content. But there's also the case that, and we've seen this with the AI tools that we have in Wix, we've used AI tools to help people do things like the meta descriptions, for instance. We talked about those. And what we've seen with that is that there's a lot more people who have accessibility, with lowercase a, to some of these techniques because they don't have to worry about the barriers to entry regarding grammar, for instance, or regarding even sometimes the ideation. So that Wellnite website is a classic example. They were publishing occasionally, but they were able to increase the rate of publishing because they were using some of these AI tools. So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are getting more access to these things, who are able to articulate themselves better with the help of some of these tools. And that I think is a win. I think that's a good thing that people who were previously not able to understand or use meta descriptions at all, for instance, are able to engage with that content. I think that's a benefit, and I think that that's something that will affect which pages are ranking and will affect how many pages are ranking. However, there's going to be a lot of people who are just putting out junk, but those people were putting out junk anyway before in lots of other ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It's really a matter of mindset, and we'll talk about it with John later on that how do you go about building the content utilizing AI and expediting your processes? Because at the same time, I think something very important to keep in the back of your mind when you're using AI to create content, which you should certainly be doing the right way, is where's Google trying to go? And this speaks to a lot of the Reddit controversy on the SERP at the moment as we're recording, and who knows if it'll fixed by the time we're done recording. But there's been a lot of pushback about the amount of Reddit results Google's showing on the SERP. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that Google's trying to push for first-person, first knowledge, experience-based content and Google's having a lot of issues with this. But you see this trend keep coming up with things like Reddit ranking, Gisele Navarro put out an interesting post about product review websites and how folks like Rolling Stone have jumped into the product review space. And one of the things that they're doing to rank is relying on first-person experience in a way. I'll put a little caveat, a little asterisk on that, by using first-person expressions, like I, we, our, which I've personally seen a huge influx of folks doing that over time. So we take the same product review page now, and you put it in the Wayback Machine, the amount of our, we, first-person language has increased exponentially. And there's a recent study that Cyrus Shepard did that shows, and again, it's a correlation study, so no one freak out like, "Oh, no, it's correlation." But correlation sometimes can point you in the right direction and correlation does mean something. And one of the things that he noticed in websites that are winning is the usage of first-person pronouns: me, we, I, that sort of thing. The direction where Google is trying to go kind of contradicts a lot of the things that people are doing with AI content. So when you're building AI content, you need to keep in mind where the ecosystem is shifting and leverage AI the right way within that context. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think that the first-person experience is super important for that. And there's a couple of reasons why writing... Whenever I'm doing content evaluations or making content recommendations, particularly to blog-facing content or customer service attributions and things, I very often say that people should speak in the second person, like, "You should do this, you can do that, you could do this. We do this for you because it is good and you will like it," and that sort of thing. And the reason why is because a lot of people are on their mobiles, and that is a one-person situation. That is a one-person thing. Even if you share that with somebody, even if you will share it to their mobile and they will read it personally on their mobile phone, individually. So it's like, "Hi, I am talking to you," it's very much an individual situation. So users are going to be responding to that in lots of ways. And I think that when we think about AI content, I don't think that AI content is necessarily opposed to that. I think it's a way to organize that sort of thing. One really good example that I saw in terms of product reviews was Spruce Pets. They had a great product review of dog carriers, and clearly they had people who were testing it with their dogs. They were like, "Here I am with my dog, here is my dog in the dog carrier," that sort of thing. But then here's where you use the AI. The AI is where you pull in how to organize all the product detail between the different ones. How you say, "Okay, this one has a carrier, this one has a pocket, this one has a thing for treats," all of that sort of stuff. That's what you use the AI for. And you maybe use the AI to pull out some of the common threads of some of the first-person things that you're using. So I don't think it's necessarily opposed, but I think you should use it to clean up some of the qualitative information. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's part of the problem with the discussion is that when you look at a zero-sum, either there's AI content or not AI content. So I'll tell you one of the things that I'm a big proponent of is what I'll call situational content writing. So one of the ways you can actually show expertise in a real way, other than just loading in the page with we, I, me, which anybody can do, an LLM can do that if you trick it to do that for you, it is actually predicting the situation the consumer's going to face and then writing about that situation. Because that actually demonstrates you actually know what the heck you're talking about and have actual experience. Because you can't predict the next scenario unless you have some kind of situational experience. However, if you're talking about let's go with a pet carrier thing, situation. How to get your pet into the pet carrier if they don't want to go in? You'll predict as someone who has a pet, you can try this. If that doesn't work, then try this. But the general like, "What is a pet carrier?" Let's say you wanted to put that there, but you probably don't need, but let's say you did, then you can have an AI spin out like, "What is the pet carrier?" Sure, go ahead and write that part. It's not a zero-sum. So let the AI save you time and let it make you more efficient in the right spots within the expert and the experience-driven content you want to create. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's also important to remember that there's going to be some content that people don't care what an AI thinks about it like, "Is your pet happy in the pet carrier?" for instance. That's something I don't really care what ChatGPT thinks about whether or not my Cocker Spaniel is happy in the carrier. If I hear from other people, "Yeah, my dog was really happy. He was wagging his tail, he kept sniffing my ear," or whatever, that sort of thing. That's something that I would like to hear first-person knowledge of and that's something that you should be aware of. And then that situational stuff is really important because that situational information is stuff that you can get from users, from real humans, from real human users and from real personal experience. And I think that you can use, again, if not zero-sum, you can use AI to help you collate and to help you organize some of the things that you're getting from user videos, user interviews, customer feedback reforms, that sort of stuff to help you bring some of that together. But you're going to be able to add value with a cyborg kind of approach, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: And look, that's going to be the kind of content that ranks fundamentally. In fact, now at some point, Google's... Listen, there's two possibilities in my opinion. Either Google will figure this out to make sure that the content that has actual expertise and actual experience, which may be supplemented by AI ranks, or it won't be a search engine anymore that we'll go to. So either way, it doesn't matter. Okay. Well, since we're already talking about AI and content and ranking, I think it behooves us to talk about AI for content generation so that you know how to create the AI content that ranks and not the AI content that ranks, but really shouldn't rank. So rank responsibly. Please rank responsibly. To help us talk about this, we have a very special guest with the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, John Wall, as we move beyond SEO and into the great beyond. Hey John, welcome to the podcast. How are you? John Wall: Great, thanks. Glad to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So you're the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. You also work for Trust Insights and do a lot with AI. Now is the time on the podcast for you to pitch. John Wall: Yeah. So with Trust Insights, we've done a lot of stuff with generative AI. Our chief technologist, Christopher Penn, has been using AI in PR and marketing for over 15 years. So we already had a bunch of stuff that we were using AI for as far as attribution and predictive analysis for creating content calendars, things like that. And so yeah, generative AI has now spun up though and he is just in demand everywhere. In fact, he's speaking in London this week. Yeah, it's become huge. And so we actually have put together a framework of generative AI for marketers, stuff that you can do to create content, do better in SEO. There's a whole bunch of different avenues and strategies, everything just from the basic habit, my blog post, which is what you're talking about, stuff that comes out and is weak at best. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, you're trying to create stuff that nobody else is doing and actually has some novelty, and we'll get you to the higher amounts of traffic and positioning because it's quality stuff. Crystal Carter: I think that one of the things that stood out from that was you said you've been working in this space for years, and I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people don't realize. People say, "Oh, AI is new." Google's been using AI in the SERPs for years. But people like folks from your team have been using these tools for many, many years. And I think that that gives you particularly interesting insights on this. There's a lot of people who are just new to the game and just getting involved, but I think that there's going to be some things that you've tried and understand more than other people. John Wall: Yeah, I think it is very different than a lot of the other trends that come up through marketing. When we had cyber currency, it was a huge deal and NFTs and all this kind of stuff, they were created. But AI, as a concept, was created back in the 1950s, right? Crystal Carter: Right. John Wall: The academic community understood what this could do and where it was going, and it was just that the computing power wasn't there. Yeah. So idea of being able to figure out, "Identify the difference between human and AI, can you fool people?" And of course, there's always been turks, right? There's always machines that can make you think you're talking to a computer when you're really not, because there's still some human interaction in there on the back-end. But yeah, we're at least getting close to the point where ChatGPT could fool somebody for a little while for four or five prompts before you figure out that they're a person. But better customer service tools have already been able to do that to some point. They can get you there. But yeah, so now people have kind of jumped on the AI bandwagon and Gartner's peak hype right now where every product has AI attached to it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my gosh. John Wall: My tires were rotated last week with AI over at the gas station. Mordy Oberstein: I have AI tires. Yours were rotated with AI. I have actual AI tires. John Wall: You have AI in the tires. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Do they tell you when you're in the wrong lane? Mordy Oberstein: No, they don't do anything for me whatsoever. They hallucinate and tell me I'm in a desert on the highway and where I'm really driving in my actual driveway. So I don't know what's flying. I'm going to use my AI tires. John Wall: Yeah, it is everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So if we're going to actually use AI in a real way, we're going to say, "Okay, let's create content and let's use AI." Is it carte blanche, like just go wild? John Wall: No, no. There's a lot of ways to go. In fact, I would even back up. I would not start with generative AI. We did and have done predictive models. So for example, we've done a bunch of stuff in the food space, and it's worked so well we had to come up with a sample for the rest of the world. So we have the cheese report, which is an annual report that comes out and it talks about, "Okay, which cheeses are most searched for every week of the year?" And so you can- Crystal Carter: It's cheddar, right? Mordy Oberstein: American. John Wall: Cheddar. We're just coming off hot cheddar with the Super Bowl here in America. That's very popular. Mozzarella surges as we get close to Christmas. Mordy Oberstein: Kraft singles, American cheese is not- Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's cheddar. Cheddar is your best cheese. It's good for almost every situation. John Wall: Cheddar is always ranking high. It's definitely top 10 most of the year. But look, for a content marketer, the big one now you'd look at is halloumi where you've got grillable cheeses will be popular June, July when that time of the year comes. So if you've got your content calendar, you should be starting to script out those halloumi videos and recipes and all that stuff now, so that you've got that stuff dropping in May and you're able to get some Google juice to that before peak search season in June, July. Mordy Oberstein: Some hot cheese right there. John Wall: Yeah, that's the hot cheese. And we have it for a whole bunch of other foods, but the brands that get those reports don't let us share that with anybody else. So we're not able to share our food insight outside of cheese, but that gives you an example of using some predictive AI to actually create content that is in demand. And that way, you've got your stuff all updated when you hit peak search. Crystal Carter: And I think is there a little bit of overlap for content like that, for instance? Let's say, if you're running a stats tool throughout the year or something, for instance, the Billboard Hot 100 changes every day or that sort of thing. If you're running a SaaS tool like that, how much is there crossover between programmatic elements and AI elements with creating content around that? John Wall: It completely overlaps. AI is not going to come up with anything new. That's really what it is. It's just you're applying programmatic strategies to figuring out what's going to be coming on and where it goes. And there's a ton of ways to apply that too. Another way we see it all over the place is with reviews or other huge libraries of content where instead of generating, have it do summarization or classification. And take a huge batch of reviews, have it come up with, "Okay, what are the five most common things that people like/don't like about this product?" And now that's a blog post that's based on your data, that's proprietary that somebody else using GenAI can't just come up with that post. You're the only one that can do that and it's going to be on target, but it's unique and it's your voice and it's probably going to be stronger across the board. Crystal Carter: I think that's great because with something like that, you can summarize and hit some of the key points with the keywords there. And also, it's got good user value because me, as a user, if I'm trying to decide whether or not I should use halloumi cheese or Havarti cheese on my cheeseburger, for instance, it might be like, "Yeah, this was a good cheese, but it didn't quite melt as much on the burger, for instance." And I can get that summary without reading 400 reviews that include like, "Oh, I dropped the cheese on the ground and things. It's one star." It's like, "No, you dropped it. That's your problem." John Wall: That's like the Amazon classic of the products that suck because the box arrived destroyed. There's all these- Mordy Oberstein: Right. I love that. I don't care. John Wall: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because you know who's going to destroy the box in three seconds anyway? My children. John Wall: That's just been part of the customer experience. Mordy Oberstein: But this is a similar point to something we discussed. We had a webinar with Mike King and Ross Hudgens where we talked about giving AI rules and confines to work within as opposed to, "Here's a very open, unconfined scenario. But if you give it parameters to work with, it does much better and it does what you want it to do. And that's where I feel like it can offer real insights and real ability to produce content for you that you couldn't have done otherwise or you couldn't have done otherwise as quickly." But again, it's giving an open prompt and just telling it to go without any borders or any confines, is probably a recipe for disaster. John Wall: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we even have a whole course that's seven hours of training, and a huge chunk of it is writing effective prompts. And so that's where some of the artistry is. And we have a whole framework, we call it the RACE Framework where for any prompt you want to do R-A-C-E. So you give it the role, you say, "Hey, you are an engineer that is working with stereo equipment. A, is for action. Your task is to come up with a list of whatever. "You give it context. That's the C, where you're saying that the audience is this level of professional. Is it engineers with 10 years' experience? Or is it people that have no experience with audio equipment? And then execute." You actually give it the instructions as far as how to write this. It should be at X grade level, it should cover X number of bullet points, have a summary. Basically, the best prompts, you have these huge paragraphs of stuff that you're using. Mordy Oberstein: That's the thing. AI is great. You have to shape it to what you want it to be. And I think the problem is that it's so easy and there's no barrier to entry that people think, "Oh, I can do this." To me, it's like picking up a baseball bat. Yes, you can pick up a baseball bat and you can swing it, but if you look at what the pros are actually doing, there's so much more that goes into it: managing the load, and where's your weight shifting? And when is your weight shifting? And where's your elbow? And how is your wrist turning? There's a million things that go into actually swinging a baseball bat the real way versus you just taking a whack at it with your wonky-ass swing. And it's very similar to AI. Yes, you could put in a prompt and yes, you can get an output but that's not actually swinging the bat. John Wall: Yeah. Another way to think of it, you have that thing, we've always talked about this in software is tools for experts versus expert tools. Look, right now, the state of AI, it's like a router. If you're a carpenter, who knows what the heck they're doing, you can do amazing things with this tool. If you are somebody who's just playing around, you could end up losing some fingers. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. The AI will add the fingers and some back for you. John Wall: Man, I hadn't thought about how much that hits. Yeah. But thankfully, AI has tons of fingers that it can spread around liberally to everyone. I even saw that on Amazon, they have a fake plastic finger you can buy so that you can wear it around and then you can tell people, "Oh, no, that's obviously AI-generated, because- Mordy Oberstein: People are interesting, huh? John Wall: Yeah. I'm thinking I don't need to go through the work of making sure the finger matches. That seems like a lot of effort to perpetrate a fraud, so I'm not going to bother with that. Mordy Oberstein: You have to really take on the next load because let's say, I don't know, you're out at the beach and your fingers get tanned. You're going to have to have a tanned finger. Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes they think arms in different places that shouldn't be there. The arms coming out in the middle and you're like, "What is going on there?" But I've seen pop stars, there was a whole thing. I'm going to show myself here, but there was a whole thing on Nicki Minaj as a popular rapper and she had a new album art. She had a song she put out unannounced. And the album art she used for, it was clearly generated with AI, and it clearly had not gone through QA. And it was supposed to be police tape and it didn't say police all the way through, and the things had different arms and they had all of this sort of stuff. And even people who have the means... She's a multi-millionaire, and she has a PR team, and she has many people available. But even people who have the means aren't going through the QA. In terms of process, you have your prompting thing, you have your data thing, how much is the QA of the AI part of your process of getting good quality stuff? John Wall: Yeah. For us, that's a huge part of it. Really, in fact, there's nothing that can be released or put out there until it's been pounded on by experts who know what it should be doing and where it should be going. That's the real challenge of this. And then people don't get this either, is that you don't just build it and start using it. No, you build it, you run it and then you train it. And it needs to be constantly trained. Training needs to be a permanent part of your process. Mordy Oberstein: You mean, like anything else, it requires hard work? John Wall: You don't just hire it and then fire your whole marketing team the next day. Mordy Oberstein: You completely kill what AI means to me, and I am now completely uninterested in it. Crystal Carter: It's magic. Isn't it just magic? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If it's not magic, I don't care. John Wall: Yes. In fact, it gets your coffee right in the morning and it will drive you home at the end of the day. Yeah. No, it doesn't do all the things. Mordy Oberstein: If it doesn't watch my kids, I don't care. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember the learning part of the machine learning because that's the other thing. For marketers, PPC, for instance, has had machine learning going on for years, for years and years. Facebook has had it in there. Google Ads has had it in there. And you had to do the machine learning part of it. You'd have to, and you'd have to train it and train the model and retrain the model and retrain your parameters and all that sort of stuff. So for people who just think you can set it and forget it and it will just do magic, it's just a rude awakening, I think. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the Ronco slow cooker, set it and forget it, which is my favorite- Crystal Carter: Hey, I love my slow cooker. My slow cooker is that. I just put all the things and then... John Wall: Set it- Mordy Oberstein: And then forget it. John Wall: One thing that we've been doing that is pretty interesting because of this idea that these models do read everything that's out there, we've played around with actually doing press releases again. We had originally abandoned press releases as a complete waste of time because they were just lost in the five million other press releases that came out today. But now we've been working with some copy that's optimized for large language models to scan and grab. So you can write about unique content. And it's funny, it's classic spammer stuff in that these press releases don't read that well. A human reads them, they don't make a lot of sense. There's some thread there, but the key is you've got 15 or 20 phrases in there that you ultimately want a large language model to think that you are the answer for. Crystal Carter: Right. And to come into the corpus of their knowledge on that particular topic. John Wall: Right. Exactly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that we find interesting, particularly with large language models that are public-facing, like SGE and banks, Bing chat for instance. So one of the things that they're doing, because it's so expensive to answer questions with AI, it's so expensive for them to run, a lot of times they will truncate the answer. So you might write a really long question about, "What was the breed of dog that Dorothy had in The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland? What exactly? Which kind of breed?" So you might write all of that, but they will truncate the answer. So even if you ask a similar question that's not exactly the same on the LLM, they'll essentially distill it to, "Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz," and they'll distill it and give you, roughly, the same answers. When you're creating a PR release with those kinds of phrases and things, are you thinking for those questions in mind, those lowest common denominator questions? How are you identifying the phrases you want to surface for? John Wall: Yeah. So our analysis on that has been just analyzing what we're getting from answers now, and seeing the format and types of stuff that it wants to see. But yeah, you've hit upon a whole nother area of this study that is a big deal, this idea of managing your tokens. And for a lot of these systems, if you go with the paid version now, suddenly, you get to send larger queries and get larger queries back and get more in depth of. So it's a different level of information and quality. The other one is, as you're building prompts, we find that it's much more effective to do long strings. You keep continuing to correct an ad. And so one trick with that is after you've done four or five prompts, have the model summarize what you've learned so far so that it can boil down your previous 10 queries into one paragraph. And then, when you do more research, you start with that one summarized paragraph and you basically get to skip the initial round. Because yeah, these all have moving windows of after four or five prompts, they start to forget the original stuff and they will start hallucinating again on things that you've walled in. Crystal Carter: So say I want it without the hat on it, and they're like, "With a hat?" And you're like, "No, that's not what I said." And you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Mordy Oberstein: All the way. I find that with images. Using Copilot or Gemini, I find that it loses its train of thought like my grandmother. Crystal Carter: You're like, "Come back, come back." And it's like, "Right over here." And you're like, "No, no. No, this way." John Wall: Yeah. Yeah, they completely start to run afield. And I don't know. And then really, for this whole space, there is this question of they are just doing an obscene amount of background computing that costs money. And sooner or later- Mordy Oberstein: So much. John Wall: Now, thankfully... Well, not thankfully for me, but thankfully for folks in AI, all of the MarTech and cyber currency VC money has dumped to AI for this next year. So there is a pile of cash there now to give everybody a free ride. But the question is how long is that going to last? Sooner or later... And the good news is it's free and they're looking at $20 a month kind of things, which is great. It doesn't cover the cost, but at least will probably boil down to two or three champions and then yeah, maybe we can finally open up that Alzheimer's window a little bit wider so that they can remember where the heck we're going. Mordy Oberstein: If people want to keep track of this by keeping track of you, where can they find you? John Wall: Oh, I'm always over at marketingovercoffee.com. And then for work stuff, we're at trustinsights.ai. We have a Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. If analytics is your thing, come on over there. We're always talking about it every day, and it's a great place to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you know how to use GA4? John Wall: Oh, we are all about GA4. Actually, the big news for us now is we've been doing GA stuff forever, but we actually offer Matomo in-house for people that are sick of GA4 already, which is 98% of people. And we do a bunch of work with Adobe too. So yeah, it's funny, we do all this cool AI stuff, but the reality is 98% of our customers have problem with the plumbing, and so that's the dirty work that we get done. Mordy Oberstein: Even imagined as toilets. John Wall: This is true. Crystal Carter: You should get an AI to clean the.. John Wall: Siri, clean my basement. What's happening? Crystal Carter: Whenever I think of AI, I always think of the housekeeper from the Jetsons. When is that coming? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Rosey. John Wall: Rosey. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: When is Rosey coming to my house? That's what I'm- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I need someone to watch my kids. Crystal Carter: She has a lot of sass though, but it's fine. John Wall: You want to read a crazy one, read about some of these disasters with the automated vacuuming machines. If the pet gets sick and then the machine hits it, and then spreads it around the whole house, fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Okay. On that happy note, give John a follow and check out all the great stuff they're doing over there at Trust Insights and the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Give that a listen as well. John, thank you so much. John Wall: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I wonder? I wonder if there'll be some AI-related news in the SEO News. Crystal Carter: Maybe something about BARD or BERT. Mordy Oberstein: Or Ernie or Gemini or Scorpio. Crystal Carter: Or Elmo. Mordy Oberstein: Or Elmo or Barry Crystal Carter: Or MUM. Mordy Oberstein: Or Barry. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Is Barry a constellation? Crystal Carter: There should be a Barry algo. I think they keep- Mordy Oberstein: That would be amazing if Google, the most penalizing algorithm ever created, they called it Barry Schwartz. I think that would go over well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: People already blame him for when they lose their rankings. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, all the time. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ask him. When Barry- Crystal Carter: Okay. I would like to just make a public service announcement, Barry's not responsible for your rankings. Mordy Oberstein: No. Barry's just reporting on what happened. There appears to be an update that Google didn't announce. He's just reporting. But there have been many times, Barry's... Actually, I've interviewed him about this. Barry's gotten death threats. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, over rankings. He's just reporting, people. Crystal Carter: He's not in charge of it. Mordy Oberstein: He's not in charge. Crystal Carter: He didn't do it. Mordy Oberstein: You shouldn't threaten anybody with death. Crystal Carter: Barry's a nice man. You shouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: I wouldn't go that far, but yeah. No, I'm kidding. Barry's a gem, which brings us to the Snappy SEO News. In case you haven't realized, this is our time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. The update is over. No, not that one. Not that one. For Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the Google March 2024 spam update is done rolling out, the March 2024 core update is very much still alive, seeing a whole bunch of reversals in the second wave of volatility that came out. Treated it last week. If you want, check that out. But anyway, onto the spam update. It's done. After 15 days on March 20th, Google announced it's done, it's complete, it's rolled out. If you'll recall, Google announced there were three new elements that are being integrated into the spam algorithm. One of them is not hitting until May. And as part of these announcements, Google released the March 2024 spam update, which obviously heavily focused on the new things being integrated into its spam algorithms, which are scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Site reputation abuse, not happening until May. And that's parasite SEO. That's again where, I don't know, I want to push my content. I don't have a very authoritative website. I go to Sports Illustrated. I say, "I will buy a page on your website, write up an article, have nothing to do with sports and get traffic through that parasite SEO." The other elements, the expired domain abuse, where you say, "Hey, that domain, that used to be about whatever topic, which is I can get the domain, bring it back to life. Google will think, 'Oh, wow, it's so authoritative. That was such a great website way back when, and I can write whatever I want, whatever garbage I want, and it'll rank.'" So that and the scaled content abuse part of the algorithm is also live right now, and that's where basically you're just throwing up tons of just AI garbage, not curating it at all, not thinking about it at all. You're just pushing out content at scale without any thought whatsoever to essentially manipulate rank and users. So that was also in the March 2024 spam update, and we saw a lot of activity around that. Part of all of this were all of the manual actions, which we discussed on the podcast as well. Thousands of sites have seen manual actions. A lot of the examples being shared have to do with that scaled content abuse where Google's killing off the entire website because again, people are just spinning up random... Some of the cases I've seen, it's not even good AI. It's just bad garbage AI. It's nonsensical even. So those websites have been completely killed off. If you have been doing those kind of things, and you've seen your content and your rankings rather just falls to the bottom floor, that might be something you want to take a look at. If you are doing good, decent work, you shouldn't really be affected by a spam update. Now, one of the things that you're going to be thinking is, "How do I know if I was hit by the spam update or by the March 2024 core update?" Well, one way to know is if you're doing things like scaled content abuse or expired domain abuse, then it's probably the spam update. Again, if you're not doing these ridiculously spammy, absurd things and you're seeing a ranking loss, one, the March 2024 core update's still not done rolling out. Again, as I mentioned, I'm seeing tons of reversals. So don't do anything yet. As Google mentioned, be patient. If, after the March 2024 core update is done and rolled out and completed, and you're still trying to figure out was it the spam update or the core update, again, if you haven't been doing these ridiculously, overtly spammy... I don't even know how to... mind-boggling things, then it's probably the core update. That's my way of looking at it. Okay, onto article number two, again from Barry Schwartz, but this time over at Search Engine around it... By the way, got to say happy birthday to Barry Schwartz. March 22nd was Barry's birthday. I hope you got a lovely birthday cake. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google SGE feedback on affiliate results and Google News: Does This Interest You Pop-Up." Hope you all caught all of that in the headline. Let me explain. Google has done this for a while, but this is a different way of doing it. This one was picked up by a friend of the show, friend of baseball, Glenn Gabe, who saw that for an affiliate website ranking on the results, Google had a little widget there that says, "How helpful was the result above? One extreme being not helpful at all, the other extreme being extremely helpful." And you just selected the dot on the spectrum of how helpful you thought that it was. So that's really interesting to see that on affiliate stuff. Another example was within a Google News result. So there was a news card that showed up and there was a little pop-up thing that says, "Does this interest you? Thumbs up, thumbs down." Google has been doing these things for a long, long, long time. There's a bunch of iterations of this with feature snippets, "Did you find the feature snippet helpful? Yada, yada, yada." So this is not new to quote Barry, but it is interesting to see. Google, again, has done this many, many times in many, many different ways over the years. I think it's really interesting that it's happening now, especially for the affiliate result that Glenn showed. I just find it really interesting that you have all of these things going on in the ecosystem, the whole Reddit question, the spam updates, the core updates, the quality of results, AI content, SGE. And Google's now rolling out this little test of showing a widget, you can offer to your feedback to how helpful the result was. So I think that aligns to what's going on in the ecosystem overall and especially on something that's product review related or affiliate related. So definitely interesting to see Google doing that there. And that is this week's Snappy SEO News. It would be nice though if they had a Barry update, but it was one that was only helpful and rewarding to all websites that were good. Crystal Carter: And then afterwards everyone would go, "Thank you." Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. And they could say, "It's new. It's a new algorithm." Crystal Carter: Indeed. Indeed. You were saying, "Wouldn't it be nice?" And now I'm thinking of that Beach Boys song. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great song, actually. Crystal Carter: It's a great song. Mordy Oberstein: How did Beach Boys stand up? That's a good song. Crystal Carter: Generally, Beach Boys, they've got that good album. They've got one really, really good album. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Pet Shops. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a great album. Listen to it start to finish. It's a great album. It's really well-produced. Great album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what else is great? Our follow of the week. And our follow of the week is none other than Dale Bertrand. Crystal Carter: Dale Bertrand. If you've been following How to Rank with AI, then you must be following Dale Bertrand. If you're not following him, please do. He's very active on LinkedIn, and you can see him all over the place speaking all over in lots of different places. So he's a founder and president of Fire&Spark with over 15 years experience working out of Boston. And he talks and shares some great resources around AI and content and using it intelligently and using it in a way that really, really works. So highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: And just a super nice guy, super nice. I met him in BrightonSEO in November in San Diego and he was super nice. Crystal Carter: Super nice. And he's very often at BrightonSEO in the UK. So yeah, he's a great speaker, great writer, great SEO marketer, so highly recommend. Great follow. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to his profiles in the show notes. Now I realize, by the way, I completely botched... It was not called Pets Shops; it's called Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. What the hell am I talking about? I am ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Pet Shops. You're thinking of Pet Shop Boys. You hallucinated. Are you AI? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I knew it. Mordy Oberstein: It explains a lot. Right? So I want to point out the irony of not saying we're not Beach Boy fans on a podcast built on surfing themes. That's not my favorite. I'll say another hot take, the Beatles aren't my favorite. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy the songs. I have Beatle albums or I had Beatle albums back in the day. Who has albums anymore? But they're historically super important. Crystal Carter: Sgt. Pepper's. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Even that, I don't know. I'm not... Crystal Carter: Come on. Their Come Together, that's a jam. Mordy Oberstein: They're not dark enough for me. They're too happy. All this music, it's just too happy. I need a little bit of an edge. I'm more of a Rolling Stones person than I am a Beatles and Beach Boys person. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I need sorrow in my music. Crystal Carter: They're good bands. I had a very long conversation on a car ride and we decided that Led Zeppelin was the best band. Mordy Oberstein: What? I like Led Zeppelin. Don't get me wrong. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of criteria that we went into. We discussed it for a very long time. Mordy Oberstein: It's just wrong. Crystal Carter: It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Wrong. And I love Zeppelin. I actually saw Robert Plant live. Crystal Carter: Where? Mordy Oberstein: The lead singer of Led Zeppelin, I've seen him live. Crystal Carter: No, I know who he is. Where did you see him? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where. At Madison Square Garden. He opened for The Who back in 2002. Crystal Carter: Oh, Zeppelin's definitely better than The Who. Mordy Oberstein: What? No, that's ridonkulous. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Were the godfather's of punk. All right. Anyway, we'll talk about this the second we end this podcast, which we're going to do right now, so we can talk about this because this is ballistically insane. I think you've been smoking too much AI, Crystal. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Aren't you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week as we dive into Building Strong Operations for SEO and Beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kristine Sachinger Cyrus Shepard John Wall Dale Bertrand Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Google Knowledge Panel: How to earn one for your name or brand InLinks Entity SEO: Moving from Things to Strings News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kristine Sachinger Cyrus Shepard John Wall Dale Bertrand Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Google Knowledge Panel: How to earn one for your name or brand InLinks Entity SEO: Moving from Things to Strings News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings 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 already overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the ever-constant, the ever-ranking, the ever-green. I say green because you have a plant in your background now. Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: This is an audio-only experience. The people don't know that I have a green thing behind me. Mordy Oberstein: You do. You have a green... I like it because it's not green green. It's sage green. Is that the name of the green? Is that right? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's actually only green because it's a fake olive tree. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I should know that because I have an olive tree right next to my house. Crystal Carter: This is true. But my grandma used to have an orange tree in their backyard. That was nice. Mordy Oberstein: You want to hear a crazy story? I used to live in an apartment and it had a garden. Crystal Carter: That is crazy. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that is crazy, right? Living is crazy. It had an olive tree. And the way the garden was laid out, it was right next to a staircase, a publicly used staircase that went down to the next street. You can imagine the next street was a level lower, you had to go down the staircase. And the branches extended over the fence onto the staircase. And we come home one day, and the olive tree, all the branches are cut down. Some maniac, I guess, got upset that the branches were overhanging onto the stair- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And cut down almost the entire olive tree. Crystal Carter: Just from that side? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he must've climbed over the fence a little bit and... Crystal Carter: Whoa. Wowza. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Psycho, right? Crystal Carter: So I used to work for the parks department for the city, and legally, if it's over your side, that part of the tree is yours. Legally speaking, that side of the tree is yours. So I used to also... Really telling everybody my business here. This is totally relevant, but not. Anyway, basically, I used to forage for free apples and stuff around. And basically, if the apple tree was hanging over the sidewalk, those apples are mine. I can have those apples. They're mine and I'm going to eat them. So that's what I'm doing. You don't like your apples being in the public domain, get your tree out of the public domain. Mordy Oberstein: How do you like them apples? Crystal Carter: Basically. So yeah, it's very complex, trees. Mordy Oberstein: Trees are complex. They are complex. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tag-creator to spit up title tags and meta descriptions in no time flat because time is not flat, time is round. Also, I don't write meta descriptions anymore. I let the AI do it every time because when it comes to meta descriptions, I don't care. Why? Because AI content ranks. And also because meta descriptions, whatever, who cares, right? I'm saying that as Crystal's looking at me like, "Why are you saying that?" Because I don't care. I don't think they are impactful. One of my least important SEO tasks are meta descriptions. I guess it might help with clicks if Google didn't rewrite half of them. I'm real salty about meta descriptions, but you can use your AI meta tag writer to write them. How's that for a pitch? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, that's cool. Okay. So let's just clear this up. I have time for meta descriptions because I've seen them work, right? I've seen them work, but I don't think that you should be hand crafting them artisanally. I don't think- Mordy Oberstein: No, there's no reason. Either way, there's no reason. Just let the AI write that. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you're not using AI, you don't necessarily have to use AI. You can also just do programmatically. So in Wix, you have the option for both. You have the option for either the programmatic setup where you insert keyword for this- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or take product description, make it meta description. Crystal Carter: Right. This is the title of the product, brand new, et cetera. You can set the template for it so that the template does the work for you. That I am all here for and following best practices, et cetera. But I have seen for good pages for your big money pages, putting a good CTA on there. Mordy Oberstein: No. It could be impactful for conversions. Fine. Yeah, I'm with that when Google's not rewriting them 99.9% of the time. I agree. We all agree to disagree. One thing we do agree on is that today we're talking about AI content and does it rank? Insert dramatic music. Why understanding if AI content ranks matters? Why understanding of AI content ranks on the SERP is just the beginning? And will AI content continue to rank on the SERP? Assuming it already does, but I feel like I'm giving it away there that we're telling you that it already does. Because we surveyed you, the SEOs, to see what you think. So y'all are our guests today, but also our guests that'd be Marketing Over Coffee's host, John Wall, who will talk about when and when not to use AI for content generation. Plus we have the Snappy SEO News for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So get out your best AI prompts and put on a funny little cone hat like you went to a birthday party as episode number 80 of the SERP's Up Podcast plays in the AI content on the rankings. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thank you for that exciting introduction. So let's just talk about why we're talking about this. Mordy Oberstein: Exciting introduction. Wow, sarcasm much. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: I was hallucinating because I was using AI. Crystal Carter: Okay. So why are we talking about this? The reason why we're talking about this is because it's been very up-and-down. When AI was in the backburner, Google was like, "Don't use AI, don't use AI everyone. I know you've heard about all these tools, but don't use AI. Be good little SEOs, don't use AI." And then ChatGPT broke virally, it was way more accessible. And then they were like, "Okay, you can use AI as long as it's helpful. You can use helpful AI. If it's helpful, that's fine, we won't penalize you. It's fine." And there's been up and down. People have been testing AI content for years, testing pretty much unedited AI content for years. There's a few people who've been doing a lot of experiments around this. Mark Williams-Cook has a very well-documented experiment that he's been running on this content as well. And for a while, people were saying, "Oh, yeah, it doesn't really rank," or "It ranks for a while and then it will completely tank." And that's something that people have said. However, it's my opinion and it's something that I've observed that basically, if people remember back around this time of year or around the spring of 2023 when Bing was like, "Yo, we have new Bing. We are putting AI in the SERP." And Google was going, "Oh, we also have AI," and they were trying to catch up, I've started to see a lot more content that is AI-generated being openly AI-generated and ranking. And so I'm going to share a couple of examples of that. One is a big example, which is LinkedIn's advice folder, which has been going gangbusters pretty much since they started doing it. They built this up in the springtime of 2023, and they've seen some incredible activities for this. If you haven't seen this, basically you haven't been on LinkedIn. And basically, when you go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will ask you questions, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And they call them collaborative articles in the folders under advice and things like, "What does a production coordinator do? What is regression testing and why is it important? What are the best practices for this?" Now, the way I stumbled upon this wasn't actually through LinkedIn; it was actually through a featured snippet. I found a featured snippet. It was talking about a technical SEO term, and it actually didn't have any contributions. But at the top of every article, it says that this article was created by AI and the LinkedIn community and they're doing incredibly well. So they started building up this folder around March 2023. They peaked with their traffic at 2.8 million globally in about 2023 September. And it went down a little bit, but it's got down to 1.7 million according to Semrush's stats. And I take that traffic. I'll take that. If that's where we're dropping back to, that's fine. And they're not the only ones. Another from a smaller example is a site called Wellnite.com, which is a site that's actually working more in the YMYL space. So they are something that talks about counseling and they've got lots of articles. One of them is bottling up emotions, how to let go, acknowledge your emotions, peaceful mind practice and things like that. And at the bottom, it says, "PS, this blog was created with AI software as a tool to supplement the author accompanied by Wellnite staff overview and supervision." And that is an example of a website that had been going, ticking along through 2020, 2021 at getting around global traffic according to Semrush of about 400 or so. There are lots of blogs that are like that, lots of company blogs that are like that for smaller websites. And theirs started ticking along. But then in 2023, they started adding in these AI-generated contents, and they were able to increase the number of articles that they were ranking. And they've now been able to double their traffic monthly because of that. And again, it's still fairly small traffic, but compared to where they were, that's a very significant jump. And the amount of traffic that they've seen increased between the start of 2023 and where we are in 2024 is significant. It's the most significant growth they've ever seen across their domain. So to my mind, AI content is doing just fine and there's lots of evidence to show that, but there's a few things that people can do to make it better. And I think the people who are doing it well are taking advantage of some of those elements. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I think very much, it depends. The linked articles I think are a great case. First off, the linked articles are from LinkedIn, so you are not LinkedIn. So that's one thing to be careful of. But the second thing is the linked articles are interesting. I actually like them because they make me think because I don't like the answers. I don't like the content that they offer. I find I comment on them, so I get a little badge thing on LinkedIn because I'm being like that. And most of my takes are like, "Nah, that's not how you should actually think about it." But interestingly enough, and I wonder if this plays into it or how it plays into it, you're actually getting first-person experience on those articles in the comments themselves. And that's my point that it all depends with this kind of thing. For example, Mark Williams-Cook has an article on Search Engine Land where he talks about LLMs generating content. And when he ran an experience, he created 10,000 URLs on unsupervised AI. And you see it ranks and it just gets killed off. And there are a bunch of examples like that. So it's using this or thinking about, "Does it rank unequivocally?" The answer is it depends what you mean by that. If you're just spinning up random content or unsupervised content, the answer is it'll rank for a while. I think it's very much spam content in general. It ranks for a while, and then it falls off. So I was reading in Traffic Think Tank recently, was Andy Chapa talking about a case where I think someone all of a sudden got... They must have bought tons of links. And you see this, people buy tons of links, they start ranking for a while and then Google eventually figures it out and gets rid of it. I think it's very similar to that or any other kind of spam practice. If you're using AI in a spammy kind of way, you'll rank two, three, four months and then it'll fall off. And that's been a lot of the consensus around what's been shared in the SEO community about this. And we actually asked the SEO community on January 29th, "Does Google consistently regularly rank AI content?" And out of 120 so votes, 82% of people said yes, and around 70% of people said no. And then the comments are filled with these anecdotes. For example, Kristine Schachinger said, "It does and then it will not." And I think what she's talking about are those kind of cases where what Mark did, where you're just unsupervised, this doesn't make any sense, it's not good content, it's not helpful, it'll get killed off, which is what Google's saying. I think there's a lot of politics behind what Google's saying also, but whatever. We'll leave that aside. It's not for this podcast. Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. He wrote, "Yes, but it's kind of skewed due to the sheer volume of it and the overall scope of AI content. Even if you utterly ignore the spammer flood, legitimate networks are always, if not partially using, so it shows for news, et cetera." So that's a really good point, how you use it, how you go about using it, it's really important. Pedro Diaz wrote, "I anticipate the answers are all going towards experience people had and seen recently within their search bubble," which I think is a very good point to having broader views in a wider spectrum of experiences. And I don't think I've seen a wide study on AI content ranking. And I think that would be fascinating to see to address that point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that there's so many different variations in the ways that people are using it because the other thing is that there's lots of people who aren't ranking with AI content. But there's also the case that, and we've seen this with the AI tools that we have in Wix, we've used AI tools to help people do things like the meta descriptions, for instance. We talked about those. And what we've seen with that is that there's a lot more people who have accessibility, with lowercase a, to some of these techniques because they don't have to worry about the barriers to entry regarding grammar, for instance, or regarding even sometimes the ideation. So that Wellnite website is a classic example. They were publishing occasionally, but they were able to increase the rate of publishing because they were using some of these AI tools. So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are getting more access to these things, who are able to articulate themselves better with the help of some of these tools. And that I think is a win. I think that's a good thing that people who were previously not able to understand or use meta descriptions at all, for instance, are able to engage with that content. I think that's a benefit, and I think that that's something that will affect which pages are ranking and will affect how many pages are ranking. However, there's going to be a lot of people who are just putting out junk, but those people were putting out junk anyway before in lots of other ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It's really a matter of mindset, and we'll talk about it with John later on that how do you go about building the content utilizing AI and expediting your processes? Because at the same time, I think something very important to keep in the back of your mind when you're using AI to create content, which you should certainly be doing the right way, is where's Google trying to go? And this speaks to a lot of the Reddit controversy on the SERP at the moment as we're recording, and who knows if it'll fixed by the time we're done recording. But there's been a lot of pushback about the amount of Reddit results Google's showing on the SERP. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that Google's trying to push for first-person, first knowledge, experience-based content and Google's having a lot of issues with this. But you see this trend keep coming up with things like Reddit ranking, Gisele Navarro put out an interesting post about product review websites and how folks like Rolling Stone have jumped into the product review space. And one of the things that they're doing to rank is relying on first-person experience in a way. I'll put a little caveat, a little asterisk on that, by using first-person expressions, like I, we, our, which I've personally seen a huge influx of folks doing that over time. So we take the same product review page now, and you put it in the Wayback Machine, the amount of our, we, first-person language has increased exponentially. And there's a recent study that Cyrus Shepard did that shows, and again, it's a correlation study, so no one freak out like, "Oh, no, it's correlation." But correlation sometimes can point you in the right direction and correlation does mean something. And one of the things that he noticed in websites that are winning is the usage of first-person pronouns: me, we, I, that sort of thing. The direction where Google is trying to go kind of contradicts a lot of the things that people are doing with AI content. So when you're building AI content, you need to keep in mind where the ecosystem is shifting and leverage AI the right way within that context. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think that the first-person experience is super important for that. And there's a couple of reasons why writing... Whenever I'm doing content evaluations or making content recommendations, particularly to blog-facing content or customer service attributions and things, I very often say that people should speak in the second person, like, "You should do this, you can do that, you could do this. We do this for you because it is good and you will like it," and that sort of thing. And the reason why is because a lot of people are on their mobiles, and that is a one-person situation. That is a one-person thing. Even if you share that with somebody, even if you will share it to their mobile and they will read it personally on their mobile phone, individually. So it's like, "Hi, I am talking to you," it's very much an individual situation. So users are going to be responding to that in lots of ways. And I think that when we think about AI content, I don't think that AI content is necessarily opposed to that. I think it's a way to organize that sort of thing. One really good example that I saw in terms of product reviews was Spruce Pets. They had a great product review of dog carriers, and clearly they had people who were testing it with their dogs. They were like, "Here I am with my dog, here is my dog in the dog carrier," that sort of thing. But then here's where you use the AI. The AI is where you pull in how to organize all the product detail between the different ones. How you say, "Okay, this one has a carrier, this one has a pocket, this one has a thing for treats," all of that sort of stuff. That's what you use the AI for. And you maybe use the AI to pull out some of the common threads of some of the first-person things that you're using. So I don't think it's necessarily opposed, but I think you should use it to clean up some of the qualitative information. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's part of the problem with the discussion is that when you look at a zero-sum, either there's AI content or not AI content. So I'll tell you one of the things that I'm a big proponent of is what I'll call situational content writing. So one of the ways you can actually show expertise in a real way, other than just loading in the page with we, I, me, which anybody can do, an LLM can do that if you trick it to do that for you, it is actually predicting the situation the consumer's going to face and then writing about that situation. Because that actually demonstrates you actually know what the heck you're talking about and have actual experience. Because you can't predict the next scenario unless you have some kind of situational experience. However, if you're talking about let's go with a pet carrier thing, situation. How to get your pet into the pet carrier if they don't want to go in? You'll predict as someone who has a pet, you can try this. If that doesn't work, then try this. But the general like, "What is a pet carrier?" Let's say you wanted to put that there, but you probably don't need, but let's say you did, then you can have an AI spin out like, "What is the pet carrier?" Sure, go ahead and write that part. It's not a zero-sum. So let the AI save you time and let it make you more efficient in the right spots within the expert and the experience-driven content you want to create. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's also important to remember that there's going to be some content that people don't care what an AI thinks about it like, "Is your pet happy in the pet carrier?" for instance. That's something I don't really care what ChatGPT thinks about whether or not my Cocker Spaniel is happy in the carrier. If I hear from other people, "Yeah, my dog was really happy. He was wagging his tail, he kept sniffing my ear," or whatever, that sort of thing. That's something that I would like to hear first-person knowledge of and that's something that you should be aware of. And then that situational stuff is really important because that situational information is stuff that you can get from users, from real humans, from real human users and from real personal experience. And I think that you can use, again, if not zero-sum, you can use AI to help you collate and to help you organize some of the things that you're getting from user videos, user interviews, customer feedback reforms, that sort of stuff to help you bring some of that together. But you're going to be able to add value with a cyborg kind of approach, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: And look, that's going to be the kind of content that ranks fundamentally. In fact, now at some point, Google's... Listen, there's two possibilities in my opinion. Either Google will figure this out to make sure that the content that has actual expertise and actual experience, which may be supplemented by AI ranks, or it won't be a search engine anymore that we'll go to. So either way, it doesn't matter. Okay. Well, since we're already talking about AI and content and ranking, I think it behooves us to talk about AI for content generation so that you know how to create the AI content that ranks and not the AI content that ranks, but really shouldn't rank. So rank responsibly. Please rank responsibly. To help us talk about this, we have a very special guest with the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, John Wall, as we move beyond SEO and into the great beyond. Hey John, welcome to the podcast. How are you? John Wall: Great, thanks. Glad to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So you're the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. You also work for Trust Insights and do a lot with AI. Now is the time on the podcast for you to pitch. John Wall: Yeah. So with Trust Insights, we've done a lot of stuff with generative AI. Our chief technologist, Christopher Penn, has been using AI in PR and marketing for over 15 years. So we already had a bunch of stuff that we were using AI for as far as attribution and predictive analysis for creating content calendars, things like that. And so yeah, generative AI has now spun up though and he is just in demand everywhere. In fact, he's speaking in London this week. Yeah, it's become huge. And so we actually have put together a framework of generative AI for marketers, stuff that you can do to create content, do better in SEO. There's a whole bunch of different avenues and strategies, everything just from the basic habit, my blog post, which is what you're talking about, stuff that comes out and is weak at best. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, you're trying to create stuff that nobody else is doing and actually has some novelty, and we'll get you to the higher amounts of traffic and positioning because it's quality stuff. Crystal Carter: I think that one of the things that stood out from that was you said you've been working in this space for years, and I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people don't realize. People say, "Oh, AI is new." Google's been using AI in the SERPs for years. But people like folks from your team have been using these tools for many, many years. And I think that that gives you particularly interesting insights on this. There's a lot of people who are just new to the game and just getting involved, but I think that there's going to be some things that you've tried and understand more than other people. John Wall: Yeah, I think it is very different than a lot of the other trends that come up through marketing. When we had cyber currency, it was a huge deal and NFTs and all this kind of stuff, they were created. But AI, as a concept, was created back in the 1950s, right? Crystal Carter: Right. John Wall: The academic community understood what this could do and where it was going, and it was just that the computing power wasn't there. Yeah. So idea of being able to figure out, "Identify the difference between human and AI, can you fool people?" And of course, there's always been turks, right? There's always machines that can make you think you're talking to a computer when you're really not, because there's still some human interaction in there on the back-end. But yeah, we're at least getting close to the point where ChatGPT could fool somebody for a little while for four or five prompts before you figure out that they're a person. But better customer service tools have already been able to do that to some point. They can get you there. But yeah, so now people have kind of jumped on the AI bandwagon and Gartner's peak hype right now where every product has AI attached to it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my gosh. John Wall: My tires were rotated last week with AI over at the gas station. Mordy Oberstein: I have AI tires. Yours were rotated with AI. I have actual AI tires. John Wall: You have AI in the tires. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Do they tell you when you're in the wrong lane? Mordy Oberstein: No, they don't do anything for me whatsoever. They hallucinate and tell me I'm in a desert on the highway and where I'm really driving in my actual driveway. So I don't know what's flying. I'm going to use my AI tires. John Wall: Yeah, it is everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So if we're going to actually use AI in a real way, we're going to say, "Okay, let's create content and let's use AI." Is it carte blanche, like just go wild? John Wall: No, no. There's a lot of ways to go. In fact, I would even back up. I would not start with generative AI. We did and have done predictive models. So for example, we've done a bunch of stuff in the food space, and it's worked so well we had to come up with a sample for the rest of the world. So we have the cheese report, which is an annual report that comes out and it talks about, "Okay, which cheeses are most searched for every week of the year?" And so you can- Crystal Carter: It's cheddar, right? Mordy Oberstein: American. John Wall: Cheddar. We're just coming off hot cheddar with the Super Bowl here in America. That's very popular. Mozzarella surges as we get close to Christmas. Mordy Oberstein: Kraft singles, American cheese is not- Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's cheddar. Cheddar is your best cheese. It's good for almost every situation. John Wall: Cheddar is always ranking high. It's definitely top 10 most of the year. But look, for a content marketer, the big one now you'd look at is halloumi where you've got grillable cheeses will be popular June, July when that time of the year comes. So if you've got your content calendar, you should be starting to script out those halloumi videos and recipes and all that stuff now, so that you've got that stuff dropping in May and you're able to get some Google juice to that before peak search season in June, July. Mordy Oberstein: Some hot cheese right there. John Wall: Yeah, that's the hot cheese. And we have it for a whole bunch of other foods, but the brands that get those reports don't let us share that with anybody else. So we're not able to share our food insight outside of cheese, but that gives you an example of using some predictive AI to actually create content that is in demand. And that way, you've got your stuff all updated when you hit peak search. Crystal Carter: And I think is there a little bit of overlap for content like that, for instance? Let's say, if you're running a stats tool throughout the year or something, for instance, the Billboard Hot 100 changes every day or that sort of thing. If you're running a SaaS tool like that, how much is there crossover between programmatic elements and AI elements with creating content around that? John Wall: It completely overlaps. AI is not going to come up with anything new. That's really what it is. It's just you're applying programmatic strategies to figuring out what's going to be coming on and where it goes. And there's a ton of ways to apply that too. Another way we see it all over the place is with reviews or other huge libraries of content where instead of generating, have it do summarization or classification. And take a huge batch of reviews, have it come up with, "Okay, what are the five most common things that people like/don't like about this product?" And now that's a blog post that's based on your data, that's proprietary that somebody else using GenAI can't just come up with that post. You're the only one that can do that and it's going to be on target, but it's unique and it's your voice and it's probably going to be stronger across the board. Crystal Carter: I think that's great because with something like that, you can summarize and hit some of the key points with the keywords there. And also, it's got good user value because me, as a user, if I'm trying to decide whether or not I should use halloumi cheese or Havarti cheese on my cheeseburger, for instance, it might be like, "Yeah, this was a good cheese, but it didn't quite melt as much on the burger, for instance." And I can get that summary without reading 400 reviews that include like, "Oh, I dropped the cheese on the ground and things. It's one star." It's like, "No, you dropped it. That's your problem." John Wall: That's like the Amazon classic of the products that suck because the box arrived destroyed. There's all these- Mordy Oberstein: Right. I love that. I don't care. John Wall: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because you know who's going to destroy the box in three seconds anyway? My children. John Wall: That's just been part of the customer experience. Mordy Oberstein: But this is a similar point to something we discussed. We had a webinar with Mike King and Ross Hudgens where we talked about giving AI rules and confines to work within as opposed to, "Here's a very open, unconfined scenario. But if you give it parameters to work with, it does much better and it does what you want it to do. And that's where I feel like it can offer real insights and real ability to produce content for you that you couldn't have done otherwise or you couldn't have done otherwise as quickly." But again, it's giving an open prompt and just telling it to go without any borders or any confines, is probably a recipe for disaster. John Wall: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we even have a whole course that's seven hours of training, and a huge chunk of it is writing effective prompts. And so that's where some of the artistry is. And we have a whole framework, we call it the RACE Framework where for any prompt you want to do R-A-C-E. So you give it the role, you say, "Hey, you are an engineer that is working with stereo equipment. A, is for action. Your task is to come up with a list of whatever. "You give it context. That's the C, where you're saying that the audience is this level of professional. Is it engineers with 10 years' experience? Or is it people that have no experience with audio equipment? And then execute." You actually give it the instructions as far as how to write this. It should be at X grade level, it should cover X number of bullet points, have a summary. Basically, the best prompts, you have these huge paragraphs of stuff that you're using. Mordy Oberstein: That's the thing. AI is great. You have to shape it to what you want it to be. And I think the problem is that it's so easy and there's no barrier to entry that people think, "Oh, I can do this." To me, it's like picking up a baseball bat. Yes, you can pick up a baseball bat and you can swing it, but if you look at what the pros are actually doing, there's so much more that goes into it: managing the load, and where's your weight shifting? And when is your weight shifting? And where's your elbow? And how is your wrist turning? There's a million things that go into actually swinging a baseball bat the real way versus you just taking a whack at it with your wonky-ass swing. And it's very similar to AI. Yes, you could put in a prompt and yes, you can get an output but that's not actually swinging the bat. John Wall: Yeah. Another way to think of it, you have that thing, we've always talked about this in software is tools for experts versus expert tools. Look, right now, the state of AI, it's like a router. If you're a carpenter, who knows what the heck they're doing, you can do amazing things with this tool. If you are somebody who's just playing around, you could end up losing some fingers. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. The AI will add the fingers and some back for you. John Wall: Man, I hadn't thought about how much that hits. Yeah. But thankfully, AI has tons of fingers that it can spread around liberally to everyone. I even saw that on Amazon, they have a fake plastic finger you can buy so that you can wear it around and then you can tell people, "Oh, no, that's obviously AI-generated, because- Mordy Oberstein: People are interesting, huh? John Wall: Yeah. I'm thinking I don't need to go through the work of making sure the finger matches. That seems like a lot of effort to perpetrate a fraud, so I'm not going to bother with that. Mordy Oberstein: You have to really take on the next load because let's say, I don't know, you're out at the beach and your fingers get tanned. You're going to have to have a tanned finger. Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes they think arms in different places that shouldn't be there. The arms coming out in the middle and you're like, "What is going on there?" But I've seen pop stars, there was a whole thing. I'm going to show myself here, but there was a whole thing on Nicki Minaj as a popular rapper and she had a new album art. She had a song she put out unannounced. And the album art she used for, it was clearly generated with AI, and it clearly had not gone through QA. And it was supposed to be police tape and it didn't say police all the way through, and the things had different arms and they had all of this sort of stuff. And even people who have the means... She's a multi-millionaire, and she has a PR team, and she has many people available. But even people who have the means aren't going through the QA. In terms of process, you have your prompting thing, you have your data thing, how much is the QA of the AI part of your process of getting good quality stuff? John Wall: Yeah. For us, that's a huge part of it. Really, in fact, there's nothing that can be released or put out there until it's been pounded on by experts who know what it should be doing and where it should be going. That's the real challenge of this. And then people don't get this either, is that you don't just build it and start using it. No, you build it, you run it and then you train it. And it needs to be constantly trained. Training needs to be a permanent part of your process. Mordy Oberstein: You mean, like anything else, it requires hard work? John Wall: You don't just hire it and then fire your whole marketing team the next day. Mordy Oberstein: You completely kill what AI means to me, and I am now completely uninterested in it. Crystal Carter: It's magic. Isn't it just magic? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If it's not magic, I don't care. John Wall: Yes. In fact, it gets your coffee right in the morning and it will drive you home at the end of the day. Yeah. No, it doesn't do all the things. Mordy Oberstein: If it doesn't watch my kids, I don't care. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember the learning part of the machine learning because that's the other thing. For marketers, PPC, for instance, has had machine learning going on for years, for years and years. Facebook has had it in there. Google Ads has had it in there. And you had to do the machine learning part of it. You'd have to, and you'd have to train it and train the model and retrain the model and retrain your parameters and all that sort of stuff. So for people who just think you can set it and forget it and it will just do magic, it's just a rude awakening, I think. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the Ronco slow cooker, set it and forget it, which is my favorite- Crystal Carter: Hey, I love my slow cooker. My slow cooker is that. I just put all the things and then... John Wall: Set it- Mordy Oberstein: And then forget it. John Wall: One thing that we've been doing that is pretty interesting because of this idea that these models do read everything that's out there, we've played around with actually doing press releases again. We had originally abandoned press releases as a complete waste of time because they were just lost in the five million other press releases that came out today. But now we've been working with some copy that's optimized for large language models to scan and grab. So you can write about unique content. And it's funny, it's classic spammer stuff in that these press releases don't read that well. A human reads them, they don't make a lot of sense. There's some thread there, but the key is you've got 15 or 20 phrases in there that you ultimately want a large language model to think that you are the answer for. Crystal Carter: Right. And to come into the corpus of their knowledge on that particular topic. John Wall: Right. Exactly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that we find interesting, particularly with large language models that are public-facing, like SGE and banks, Bing chat for instance. So one of the things that they're doing, because it's so expensive to answer questions with AI, it's so expensive for them to run, a lot of times they will truncate the answer. So you might write a really long question about, "What was the breed of dog that Dorothy had in The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland? What exactly? Which kind of breed?" So you might write all of that, but they will truncate the answer. So even if you ask a similar question that's not exactly the same on the LLM, they'll essentially distill it to, "Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz," and they'll distill it and give you, roughly, the same answers. When you're creating a PR release with those kinds of phrases and things, are you thinking for those questions in mind, those lowest common denominator questions? How are you identifying the phrases you want to surface for? John Wall: Yeah. So our analysis on that has been just analyzing what we're getting from answers now, and seeing the format and types of stuff that it wants to see. But yeah, you've hit upon a whole nother area of this study that is a big deal, this idea of managing your tokens. And for a lot of these systems, if you go with the paid version now, suddenly, you get to send larger queries and get larger queries back and get more in depth of. So it's a different level of information and quality. The other one is, as you're building prompts, we find that it's much more effective to do long strings. You keep continuing to correct an ad. And so one trick with that is after you've done four or five prompts, have the model summarize what you've learned so far so that it can boil down your previous 10 queries into one paragraph. And then, when you do more research, you start with that one summarized paragraph and you basically get to skip the initial round. Because yeah, these all have moving windows of after four or five prompts, they start to forget the original stuff and they will start hallucinating again on things that you've walled in. Crystal Carter: So say I want it without the hat on it, and they're like, "With a hat?" And you're like, "No, that's not what I said." And you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Mordy Oberstein: All the way. I find that with images. Using Copilot or Gemini, I find that it loses its train of thought like my grandmother. Crystal Carter: You're like, "Come back, come back." And it's like, "Right over here." And you're like, "No, no. No, this way." John Wall: Yeah. Yeah, they completely start to run afield. And I don't know. And then really, for this whole space, there is this question of they are just doing an obscene amount of background computing that costs money. And sooner or later- Mordy Oberstein: So much. John Wall: Now, thankfully... Well, not thankfully for me, but thankfully for folks in AI, all of the MarTech and cyber currency VC money has dumped to AI for this next year. So there is a pile of cash there now to give everybody a free ride. But the question is how long is that going to last? Sooner or later... And the good news is it's free and they're looking at $20 a month kind of things, which is great. It doesn't cover the cost, but at least will probably boil down to two or three champions and then yeah, maybe we can finally open up that Alzheimer's window a little bit wider so that they can remember where the heck we're going. Mordy Oberstein: If people want to keep track of this by keeping track of you, where can they find you? John Wall: Oh, I'm always over at marketingovercoffee.com. And then for work stuff, we're at trustinsights.ai. We have a Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. If analytics is your thing, come on over there. We're always talking about it every day, and it's a great place to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you know how to use GA4? John Wall: Oh, we are all about GA4. Actually, the big news for us now is we've been doing GA stuff forever, but we actually offer Matomo in-house for people that are sick of GA4 already, which is 98% of people. And we do a bunch of work with Adobe too. So yeah, it's funny, we do all this cool AI stuff, but the reality is 98% of our customers have problem with the plumbing, and so that's the dirty work that we get done. Mordy Oberstein: Even imagined as toilets. John Wall: This is true. Crystal Carter: You should get an AI to clean the.. John Wall: Siri, clean my basement. What's happening? Crystal Carter: Whenever I think of AI, I always think of the housekeeper from the Jetsons. When is that coming? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Rosey. John Wall: Rosey. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: When is Rosey coming to my house? That's what I'm- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I need someone to watch my kids. Crystal Carter: She has a lot of sass though, but it's fine. John Wall: You want to read a crazy one, read about some of these disasters with the automated vacuuming machines. If the pet gets sick and then the machine hits it, and then spreads it around the whole house, fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Okay. On that happy note, give John a follow and check out all the great stuff they're doing over there at Trust Insights and the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Give that a listen as well. John, thank you so much. John Wall: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I wonder? I wonder if there'll be some AI-related news in the SEO News. Crystal Carter: Maybe something about BARD or BERT. Mordy Oberstein: Or Ernie or Gemini or Scorpio. Crystal Carter: Or Elmo. Mordy Oberstein: Or Elmo or Barry Crystal Carter: Or MUM. Mordy Oberstein: Or Barry. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Is Barry a constellation? Crystal Carter: There should be a Barry algo. I think they keep- Mordy Oberstein: That would be amazing if Google, the most penalizing algorithm ever created, they called it Barry Schwartz. I think that would go over well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: People already blame him for when they lose their rankings. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, all the time. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ask him. When Barry- Crystal Carter: Okay. I would like to just make a public service announcement, Barry's not responsible for your rankings. Mordy Oberstein: No. Barry's just reporting on what happened. There appears to be an update that Google didn't announce. He's just reporting. But there have been many times, Barry's... Actually, I've interviewed him about this. Barry's gotten death threats. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, over rankings. He's just reporting, people. Crystal Carter: He's not in charge of it. Mordy Oberstein: He's not in charge. Crystal Carter: He didn't do it. Mordy Oberstein: You shouldn't threaten anybody with death. Crystal Carter: Barry's a nice man. You shouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: I wouldn't go that far, but yeah. No, I'm kidding. Barry's a gem, which brings us to the Snappy SEO News. In case you haven't realized, this is our time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. The update is over. No, not that one. Not that one. For Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the Google March 2024 spam update is done rolling out, the March 2024 core update is very much still alive, seeing a whole bunch of reversals in the second wave of volatility that came out. Treated it last week. If you want, check that out. But anyway, onto the spam update. It's done. After 15 days on March 20th, Google announced it's done, it's complete, it's rolled out. If you'll recall, Google announced there were three new elements that are being integrated into the spam algorithm. One of them is not hitting until May. And as part of these announcements, Google released the March 2024 spam update, which obviously heavily focused on the new things being integrated into its spam algorithms, which are scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Site reputation abuse, not happening until May. And that's parasite SEO. That's again where, I don't know, I want to push my content. I don't have a very authoritative website. I go to Sports Illustrated. I say, "I will buy a page on your website, write up an article, have nothing to do with sports and get traffic through that parasite SEO." The other elements, the expired domain abuse, where you say, "Hey, that domain, that used to be about whatever topic, which is I can get the domain, bring it back to life. Google will think, 'Oh, wow, it's so authoritative. That was such a great website way back when, and I can write whatever I want, whatever garbage I want, and it'll rank.'" So that and the scaled content abuse part of the algorithm is also live right now, and that's where basically you're just throwing up tons of just AI garbage, not curating it at all, not thinking about it at all. You're just pushing out content at scale without any thought whatsoever to essentially manipulate rank and users. So that was also in the March 2024 spam update, and we saw a lot of activity around that. Part of all of this were all of the manual actions, which we discussed on the podcast as well. Thousands of sites have seen manual actions. A lot of the examples being shared have to do with that scaled content abuse where Google's killing off the entire website because again, people are just spinning up random... Some of the cases I've seen, it's not even good AI. It's just bad garbage AI. It's nonsensical even. So those websites have been completely killed off. If you have been doing those kind of things, and you've seen your content and your rankings rather just falls to the bottom floor, that might be something you want to take a look at. If you are doing good, decent work, you shouldn't really be affected by a spam update. Now, one of the things that you're going to be thinking is, "How do I know if I was hit by the spam update or by the March 2024 core update?" Well, one way to know is if you're doing things like scaled content abuse or expired domain abuse, then it's probably the spam update. Again, if you're not doing these ridiculously spammy, absurd things and you're seeing a ranking loss, one, the March 2024 core update's still not done rolling out. Again, as I mentioned, I'm seeing tons of reversals. So don't do anything yet. As Google mentioned, be patient. If, after the March 2024 core update is done and rolled out and completed, and you're still trying to figure out was it the spam update or the core update, again, if you haven't been doing these ridiculously, overtly spammy... I don't even know how to... mind-boggling things, then it's probably the core update. That's my way of looking at it. Okay, onto article number two, again from Barry Schwartz, but this time over at Search Engine around it... By the way, got to say happy birthday to Barry Schwartz. March 22nd was Barry's birthday. I hope you got a lovely birthday cake. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google SGE feedback on affiliate results and Google News: Does This Interest You Pop-Up." Hope you all caught all of that in the headline. Let me explain. Google has done this for a while, but this is a different way of doing it. This one was picked up by a friend of the show, friend of baseball, Glenn Gabe, who saw that for an affiliate website ranking on the results, Google had a little widget there that says, "How helpful was the result above? One extreme being not helpful at all, the other extreme being extremely helpful." And you just selected the dot on the spectrum of how helpful you thought that it was. So that's really interesting to see that on affiliate stuff. Another example was within a Google News result. So there was a news card that showed up and there was a little pop-up thing that says, "Does this interest you? Thumbs up, thumbs down." Google has been doing these things for a long, long, long time. There's a bunch of iterations of this with feature snippets, "Did you find the feature snippet helpful? Yada, yada, yada." So this is not new to quote Barry, but it is interesting to see. Google, again, has done this many, many times in many, many different ways over the years. I think it's really interesting that it's happening now, especially for the affiliate result that Glenn showed. I just find it really interesting that you have all of these things going on in the ecosystem, the whole Reddit question, the spam updates, the core updates, the quality of results, AI content, SGE. And Google's now rolling out this little test of showing a widget, you can offer to your feedback to how helpful the result was. So I think that aligns to what's going on in the ecosystem overall and especially on something that's product review related or affiliate related. So definitely interesting to see Google doing that there. And that is this week's Snappy SEO News. It would be nice though if they had a Barry update, but it was one that was only helpful and rewarding to all websites that were good. Crystal Carter: And then afterwards everyone would go, "Thank you." Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. And they could say, "It's new. It's a new algorithm." Crystal Carter: Indeed. Indeed. You were saying, "Wouldn't it be nice?" And now I'm thinking of that Beach Boys song. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great song, actually. Crystal Carter: It's a great song. Mordy Oberstein: How did Beach Boys stand up? That's a good song. Crystal Carter: Generally, Beach Boys, they've got that good album. They've got one really, really good album. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Pet Shops. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a great album. Listen to it start to finish. It's a great album. It's really well-produced. Great album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what else is great? Our follow of the week. And our follow of the week is none other than Dale Bertrand. Crystal Carter: Dale Bertrand. If you've been following How to Rank with AI, then you must be following Dale Bertrand. If you're not following him, please do. He's very active on LinkedIn, and you can see him all over the place speaking all over in lots of different places. So he's a founder and president of Fire&Spark with over 15 years experience working out of Boston. And he talks and shares some great resources around AI and content and using it intelligently and using it in a way that really, really works. So highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: And just a super nice guy, super nice. I met him in BrightonSEO in November in San Diego and he was super nice. Crystal Carter: Super nice. And he's very often at BrightonSEO in the UK. So yeah, he's a great speaker, great writer, great SEO marketer, so highly recommend. Great follow. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to his profiles in the show notes. Now I realize, by the way, I completely botched... It was not called Pets Shops; it's called Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. What the hell am I talking about? I am ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Pet Shops. You're thinking of Pet Shop Boys. You hallucinated. Are you AI? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I knew it. Mordy Oberstein: It explains a lot. Right? So I want to point out the irony of not saying we're not Beach Boy fans on a podcast built on surfing themes. That's not my favorite. I'll say another hot take, the Beatles aren't my favorite. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy the songs. I have Beatle albums or I had Beatle albums back in the day. Who has albums anymore? But they're historically super important. Crystal Carter: Sgt. Pepper's. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Even that, I don't know. I'm not... Crystal Carter: Come on. Their Come Together, that's a jam. Mordy Oberstein: They're not dark enough for me. They're too happy. All this music, it's just too happy. I need a little bit of an edge. I'm more of a Rolling Stones person than I am a Beatles and Beach Boys person. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I need sorrow in my music. Crystal Carter: They're good bands. I had a very long conversation on a car ride and we decided that Led Zeppelin was the best band. Mordy Oberstein: What? I like Led Zeppelin. Don't get me wrong. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of criteria that we went into. We discussed it for a very long time. Mordy Oberstein: It's just wrong. Crystal Carter: It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Wrong. And I love Zeppelin. I actually saw Robert Plant live. Crystal Carter: Where? Mordy Oberstein: The lead singer of Led Zeppelin, I've seen him live. Crystal Carter: No, I know who he is. Where did you see him? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where. At Madison Square Garden. He opened for The Who back in 2002. Crystal Carter: Oh, Zeppelin's definitely better than The Who. Mordy Oberstein: What? No, that's ridonkulous. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Were the godfather's of punk. All right. Anyway, we'll talk about this the second we end this podcast, which we're going to do right now, so we can talk about this because this is ballistically insane. I think you've been smoking too much AI, Crystal. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Aren't you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week as we dive into Building Strong Operations for SEO and Beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Gemma Fontané is an SEO consultant, co-founder, and director of Orvit Digital, where she leads digital strategies for B2B and eCommerce clients. She is also a teacher, industry speaker and author, as well as a co-founder of two international Christmas eCommerce stores. Gemma Fontané Co-founder and Director at Orvit Digital Gemma Fontané is an SEO consultant, co-founder, and director of Orvit Digital , where she leads digital strategies for B2B and eCommerce clients. She is also a teacher, industry speaker and author, as well as a co-founder of two international Christmas eCommerce stores. Articles & Resources 16 Sept 2024 How to optimize your Etsy shop for Google 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

This week’s SERP’s Up episode is brought to you by the letter ‘L’ for Learning! Mordy and Crystal help guide you during the most critical first steps in your SEO learning journey. Listen as they discuss the SEO learning process from how to get that hands-on experience you’ll need to having the right mindset to really absorb SEO. From the sources, you’ll need to deal with gaps in your SEO knowledge. This episode is all about how to learn SEO! But what does it really mean to learn SEO? Share a ‘Deep Thoughts’ moment with Mordy and Crystal about what it fundamentally means to learn SEO! Back Learning how to learn SEO This week’s SERP’s Up episode is brought to you by the letter ‘L’ for Learning! Mordy and Crystal help guide you during the most critical first steps in your SEO learning journey. Listen as they discuss the SEO learning process from how to get that hands-on experience you’ll need to having the right mindset to really absorb SEO. From the sources, you’ll need to deal with gaps in your SEO knowledge. This episode is all about how to learn SEO! But what does it really mean to learn SEO? Share a ‘Deep Thoughts’ moment with Mordy and Crystal about what it fundamentally means to learn SEO! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 06 | September 28, 2022 | 32 MIN 00:00 / 31:58 This week’s guests Luke Davis Luke Davis is a technical SEO, music producer, and content creator based in the UK. He has been messing around on the Web since 2000 and, after entering digital marketing in 2019, started specialising in technical SEO soon after. He enjoys blogging, making music, coding in Python, playing Pokémon and finding a Simpsons meme for every occasion. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERPs Up podcast. 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 our Illustrious head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you fantastic SEO people. Mordy Oberstein: You're back. Crystal Carter: I'm back. I was in California. I went to my homeland. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? How was Mars? Just kidding. Crystal Carter: Women are from Venus, Mordy, don't you remember? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I didn't read that. Crystal Carter: No. Yeah. I was in California, and I did some surfing while I was there, actually, which was quite exciting. Mordy Oberstein: So now I'm the odd person out. Crystal Carter: We got to get you on a board, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Do I still fit in this podcast that now I have no surfing experience? Crystal Carter: You surfed the wild waves of the interwebs. Mordy Oberstein: Of the web. I can still be here? Crystal Carter: Sure. Of course. All are welcome. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Well, pleasure to have you back. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's nice to be back. I really, really did enjoy it. It's good to be back doing the things that we do. Mordy Oberstein: Sweet. Well, the things that we do are SERPs Up podcast, which is brought to you by Wix, where you have the log. Server log reports, right in your own backyard, without you having to do anything to access them. Check out our bot log reports in the Wix analytics with full on prebuilt graphs and charts. Crystal Carter: Log, log, log. Mordy Oberstein: And log a logs. Crystal Carter: Do you remember that from Ren and Stimpy? Mordy Oberstein: I love Ren and... Right. The log song. Crystal Carter: Log rolls downstairs, rolls over your chairs, rolls over your neighbor's dog. It's good for your back and fits on a cat. I don't know what it says anyway. That's what I think of when I think- Mordy Oberstein: Such a lost relic of our past. [00:01:58] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Today's show is sponsored, not just by Wix, but by the letter L, as in learn, because we're learning how to learn about SEO today. We're going to get into what you should be doing to learn the ways of the SEO from mindset to matter. We'll help you create your SEO curriculum with a little help of our friends, cue Joe Cocker from 1969's Woodstock. Anyway, Luke Davis shares his approach for scaling up the SEO ladder. Plus we'll get meta by analyzing what does it even mean to know SEO? What does it mean? Crystal Carter: What does it mean? What does it mean? Mordy Oberstein: No one knows. Crystal Carter: Let's really get into it. Who am I? What are we even doing? Mordy Oberstein: What are we doing here? Crystal Carter: Who, where, what? Mordy Oberstein: The letter L. Crystal Carter: The letter L. Mordy Oberstein: And of course we have some snappy news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's rocking and rolling on this episode of the SERPs Up podcast. I'm saying rocket and rolling by the way, I'm not just being cliche. I just watched the Elvis movie. It was amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh, was it? Mordy Oberstein: I finally watched it, it was so good. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: So definitely check out Elvis, but we should definitely check out, by the way, if you're listening now, but didn't listen last week is last week's episode. Cause if you were with us last week, George Nguyen and I took up how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. Well, now that we've helped you weed out the charlatans and all the snake oil out there in SEO, how should you actually approach SEO learning? What mindset should you have? What actions should you take? What should your SEO curriculum look like? Because SEO's kind of a bit unique, especially when it comes to learning the craft that is SEO. [00:03:38] Focus Topic of the Week: Learning to Learn About SEO So today we are learning to learn. Well, we're learning to learn how to learn about SEO. Crystal Carter: Brought to you by the letter L. Mordy Oberstein: Brought to you by the letter L. By the letter L for all you Sesame Street folks. So Crystal, where do we start with this? Because SEO learning is really unique and it is really different than anything I ever learned before. Crystal Carter: The thing that I always think about when I'm thinking about learning how to learn is learning how you learn. And it's very important to think about your own personal process. It does not have to be the same as anyone else's. It does not have to be what someone recommended to you on a podcast or wherever. It needs to be something that's very unique to you. So my personal general rule of thumb, I tend to fall down rabbit holes and then scrape my way back out of them having made a lot more sense of it. And I normally do this where sort of I'll jump straight into something until I get stuck. And then I'll figure out why I got stuck and figure out how to get back out. I tend to use a lot of YouTube and I tend to spend a lot of time in the technical documentation for whatever I'm doing because I spend a lot of time wrangling tech SEO, and wrangling website configurations and things like that. So that generally speaking is the way that I go. And when I say YouTube, I don't mean two minute videos. I mean find two hour tutorial that walks you through all of this something. Find a two hour conversation from a symposium somewhere or from a conference that talks you through all of those different things. And that's my personal methodology. The second thing I would say, for anybody who particularly is interested in learning technical SEO is to learn your CMS. Whatever your CMS of choice is, learn your CMS. There are so many different tools and the people who make the CMS taking Wix as an example, will provide you with lots of different tools to help you to learn that CMS. And it's a bit like if you were trying to learn an instrument, you wouldn't just try to learn all the instruments. You would learn how to play the bassoon, or you would learn how to play the cello, or you would learn how to play the didgeridoo or whatever it is. You wouldn't seek to learn all of the different instruments at once, but in the process of learning the didgeridoo or the harmonica or whatever it is, you would learn how to learn an instrument and you would learn skills that are applicable to other instruments later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so tempted to make the didgeridoo sound. I don't know how to do that, but I really want to make one. Crystal Carter: Something like that. But yeah, it's really important to think about that. So taking Wix as an example, we've got Facebook groups that can help you learn about the CMS. We've got documentation, there're forums, we've got our learning hub, for instance, where you can go and learn about that CMS. And another reason why this is really useful is because you need to be strategic about which things you're learning. So if you are working with clients who are all using the same CMS, it makes sense to learn that in CMS. If you're working with clients who are using lots of different CMSs, because you might be like, I work at an agency, I don't get to pick the CFS for my clients. They just show up and I just get whatever I'm given. Well actually that's not entirely true. I've done this, working agency side I've said to my agency, "There's too many, I've got too many. I would like to specialize on all of the eCommerce clients. Or I would like to specialize on all of the ones that are using this particular CMS, or I would like to... Just give me everybody who's using that." And the reason why is because it allows you to refine your methodology. So if you learned how to optimize for one particular SEO tactic on a given CMS, then you can roll that out across everybody who's using that CMS. And every time you roll it out, you can refine it and refine it and refine it and refine it further. So it allows you to grow, but it allows you to grow exponentially and to learn that much more. So let's say by the time you get down to the fifth one, you go, oh actually I should have done that better on the first one. So you can go back and do it again. And you can see the impact and see all of the efforts and to that point I would say, learn by doing, get involved, get your hands dirty. That's my advice for learning how to learn. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, that could be very complicated. Could be very simple. You can just spin up a website and start playing around with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's usually my first advice to people is take a website, get a free... You don't have to pay for the full subscription. If you don't want to do that yet, just spin up a free website and start building. Crystal Carter: And there's lots of things that you can do. Basically your goal with SEO is to try to bend the internet to your will. That is what you want to do. You want- Mordy Oberstein: That's not sensible at all. Crystal Carter: No, but basically you want to be able to say, it's like calling a shot if you're playing pool or something. You're like, I'm going to put it right there. And people are like, no, you aren't. And you're like, yes, I am. Watch me work. And that's essentially what you want to do. So whatever goal you have. So let's say you want to get a bunch of people to come and look at your blog. See if you can do that, set a goal and see if you can do that. See if you want to get a bunch of people to come to your, I don't know, say you're having a clam bake or something and you're advertising it on Facebook or various other things. See if you can get a bunch of people to come and sign up and see how that works. Get involved. Do some. Mordy Oberstein: And don't be scared. Lean in. This is my advice to you. If you're trying to learn SEO, if you have a point or a topic or whatever it is that you're not exactly confident in lean into that. Don't run away from it. That's the thing you should be researching. I feel like everyone has gaps. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're learning SEO, whatever stage in the SEO world you're in, everyone has gaps. It's about being able to recognize, okay, right now this is a gap I don't fully understand. I need to now go research this. If you're creating a curriculum for yourself, I'm saying this as a former teacher, the biggest skill you can have is being self-aware of knowing when you don't know something and then having the proactive stance of going out there and being I am going to find the answer. It's frustrating because when you start out doing that, you might find the answer and understand 70% of it. And as you go along the next time, you'll understand another 10% more of that then another 10% more. So don't think you have to acquire all of that knowledge, what you don't have, in one sitting or one shot. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Look for the answer, get the information, whatever you get out of it, great. Move on. Come back to it again another time it'll inevitably swing back around another time. You'll get it a little bit more refined the next time around. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a talk on greatness and they were talking about figure skaters, people who went on to be Olympian figure skaters and people who were very, very good figure skaters, but maybe didn't make it to Olympic gold medalist status or whatever. And they said the difference was the people who made it to be Olympic rockstar, Brian Boitano, shout out to Kristi Yamaguchi, my childhood hero. Mordy Oberstein: Scott Hamilton. Crystal Carter: So those folks, they practice the jumps they can't do. So they look at their self and they say, I can't do the triple lutz. I can't do the quadruple axle or whatever, I'm not even sure if that's a move. But they look at that and they say, I can't do that. And they practice that until they can. And then they move onto the next thing that they can't do. And they practice that until they can. And they fall over lots in between, but they keep practicing until they can do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why mindset matters so much. And particularly in SEO learning, I'll quote field of dreams, "Go the distance." Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's the mindset of going the distance, of taking it on on yourself, because what's weird about SEO is, and I know that there our courses out there, even if you're part of a college course, a digital marketing, they'll probably cover SEO to some degree. There are some not so great SEO courses out there, and we talked about this last week and there's some good SEO courses, but it doesn't matter whether it's a course or a podcast or a webinar or a blog or an SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. You're not going to get everything you need to get out of it. That's not possible. It's not how SEO was built. It's not the kind of thing where you take a course. I'm certified. I got it. We're good to go. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's the kind of thing you have to take ownership of and put the extra effort. Nick Leroy, who was on our SEO advisory board one time said the difference between a good SEO and a great SEO is the great SEO will take the extra time to learn more on their own. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And as I said, falling down rabbit holes and going, what? You find something, someone asks you a question and you're like, I don't know. How come I don't know that. And you just keep picking at it until you know how to do it or something, or there's a new update or something and the client you have doesn't have that update or you get a new client in a new vertical that maybe you don't know about. We were just talking with a very prominent SEO just recently and I mentioned some company and he knew it right off the bat. I was like, I've never heard of this company and he knew all about it. I was like, you've worked in that vertical before. Mordy Oberstein: The only reason the other company you mentioned, I actually knew them, because I used to use them for my natural gas stove in New York. That was it. Crystal Carter: Ok. But yeah, these are the things. And then you end up learning lots of random things and suddenly you get really into forklifts. You didn't know that you were really into forklifts, but it turns out that you have this client that's into forklifts and you get really into learning forklifts because not only is it a question of learning about the actual tools and the techniques and the methodology that you need, you also need to learn, particularly with clients, you need to learn how to learn that vertical, very quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn their niche. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And how to recognize what's good and what will be of value to customers. And there are things that are transferable about that. But I sometimes think about in the matrix where he says, "Oh, I need to find a helicopter." And the guy goes, "Can you find a helicopter? Yes. Now I can." And it's sort of like that. Yeah, I know kung fu. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to make one last point for listening to this a great way to keep up with learning and learn about the ecosystem overall is follow the news religiously in SEO. One, it'll help you realize, Hey, I didn't know that. And helps you kickstart your own investigations. Oh, Barry Schwartz wrote an SEO round table that Google now said this, I don't even know what this is. Let me now go research this. And it helps you get a feel for what's happening in SEO. So even though there are small little stories, it kind of builds up through a kind of osmosis kind of process about learning SEO. So definitely do that. Now, if you're looking to understand, SEO is constantly changing as I just mentioned, it's why you should follow the news, then [00:13:16] Focus Topic Guest: Luke Davis check out Luke Davis technical SEO consultant, extraordinaire out of the UK, as he's going to help you understand that SEO is constantly changing. How do you up skill when you need to learn something new for a client or goal? Here's Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos, and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in the subject and kind of get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online, or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro. And that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. That kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do. And I like to think I'm much better for it. One of the biggest things I've upskilled over the last few years has to be Python. I saw a lot of other colleagues in the industry making these amazing things at the time. And FOMO really hit me hard so I decided to start learning October 2019 and then documented my journey in a Twitter thread. Since then, I've written countless scripts for work and leisure and improved my understanding of things such as automation and LP, machine learning, and then talked about in various podcasts and webinars. And people have even said that they've enjoyed the thread and inspired them to learn too. I'd recommend learning out loud if that's comfortable for you. I know it's not for everyone. I mean, I only started doing it to keep myself accountable, but eventually kind of became something like a mini beacon of learning for other people and realizing that it showed them that it doesn't have to be scary to learn after all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Luke. Very much appreciative of that. Really cool insights. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad to hear from Luke because he has such an enthusiasm for learning. He is somebody who, if you go to his Twitter account, which is @LukeDavisSEO, you'll see that he has a pinned tweet that says, "Right, I'm going to learn Python next week. I'm going to do it. Yes I am." And then that pinned tweet is a thread that he's been updating for two or three years. And it shows his entire journey of going from complete Python newb to being a Pythonista all the way through and that mindset that you were talking about that, that determination to learn the thing and get to grips with it is something that he absolutely has. So it's great to hear from Luke about his approach and how he moves forward with learning. Mordy Oberstein: That is really cool. I didn't even know he had that thread. I got to check that out. Crystal Carter: It's really awesome. It's a beauty to behold. I walked through dust. So I was like, this is amazing. And he has times where he's like, oh, I didn't do it last week. Okay. I'm back on it now, that sort of thing. Or, oh, I just got this new- Mordy Oberstein: It's cool that he's recording that because you will fall and have to get back up. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I find, maybe this is odd. And maybe we should have done this in reverse order, but this is not how this podcast works. Understanding how to learn about SEO, you kind of need to understand what does it mean to know SEO, which is a whole debate among SEOs, which we'll probably get to in a few seconds, but we're going to have to go deep on this one. We're going meta on this. We're going conceptual on this one. [00:16:32] Deep Thoughts with Mordy and Crystal This is a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. What does it mean to know SEO? Which sounds so weird. I know SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Because SEO's one of those weird things where there's not some sort of official course and there's an actual checklist and now I know it. I'm an astrophysicist, I know all the astrophysics. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What does it actually mean to know SEO? Crystal Carter: I mean, well, does anyone know SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you go on Twitter, you're probably going to find people like I know SEO and you don't, which is why we're trying to dispel that myth right here right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things is SEO is super vast. The reason why I love SEO is it's incredibly vast and there are nooks and crannies and things. I mean, one of my favorite Twitter threads recently was from somebody who was talking about doing SEO for Amish folks who don't use the internet Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I saw that. Brandon Schmidt. Crystal Carter: What? He set up a podcast that people call into. His clients fax him information. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they fax in their SEO needs. Crystal Carter: That is absolutely incredible. I had no idea. And I thought I knew SEO and I had no idea that that was even a thing. As SEOs it's constantly shifting and it's constantly changing. We're essentially working on shifting sand. You can be going about minding your fantastic SEO business and Google will change something completely different. And they'll be like, oh, we're not accepting that schema anymore. We're accepting this schema now. And the schema you had before, wasn't invalid. They just decided they wanted to change it from one thing to another. And so now you have to go back and do the thing. And so if you just left the SEO and thought that you knew the SEO, then you would not be as optimized as you would be if you were keeping up with it all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Like GA4. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no one knows SEO. No one ever will ever again. Crystal Carter: It changes a lot. And also I think Google has so many different... People say, oh, it's a ranking factor. Oh, the Google algorithm. There are many, many, many, many algorithms working in tangent all the time... Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes cohesively, sometimes not cohesively together. Crystal Carter: Right, in lots of different ways. So the feature snippets are running on one thing, the plain blue links are running on another thing, shopping is running one thing. Yeah, exactly. So there's all different stuff. And Google doesn't even know all the time, which algorithm is doing what. So the idea that you could know SEO, that you could know, all of it... Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of silly. For lack of a better word. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think it's the kind of thing that... I don't know. Erykah Badu once said "The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all." And I think that it's very important to think about that. It's okay to say that you don't know it's okay to say- Mordy Oberstein: I once said that in a webinar, they didn't like that. It was the truth. I didn't know the answer. Crystal Carter: I think it's better to say, I'm not sure. I don't know. You can say in my experience, that is a useful one, because you can say- Mordy Oberstein: In my experience, I don't know. Crystal Carter: But some of my favorite SEOs will say, that's not my area of expertise. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's not. Crystal Carter: Speak to this person. Mordy Oberstein: And those are the good SEOs, that they're honest. I feel like if you want to say, what does it mean to no SEO? I feel like it means that you have your little corner of the SEO universe and you own that. That's your thing. That's your jam. You've created identity around that. You deep dive into that. That area really speaks to you. You've done your research, you've done your own investigation. And not only that, you've conceptually thought about. And I feel like perhaps you don't talk enough about this, but there is a conceptual underpinning to SEO. And thinking about SEO at the conceptual level helps you to create new ideas, create new approaches, create new segues into doing SEO. And therefore it helps you kind of own that little corner of the SEO world. So having innovation of your own about how you think about SEO and being into one little specific corner of the SEO world. Not saying you shouldn't have broader knowledge, but having some really souped up awesome uber knowledge about one particular, two particular kinds of verticals in SEO or SERP features or the algorithm or indexing, whatever your jam is. Being able to own that and being like, yes, this is me and I really have an expertise over this. That's what I feel like it means to know SEO. Because you're right, you're never going to know all of it. There is no knowing all of SEO, but there is having identity around, I really like this, I'm really exploring this and I have a really profound, and multi-layered understanding of this particular aspect of SEO. Crystal Carter: Hmm. And I think it makes you more efficient because it means that you can build on that. So you can build on the information you know and build on it more and build on it more. So if you've been following algorithms for years, so you have the context of what the algorithm was before and before that and before that, and this allows you to build on that knowledge. So you're not starting from fresh every single time you're writing an article or you're making a deck or you're doing whatever it allows you to build on that and to refine your knowledge and to get better with that. And it's not to say that you can't use some of those skills for some other projects. And it's not to say that it might not evolve at some point, but yeah, as you say, being able to hone in on something that is your particular perspective is absolutely valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. It totally will evolve. But once you build on one thing, you're like, oh, okay, now I really want to explore the next logical thing. And it kind of takes you in this weird little journey. Going back to what you said before and just going back to our point about how to learn about SEO or learning how to learn about SEO. The history point is a really good point that I think that you should definitely check out what's happened in the past. If you're new to the industry, go look at the past updates like Panda and Penguin and Caffeine and the Google dance and all that kind of stuff, because it helps you contextualize what's happening now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Seeing what Google used to do, how they moved away from that helps you understand where they're trying to go now, which I guess, I'll say part of knowing SEO is understanding the ecosystem. Google is a living, breathing ecosystem and understanding that ecosystem is part of knowing SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think also something that people forget, we often have conversations about how you also want to know SEO, you need to use the internet. And consciously. If you follow people, some of the best SEOs online, they're constantly sharing screenshots from stuff that they were just doing. They were just looking at a website and they're like, oh, look at this faceted navigation or, oh, they're looking at this website and they're like, oh, your search function is awful or whatever. They're searching for this and they go, oh, look at this. I found this thing on the SERP. Be conscious, keep your eyes open all the time. I look at websites all the time. And I remember looking at a gym website and I was like, wow, your copy's amazing. And I was just looking for a gym. But understand the craft and think about how you find stuff online. Think about the things that you value from the sites that you really appreciate. Think about how you experience things. Think about how your mom finds information online. I recently was talking to an older aunt and she doesn't even have Chrome on her phone. She just has the Google discover the Google app. She doesn't have Chrome. And I was like, how do you even find websites like this? But it's what came with the phone. The phone comes default. Mordy Oberstein: Google gives me the websites. They said, do this. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that's a completely different search experience from the search experience that I have. And these are very interesting things to think about. So to also think consciously about how SEO impacts- Mordy Oberstein: Your own experience. Crystal Carter: Your own experience, the experience of your friends, Mordy Oberstein: What's happening as you're surfing the web. Totally. You go to Google, I'm like, wow, that's new. Where did that come from? Right. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's a wholly new feature Google threw on the SERP. And I found it by researching the Pittsburgh Steelers, because I wanted to research the Pittsburgh Steelers. Crystal Carter: Right. I recently did a talk on visual search and people were like, oh, that's really interesting. I've been using this for years because I have a kid who's really into wildlife stuff. And he's like, what's that caterpillar? And I'm like, I don't know. So I use Google lens. And so I started learning more about Google lens and how all those things work and using the knowledge that I have about other parts of the SEO to help me shape that as a concept. And that's something that you can do. So think about how you use search and think about how that can be applied to different scenarios and how that fits in with your current skill set. And yeah, it's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We're going full circle. [00:25:07] Snappy News We've gone from learning about learning about SEO to what does it mean to know SEO back to learning about learning about SEO. If you're not confused already by that, now we're going to help you learn how to learn more about SEO by modeling the learning that we talked about by covering the news. And so here is the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a lot of Google update news for you. Let's kick it off with Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google September, 2022 product review algorithm update rolling out now. If you remember when Google launched the helpful content update, they said they'll be offering a product review update soon after. What they didn't say, by the way, was that there would be a core update in between, but there was. We'll get to that shortly. Product review updates, target pages, reviewing products that may not really have the best info that are helpful to users. So if you have such a page, you want to make sure that you have actual firsthand experience with the products you are reviewing and can in detail discuss what sets each product apart from each other from the user's point of view and explain things like how different models of the product have evolved over time. Google has some great guidelines, read them. We will link to them in the show notes and the product review update generally takes a few weeks to roll out. So keep an eye on your ranking. Now speaking of the aforementioned core update, the product review update rolling out, Google then said that the September 22 core update is coming to a close. I actually dove into the data from Semrush on this update and it was actually pretty interesting. So obviously specific sites and particular pages did get hit hard by this September 2022 core update, most definitely the case Glenn gave us some great examples on Twitter you can check out. But on average, the September, 2022 core update was about 50% less powerful than previous core updates. What exactly does that mean? Well, have a look at Search Engine Land's, article by Barry Schwartz, Google's September, 2022 core update hit fast, but was less significant than previous updates. Because Barry dives into the data that he analyzed in greater detail, along with other data from other data providers. If you want to get an understanding of how impactful the September 2022 core update was overall, have a look at Barry's article over on Search Engine Land. And with that, that is the snappy news. Now, since we're going full meta on you about learning about learning SEO and how to learn about learning about SEO and what does it mean to know SEO. What it means to learn about SEO when no SEO is to follow the people who can help you learn about SEO so that you know the SEO. Crystal Carter: Did you follow that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, pun intended? Pun intended? Crystal Carter: Pun intended. Mordy Oberstein: Because it is, our follow or the week. Crystal Carter: Woohoo. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of SEO learning, this person has her own SEO mentorship, which is so appropriate for this episode. Who would've thunk. Crystal Carter: I mean, we put a lot of thought into this, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: We do, literally. Crystal Carter: It's how it all goes down. Mordy Oberstein: Meetings upon meetings about every episode. Crystal Carter: I always enjoy our meetings. Mordy Oberstein: I know, they're good. I'm saying it in a good way. So the follow of the week is Chima Mmeje. Who is Chima? I mean, I know Chima is, but Crystal who's Chima? Crystal Carter: Chima is a fantastic freelancer. She's got a course, she's got a few other things, but she also runs the freelance coalition for developing countries, which is an organization which provides learning resources and mentorship for black indigenous people of color freelancers who a need upscaling and learning. And one of the things that's great about her program is it's very holistic. So the people that become part of the freelance coalition will get direct mentorship. They also take courses. They also have access to talks where people will come and discuss their journey. So their tech SEO journey. So John Miller's gone on it. Alada was one of the mentors and they will also get certifications from things like Semrush. So Semrush will ask people to do that. We also for Wix gave people free access to websites so that they could build so that they could see- Mordy Oberstein: That's what learning about SEO means. Crystal Carter: So they can learn hands on. So it's very hands on, mentors, training, lots of different elements. And they're talking about lots of different parts of the freelance journey and it's just a great organization and she's doing some really interesting things. So do follow Chima to find out more about that and to find out more about her work. She's also a fantastic freelance or just generally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And she does a lot around content marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: From the SEO point of view. So if you're looking to learn about content from an SEO point of view, she has a lot of threads she'll put out there. So definitely follow Chima. It's at C-H-I-M-A M-M-E-J-E. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. But again, great follow. Especially if you're looking to follow some information about content and SEO and well beyond. That's our follow of the week, which means that's our show. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Crystal Carter: Do you feel like you learned something? Mordy Oberstein: I do. I do. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned something. Crystal Carter: I feel like I've learned how to learn something about learning something. Mordy Oberstein: I know what learning is now. Crystal Carter: I'm helping. Mordy Oberstein: I'm helping. Crystal Carter: Was it, wait. Mordy, Mordy. Helpful? Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Great. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: I do get a helpful stamp for that. And that's a little inside joke. Crystal Carter: We can get you a stamp. We absolutely need to get you a stamp. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: It was just now there is no helpful content update it seems based on the last statement that Google made. So... Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Someones got to do it now. Anyway, that's a whole other wormhole. 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 managing multiple intents with your content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars and so forth we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guest it wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. So thank you for listening and until next time, peace, love and SEO. Crystal Carter: SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Luke Davis Chima Mmege Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How to Know Good SEO Advice from Bad? Write high quality product reviews Luke Davis SEO Consultancy Nick LeRoy Search Engine Roundtable News: Google September 2022 Product Review Algorithm Update Rolling Out Now Google releases September 2022 product reviews update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Luke Davis Chima Mmege Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How to Know Good SEO Advice from Bad? Write high quality product reviews Luke Davis SEO Consultancy Nick LeRoy Search Engine Roundtable News: Google September 2022 Product Review Algorithm Update Rolling Out Now Google releases September 2022 product reviews update Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERPs Up podcast. 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 our Illustrious head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you fantastic SEO people. Mordy Oberstein: You're back. Crystal Carter: I'm back. I was in California. I went to my homeland. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? How was Mars? Just kidding. Crystal Carter: Women are from Venus, Mordy, don't you remember? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I didn't read that. Crystal Carter: No. Yeah. I was in California, and I did some surfing while I was there, actually, which was quite exciting. Mordy Oberstein: So now I'm the odd person out. Crystal Carter: We got to get you on a board, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Do I still fit in this podcast that now I have no surfing experience? Crystal Carter: You surfed the wild waves of the interwebs. Mordy Oberstein: Of the web. I can still be here? Crystal Carter: Sure. Of course. All are welcome. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Well, pleasure to have you back. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's nice to be back. I really, really did enjoy it. It's good to be back doing the things that we do. Mordy Oberstein: Sweet. Well, the things that we do are SERPs Up podcast, which is brought to you by Wix, where you have the log. Server log reports, right in your own backyard, without you having to do anything to access them. Check out our bot log reports in the Wix analytics with full on prebuilt graphs and charts. Crystal Carter: Log, log, log. Mordy Oberstein: And log a logs. Crystal Carter: Do you remember that from Ren and Stimpy? Mordy Oberstein: I love Ren and... Right. The log song. Crystal Carter: Log rolls downstairs, rolls over your chairs, rolls over your neighbor's dog. It's good for your back and fits on a cat. I don't know what it says anyway. That's what I think of when I think- Mordy Oberstein: Such a lost relic of our past. [00:01:58] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Today's show is sponsored, not just by Wix, but by the letter L, as in learn, because we're learning how to learn about SEO today. We're going to get into what you should be doing to learn the ways of the SEO from mindset to matter. We'll help you create your SEO curriculum with a little help of our friends, cue Joe Cocker from 1969's Woodstock. Anyway, Luke Davis shares his approach for scaling up the SEO ladder. Plus we'll get meta by analyzing what does it even mean to know SEO? What does it mean? Crystal Carter: What does it mean? What does it mean? Mordy Oberstein: No one knows. Crystal Carter: Let's really get into it. Who am I? What are we even doing? Mordy Oberstein: What are we doing here? Crystal Carter: Who, where, what? Mordy Oberstein: The letter L. Crystal Carter: The letter L. Mordy Oberstein: And of course we have some snappy news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's rocking and rolling on this episode of the SERPs Up podcast. I'm saying rocket and rolling by the way, I'm not just being cliche. I just watched the Elvis movie. It was amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh, was it? Mordy Oberstein: I finally watched it, it was so good. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: So definitely check out Elvis, but we should definitely check out, by the way, if you're listening now, but didn't listen last week is last week's episode. Cause if you were with us last week, George Nguyen and I took up how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. Well, now that we've helped you weed out the charlatans and all the snake oil out there in SEO, how should you actually approach SEO learning? What mindset should you have? What actions should you take? What should your SEO curriculum look like? Because SEO's kind of a bit unique, especially when it comes to learning the craft that is SEO. [00:03:38] Focus Topic of the Week: Learning to Learn About SEO So today we are learning to learn. Well, we're learning to learn how to learn about SEO. Crystal Carter: Brought to you by the letter L. Mordy Oberstein: Brought to you by the letter L. By the letter L for all you Sesame Street folks. So Crystal, where do we start with this? Because SEO learning is really unique and it is really different than anything I ever learned before. Crystal Carter: The thing that I always think about when I'm thinking about learning how to learn is learning how you learn. And it's very important to think about your own personal process. It does not have to be the same as anyone else's. It does not have to be what someone recommended to you on a podcast or wherever. It needs to be something that's very unique to you. So my personal general rule of thumb, I tend to fall down rabbit holes and then scrape my way back out of them having made a lot more sense of it. And I normally do this where sort of I'll jump straight into something until I get stuck. And then I'll figure out why I got stuck and figure out how to get back out. I tend to use a lot of YouTube and I tend to spend a lot of time in the technical documentation for whatever I'm doing because I spend a lot of time wrangling tech SEO, and wrangling website configurations and things like that. So that generally speaking is the way that I go. And when I say YouTube, I don't mean two minute videos. I mean find two hour tutorial that walks you through all of this something. Find a two hour conversation from a symposium somewhere or from a conference that talks you through all of those different things. And that's my personal methodology. The second thing I would say, for anybody who particularly is interested in learning technical SEO is to learn your CMS. Whatever your CMS of choice is, learn your CMS. There are so many different tools and the people who make the CMS taking Wix as an example, will provide you with lots of different tools to help you to learn that CMS. And it's a bit like if you were trying to learn an instrument, you wouldn't just try to learn all the instruments. You would learn how to play the bassoon, or you would learn how to play the cello, or you would learn how to play the didgeridoo or whatever it is. You wouldn't seek to learn all of the different instruments at once, but in the process of learning the didgeridoo or the harmonica or whatever it is, you would learn how to learn an instrument and you would learn skills that are applicable to other instruments later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so tempted to make the didgeridoo sound. I don't know how to do that, but I really want to make one. Crystal Carter: Something like that. But yeah, it's really important to think about that. So taking Wix as an example, we've got Facebook groups that can help you learn about the CMS. We've got documentation, there're forums, we've got our learning hub, for instance, where you can go and learn about that CMS. And another reason why this is really useful is because you need to be strategic about which things you're learning. So if you are working with clients who are all using the same CMS, it makes sense to learn that in CMS. If you're working with clients who are using lots of different CMSs, because you might be like, I work at an agency, I don't get to pick the CFS for my clients. They just show up and I just get whatever I'm given. Well actually that's not entirely true. I've done this, working agency side I've said to my agency, "There's too many, I've got too many. I would like to specialize on all of the eCommerce clients. Or I would like to specialize on all of the ones that are using this particular CMS, or I would like to... Just give me everybody who's using that." And the reason why is because it allows you to refine your methodology. So if you learned how to optimize for one particular SEO tactic on a given CMS, then you can roll that out across everybody who's using that CMS. And every time you roll it out, you can refine it and refine it and refine it and refine it further. So it allows you to grow, but it allows you to grow exponentially and to learn that much more. So let's say by the time you get down to the fifth one, you go, oh actually I should have done that better on the first one. So you can go back and do it again. And you can see the impact and see all of the efforts and to that point I would say, learn by doing, get involved, get your hands dirty. That's my advice for learning how to learn. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, that could be very complicated. Could be very simple. You can just spin up a website and start playing around with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's usually my first advice to people is take a website, get a free... You don't have to pay for the full subscription. If you don't want to do that yet, just spin up a free website and start building. Crystal Carter: And there's lots of things that you can do. Basically your goal with SEO is to try to bend the internet to your will. That is what you want to do. You want- Mordy Oberstein: That's not sensible at all. Crystal Carter: No, but basically you want to be able to say, it's like calling a shot if you're playing pool or something. You're like, I'm going to put it right there. And people are like, no, you aren't. And you're like, yes, I am. Watch me work. And that's essentially what you want to do. So whatever goal you have. So let's say you want to get a bunch of people to come and look at your blog. See if you can do that, set a goal and see if you can do that. See if you want to get a bunch of people to come to your, I don't know, say you're having a clam bake or something and you're advertising it on Facebook or various other things. See if you can get a bunch of people to come and sign up and see how that works. Get involved. Do some. Mordy Oberstein: And don't be scared. Lean in. This is my advice to you. If you're trying to learn SEO, if you have a point or a topic or whatever it is that you're not exactly confident in lean into that. Don't run away from it. That's the thing you should be researching. I feel like everyone has gaps. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're learning SEO, whatever stage in the SEO world you're in, everyone has gaps. It's about being able to recognize, okay, right now this is a gap I don't fully understand. I need to now go research this. If you're creating a curriculum for yourself, I'm saying this as a former teacher, the biggest skill you can have is being self-aware of knowing when you don't know something and then having the proactive stance of going out there and being I am going to find the answer. It's frustrating because when you start out doing that, you might find the answer and understand 70% of it. And as you go along the next time, you'll understand another 10% more of that then another 10% more. So don't think you have to acquire all of that knowledge, what you don't have, in one sitting or one shot. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Look for the answer, get the information, whatever you get out of it, great. Move on. Come back to it again another time it'll inevitably swing back around another time. You'll get it a little bit more refined the next time around. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a talk on greatness and they were talking about figure skaters, people who went on to be Olympian figure skaters and people who were very, very good figure skaters, but maybe didn't make it to Olympic gold medalist status or whatever. And they said the difference was the people who made it to be Olympic rockstar, Brian Boitano, shout out to Kristi Yamaguchi, my childhood hero. Mordy Oberstein: Scott Hamilton. Crystal Carter: So those folks, they practice the jumps they can't do. So they look at their self and they say, I can't do the triple lutz. I can't do the quadruple axle or whatever, I'm not even sure if that's a move. But they look at that and they say, I can't do that. And they practice that until they can. And then they move onto the next thing that they can't do. And they practice that until they can. And they fall over lots in between, but they keep practicing until they can do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why mindset matters so much. And particularly in SEO learning, I'll quote field of dreams, "Go the distance." Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's the mindset of going the distance, of taking it on on yourself, because what's weird about SEO is, and I know that there our courses out there, even if you're part of a college course, a digital marketing, they'll probably cover SEO to some degree. There are some not so great SEO courses out there, and we talked about this last week and there's some good SEO courses, but it doesn't matter whether it's a course or a podcast or a webinar or a blog or an SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. You're not going to get everything you need to get out of it. That's not possible. It's not how SEO was built. It's not the kind of thing where you take a course. I'm certified. I got it. We're good to go. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's the kind of thing you have to take ownership of and put the extra effort. Nick Leroy, who was on our SEO advisory board one time said the difference between a good SEO and a great SEO is the great SEO will take the extra time to learn more on their own. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And as I said, falling down rabbit holes and going, what? You find something, someone asks you a question and you're like, I don't know. How come I don't know that. And you just keep picking at it until you know how to do it or something, or there's a new update or something and the client you have doesn't have that update or you get a new client in a new vertical that maybe you don't know about. We were just talking with a very prominent SEO just recently and I mentioned some company and he knew it right off the bat. I was like, I've never heard of this company and he knew all about it. I was like, you've worked in that vertical before. Mordy Oberstein: The only reason the other company you mentioned, I actually knew them, because I used to use them for my natural gas stove in New York. That was it. Crystal Carter: Ok. But yeah, these are the things. And then you end up learning lots of random things and suddenly you get really into forklifts. You didn't know that you were really into forklifts, but it turns out that you have this client that's into forklifts and you get really into learning forklifts because not only is it a question of learning about the actual tools and the techniques and the methodology that you need, you also need to learn, particularly with clients, you need to learn how to learn that vertical, very quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn their niche. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And how to recognize what's good and what will be of value to customers. And there are things that are transferable about that. But I sometimes think about in the matrix where he says, "Oh, I need to find a helicopter." And the guy goes, "Can you find a helicopter? Yes. Now I can." And it's sort of like that. Yeah, I know kung fu. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to make one last point for listening to this a great way to keep up with learning and learn about the ecosystem overall is follow the news religiously in SEO. One, it'll help you realize, Hey, I didn't know that. And helps you kickstart your own investigations. Oh, Barry Schwartz wrote an SEO round table that Google now said this, I don't even know what this is. Let me now go research this. And it helps you get a feel for what's happening in SEO. So even though there are small little stories, it kind of builds up through a kind of osmosis kind of process about learning SEO. So definitely do that. Now, if you're looking to understand, SEO is constantly changing as I just mentioned, it's why you should follow the news, then [00:13:16] Focus Topic Guest: Luke Davis check out Luke Davis technical SEO consultant, extraordinaire out of the UK, as he's going to help you understand that SEO is constantly changing. How do you up skill when you need to learn something new for a client or goal? Here's Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos, and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in the subject and kind of get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online, or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro. And that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. That kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do. And I like to think I'm much better for it. One of the biggest things I've upskilled over the last few years has to be Python. I saw a lot of other colleagues in the industry making these amazing things at the time. And FOMO really hit me hard so I decided to start learning October 2019 and then documented my journey in a Twitter thread. Since then, I've written countless scripts for work and leisure and improved my understanding of things such as automation and LP, machine learning, and then talked about in various podcasts and webinars. And people have even said that they've enjoyed the thread and inspired them to learn too. I'd recommend learning out loud if that's comfortable for you. I know it's not for everyone. I mean, I only started doing it to keep myself accountable, but eventually kind of became something like a mini beacon of learning for other people and realizing that it showed them that it doesn't have to be scary to learn after all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Luke. Very much appreciative of that. Really cool insights. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad to hear from Luke because he has such an enthusiasm for learning. He is somebody who, if you go to his Twitter account, which is @LukeDavisSEO, you'll see that he has a pinned tweet that says, "Right, I'm going to learn Python next week. I'm going to do it. Yes I am." And then that pinned tweet is a thread that he's been updating for two or three years. And it shows his entire journey of going from complete Python newb to being a Pythonista all the way through and that mindset that you were talking about that, that determination to learn the thing and get to grips with it is something that he absolutely has. So it's great to hear from Luke about his approach and how he moves forward with learning. Mordy Oberstein: That is really cool. I didn't even know he had that thread. I got to check that out. Crystal Carter: It's really awesome. It's a beauty to behold. I walked through dust. So I was like, this is amazing. And he has times where he's like, oh, I didn't do it last week. Okay. I'm back on it now, that sort of thing. Or, oh, I just got this new- Mordy Oberstein: It's cool that he's recording that because you will fall and have to get back up. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I find, maybe this is odd. And maybe we should have done this in reverse order, but this is not how this podcast works. Understanding how to learn about SEO, you kind of need to understand what does it mean to know SEO, which is a whole debate among SEOs, which we'll probably get to in a few seconds, but we're going to have to go deep on this one. We're going meta on this. We're going conceptual on this one. [00:16:32] Deep Thoughts with Mordy and Crystal This is a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. What does it mean to know SEO? Which sounds so weird. I know SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Because SEO's one of those weird things where there's not some sort of official course and there's an actual checklist and now I know it. I'm an astrophysicist, I know all the astrophysics. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What does it actually mean to know SEO? Crystal Carter: I mean, well, does anyone know SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you go on Twitter, you're probably going to find people like I know SEO and you don't, which is why we're trying to dispel that myth right here right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things is SEO is super vast. The reason why I love SEO is it's incredibly vast and there are nooks and crannies and things. I mean, one of my favorite Twitter threads recently was from somebody who was talking about doing SEO for Amish folks who don't use the internet Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I saw that. Brandon Schmidt. Crystal Carter: What? He set up a podcast that people call into. His clients fax him information. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they fax in their SEO needs. Crystal Carter: That is absolutely incredible. I had no idea. And I thought I knew SEO and I had no idea that that was even a thing. As SEOs it's constantly shifting and it's constantly changing. We're essentially working on shifting sand. You can be going about minding your fantastic SEO business and Google will change something completely different. And they'll be like, oh, we're not accepting that schema anymore. We're accepting this schema now. And the schema you had before, wasn't invalid. They just decided they wanted to change it from one thing to another. And so now you have to go back and do the thing. And so if you just left the SEO and thought that you knew the SEO, then you would not be as optimized as you would be if you were keeping up with it all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Like GA4. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no one knows SEO. No one ever will ever again. Crystal Carter: It changes a lot. And also I think Google has so many different... People say, oh, it's a ranking factor. Oh, the Google algorithm. There are many, many, many, many algorithms working in tangent all the time... Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes cohesively, sometimes not cohesively together. Crystal Carter: Right, in lots of different ways. So the feature snippets are running on one thing, the plain blue links are running on another thing, shopping is running one thing. Yeah, exactly. So there's all different stuff. And Google doesn't even know all the time, which algorithm is doing what. So the idea that you could know SEO, that you could know, all of it... Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of silly. For lack of a better word. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think it's the kind of thing that... I don't know. Erykah Badu once said "The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all." And I think that it's very important to think about that. It's okay to say that you don't know it's okay to say- Mordy Oberstein: I once said that in a webinar, they didn't like that. It was the truth. I didn't know the answer. Crystal Carter: I think it's better to say, I'm not sure. I don't know. You can say in my experience, that is a useful one, because you can say- Mordy Oberstein: In my experience, I don't know. Crystal Carter: But some of my favorite SEOs will say, that's not my area of expertise. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's not. Crystal Carter: Speak to this person. Mordy Oberstein: And those are the good SEOs, that they're honest. I feel like if you want to say, what does it mean to no SEO? I feel like it means that you have your little corner of the SEO universe and you own that. That's your thing. That's your jam. You've created identity around that. You deep dive into that. That area really speaks to you. You've done your research, you've done your own investigation. And not only that, you've conceptually thought about. And I feel like perhaps you don't talk enough about this, but there is a conceptual underpinning to SEO. And thinking about SEO at the conceptual level helps you to create new ideas, create new approaches, create new segues into doing SEO. And therefore it helps you kind of own that little corner of the SEO world. So having innovation of your own about how you think about SEO and being into one little specific corner of the SEO world. Not saying you shouldn't have broader knowledge, but having some really souped up awesome uber knowledge about one particular, two particular kinds of verticals in SEO or SERP features or the algorithm or indexing, whatever your jam is. Being able to own that and being like, yes, this is me and I really have an expertise over this. That's what I feel like it means to know SEO. Because you're right, you're never going to know all of it. There is no knowing all of SEO, but there is having identity around, I really like this, I'm really exploring this and I have a really profound, and multi-layered understanding of this particular aspect of SEO. Crystal Carter: Hmm. And I think it makes you more efficient because it means that you can build on that. So you can build on the information you know and build on it more and build on it more. So if you've been following algorithms for years, so you have the context of what the algorithm was before and before that and before that, and this allows you to build on that knowledge. So you're not starting from fresh every single time you're writing an article or you're making a deck or you're doing whatever it allows you to build on that and to refine your knowledge and to get better with that. And it's not to say that you can't use some of those skills for some other projects. And it's not to say that it might not evolve at some point, but yeah, as you say, being able to hone in on something that is your particular perspective is absolutely valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. It totally will evolve. But once you build on one thing, you're like, oh, okay, now I really want to explore the next logical thing. And it kind of takes you in this weird little journey. Going back to what you said before and just going back to our point about how to learn about SEO or learning how to learn about SEO. The history point is a really good point that I think that you should definitely check out what's happened in the past. If you're new to the industry, go look at the past updates like Panda and Penguin and Caffeine and the Google dance and all that kind of stuff, because it helps you contextualize what's happening now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Seeing what Google used to do, how they moved away from that helps you understand where they're trying to go now, which I guess, I'll say part of knowing SEO is understanding the ecosystem. Google is a living, breathing ecosystem and understanding that ecosystem is part of knowing SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think also something that people forget, we often have conversations about how you also want to know SEO, you need to use the internet. And consciously. If you follow people, some of the best SEOs online, they're constantly sharing screenshots from stuff that they were just doing. They were just looking at a website and they're like, oh, look at this faceted navigation or, oh, they're looking at this website and they're like, oh, your search function is awful or whatever. They're searching for this and they go, oh, look at this. I found this thing on the SERP. Be conscious, keep your eyes open all the time. I look at websites all the time. And I remember looking at a gym website and I was like, wow, your copy's amazing. And I was just looking for a gym. But understand the craft and think about how you find stuff online. Think about the things that you value from the sites that you really appreciate. Think about how you experience things. Think about how your mom finds information online. I recently was talking to an older aunt and she doesn't even have Chrome on her phone. She just has the Google discover the Google app. She doesn't have Chrome. And I was like, how do you even find websites like this? But it's what came with the phone. The phone comes default. Mordy Oberstein: Google gives me the websites. They said, do this. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that's a completely different search experience from the search experience that I have. And these are very interesting things to think about. So to also think consciously about how SEO impacts- Mordy Oberstein: Your own experience. Crystal Carter: Your own experience, the experience of your friends, Mordy Oberstein: What's happening as you're surfing the web. Totally. You go to Google, I'm like, wow, that's new. Where did that come from? Right. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's a wholly new feature Google threw on the SERP. And I found it by researching the Pittsburgh Steelers, because I wanted to research the Pittsburgh Steelers. Crystal Carter: Right. I recently did a talk on visual search and people were like, oh, that's really interesting. I've been using this for years because I have a kid who's really into wildlife stuff. And he's like, what's that caterpillar? And I'm like, I don't know. So I use Google lens. And so I started learning more about Google lens and how all those things work and using the knowledge that I have about other parts of the SEO to help me shape that as a concept. And that's something that you can do. So think about how you use search and think about how that can be applied to different scenarios and how that fits in with your current skill set. And yeah, it's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We're going full circle. [00:25:07] Snappy News We've gone from learning about learning about SEO to what does it mean to know SEO back to learning about learning about SEO. If you're not confused already by that, now we're going to help you learn how to learn more about SEO by modeling the learning that we talked about by covering the news. And so here is the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a lot of Google update news for you. Let's kick it off with Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google September, 2022 product review algorithm update rolling out now. If you remember when Google launched the helpful content update, they said they'll be offering a product review update soon after. What they didn't say, by the way, was that there would be a core update in between, but there was. We'll get to that shortly. Product review updates, target pages, reviewing products that may not really have the best info that are helpful to users. So if you have such a page, you want to make sure that you have actual firsthand experience with the products you are reviewing and can in detail discuss what sets each product apart from each other from the user's point of view and explain things like how different models of the product have evolved over time. Google has some great guidelines, read them. We will link to them in the show notes and the product review update generally takes a few weeks to roll out. So keep an eye on your ranking. Now speaking of the aforementioned core update, the product review update rolling out, Google then said that the September 22 core update is coming to a close. I actually dove into the data from Semrush on this update and it was actually pretty interesting. So obviously specific sites and particular pages did get hit hard by this September 2022 core update, most definitely the case Glenn gave us some great examples on Twitter you can check out. But on average, the September, 2022 core update was about 50% less powerful than previous core updates. What exactly does that mean? Well, have a look at Search Engine Land's, article by Barry Schwartz, Google's September, 2022 core update hit fast, but was less significant than previous updates. Because Barry dives into the data that he analyzed in greater detail, along with other data from other data providers. If you want to get an understanding of how impactful the September 2022 core update was overall, have a look at Barry's article over on Search Engine Land. And with that, that is the snappy news. Now, since we're going full meta on you about learning about learning SEO and how to learn about learning about SEO and what does it mean to know SEO. What it means to learn about SEO when no SEO is to follow the people who can help you learn about SEO so that you know the SEO. Crystal Carter: Did you follow that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, pun intended? Pun intended? Crystal Carter: Pun intended. Mordy Oberstein: Because it is, our follow or the week. Crystal Carter: Woohoo. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of SEO learning, this person has her own SEO mentorship, which is so appropriate for this episode. Who would've thunk. Crystal Carter: I mean, we put a lot of thought into this, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: We do, literally. Crystal Carter: It's how it all goes down. Mordy Oberstein: Meetings upon meetings about every episode. Crystal Carter: I always enjoy our meetings. Mordy Oberstein: I know, they're good. I'm saying it in a good way. So the follow of the week is Chima Mmeje. Who is Chima? I mean, I know Chima is, but Crystal who's Chima? Crystal Carter: Chima is a fantastic freelancer. She's got a course, she's got a few other things, but she also runs the freelance coalition for developing countries, which is an organization which provides learning resources and mentorship for black indigenous people of color freelancers who a need upscaling and learning. And one of the things that's great about her program is it's very holistic. So the people that become part of the freelance coalition will get direct mentorship. They also take courses. They also have access to talks where people will come and discuss their journey. So their tech SEO journey. So John Miller's gone on it. Alada was one of the mentors and they will also get certifications from things like Semrush. So Semrush will ask people to do that. We also for Wix gave people free access to websites so that they could build so that they could see- Mordy Oberstein: That's what learning about SEO means. Crystal Carter: So they can learn hands on. So it's very hands on, mentors, training, lots of different elements. And they're talking about lots of different parts of the freelance journey and it's just a great organization and she's doing some really interesting things. So do follow Chima to find out more about that and to find out more about her work. She's also a fantastic freelance or just generally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And she does a lot around content marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: From the SEO point of view. So if you're looking to learn about content from an SEO point of view, she has a lot of threads she'll put out there. So definitely follow Chima. It's at C-H-I-M-A M-M-E-J-E. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. But again, great follow. Especially if you're looking to follow some information about content and SEO and well beyond. That's our follow of the week, which means that's our show. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Crystal Carter: Do you feel like you learned something? Mordy Oberstein: I do. I do. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned something. Crystal Carter: I feel like I've learned how to learn something about learning something. Mordy Oberstein: I know what learning is now. Crystal Carter: I'm helping. Mordy Oberstein: I'm helping. Crystal Carter: Was it, wait. Mordy, Mordy. Helpful? Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Great. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: I do get a helpful stamp for that. And that's a little inside joke. Crystal Carter: We can get you a stamp. We absolutely need to get you a stamp. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: It was just now there is no helpful content update it seems based on the last statement that Google made. So... Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Someones got to do it now. Anyway, that's a whole other wormhole. 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 managing multiple intents with your content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars and so forth we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guest it wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. So thank you for listening and 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

Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Duane Brown Founder & Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk Inc. Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Articles & Resources 27 Feb 2024 Automate and share customer data with Google Ads for better PPC campaigns 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

Ola King is a UX & SEO consultant using design-thinking to make digital information simple and accessible. He’s worked for Moz, created the Notion SEO Growth Kit, and presented at MozCon, BrightonSEO, and more. Ola King UX & SEO Consultant Ola King is a UX & SEO consultant using design-thinking to make digital information simple and accessible. He’s worked for Moz, created the Notion SEO Growth Kit, and presented at MozCon, BrightonSEO, and more. Articles & Resources 28 Jan 2025 UX & SEO 101: On-page best practices to attract, engage, and convert Resources Ola King UX for SEO checklist Consult this checklist to ensure you’re considering all aspects of user experience and creating people-first content. 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

Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. Claire Carlile Local Search Expert, BrightLocal Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. Articles & Resources 10 Jan 2023 GBP Posts: What you need to know to get started 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

Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix, where he's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before joining Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Yossi Fest Technical SEO Specialist at Wix Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix, where he's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before joining Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Articles & Resources 19 Sept 2025 Your guide to crawl budget optimization 29 Oct 2024 How to optimize for INP Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What prevents SEO professionals from pursuing senior positions at an SEO agency? Which skills are essential for excelling in a senior SEO role? What mindset is necessary to succeed in a senior position? Wix’s, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss ascending your career as an SEO with StudioHawk UK founder Anthony Barone. Anthony shares his comprehensive strategy for demonstrating your value in order to advance your career within the agency hierarchy, along with additional valuable agency insights. Plus, If you're on the hunt for an SEO gig we run through how to pick apart an SEO job listing. Get ready to skyrocket your SEO career with this episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast! Back How to build your career at an SEO agency What prevents SEO professionals from pursuing senior positions at an SEO agency? Which skills are essential for excelling in a senior SEO role? What mindset is necessary to succeed in a senior position? Wix’s, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss ascending your career as an SEO with StudioHawk UK founder Anthony Barone. Anthony shares his comprehensive strategy for demonstrating your value in order to advance your career within the agency hierarchy, along with additional valuable agency insights. Plus, If you're on the hunt for an SEO gig we run through how to pick apart an SEO job listing. Get ready to skyrocket your SEO career with this episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 44 | June 28, 2023 | 41 MIN 00:00 / 40:46 This week’s guests Anthony Barone Anthony Barone is the Co-Founder & Managing Director of StudioHawk UK. Anthony was the 3rd hire at StudioHawk Australia and is one of the longest-serving members, making up the Core Hawk team. Anthony originally came from a background in Hospitality and Sports, completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Sports Management, while working in a nightclub, pub and at an Australian Football Club for 5 years. Anthony learnt SEO from the ground up, under the tutelage of Harry Sanders, and now is the leader in the UK, leading the team and the day-to-day operations of StudioHawk UK. A Senior SEO Specialist before starting the UK arm of StudioHawk. Anthony has a soft spot for Local SEO. 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 putting 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 enjoying life. Check this. She's not AI. I ran it through an AI checker. It's 100% human. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Oh wait, you forgot. I've got a bionic leg. No, I don't have a bionic leg, although I wish I did. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that would be awesome. I wish I had a bionic... Maybe my knees wouldn't hurt so much. Crystal Carter: My knee is such a mess. I wish I had a better knee. Maybe AI can fix my leg. Mordy Oberstein: My wife's like, "Why is your chair so low?" I'm like, "Well, because if I sit high up and then my leg half dangles a little bit and my knee hurts at night." Crystal Carter: These are honestly the things that you have to think about. Mordy Oberstein: I've reached that stage. Now I feel officially old, my knees hurt. Crystal Carter: They have that... What is that, there's that standing up sound, the... Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I totally do that. I totally do that. Crystal Carter: These are the things. You've got to pace yourself these days. You have to pace yourself. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Advil. No, I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: It's brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search that at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can work efficiently and at scale with cutting edge SEO technology that helps you work as efficiently as possible. It helps you even leave broken links with automatic redirects, inspect indexation in a single bound, and apply tags to all pages within a folder faster than a locomotive. Look up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Wix SEO for scalability and efficiency. Heck, by the way, you can even spin up content with our inbuilt AI tools. Make sure you edit and review the content that comes out. I feel like I need to have that disclaimer in there about all things AI. Scalability, by the way, why? Because today we're helping you scale the company ladder by talking about how to move up from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency. By the way, the advantage of moving up to being from a junior to a senior is you'll get discounted tickets to the movie and on the bus. Crystal Carter: That's a fact sponsored by Advil again. Mordy Oberstein: Right, bad joke. Just kidding, not that kind of senior. We're going to dive into what holds SEOs back from taking on a senior role at an SEO agency, what skills actually help you thrive in a senior role at an SEO agency, the mindset that matters for thriving as a senior at an SEO agency. And to help us, we have a special guest host, all around great guy, all around nice guy and co-founder of StudioHawk UK, Anthony Barone is set to join us in just a wee bit. Plus we'll take a look at Google for jobs and some red flags in SEO job listings that you might want to avoid. And of course we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So get out your climbing shoes as episode number 44 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you reach the top of the SEO agency mountain. Crystal Carter: We're climbing up. Mordy Oberstein: We're climbing on up. It's really moving on up, but we're just going to go with it. So agency life is a hard knock life, cue music from Annie. I wouldn't know, I've never worked at an agency, but from what I've heard, that seems to be the general consensus. Crystal Carter: I had a lovely time working at an agency. There's some great agencies. We are going to be joined by the head of a fantastic agency, as a matter of fact. And so I think that there's some great things and it's not without challenge, but I think the challenge could be fun. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's what I was about to say, that you can meet these challenges and really grow and advance your career by checking out as much as you can as a junior, learning as much as you can, and then taking on a senior role at an agency and really putting your SEO career on a very different trajectory. So to do that, to help us climb the agency, scale the agency ladder, give a warm welcome to the boss. Also, again the founding member of StudioHawk UK. The one, the only, Anthony Barone. What's up? How are you dude? Anthony Barone: Very well. Thank you very much for having me today. Morning, Crystal. Great to be here. Crystal Carter: It's our absolute pleasure. Such a big fan of StudioHawk. Mordy Oberstein: Love it. Crystal Carter: The team is fantastic. I love your energy and I'm sorry that every time I see y'all, I kakaaw at you. I just love it. Mordy Oberstein: Great logo, by the way. Love the logo. So cool. Check if you're listening, check it out. Anthony Barone: Thank you very much. Some of the team have actually taken on that kakaaw actually. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Anthony Barone: Internally, yeah. So we start to do it. So Logan and a few other team members, when we're doing things, the kakaaw will come out. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like whenever there's success, landed a big new client, optimize a million pages, it should be an official kakaaw that goes off around the office. Anthony Barone: Pretty much. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Anthony Barone: Pretty much. Mordy Oberstein: We're glad we can do that for you. Anthony Barone: Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: Hawks assemble. Mordy Oberstein: It just reminded me of the Silver Hawks, which was an amazing 1980s cartoon, but let's not get too down, yeah, check that out. That's a deep cut. Let's not go down too far the 1980s wormhole because I can get very much stuck there. Anthony, you obviously know a lot about working on an SEO agency, having founded a branch of one. Let's just start from basics, the most fundamental thing. If you're trying to move up from a junior role to a senior role, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Anthony Barone: The strategy. You can learn about SEO on the internet. You can go onto many different platforms to try and learn... All the stuff about SEO is out there. You don't have to tell, I don't have to tell you. It's the execution and then understanding how those individual parts that make up SEO are relevant in an overall strategy for a business. Whether you're working as an agency like us or working in-house, how do these moves move the needle for the business to achieve their goals? Crystal Carter: I think that's so important. You talked about, "Yeah, you can learn it online." I think in an agency environment, what's great is that you can learn from other people. So one of the things that I learned... And this is why I said I love your team. So the team element of an SEO agency is so fantastic and if you've got a good team, like I know that you do, you have a good team, then you can learn from each other. So somebody says, "Oh, I tried this thing and it worked really well", and says "Really? Oh, what did you do?" And then you can apply it to another client and you say, "Oh well I did this a little bit different and I added that." And so, that I find is a really fantastic environment for learning and for bringing together all those component parts that you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: For us, we've got a team of eight here, whereby some people working on an e-commerce client, some people working on B2B, they'll be working on Shopify, they'll be working on this, they'll be working on that. I've tried one thing here that might work there. So yes, working on the team and being able, so that's what we try and do. We try and collaborate and foster that learning and growth between each other. So we'll have a Slack channel. I do things like team brainstorms every couple of weeks where we'll look at a client and go, "Hey, what's maybe the problem with this one? Or how can we grow this one?" And then so someone will come who did mention it before, "Oh, how about you try this? Oh actually, have you done a proper technical SEO ordered on so and so? Or actually we tried improving location pages for this." So the team, because you got the... Instead of just one person learning everything, the more members you add to your team, the more people that can read, they'll learn, they can understand what's going on in SEO, they're working on different platforms, they're working on different clients, they're working in different businesses. All that knowledge can then... You want to try and foster that sort of knowledge sharing. So you're saying, at the role of someone in senior in the SEO agency, it's really to foster collaboration. Anthony Barone: I would be fostering collaboration, leadership, lead by example and then overall strategy. So being able to understand the business or understand the client and go, all right, what will move the needle? Like a site map in robots TXT, that's default. No one's really going to care. But a full on hub and spoke approach, content approach. Great. That's the type of stuff where I think as a senior you're looking more at that strategic level because you've got really good knowledge in SEO and how it works and all that. But it's then putting it into place for different clients, businesses, people, websites. That's where I think you make that leap. You can go and teach a junior how to do title tags great. But it's understanding the data and analytics and strategy behind that. Crystal Carter: And I think also being able to demonstrate your strategy. So certainly with one of the key components of any SEO agency is maintaining good client relationships and being able to build on your client base to minimize churn so that you can maximize growth and all of that sort of stuff. So to be able to evidence the strategy that helped you to achieve that for the client is really, really useful. I was lucky enough to see an entry for StudioHawk and awards and I know that you guys are great at evidencing your work. What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to demonstrate the high level strategies that they have in order to be seen as a more senior role, and potentially move up? Mordy Oberstein: So it's matching that with the business goal. So this is where SEO struggles because it's an intangible thing. I can't sit there and guarantee you 10,000 views a month from Google. It's just not the way it works. So you use things like forecasting and then Google search console data and you use their Google analytics data as the baseline and then try and map out points along the way where you can then match up, okay, these are the tasks you want to join the SEO front and this is why. So using that data, but for me, reporting is a big one to be able to showcase the intangible thing that is SEO in a tangible way so that either, your team can understand what you're trying to do, clients can understand what you're trying to do, stakeholders are trying to understand what you do. But that's the way I see it, is fundamentally understanding what you're trying to do, the data around it, explaining that clearly and then matching that up with the business goals. Because not everyone's going to be as good at SEO as you, that's why they're paying you either in-house or they're paying an agency to tell them how this matches up with their business goals. How is this going to get me more sales of chairs? That's what you want to try and do. It's funny because I wanted to hone in on that, being good at SEO, not just related to that. I do have a question about this, but also to pivot back to a point you made before, I feel like there's like a pink elephant in the room, white elephant in the room. I always get the two phrases confused. I'm so bad at English. Just because, I feel like just because you haven't moved up to a senior role doesn't mean that you are not good at SEO. I think that something you hit on before that it's very strategy driven, it's very top level view, holistic view of everything that's going on, understanding the impact and aligning it, the business, all that kind... That in itself is a unique skill and a unique way of thinking. And that I don't think it means that if you're not good at that, you're not good at SEO. It just means that you're not good at this particular part, which happens to coincide with what is important to being in a senior role. Anthony Barone: A hundred percent. And this is where the collaboration comes together. There's people who are just SEO specialists, they love that, they want to do that. Fine, jump into a WordPress website, jump into a website, jump in and do the work and see the results, great. But in terms of high level strategy, some people will like it, some people don't. Honestly, you are right. It shouldn't disqualify you from thinking that you're not good. Because mate, you've got SEO specialists at bigger companies who would be better than senior SEO specialists at other companies. So you're a hundred percent right there. Crystal Carter: In my career, I had a situation where I made a role, they didn't have a senior role, they didn't have a senior SEO role. And I was like, we should because in our current structure we need one. And I basically was looking around and I was like, I'm training everybody. I'm doing the role. Mordy Oberstein: I am the senior now. Crystal Carter: Well I'm training everybody. So we had a new group of people and sometimes with agencies you'll have a growth spurt, you'll suddenly get a bunch of clients or suddenly you'll get a really big project and you have to hire quickly and get people on. And I was training everybody and I was like, I'm training everybody. I should be acknowledged for all of this because they're taking all of the things from my brain. So I think that that's something that you can think about as well. So if you, certainly in my experience, I found that the new thing that comes along, let's say there's a new mobile first and maybe we need to be doing more mobile or maybe there's a new other thing as well. And I think that sometimes people feel like, oh, I have to stick to whatever role is currently available to me. But... I can see you nodding, Anthony, there can be sometimes that where, maybe we should create a new role and maybe you should advocate for yourself to be that person for that new role, if you see that there's a need. Mordy Oberstein: Understand. Honestly as an agency owner, when you can see that drive and determination for people who are willing to put it all on the line to be like, "I could do better than that." Great, because you have done so well to be able to force me or force an owner to consider creating that role. Whether you call that head of role, head of training, head of SEO, head of strategy or whatever it is, like you did, you proved your worth, you showcased what you were doing and forced your way into creating that role, because sometimes the business owner just doesn't think about it. They just, recency bias, they like what's happening. It's always worked, so why change it? But with SEO, as we know, you have to keep, if you don't innovate, you die. And with SEO, it's probably one of those industries where you have to keep on top of everything because we are throwing so many challenges at all times. You look at every facet of SEO, Google changes, you've got other search engines that'll keep changing, you've got CMS's that'll keep changing. Businesses keep changing. There are so many factors that keep changing. You have to keep on moving because there are so many working parts that make up our day-to-day lives to be able to get that traffic from search engines. If we're not doing that, we are left behind. It's so much of that goes into it, is more so I feel like business acumen, business skills, business navigation, however you want to define it versus actual SEO, it's like almost ironic in a way. Anthony Barone: Hundred percent. And that's why we are trying, that's the strategy point of it, where you're just understanding, dig into those client's understanding what are your goals, what do you want to achieve? Because they don't understand what a robust TST file is. But if you say you have disallowed Google from calling your website and that stops you from, that stops you from ranking on Google to get some more customers, they'll maybe understand, but I don't actually know what the hell a robot's txt file is. So that's some of the stuff that you want to try and match up, which as a junior, you're learning the ropes, you're learning the basics, that's what you want to do. But as you grow and develop, it's having that commercial mindset of you are an agency or you are a client, you are an in-house that's getting paid, and it's simple like money in money out, ROI, what am I doing to be able to provide the ROI? Because if you think in terms of how a business owner thinks, they're looking at simple P&L, money in money out. I'm paying this person for X job, what's it going to get me? And as an agency you look at that and go, all right, we've got X amount of time and investments to be able to do what we need to do. How can we make the biggest impact? Crystal Carter: How do you feel about opportunity? So within an agency space and within a single SEO space or if you are a freelancer, if you are in-house or whichever. In my experience I've seen that being able to spot the opportunity, spot the gap can be really, really useful. Do you find that that is something that would lead you to progressive project or a progressive person to lead that project? How do you find that that plays into reading opportunities for progression? Mordy Oberstein: I love that type of stuff because if you can see someone who's actively used data to find those opportunities. There's one where, speaking to a local bar and their SEO's no good, but I looked at the Google search console and found three or four opportunities to create events, pages, and hubs because they just had no idea. So using that data to be able to find those opportunities. And when I see people who do use that same methodology, using data or trends, and then even just a little bit of an understanding of the business, that's where you can be like, all right, awesome. You are now thinking about it differently. It's not just the SEO bit like, "Oh, I'm going to use Google Search Console to see if I can improve impressions." No. Actually using Google search console to see what Google and the users are clicking on and Google showing you for, and they're looking at the website and going, oh actually people are searching for this, they're looking for it, but it's not on a website. And then there's an opportunity, there's a content plan, there's a whole strategy around it. So I love that when I see that from people. I think it's something that's universal at a certain level of, we'll call it business or involvement in a company, that hunting for opportunity is the key difference between one level of functioning within an organization and a different level of functioning within an organization. And on that point, and you think about spotting opportunity, I'm curious, as somebody who is high up in the agency world, to toot your horn for you, what are you looking for? If you are looking to move somebody up? And I know maybe you want to speak very generally about this, because who knows who from StudioHawk is listening, Ethan Marlbauer. Crystal Carter: You're taking notes right now. Mordy Oberstein: Taking notes, but what are you looking for, universally speaking? Anthony Barone: So for me it's the attitude to learning and the attitude to taking on a challenge. Because like you said, in SEO, nothing ever stops. Just because something worked six months ago doesn't mean it's going to work today. And the businesses are changing. People shut down their website, Google will drop the bomb at Google IO. Mordy Oberstein: And SGE. Anthony Barone: There you go, like SGE. So these are the types of things where it's attitude to learning, being a perennial student SEO. And for me with SEO, it's having a lack of ego. And I say that because SEO, there is always someone harder, better, faster, stronger as staff, I would say in SEO. So it's about learning from each other and learning others who have done it with bigger science, smaller science, bigger ecomms, smaller ecomms, because there's always someone who's done something somewhere that we can learn from and either replicate or improve. So that's what I say. Crystal Carter: I agree with that a hundred percent. In my agency team that I was working with, I mean my team now, which is fantastic as well. Shout out, Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think sharing is caring and I think remembering when you were in an agency... People say, and I'm not sure if I like this term generally speaking, but we're all going to eat. We do well on this client, then we are all going to benefit from that. And we as a team, if you see somebody in your agency that's struggling and you can help them, then that means that we can all do well out of it. If you see someone in your team that's doing well, you should think, how'd you do that? How did you do that? How can we do that for everyone? How can we roll that out? And that perennial student, that's a great phrase. Perennial student is a really good way to keep on top of learning and to end and keep on top of new trends, new ideas. That's a great scope. Mordy Oberstein: And it could be scary. You want to bring somebody in who might be better than you are at something. I've had that experience multiple times and it's something that I now lean into on purpose. That person's better? Great. That's actually a good thing. And that's your job as a leader. First off, let's work for me. Right? No, just kidding. But as a leader, that's what you want to be doing. Anthony Barone: I wish us, but all the team better than me SEO, you know, these days. And that's what I want, because for me to be able to run the company, run the agency, I'm the MD, I'm the co-founder, I'm supposed to be the orchestrator. If I'm still doing day-to-day work and telling everyone, if I'm still micromanaging and saying that title tag's not right and hover and not trusting them, then yeah, what am I doing here? So for me, it's about instilling the values, the high quality, the standards that they can replicate, but leave them to do the SEO and lead that team because I've got to run the rest of the agency and then find people who are better than me at other sections and then orchestrate it off. So that's my job. I started off as an SEO, as a junior SEO, but now it's up to me to foster the culture, foster the team, foster the learning so that they can take it and run with it. And then I do all the stuff in the background. Mordy Oberstein: You're living proof, you're proof of the success of going from junior to senior. Anthony Barone: There you go. Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: Kakaa. Mordy Oberstein: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. That's my story, man. I started off as a two day week junior SEO, and I knew nothing about SEO. I had so little idea of SEO that I didn't even bring my laptop to my first day with Harry. I printed off the Moz Beginner's Guide in a binder folder and had highlighted sections. And then my first six months were pretty terrible, but I stuck at it, did audits, read Search Engine and Barry Schwarz, all these guys, right? What's going on? What's going on? And then it clicked for me at about the month five, month six mark as to how the technical came in with the content, came in with the links, came in with the local and then go, oh, okay. And then Google search content and using all these tools and started to click for me because it was more like the Mr. Miyagi approach of understanding why am I waxing the car? Well, you're going to wax the car because it's going to lead you to be able to do that move. Same thing with us at StudioHawk and the way I learned was do a title tag here, do this, do that, and then all of a sudden after, well not all of a sudden, but after six months it started to click. And then that's how I did it. And then I started to develop further and further. And then, I think it was maybe, I was in hospitality and retail before this and had to deal with a lot of people and had to do a few things in those areas where you're looking at that ROI and go, okay, so how is this SEO matching up with the business goals and trying to be a bit more commercially minded when I was just an SEO specialist and then developed to be senior back in Australia and that's my story. And then being able to move over here and create an agency. You said it, that's my journey as well. Crystal Carter: We've discussed this before about the value of doing that repetitive SEO task of going hard on the copy/paste. You do a lot of time, you go do a lot of time strategizing, planning, research, and things, and then you upload it or onto a sheet or you upload it onto a document and then you got to get it on the website and you do that 700 times, then you're going to learn a lot. And I've heard from juniors who are like, "Oh, I've had to do this loads of times, I have to do this over and over again." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that's learning. Every time you do it, you're going to refine it every single time. And if you do it enough times, you'll figure out the best way." They say 10,000 hours, learn an instrument or whatever it is. And I'm not saying necessarily you should do 10,000 hours of SEO, but that practicing, practicing again, practicing with intent, moving forward, that does make a really big difference and helps you get that high level strategy from having done the practical. Mordy Oberstein: Hundred percent. I love SEO. So when you practice it, I regard it as just doing SEO, just like that's what you want to do. You are practicing this through doing, and if you call it practice might have a negative connotation, but that's just doing SEO. The more and more that you do it, the better you get at it. The more understand... And think about how flexible you have to be. You have to do this on one CMS with, you have to do it with different agencies. Someone sells dog food, someone's a lawyer over here, someone does this, someone does that. You're going to be like, you are learning so much, you're going to be so flexible. So I've had days where I'll be having six calls a day and I'll go from women's fashion to dog food to automotive to marketing to men's fashion to marketing again. It's just like all talking about SEO, because you're continually learning, continually understanding SEO. Crystal Carter: I love that. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. And that learning process that... Kind of goes back, we talked about a different episode about learning SEO. One of the great things that you should be doing is taking that initiative just to dive in and learn. I remember I started with, not the Mazda beginner, but I started with the periodic table of SEO from search engine land. But you take that on, you dive into it, okay, what's the next thing that's like, let me read SEO Roundtable every single day to get a sense of what's going on. And as you get a better sense of what's going on, you really get a feel for SEO. That kind of thing is really, really important. If people wanted to learn from you, Anthony, where could they theoretically find you on the internet? Anthony Barone: LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one that I'm trying to really grow in terms of SEO tips or agency staff or the events that we do. So LinkedIn is probably one of the channels that I'm doing again. So probably LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: So we will definitely link to your LinkedIn profile. Anthony Barone: We do run an event called the Agency Social Club, which is geared towards agencies in the heart of shortage. Then we're just trying to create a fun, friendly vibe on the night and shortage, which is Thursday nights. So look out for the next one. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well follow Anthony. Or is it follow on LinkedIn? I think it's Follow or Connect. I'm not good at the whole LinkedIn verbiage. Whatever it is on LinkedIn, do that and see when the next event is. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. This was super fantastic. Say Hi to Ethan Mar for me. Anthony Barone: Will do. He's always asking about you. Thank you Crystal. Thank you Mordy. Appreciate your time. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much. So, since we're talking SEO careers, we thought we'd give you some tips on what to look for in an SEO job listing. Maybe point out some red flags because some of them are great and some of them you need to be careful with, I think. So we're going to do that by taking a look at a little All SERP feature, which is called Google for Jobs, which means that we're doing a very special from the top of the SERP because Google for Jobs shows at the top of the SERP. So here's the SEO jobs version of from the top of the SERP. So Google for Jobs, you may not know, you may know because it does depend on the geolocation, doesn't show everywhere, it's box. It's a SERP feature. And what it does is amazing. It aggregates job listing. So for example, if I search for accountant's job in New York City, this box, the top of the SERP will pull in listings from, I don't know, monster.com or career builders. Am I dating myself? Is career builders still a thing? I think I am, right? Crystal Carter: Possibly. Possibly. Mordy Oberstein: That's indeed. Crystal Carter: Glass Door, various different places. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed is another one. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed is another one. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: That was not on purpose, by the way. Indeed. It's a great feature that helps you really explore the jobs that, the listings that you might want to explore because you might need a new job and you might want to move careers or whatever it is you're trying to do. Look for a friend. I don't know. However, with SEO jobs, sometimes they're great and sometimes you need to be careful. Crystal Carter: This is true. Mordy Oberstein: What we did was we looked for SEO jobs for you and pulled out some listings and these are from Google for Jobs, which shows at the top of the SERP. And here's a couple of things that you might want to look out for. So for example, I pulled out a job listing and it talked about the usual two plus years experience and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then it says something like strong foundational knowledge of whatever. I don't want to give away the full listing. I don't want you to find it. I don't want you to be able, that listing was bad, that company was bad. It's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to give you tips. We're not trying to get people in trouble. And what it said was strong foundational knowledge of HTML, CSS, analytics and reporting. And that's not out of the order, in my personal opinions, necessarily for certain types of SEO job. But then it said knowledge of social media analytics and tracking technologies. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Whoa, wait a second. That seems like it's a very technical SEO job, which is great. And a social media marketing manager at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And I think this is something that you get a lot of, I've seen a lot of SEOs discuss this where there will be a job description and it seems to be asking you to do everything. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's very common in SEO. Crystal Carter: It's very common. I think a lot of teams will be looking for somebody to help them with SEO, potentially in-house. I think you see this less from agencies, these kinds of job requests. But I think, particularly for in-house things, they'll be asking for everything under the moon because they know that they need digital marketing support. And so they'll try to throw everything all together, not realizing that social media is a specialism. And there's a whole different ecosystem for social media. And I think that sometimes this can be a sign that the team is less experienced in their digital marketing journey or less sophisticated in their digital marketing journey. It might mean that they need more guidance. And I think also if you see this job description, if you do get to interview, let's say this is a job description and you're like, oh my gosh, but actually the salary's okay, and there's other things that might work. You can also talk to them about some of this. You can say, I can offer you this, but I would recommend that, you get somebody else to do that part. Or I know a great consultant. Mordy Oberstein: What we're pointing out might not be like, don't apply for the job, or this is a terrible company. It's not what we're saying at all. These would be things to red flag to ask at a job interview, let's say. I mean, I think there are certain things, there are enormous red flags that maybe you shouldn't apply altogether. I don't think we're getting into those. I think those are relatively obvious, but I think it's a common theme. One of them, another one that I saw was talking about, you love technical SEO, can quickly identify issues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And another bullet point was, excellent writer, you believe grammar editing is not subjective. A lot of heavy detail, wait a second. My point of view is sometimes those are very different people, very technical SEO and someone who's really into content writing, personal experience only here. And that's a little bit biased. Those two things, generally, it's a real unicorn to find somebody who does both of those at that level. Crystal Carter: Right, right. There will definitely be some overlap. And you want somebody who's a good communicator. But if you've got, but I think that depending on the job title for that, you've got somebody who's super technical and you also want somebody who's a super writer. I mean, that person is going to be worth a lot, is going to be very expensive. It's what I say. Mordy Oberstein: And if that is you, you're listening to this ask for a lot of money, I think. Crystal Carter: Right, right. That's what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: It's very rare to find somebody who's so in depth into technical grammar and technical SEO. At the same time. Crystal Carter: And I think that there's a difference between, so people who are working in semantic SEO, again, will also be doing some work that will include some understanding of grammar and stuff, but maybe not necessarily with the stylistic, I think more of the LLM functioning of grammar. And I think that if you're that person, then you are worth a lot of money. And if you are that team, then you should expect to be paying that person well to be able to do that. And it might even make more sense to split that job between somebody who is one or the other, potentially supported by an agency or supported by a freelancer or supported by a consultant or something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're an SEO agency or in-house and you're listing the job listing, you might write things like that because from your point of view, those are things that you're concerned about. And I think it's a matter of just wording them in a way where it's clearly understood. That's something you want, you're focused on. But this is the main part of the job. And I think a great example of one is something similar that I saw was it talked about being successful in the role that you need to be comfortable moving between high level strategy, in the weeds work. And it's for an SEO manager, it wasn't for an SEO strategist. And I think if I were applying for this job, I would be wanting to clarify, well, what exactly is the role? And again, this comes back to the same sort of thematic theme. Sometimes it's a lot and certain things do and don't mesh, being high level strategy and then being in the weeds, it's a very different mindset. Forget the hours in the day, how do I get all that done? It's a very different mindset of, okay, how do I be a super efficient updating all the title tags and how do I make sure this whole high level strategy thing is working are different ways of thinking. So if you're creating this listing, I might want to phrase it in a way where you're making it clear that you don't expect that person to do all of the things. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that that's something to think about. I think when you're speaking to agencies, so if you are somebody who's looking for an SEO job and you see a job listing like that, I think call them up, have a chat. Have a chat, because I think the other thing is there's a lot of flexibility, particularly from an agency point of view, there's a lot of flexibility with regards to agency roles, because an agency will be made up of a team. They might have a specific person in mind, but if you have a lot of the skills and if you have some of them that are high priority, then there's very often a lot of space to negotiate what's required and what's not required. But for instance, for that both strategic and in the weeds thing, you're absolutely right that they're individuals, they tend to be individual skills. But also, I mean, it's possible to do some of that, but it will also have to do with how much time you're giving. Mordy Oberstein: And that's what you need to clarify. Crystal Carter: So you need to clarify, what is the workload? How are we doing this? How many clients should I be expecting to be managing at the same time? Because there's no way that you could possibly be in the weeds on 15 clients at a time and do your strategy at the same time. And also think about what is the team framework. Because if you have a situation where you're expected to be the one man band per client, or whether or not you have assistance or a technologist that works in your team or whether you have developers at your disposal or that sort of thing, that will change what the role is and what the demands are on your role. Because I think, with SEO, there's a million things you could do. And as an SEO, an account manager, you need to think about prioritizing those things and what resources you have available will impact your effectiveness and whether or not, what becomes a top priority. And if you want to be successful in the job, you need to be able to manage that well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, a job listing, you're trying to really, if you're creating a job with, and we've never done this before, but you're really trying to mesh all these 4 million points that you're thinking about into basically an email. And it's hard to get that right. So while these might be red flags, just because there's a red flag there, again, it's something for you to think about and discuss. It doesn't necessarily mean, whoa, bad place to work. It's hard to get that listing right. So inquire. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely inquire. And I think also we see fairly often that there are people who tend to be from marginalized communities who are less likely to apply for a job if they don't have all the qualifications, like statistically speaking, apparently it's quite common for people to not apply if they don't have all the qualifications. Whereas there are people who are from more privileged communities or whatever you want to call it, who tend to be more likely to be like, "Yeah, I'll like throw my hat in the ring. We'll see what happens." And I think that if you see jobs that have these sorts of things, try to clarify with them and try to make sure that you aren't selling yourself short if it is an opportunity that you think might work for you, but also think about some of the other elements that you can bring, even if it's not listed. And think about some of the things that you are not willing to do, even if they are listed. And so if they've listed a bunch of things, just say in the interview, I don't do that, but I do this really well. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point because again, in the format of a job listing, it's very hard to indicate what you are prioritizing and what you're not prioritizing. You're just listing all of the things basically. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: It's exactly why. Now with that, if you want to see what's happening on the SERP, the top of the SERP, new things, new changes, you would have to read the news in order to know that. Crystal Carter: The news. Mordy Oberstein: The news, the SEO news, and what better time than I think than for us to dive into the snappy news. Crystal Carter: The snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. INP has arrived, sort of kind of. A little while ago we told you that Google was going to replace first input delay, better known as FID as one of the core web vitals and replace it with INP interaction to next paint. Long story short, FID is very easy to pass because it doesn't require a lot to get that first input. INP is a little more, let's call it, thorough. Anyway, per met southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google's search console adds INP to core web vitals report. So basically, Google is starting to add INP to the Google search console core web vital reporting as it will replace FID in March of 2024. So new data in GSC, but not part of the ranking equation yet. And just a reminder, don't freak out, in my honest opinion, as the data tends to show that core web vitals has not been a major factor in sites improving losing rankings. Obviously there are cases where it does, but as Google has said, it's more when there is a tiebreaker scenario that core web vitals really factors into that extent. Speaking of freaking out, by the way, per the King of SEO news, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google search ranking volatility exploding. Where is the confirmed algorithm update? Where's the cream filling? Usually I don't report on these, but this time the movement is so extensive and so unusual from beyond what we normally see with these unconfirmed updates that I thought I would share it here. It's not just, by the way, I'm not just seeing this in the SEO weather tools like the Summer sensor in actual sites that I'm monitoring. I'm seeing a lot of extensive movement. It's hotter than usual for a unconfirmed algorithm update. My SEO sense, if you want to call that my spidey sense but in the SEO sense, is tingling. Seeing this makes me feel like Google is prepping for a bigger, wider, official Google update coming, which is why I guess Barry's asking, where is the confirmed algorithm update? Famous last words, by the way, famous last words. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. And again, what a lovely edition of the Snappiest of the Snappiest of Snappys of New's. Crystal Carter: So snappy. I really enjoyed how snappy it was. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I aim for when I do it. I really, I want to snap like a snow pea, like a really good crisp snow pea. It's like Snap. Crystal Carter: Oh, you're right. That is nice. Mordy Oberstein: They call Snap peas. I don't know, maybe I'm confusing this. Crystal Carter: No, I know what you mean though. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I'm talking about? Crystal Carter: I know what you mean. I know what, the other one that I think of is of is like a nice crisp apple. I love a nice crisp apple. Mordy Oberstein: That does make a nice snap. It does make a nice snap. If only this pocket were about vegetables and fruits that make nice snaps. But there is something to it, right? There's something to it... Crystal Carter: That's true. Mordy Oberstein: The sound of a carrot. Crystal Carter: This is true. We should just start a podcast that's just us eating vegetables. Mordy Oberstein: But I feel like might not be what our target audience is really after. I don't know. I speculate. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Okay. We can do some research. Mordy Oberstein: What they might be after is who they could follow on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And this week I have my favorite, one of my favorites, I should say my favorite because Barry Schwartz is also a favorite. It's like Ty, like Barry Schwartz level favorite. It's Carolyn Leiden who's like my SEO BFF. I love Caroline Leiden. Why is she a great follower? Because she's a great person and you'll get great parenting tips, but you'll also get tips about your SEO career because Carolyn is at aficionado at giving advice on SEO career, negotiating for yourself in your career, how to negotiate. She had a newsletter, at one point, all about this. So a great follow at Carolyn Leiden on Twitter about advancing your SEO career and getting a career tips and advice. Crystal Carter: She's a fantastic follow and such an anchor and a wonderful, wonderful part of the SEO community. She's really encouraging and supportive and just fantastic. And she's done so much for the community over the years and it's, she's a fantastic, fantastic follow. Mordy Oberstein: I cannot more highly recommend a follow, so extra emphasis on Follow Carolyn Leiden over at Carolyn Leiden on Twitter. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Carolyn, we love you. You're amazing. Keep at it. By the way, she does share a lot of job listings, so it's a good follow, practically speaking, if you're looking for a job. Crystal Carter: And her discussions around salary are fantastic. So she had her salary newsletter and I think they're available in archive about negotiations and about making sure that you, she's very frank about it. She's like, get your money, get your money, go and get paid. Go and get your money. Get paid for what you do. And it's really important because I think that SEO salaries can vary significantly. So make sure that you're doing your best for you. Mordy Oberstein: So cha ching. It's a good follow, cha ching, cash register sound. I can't do that sound. I don't know how to, I'm not the guy from Police Academy. I can't make sounds. Crystal Carter: Oh gosh. He's great. Mordy Oberstein: He's wonderful. What happened with that guy? Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next with the new episodes we dive into, does Speed Experience still matter? Short answer, yes, but we'll see why we're asking the question, if you tune in next week. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Anthony Barone Carolyn Lyden Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter StudioHawk SEO Agency About Google for Jobs News: Google Search Console Adds INP To Core Web Vitals Report Google Search Ranking Volatility Exploding Today - Where Is The Confirmed Algorithm Update? Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Anthony Barone Carolyn Lyden Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter StudioHawk SEO Agency About Google for Jobs News: Google Search Console Adds INP To Core Web Vitals Report Google Search Ranking Volatility Exploding Today - Where Is The Confirmed Algorithm 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 putting 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 enjoying life. Check this. She's not AI. I ran it through an AI checker. It's 100% human. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Oh wait, you forgot. I've got a bionic leg. No, I don't have a bionic leg, although I wish I did. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that would be awesome. I wish I had a bionic... Maybe my knees wouldn't hurt so much. Crystal Carter: My knee is such a mess. I wish I had a better knee. Maybe AI can fix my leg. Mordy Oberstein: My wife's like, "Why is your chair so low?" I'm like, "Well, because if I sit high up and then my leg half dangles a little bit and my knee hurts at night." Crystal Carter: These are honestly the things that you have to think about. Mordy Oberstein: I've reached that stage. Now I feel officially old, my knees hurt. Crystal Carter: They have that... What is that, there's that standing up sound, the... Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I totally do that. I totally do that. Crystal Carter: These are the things. You've got to pace yourself these days. You have to pace yourself. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Advil. No, I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: It's brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search that at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can work efficiently and at scale with cutting edge SEO technology that helps you work as efficiently as possible. It helps you even leave broken links with automatic redirects, inspect indexation in a single bound, and apply tags to all pages within a folder faster than a locomotive. Look up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Wix SEO for scalability and efficiency. Heck, by the way, you can even spin up content with our inbuilt AI tools. Make sure you edit and review the content that comes out. I feel like I need to have that disclaimer in there about all things AI. Scalability, by the way, why? Because today we're helping you scale the company ladder by talking about how to move up from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency. By the way, the advantage of moving up to being from a junior to a senior is you'll get discounted tickets to the movie and on the bus. Crystal Carter: That's a fact sponsored by Advil again. Mordy Oberstein: Right, bad joke. Just kidding, not that kind of senior. We're going to dive into what holds SEOs back from taking on a senior role at an SEO agency, what skills actually help you thrive in a senior role at an SEO agency, the mindset that matters for thriving as a senior at an SEO agency. And to help us, we have a special guest host, all around great guy, all around nice guy and co-founder of StudioHawk UK, Anthony Barone is set to join us in just a wee bit. Plus we'll take a look at Google for jobs and some red flags in SEO job listings that you might want to avoid. And of course we have the snap piece of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So get out your climbing shoes as episode number 44 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you reach the top of the SEO agency mountain. Crystal Carter: We're climbing up. Mordy Oberstein: We're climbing on up. It's really moving on up, but we're just going to go with it. So agency life is a hard knock life, cue music from Annie. I wouldn't know, I've never worked at an agency, but from what I've heard, that seems to be the general consensus. Crystal Carter: I had a lovely time working at an agency. There's some great agencies. We are going to be joined by the head of a fantastic agency, as a matter of fact. And so I think that there's some great things and it's not without challenge, but I think the challenge could be fun. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's what I was about to say, that you can meet these challenges and really grow and advance your career by checking out as much as you can as a junior, learning as much as you can, and then taking on a senior role at an agency and really putting your SEO career on a very different trajectory. So to do that, to help us climb the agency, scale the agency ladder, give a warm welcome to the boss. Also, again the founding member of StudioHawk UK. The one, the only, Anthony Barone. What's up? How are you dude? Anthony Barone: Very well. Thank you very much for having me today. Morning, Crystal. Great to be here. Crystal Carter: It's our absolute pleasure. Such a big fan of StudioHawk. Mordy Oberstein: Love it. Crystal Carter: The team is fantastic. I love your energy and I'm sorry that every time I see y'all, I kakaaw at you. I just love it. Mordy Oberstein: Great logo, by the way. Love the logo. So cool. Check if you're listening, check it out. Anthony Barone: Thank you very much. Some of the team have actually taken on that kakaaw actually. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Anthony Barone: Internally, yeah. So we start to do it. So Logan and a few other team members, when we're doing things, the kakaaw will come out. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like whenever there's success, landed a big new client, optimize a million pages, it should be an official kakaaw that goes off around the office. Anthony Barone: Pretty much. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Anthony Barone: Pretty much. Mordy Oberstein: We're glad we can do that for you. Anthony Barone: Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: Hawks assemble. Mordy Oberstein: It just reminded me of the Silver Hawks, which was an amazing 1980s cartoon, but let's not get too down, yeah, check that out. That's a deep cut. Let's not go down too far the 1980s wormhole because I can get very much stuck there. Anthony, you obviously know a lot about working on an SEO agency, having founded a branch of one. Let's just start from basics, the most fundamental thing. If you're trying to move up from a junior role to a senior role, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Anthony Barone: The strategy. You can learn about SEO on the internet. You can go onto many different platforms to try and learn... All the stuff about SEO is out there. You don't have to tell, I don't have to tell you. It's the execution and then understanding how those individual parts that make up SEO are relevant in an overall strategy for a business. Whether you're working as an agency like us or working in-house, how do these moves move the needle for the business to achieve their goals? Crystal Carter: I think that's so important. You talked about, "Yeah, you can learn it online." I think in an agency environment, what's great is that you can learn from other people. So one of the things that I learned... And this is why I said I love your team. So the team element of an SEO agency is so fantastic and if you've got a good team, like I know that you do, you have a good team, then you can learn from each other. So somebody says, "Oh, I tried this thing and it worked really well", and says "Really? Oh, what did you do?" And then you can apply it to another client and you say, "Oh well I did this a little bit different and I added that." And so, that I find is a really fantastic environment for learning and for bringing together all those component parts that you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: For us, we've got a team of eight here, whereby some people working on an e-commerce client, some people working on B2B, they'll be working on Shopify, they'll be working on this, they'll be working on that. I've tried one thing here that might work there. So yes, working on the team and being able, so that's what we try and do. We try and collaborate and foster that learning and growth between each other. So we'll have a Slack channel. I do things like team brainstorms every couple of weeks where we'll look at a client and go, "Hey, what's maybe the problem with this one? Or how can we grow this one?" And then so someone will come who did mention it before, "Oh, how about you try this? Oh actually, have you done a proper technical SEO ordered on so and so? Or actually we tried improving location pages for this." So the team, because you got the... Instead of just one person learning everything, the more members you add to your team, the more people that can read, they'll learn, they can understand what's going on in SEO, they're working on different platforms, they're working on different clients, they're working in different businesses. All that knowledge can then... You want to try and foster that sort of knowledge sharing. So you're saying, at the role of someone in senior in the SEO agency, it's really to foster collaboration. Anthony Barone: I would be fostering collaboration, leadership, lead by example and then overall strategy. So being able to understand the business or understand the client and go, all right, what will move the needle? Like a site map in robots TXT, that's default. No one's really going to care. But a full on hub and spoke approach, content approach. Great. That's the type of stuff where I think as a senior you're looking more at that strategic level because you've got really good knowledge in SEO and how it works and all that. But it's then putting it into place for different clients, businesses, people, websites. That's where I think you make that leap. You can go and teach a junior how to do title tags great. But it's understanding the data and analytics and strategy behind that. Crystal Carter: And I think also being able to demonstrate your strategy. So certainly with one of the key components of any SEO agency is maintaining good client relationships and being able to build on your client base to minimize churn so that you can maximize growth and all of that sort of stuff. So to be able to evidence the strategy that helped you to achieve that for the client is really, really useful. I was lucky enough to see an entry for StudioHawk and awards and I know that you guys are great at evidencing your work. What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to demonstrate the high level strategies that they have in order to be seen as a more senior role, and potentially move up? Mordy Oberstein: So it's matching that with the business goal. So this is where SEO struggles because it's an intangible thing. I can't sit there and guarantee you 10,000 views a month from Google. It's just not the way it works. So you use things like forecasting and then Google search console data and you use their Google analytics data as the baseline and then try and map out points along the way where you can then match up, okay, these are the tasks you want to join the SEO front and this is why. So using that data, but for me, reporting is a big one to be able to showcase the intangible thing that is SEO in a tangible way so that either, your team can understand what you're trying to do, clients can understand what you're trying to do, stakeholders are trying to understand what you do. But that's the way I see it, is fundamentally understanding what you're trying to do, the data around it, explaining that clearly and then matching that up with the business goals. Because not everyone's going to be as good at SEO as you, that's why they're paying you either in-house or they're paying an agency to tell them how this matches up with their business goals. How is this going to get me more sales of chairs? That's what you want to try and do. It's funny because I wanted to hone in on that, being good at SEO, not just related to that. I do have a question about this, but also to pivot back to a point you made before, I feel like there's like a pink elephant in the room, white elephant in the room. I always get the two phrases confused. I'm so bad at English. Just because, I feel like just because you haven't moved up to a senior role doesn't mean that you are not good at SEO. I think that something you hit on before that it's very strategy driven, it's very top level view, holistic view of everything that's going on, understanding the impact and aligning it, the business, all that kind... That in itself is a unique skill and a unique way of thinking. And that I don't think it means that if you're not good at that, you're not good at SEO. It just means that you're not good at this particular part, which happens to coincide with what is important to being in a senior role. Anthony Barone: A hundred percent. And this is where the collaboration comes together. There's people who are just SEO specialists, they love that, they want to do that. Fine, jump into a WordPress website, jump into a website, jump in and do the work and see the results, great. But in terms of high level strategy, some people will like it, some people don't. Honestly, you are right. It shouldn't disqualify you from thinking that you're not good. Because mate, you've got SEO specialists at bigger companies who would be better than senior SEO specialists at other companies. So you're a hundred percent right there. Crystal Carter: In my career, I had a situation where I made a role, they didn't have a senior role, they didn't have a senior SEO role. And I was like, we should because in our current structure we need one. And I basically was looking around and I was like, I'm training everybody. I'm doing the role. Mordy Oberstein: I am the senior now. Crystal Carter: Well I'm training everybody. So we had a new group of people and sometimes with agencies you'll have a growth spurt, you'll suddenly get a bunch of clients or suddenly you'll get a really big project and you have to hire quickly and get people on. And I was training everybody and I was like, I'm training everybody. I should be acknowledged for all of this because they're taking all of the things from my brain. So I think that that's something that you can think about as well. So if you, certainly in my experience, I found that the new thing that comes along, let's say there's a new mobile first and maybe we need to be doing more mobile or maybe there's a new other thing as well. And I think that sometimes people feel like, oh, I have to stick to whatever role is currently available to me. But... I can see you nodding, Anthony, there can be sometimes that where, maybe we should create a new role and maybe you should advocate for yourself to be that person for that new role, if you see that there's a need. Mordy Oberstein: Understand. Honestly as an agency owner, when you can see that drive and determination for people who are willing to put it all on the line to be like, "I could do better than that." Great, because you have done so well to be able to force me or force an owner to consider creating that role. Whether you call that head of role, head of training, head of SEO, head of strategy or whatever it is, like you did, you proved your worth, you showcased what you were doing and forced your way into creating that role, because sometimes the business owner just doesn't think about it. They just, recency bias, they like what's happening. It's always worked, so why change it? But with SEO, as we know, you have to keep, if you don't innovate, you die. And with SEO, it's probably one of those industries where you have to keep on top of everything because we are throwing so many challenges at all times. You look at every facet of SEO, Google changes, you've got other search engines that'll keep changing, you've got CMS's that'll keep changing. Businesses keep changing. There are so many factors that keep changing. You have to keep on moving because there are so many working parts that make up our day-to-day lives to be able to get that traffic from search engines. If we're not doing that, we are left behind. It's so much of that goes into it, is more so I feel like business acumen, business skills, business navigation, however you want to define it versus actual SEO, it's like almost ironic in a way. Anthony Barone: Hundred percent. And that's why we are trying, that's the strategy point of it, where you're just understanding, dig into those client's understanding what are your goals, what do you want to achieve? Because they don't understand what a robust TST file is. But if you say you have disallowed Google from calling your website and that stops you from, that stops you from ranking on Google to get some more customers, they'll maybe understand, but I don't actually know what the hell a robot's txt file is. So that's some of the stuff that you want to try and match up, which as a junior, you're learning the ropes, you're learning the basics, that's what you want to do. But as you grow and develop, it's having that commercial mindset of you are an agency or you are a client, you are an in-house that's getting paid, and it's simple like money in money out, ROI, what am I doing to be able to provide the ROI? Because if you think in terms of how a business owner thinks, they're looking at simple P&L, money in money out. I'm paying this person for X job, what's it going to get me? And as an agency you look at that and go, all right, we've got X amount of time and investments to be able to do what we need to do. How can we make the biggest impact? Crystal Carter: How do you feel about opportunity? So within an agency space and within a single SEO space or if you are a freelancer, if you are in-house or whichever. In my experience I've seen that being able to spot the opportunity, spot the gap can be really, really useful. Do you find that that is something that would lead you to progressive project or a progressive person to lead that project? How do you find that that plays into reading opportunities for progression? Mordy Oberstein: I love that type of stuff because if you can see someone who's actively used data to find those opportunities. There's one where, speaking to a local bar and their SEO's no good, but I looked at the Google search console and found three or four opportunities to create events, pages, and hubs because they just had no idea. So using that data to be able to find those opportunities. And when I see people who do use that same methodology, using data or trends, and then even just a little bit of an understanding of the business, that's where you can be like, all right, awesome. You are now thinking about it differently. It's not just the SEO bit like, "Oh, I'm going to use Google Search Console to see if I can improve impressions." No. Actually using Google search console to see what Google and the users are clicking on and Google showing you for, and they're looking at the website and going, oh actually people are searching for this, they're looking for it, but it's not on a website. And then there's an opportunity, there's a content plan, there's a whole strategy around it. So I love that when I see that from people. I think it's something that's universal at a certain level of, we'll call it business or involvement in a company, that hunting for opportunity is the key difference between one level of functioning within an organization and a different level of functioning within an organization. And on that point, and you think about spotting opportunity, I'm curious, as somebody who is high up in the agency world, to toot your horn for you, what are you looking for? If you are looking to move somebody up? And I know maybe you want to speak very generally about this, because who knows who from StudioHawk is listening, Ethan Marlbauer. Crystal Carter: You're taking notes right now. Mordy Oberstein: Taking notes, but what are you looking for, universally speaking? Anthony Barone: So for me it's the attitude to learning and the attitude to taking on a challenge. Because like you said, in SEO, nothing ever stops. Just because something worked six months ago doesn't mean it's going to work today. And the businesses are changing. People shut down their website, Google will drop the bomb at Google IO. Mordy Oberstein: And SGE. Anthony Barone: There you go, like SGE. So these are the types of things where it's attitude to learning, being a perennial student SEO. And for me with SEO, it's having a lack of ego. And I say that because SEO, there is always someone harder, better, faster, stronger as staff, I would say in SEO. So it's about learning from each other and learning others who have done it with bigger science, smaller science, bigger ecomms, smaller ecomms, because there's always someone who's done something somewhere that we can learn from and either replicate or improve. So that's what I say. Crystal Carter: I agree with that a hundred percent. In my agency team that I was working with, I mean my team now, which is fantastic as well. Shout out, Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think sharing is caring and I think remembering when you were in an agency... People say, and I'm not sure if I like this term generally speaking, but we're all going to eat. We do well on this client, then we are all going to benefit from that. And we as a team, if you see somebody in your agency that's struggling and you can help them, then that means that we can all do well out of it. If you see someone in your team that's doing well, you should think, how'd you do that? How did you do that? How can we do that for everyone? How can we roll that out? And that perennial student, that's a great phrase. Perennial student is a really good way to keep on top of learning and to end and keep on top of new trends, new ideas. That's a great scope. Mordy Oberstein: And it could be scary. You want to bring somebody in who might be better than you are at something. I've had that experience multiple times and it's something that I now lean into on purpose. That person's better? Great. That's actually a good thing. And that's your job as a leader. First off, let's work for me. Right? No, just kidding. But as a leader, that's what you want to be doing. Anthony Barone: I wish us, but all the team better than me SEO, you know, these days. And that's what I want, because for me to be able to run the company, run the agency, I'm the MD, I'm the co-founder, I'm supposed to be the orchestrator. If I'm still doing day-to-day work and telling everyone, if I'm still micromanaging and saying that title tag's not right and hover and not trusting them, then yeah, what am I doing here? So for me, it's about instilling the values, the high quality, the standards that they can replicate, but leave them to do the SEO and lead that team because I've got to run the rest of the agency and then find people who are better than me at other sections and then orchestrate it off. So that's my job. I started off as an SEO, as a junior SEO, but now it's up to me to foster the culture, foster the team, foster the learning so that they can take it and run with it. And then I do all the stuff in the background. Mordy Oberstein: You're living proof, you're proof of the success of going from junior to senior. Anthony Barone: There you go. Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: Kakaa. Mordy Oberstein: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. That's my story, man. I started off as a two day week junior SEO, and I knew nothing about SEO. I had so little idea of SEO that I didn't even bring my laptop to my first day with Harry. I printed off the Moz Beginner's Guide in a binder folder and had highlighted sections. And then my first six months were pretty terrible, but I stuck at it, did audits, read Search Engine and Barry Schwarz, all these guys, right? What's going on? What's going on? And then it clicked for me at about the month five, month six mark as to how the technical came in with the content, came in with the links, came in with the local and then go, oh, okay. And then Google search content and using all these tools and started to click for me because it was more like the Mr. Miyagi approach of understanding why am I waxing the car? Well, you're going to wax the car because it's going to lead you to be able to do that move. Same thing with us at StudioHawk and the way I learned was do a title tag here, do this, do that, and then all of a sudden after, well not all of a sudden, but after six months it started to click. And then that's how I did it. And then I started to develop further and further. And then, I think it was maybe, I was in hospitality and retail before this and had to deal with a lot of people and had to do a few things in those areas where you're looking at that ROI and go, okay, so how is this SEO matching up with the business goals and trying to be a bit more commercially minded when I was just an SEO specialist and then developed to be senior back in Australia and that's my story. And then being able to move over here and create an agency. You said it, that's my journey as well. Crystal Carter: We've discussed this before about the value of doing that repetitive SEO task of going hard on the copy/paste. You do a lot of time, you go do a lot of time strategizing, planning, research, and things, and then you upload it or onto a sheet or you upload it onto a document and then you got to get it on the website and you do that 700 times, then you're going to learn a lot. And I've heard from juniors who are like, "Oh, I've had to do this loads of times, I have to do this over and over again." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that's learning. Every time you do it, you're going to refine it every single time. And if you do it enough times, you'll figure out the best way." They say 10,000 hours, learn an instrument or whatever it is. And I'm not saying necessarily you should do 10,000 hours of SEO, but that practicing, practicing again, practicing with intent, moving forward, that does make a really big difference and helps you get that high level strategy from having done the practical. Mordy Oberstein: Hundred percent. I love SEO. So when you practice it, I regard it as just doing SEO, just like that's what you want to do. You are practicing this through doing, and if you call it practice might have a negative connotation, but that's just doing SEO. The more and more that you do it, the better you get at it. The more understand... And think about how flexible you have to be. You have to do this on one CMS with, you have to do it with different agencies. Someone sells dog food, someone's a lawyer over here, someone does this, someone does that. You're going to be like, you are learning so much, you're going to be so flexible. So I've had days where I'll be having six calls a day and I'll go from women's fashion to dog food to automotive to marketing to men's fashion to marketing again. It's just like all talking about SEO, because you're continually learning, continually understanding SEO. Crystal Carter: I love that. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. And that learning process that... Kind of goes back, we talked about a different episode about learning SEO. One of the great things that you should be doing is taking that initiative just to dive in and learn. I remember I started with, not the Mazda beginner, but I started with the periodic table of SEO from search engine land. But you take that on, you dive into it, okay, what's the next thing that's like, let me read SEO Roundtable every single day to get a sense of what's going on. And as you get a better sense of what's going on, you really get a feel for SEO. That kind of thing is really, really important. If people wanted to learn from you, Anthony, where could they theoretically find you on the internet? Anthony Barone: LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one that I'm trying to really grow in terms of SEO tips or agency staff or the events that we do. So LinkedIn is probably one of the channels that I'm doing again. So probably LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: So we will definitely link to your LinkedIn profile. Anthony Barone: We do run an event called the Agency Social Club, which is geared towards agencies in the heart of shortage. Then we're just trying to create a fun, friendly vibe on the night and shortage, which is Thursday nights. So look out for the next one. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well follow Anthony. Or is it follow on LinkedIn? I think it's Follow or Connect. I'm not good at the whole LinkedIn verbiage. Whatever it is on LinkedIn, do that and see when the next event is. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. This was super fantastic. Say Hi to Ethan Mar for me. Anthony Barone: Will do. He's always asking about you. Thank you Crystal. Thank you Mordy. Appreciate your time. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much. So, since we're talking SEO careers, we thought we'd give you some tips on what to look for in an SEO job listing. Maybe point out some red flags because some of them are great and some of them you need to be careful with, I think. So we're going to do that by taking a look at a little All SERP feature, which is called Google for Jobs, which means that we're doing a very special from the top of the SERP because Google for Jobs shows at the top of the SERP. So here's the SEO jobs version of from the top of the SERP. So Google for Jobs, you may not know, you may know because it does depend on the geolocation, doesn't show everywhere, it's box. It's a SERP feature. And what it does is amazing. It aggregates job listing. So for example, if I search for accountant's job in New York City, this box, the top of the SERP will pull in listings from, I don't know, monster.com or career builders. Am I dating myself? Is career builders still a thing? I think I am, right? Crystal Carter: Possibly. Possibly. Mordy Oberstein: That's indeed. Crystal Carter: Glass Door, various different places. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed is another one. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed is another one. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: That was not on purpose, by the way. Indeed. It's a great feature that helps you really explore the jobs that, the listings that you might want to explore because you might need a new job and you might want to move careers or whatever it is you're trying to do. Look for a friend. I don't know. However, with SEO jobs, sometimes they're great and sometimes you need to be careful. Crystal Carter: This is true. Mordy Oberstein: What we did was we looked for SEO jobs for you and pulled out some listings and these are from Google for Jobs, which shows at the top of the SERP. And here's a couple of things that you might want to look out for. So for example, I pulled out a job listing and it talked about the usual two plus years experience and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then it says something like strong foundational knowledge of whatever. I don't want to give away the full listing. I don't want you to find it. I don't want you to be able, that listing was bad, that company was bad. It's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to give you tips. We're not trying to get people in trouble. And what it said was strong foundational knowledge of HTML, CSS, analytics and reporting. And that's not out of the order, in my personal opinions, necessarily for certain types of SEO job. But then it said knowledge of social media analytics and tracking technologies. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Whoa, wait a second. That seems like it's a very technical SEO job, which is great. And a social media marketing manager at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And I think this is something that you get a lot of, I've seen a lot of SEOs discuss this where there will be a job description and it seems to be asking you to do everything. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's very common in SEO. Crystal Carter: It's very common. I think a lot of teams will be looking for somebody to help them with SEO, potentially in-house. I think you see this less from agencies, these kinds of job requests. But I think, particularly for in-house things, they'll be asking for everything under the moon because they know that they need digital marketing support. And so they'll try to throw everything all together, not realizing that social media is a specialism. And there's a whole different ecosystem for social media. And I think that sometimes this can be a sign that the team is less experienced in their digital marketing journey or less sophisticated in their digital marketing journey. It might mean that they need more guidance. And I think also if you see this job description, if you do get to interview, let's say this is a job description and you're like, oh my gosh, but actually the salary's okay, and there's other things that might work. You can also talk to them about some of this. You can say, I can offer you this, but I would recommend that, you get somebody else to do that part. Or I know a great consultant. Mordy Oberstein: What we're pointing out might not be like, don't apply for the job, or this is a terrible company. It's not what we're saying at all. These would be things to red flag to ask at a job interview, let's say. I mean, I think there are certain things, there are enormous red flags that maybe you shouldn't apply altogether. I don't think we're getting into those. I think those are relatively obvious, but I think it's a common theme. One of them, another one that I saw was talking about, you love technical SEO, can quickly identify issues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And another bullet point was, excellent writer, you believe grammar editing is not subjective. A lot of heavy detail, wait a second. My point of view is sometimes those are very different people, very technical SEO and someone who's really into content writing, personal experience only here. And that's a little bit biased. Those two things, generally, it's a real unicorn to find somebody who does both of those at that level. Crystal Carter: Right, right. There will definitely be some overlap. And you want somebody who's a good communicator. But if you've got, but I think that depending on the job title for that, you've got somebody who's super technical and you also want somebody who's a super writer. I mean, that person is going to be worth a lot, is going to be very expensive. It's what I say. Mordy Oberstein: And if that is you, you're listening to this ask for a lot of money, I think. Crystal Carter: Right, right. That's what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: It's very rare to find somebody who's so in depth into technical grammar and technical SEO. At the same time. Crystal Carter: And I think that there's a difference between, so people who are working in semantic SEO, again, will also be doing some work that will include some understanding of grammar and stuff, but maybe not necessarily with the stylistic, I think more of the LLM functioning of grammar. And I think that if you're that person, then you are worth a lot of money. And if you are that team, then you should expect to be paying that person well to be able to do that. And it might even make more sense to split that job between somebody who is one or the other, potentially supported by an agency or supported by a freelancer or supported by a consultant or something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're an SEO agency or in-house and you're listing the job listing, you might write things like that because from your point of view, those are things that you're concerned about. And I think it's a matter of just wording them in a way where it's clearly understood. That's something you want, you're focused on. But this is the main part of the job. And I think a great example of one is something similar that I saw was it talked about being successful in the role that you need to be comfortable moving between high level strategy, in the weeds work. And it's for an SEO manager, it wasn't for an SEO strategist. And I think if I were applying for this job, I would be wanting to clarify, well, what exactly is the role? And again, this comes back to the same sort of thematic theme. Sometimes it's a lot and certain things do and don't mesh, being high level strategy and then being in the weeds, it's a very different mindset. Forget the hours in the day, how do I get all that done? It's a very different mindset of, okay, how do I be a super efficient updating all the title tags and how do I make sure this whole high level strategy thing is working are different ways of thinking. So if you're creating this listing, I might want to phrase it in a way where you're making it clear that you don't expect that person to do all of the things. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that that's something to think about. I think when you're speaking to agencies, so if you are somebody who's looking for an SEO job and you see a job listing like that, I think call them up, have a chat. Have a chat, because I think the other thing is there's a lot of flexibility, particularly from an agency point of view, there's a lot of flexibility with regards to agency roles, because an agency will be made up of a team. They might have a specific person in mind, but if you have a lot of the skills and if you have some of them that are high priority, then there's very often a lot of space to negotiate what's required and what's not required. But for instance, for that both strategic and in the weeds thing, you're absolutely right that they're individuals, they tend to be individual skills. But also, I mean, it's possible to do some of that, but it will also have to do with how much time you're giving. Mordy Oberstein: And that's what you need to clarify. Crystal Carter: So you need to clarify, what is the workload? How are we doing this? How many clients should I be expecting to be managing at the same time? Because there's no way that you could possibly be in the weeds on 15 clients at a time and do your strategy at the same time. And also think about what is the team framework. Because if you have a situation where you're expected to be the one man band per client, or whether or not you have assistance or a technologist that works in your team or whether you have developers at your disposal or that sort of thing, that will change what the role is and what the demands are on your role. Because I think, with SEO, there's a million things you could do. And as an SEO, an account manager, you need to think about prioritizing those things and what resources you have available will impact your effectiveness and whether or not, what becomes a top priority. And if you want to be successful in the job, you need to be able to manage that well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, a job listing, you're trying to really, if you're creating a job with, and we've never done this before, but you're really trying to mesh all these 4 million points that you're thinking about into basically an email. And it's hard to get that right. So while these might be red flags, just because there's a red flag there, again, it's something for you to think about and discuss. It doesn't necessarily mean, whoa, bad place to work. It's hard to get that listing right. So inquire. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely inquire. And I think also we see fairly often that there are people who tend to be from marginalized communities who are less likely to apply for a job if they don't have all the qualifications, like statistically speaking, apparently it's quite common for people to not apply if they don't have all the qualifications. Whereas there are people who are from more privileged communities or whatever you want to call it, who tend to be more likely to be like, "Yeah, I'll like throw my hat in the ring. We'll see what happens." And I think that if you see jobs that have these sorts of things, try to clarify with them and try to make sure that you aren't selling yourself short if it is an opportunity that you think might work for you, but also think about some of the other elements that you can bring, even if it's not listed. And think about some of the things that you are not willing to do, even if they are listed. And so if they've listed a bunch of things, just say in the interview, I don't do that, but I do this really well. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point because again, in the format of a job listing, it's very hard to indicate what you are prioritizing and what you're not prioritizing. You're just listing all of the things basically. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: It's exactly why. Now with that, if you want to see what's happening on the SERP, the top of the SERP, new things, new changes, you would have to read the news in order to know that. Crystal Carter: The news. Mordy Oberstein: The news, the SEO news, and what better time than I think than for us to dive into the snappy news. Crystal Carter: The snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. INP has arrived, sort of kind of. A little while ago we told you that Google was going to replace first input delay, better known as FID as one of the core web vitals and replace it with INP interaction to next paint. Long story short, FID is very easy to pass because it doesn't require a lot to get that first input. INP is a little more, let's call it, thorough. Anyway, per met southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google's search console adds INP to core web vitals report. So basically, Google is starting to add INP to the Google search console core web vital reporting as it will replace FID in March of 2024. So new data in GSC, but not part of the ranking equation yet. And just a reminder, don't freak out, in my honest opinion, as the data tends to show that core web vitals has not been a major factor in sites improving losing rankings. Obviously there are cases where it does, but as Google has said, it's more when there is a tiebreaker scenario that core web vitals really factors into that extent. Speaking of freaking out, by the way, per the King of SEO news, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google search ranking volatility exploding. Where is the confirmed algorithm update? Where's the cream filling? Usually I don't report on these, but this time the movement is so extensive and so unusual from beyond what we normally see with these unconfirmed updates that I thought I would share it here. It's not just, by the way, I'm not just seeing this in the SEO weather tools like the Summer sensor in actual sites that I'm monitoring. I'm seeing a lot of extensive movement. It's hotter than usual for a unconfirmed algorithm update. My SEO sense, if you want to call that my spidey sense but in the SEO sense, is tingling. Seeing this makes me feel like Google is prepping for a bigger, wider, official Google update coming, which is why I guess Barry's asking, where is the confirmed algorithm update? Famous last words, by the way, famous last words. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. And again, what a lovely edition of the Snappiest of the Snappiest of Snappys of New's. Crystal Carter: So snappy. I really enjoyed how snappy it was. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I aim for when I do it. I really, I want to snap like a snow pea, like a really good crisp snow pea. It's like Snap. Crystal Carter: Oh, you're right. That is nice. Mordy Oberstein: They call Snap peas. I don't know, maybe I'm confusing this. Crystal Carter: No, I know what you mean though. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I'm talking about? Crystal Carter: I know what you mean. I know what, the other one that I think of is of is like a nice crisp apple. I love a nice crisp apple. Mordy Oberstein: That does make a nice snap. It does make a nice snap. If only this pocket were about vegetables and fruits that make nice snaps. But there is something to it, right? There's something to it... Crystal Carter: That's true. Mordy Oberstein: The sound of a carrot. Crystal Carter: This is true. We should just start a podcast that's just us eating vegetables. Mordy Oberstein: But I feel like might not be what our target audience is really after. I don't know. I speculate. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay. Okay. We can do some research. Mordy Oberstein: What they might be after is who they could follow on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And this week I have my favorite, one of my favorites, I should say my favorite because Barry Schwartz is also a favorite. It's like Ty, like Barry Schwartz level favorite. It's Carolyn Leiden who's like my SEO BFF. I love Caroline Leiden. Why is she a great follower? Because she's a great person and you'll get great parenting tips, but you'll also get tips about your SEO career because Carolyn is at aficionado at giving advice on SEO career, negotiating for yourself in your career, how to negotiate. She had a newsletter, at one point, all about this. So a great follow at Carolyn Leiden on Twitter about advancing your SEO career and getting a career tips and advice. Crystal Carter: She's a fantastic follow and such an anchor and a wonderful, wonderful part of the SEO community. She's really encouraging and supportive and just fantastic. And she's done so much for the community over the years and it's, she's a fantastic, fantastic follow. Mordy Oberstein: I cannot more highly recommend a follow, so extra emphasis on Follow Carolyn Leiden over at Carolyn Leiden on Twitter. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Carolyn, we love you. You're amazing. Keep at it. By the way, she does share a lot of job listings, so it's a good follow, practically speaking, if you're looking for a job. Crystal Carter: And her discussions around salary are fantastic. So she had her salary newsletter and I think they're available in archive about negotiations and about making sure that you, she's very frank about it. She's like, get your money, get your money, go and get paid. Go and get your money. Get paid for what you do. And it's really important because I think that SEO salaries can vary significantly. So make sure that you're doing your best for you. Mordy Oberstein: So cha ching. It's a good follow, cha ching, cash register sound. I can't do that sound. I don't know how to, I'm not the guy from Police Academy. I can't make sounds. Crystal Carter: Oh gosh. He's great. Mordy Oberstein: He's wonderful. What happened with that guy? Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next with the new episodes we dive into, does Speed Experience still matter? Short answer, yes, but we'll see why we're asking the question, if you tune in next week. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Websites aren’t built by SEOs alone. As an SEO, how can you best collaborate with all of the teams pushing the site’s success? We dive into how SEOs can best work this designers, devs, content creators, and beyond to build the best and most optimzied site possible. Join Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to get tips and strategies on working with non-SEOs on websites. In the SEO world, jargon can be a hindrance when working with non-SEO teams. Neha Khanna joins the podcast to enlighten us on how to use the art of communication when working with these teams. Marissa Brower also joins the conversation to shed light on the fascinating world of personal branding. Gain insights on how not just to create a personal brand but how to leverage that personal brand to uplift your whole team. Join us as we share the long-term strategies that can help you win the SEO game and beyond on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back SEOs working well with non-SEOs for success Websites aren’t built by SEOs alone. As an SEO, how can you best collaborate with all of the teams pushing the site’s success? We dive into how SEOs can best work this designers, devs, content creators, and beyond to build the best and most optimzied site possible. Join Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to get tips and strategies on working with non-SEOs on websites. In the SEO world, jargon can be a hindrance when working with non-SEO teams. Neha Khanna joins the podcast to enlighten us on how to use the art of communication when working with these teams. Marissa Brower also joins the conversation to shed light on the fascinating world of personal branding. Gain insights on how not just to create a personal brand but how to leverage that personal brand to uplift your whole team. Join us as we share the long-term strategies that can help you win the SEO game and beyond on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 60 | November 1, 2023 | 44 MIN 00:00 / 44:18 This week’s guests Marissa Brower Marissa Brower is a highly skilled and experienced social media manager and content creator with a proven track record of successfully developing and implementing video-focused social media strategies to drive brand awareness, engagement, and growth. She has amassed over 220,000 followers on her TikTok channel, as well as nearly 70,000 followers between her Instagram and YouTube channels. She has honed her skills in social media management, content creation, and video editing to drive Wix's brand awareness and boost audience engagement. Neha Khanna Neha Khanna is a seasoned Technical Product Manager at Wayfair, where she has made her mark in the dynamic world of SEO. With several years of dedicated experience in the field, Neha has established herself as a passionate problem solver and product builder, consistently driving SEO value to the business. Her enthusiasm for optimizing digital landscapes and crafting solutions that boost online visibility is not only a profession but also a profound passion! Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahala. We're joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by she who works well with others, plays nicely with the sandbox, with everybody. She is our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hi. Yes, it is very important to work well with others, to get along, to make friends, and influence people- Mordy Oberstein: Play nicely in the sandbox. Crystal Carter: ... It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's very hard, because in a sandbox, the one thing you want to do was fling sand at other children. Not that I am an adult, go into the sandbox and fling sand at children, but when I was a child. Crystal Carter: No. I was all about digging a hole from one side, digging a tunnel, a full tunnel, so that you had the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... sand... I mean, because that was a challenge. You'd have to maintain the integrity and you also have to judge it correctly, because otherwise it will collapse. That was my favorite thing. I was like, "Can we dig a tunnel? Yes or no? Let's see." Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. You right- Crystal Carter: Can I step up? Mordy Oberstein: ... when I dig a tunnel and I'm like, "Hey, can I fling sand at this kid over here?" Look at what we both turned out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there you go. Mordy Oberstein: This SERF's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also manage projects in one unified workspace of multiple teammates, work on one site at the same time while sharing live comments, and all while setting specific roles for specific team members on specific sites, with our new agency first offering with Studio. Learn more about that over at wix.com/studios. Today, we talk about working well with non-SEO teams, or as my language, don't fling sand at the design team or the dev team. Work well with them. We're diving into joining together with the band to make beautiful music on the site that you're working on, as we cover why jargon is not an SEO's best friend when working with other teams. Why everyone is different and their different priorities are A-okay. Why common sense ain't so common when working with non-SEO teams. It ain't so common, to be honest with you, when working with anybody, but whatever. To help us make SEO accessible to non-SEO teams, Neha Khanna: will stop by to help us make SEO accessible for non-SEO teams. Hello, redundancy. I think I has said that. Anyway, we'll also talk with one of our in-house influencers, Marissa Brower on how to build your personal brand, but do it in a way that works well, not just for you but for your whole team. We're all team this week. So put on your cooperation caps as episode number 60 of the SERF's Up podcast takes Sesame Street's cooperation makes it happen to a whole other level. (singing) Remember that song? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, it's a classic Sesame Street song. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. I mean, I was a big fan of Sesame Street's. Still am. Still absolutely am, but I don't remember Cooperation. I remember (singing)- Mordy Oberstein: Also a classic. Crystal Carter: That's a good one. Also- Mordy Oberstein: That's the classic. Crystal Carter: Right? Also, Martina, know is a tennis player is a person in your neighborhood, and they had Martina Navratilova, and I was like, "What's up, Martina? Okay." Mordy Oberstein: "This isn't my neighborhood." Crystal Carter: She's not, she's really not. Mordy Oberstein: It's like on Park Avenue somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. I think I'd know if Martina Navratilova lived in my neighborhood. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: But also, what was the, the other one is put down the ducky. That is like... Mordy Oberstein: That's, also B is for Bubble is one of my classic favorite ones. (singing) Crystal Carter: There was a New York Giants one that they did or something as well, I think. Mordy Oberstein: Billy Joel was on Sesame Street. Wow, we- Crystal Carter: Ooh. Sorry, last one. The best one is it's like that Paul Simon song, You got to get on- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... make a new plan, Stan. And it was like, God, what was it? Oh no, I'm sorry, it's Kermit the Frog. It's Kermit the Frog, and I think it's a wrench or something? What's the name of that song? It's like make a news plan stand. You don't need to be coy, Roy, just listen to me. Mordy Oberstein: Didn't Kermit sing that Carpenter song also? Maybe the Carpenters sang the Kermit song. Crystal Carter: Lever. It was love your lever. It wasn't learn to love your... leave your lover, it was Learn to Love Your Lever. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Crystal Carter: That's what they did. It was brilliant. Anyway, it was worth it. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we're talking about not-Sesame Street today, although really we could. Talking about creating, managing, and growing a website and a business along with it. And when you're doing it, it's like an onion, or for fans of Shrek, like an ogre, it has layers. And the success of the site, as much as it pains me to say this, is not all about SEO. I know, hot take, right? Everyone's, "Oh, no. It's about SEO." It is, and it's also not. There are multiple things going on, from the organic success to the branding, to the social media marketing, to dev, to whatever that means. Getting along with others in the wider sandbox and not flinging sand at them. Nay, it means more than getting along with them. That means actually being productive. It means digging tunnels in the sandbox together. And I can tell you from personal experience, that's very hard. It's hard, because it means you have to not only explain things the right way, but it also means bringing in other teams at the right time, which can be tricky, but your ability as an SEO can make or break the efficiency of getting that site going. And at that level of organization, especially on bigger sites and bigger organizations, it's really, really tricky. And it means being very well organized, I think, and very well aware of what's happening around you in the organization. And it also means, in my personal opinion, hard it is for me to say, because I have a hard time with this, being able to let go. I feel like SEO's hard because we fight for every inch of the internet, but when working with non-SEO teams, you need to know how to accommodate their goals and their needs and how they see things. And it's going to mean knowing when to and when not to push the envelope. If there's a big branding push on the site's homepage, and that may impact some small SEO tasks, maybe don't fight it. Save your capital. And that's not always very easy, because at times, you do want to push the SEO agenda, but not all the way, meaning you have to be strategic and know how to start a conversation without finishing it so that in the future, other teams may eventually adopt your SEO outlook. Meaning you're starting even though you think, "Yes, we should do this SEO thing." Sometimes you want to start the conversation but not finish it. Let it simmer, let it stew, and all those sorts of cooking analogies. Crystal Carter: Let it marinate. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. That's another one. Wow, good pull. Good pull. That's why you're my favorite co-host. You're also my only co-host. Whatever it is, when working with non-SEO teams, my opinion is play the long game. Crystal, your take. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I totally think so. And also I think it's really important to understand what's important to them and how you can make SEO important to them based on what they value. So if you're working with sales teams, how can you connect SEO to sales? If you're working with PPC teams, how can you connect the value of your SEO to making their ads cost less? Because if your SEO is good on the pages that you're using for PPC as well, then that's going to help you to get a good value there. If you're seeing that you're getting good PPC traffic... I think I saw a really good presentation at Brighton SEO, and I cannot remember who it was off the top of my head just now, but they were talking about prioritization. And they were saying that sometimes you can have a look at your information and your keyword research and you can say, "This keyword should be used for PPC," "This keyword, we're crushing it on SEO, so we should not be doing PPC on that, because we're getting that traffic anyway." "But this one is something that we're in the ballpark, and if we did a little PPC on there, we could get some good reaction there." So I think don't just go to people with your own agenda, go to them with something that's of value to them and understand what things are of value to them so that you can work genuinely together. Genuinely. Mordy Oberstein: At the same time, it's also explain the value to you. If you want something done, if you're able to explain, "Hey, this is why I think it's really important and here's the impact and the outcomes, and maybe the long-term impact," or whatever it is, if you're able to educate and explain why it's important to you. So even just outside of, okay, now they understand what you're looking for and why it's important, but they know that it's something that actually is important to you for a real reason, and they'll identify with that and identify with you. And that identification, not to get too psychological here, is super important working with non-SEO teams. Crystal Carter: Right. And it also means that they'll come to you ahead of time next time. So- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... if if you're working with a PR team or something and they're doing all this stuff and you're like, "Hey, can we just make sure that we get a link there and that the link doesn't say learn more, the link doesn't say click here, the link doesn't say something completely useless. And if they're like, "Oh yeah, we can get a link." You're like, "Cool. If we can get a link there, then we can track some of the value of the PR that you're doing." So make it a give and take. How can you help them to help you? Think about those opportunities? And also feedback. Right? So in the PR example, for instance, sometimes people will say, "Oh, we're sponsoring this event." It's like, "Have we got an event page or have we got a sponsor page with a link on it to us and with some keywords around that?" So let's say, I've had it before where I had clients sponsoring the local marathon or half-marathon or whatever it is, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, we're sponsoring this thing. We got things on the banner, we have the logo on the finish line and all that stuff." And I'm like, "Do we have some real estate on the webpage?" And they're like, "No." I'm like, "Can we get some? Can we get a paragraph? Can we get a logo link? Can we get a page? Can we get a blog? Can we get a quote somewhere? Can we get something online?" Because that will give us a long-term value out of that. They're like, "Oh, okay." And make sure that you make it as easy for them as possible to help you to achieve your SEO goals. And then after the event, for instance, let's say this marathon example, after the event, tell them what information you got from that. So, "We found that this many people clicked through the website, this page had that many views, this helped our rankings this much, we saw this uplift." And then they'll go, "Oh, hey, I do see the value of that.: And next time they have a sponsorship, they'll say, "Hey, talk to the SEO team, just to make sure that we're ticking any boxes that we can to also get a little SEO lift off of that." So make sure that you're illustrating to them the opportunities. And make them as simple as possible. Lay it out for them, because they don't need to know the technical details of link-building and all of the ranking algorithms. They don't need to know that. They just need to know that they need to put a paragraph or something on the page that has a link back to your website that includes the keyword that is relevant to you. That's what you need to do. So write them that paragraph. Give it to them. Spoonfeed them if you have to, but get that done and then give them the feedback, and then you will get buy-in from them, because they'll be able to see the value from that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Two great points, then, right? You don't want to use jargon when you don't have to use jargon. Oh, this is... Imagine it's a page, you want to add author bios onto the page. You need to put a dev ticket in order to have that done."Oh, it's very important, we're in a Y and YL niche, and it's very important for our EEAT. Of course, I'm so smart, they look at the abbreviations I know." It doesn't help if you actually get rid of the jargon and flush out, hey, look, one of the things the algorithm that Google's looking for is actual experience from actual people. One of the ways you can send us signals by having an author bio there, but our pages just don't have them. What can you do there? And a second point is being specific. And I've had this a lot of times where I'm trying to do a run an experiment and try to see what's going on, and I need the help of the dev team to do that. And whatever it is that you want, in this particular case, I wanted to set up the experiment, be as specific as possible. Because if they're left trying to even figure out the smallest details, they're out. They're just out right away. Unless you have a really good dev who's like, "Hey, let me help you here." And I have had that, but sometimes I haven't had that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that brings up another point, is that you need to know your team. So it's really worth introducing yourself to multiple teams, having, and I think this is something that Eli Schwartz talked about in his in-house enterprise SEO tactics as well. It's really worth introducing yourself to some of the other marketing channels and the teams there in a casual space. It could be that you're all doing CPD and you're doing some CPD that's nothing to do with anything, but I don't know, it's like health and safety training, and the marketing person is there, or the PPC person is there and you're like, "Oh, hey. Just saying hi, nice to meet you," that sort of thing, so that you get to know them. Because the devs really vary. Sometimes with devs, you have some devs who you literally have to give them every single thing, or you have a dev where you're like, "Hey, I want to get from A to B. I've seen this website that does this, I've seen that website that does that." And they're like, "Cool, I'll get in the kitchen. I'll cook you up something nice." And they come back to you with a surprise. And some devs want a recipe and they want all of the different things. So depending on which kind of dev. But you need to know which kind of dev you're working with. Because the one who's more like, "Oh, yeah, I'll make something that's beautiful la, la, la, la, la," they don't want you to be super prescriptive. In fact, they find that irritating. Whereas, the ones who really want a recipe, it's like, "Yeah, do what you like," they find that really, really off-putting as well. So it's really important to know what kind of teams you're working with and their schedule, their calendar, all those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to our last point, that common sense isn't always so common. You might think this is quite obvious. And by the... I'll say this, if you're listening to this podcast, you're not an SEO. In fact, you're looking to hire an SEO, let's say. You're looking to hire an SEO agency and your business and your goals are quite obvious to you when you're communicating them to the SEO, because from your perspective, the SEO is a non-business team. They're not part of your business team, they're not an SEO. They don't always understand the full scope of what you're doing in your business model. What might be obvious to you and common sense to you is completely not obvious to us SEOs. I have no idea. It's the same thing with a dev. What's obvious to you and obvious to you if you... Don't use a PNG. Obvious to me. That thing is massive. GIFs? God no. Although I love a good GIF. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: But to someone on the design team, JPEG is less quality. Why would I use a JPEG? That's crazy. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And I think it's important to understand those things. And I think that when you're working with folks, you have to meet them at their level in order to get the results that you want and in order to get the results that they want and stuff. And think in terms of common sense. The way I always describe it is two things. First of all, if you're hiring an SEO company and they're using jargon, they're using language that you don't understand or they're taking for granted certain things that you know, don't be afraid to ask what people call "stupid questions." Don't be afraid to ask those questions. Because I've definitely been in meetings where somebody was telling me this acronym or that acronym, and I just raised my hand and I was like, "What does that acronym mean?" And they were like, "I don't know." I was like, "Well, what the F is going on here?" So don't be afraid to ask that question, because if you're spending money, they should be able to tell you. And if they can't explain it to you in plain English, then they don't know what they're doing. The other thing I would say on that is, in terms of common sense is, make sure that you know what you want out of it when you're going into it. And also, make sure that... If you've ever been to a hotel, every hotel shower is completely different. Right? And I've been in hotels before and I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to turn on the hot water. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's the most annoying thing, then you burn yourself and flood the bathroom at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. So whole drama. So sometimes, even if it's something that you take for granted, just say to them and be like, "Look, I'm not trying to patronize you, but let me just explain this to you quickly for five minutes and then it might save you another half an hour of faffing around with whatever this thing is. Give me these couple minutes just to explain it, and if you know all of this, cool. You can just go, 'I know all of that.' If you don't know all of this, then great, we've made sure that we have a baseline here." So make sure that you know what you want out of it and that you know which things they need to know. So it might be that they need to know that you don't work on a certain day of the week, or they need to know that you only have one receptionist. So on this SEO campaign, if you're setting up a, "Yeah, we'll get you lots of phone calls." And let's say you only have one receptionist and she can't handle all those phone calls, that's something that they need to know when they're getting that stuff together. There's going to be certain things that they need to know. Make sure that they know those things and make sure that you have, you are like, "Oh, well, actually, we have a quarterly report that we have to do and that we need to have those metrics by that..." Make sure that you know, that they know those things. Don't take these things for granted. And it might seem obvious, that's fine. Just quickly tell them the obvious thing quickly. If it's obvious, they'll go, "Great." And if not, they'll go, "What?" And then you know that you need to spend some more time on that. Mordy Oberstein: Last point, real, real quick, bribery. Bribery works. The point that Jack Chambers-Ward made to me a long time ago over at Candour, bribery. So like, "Hey, dev, I got your tickets for the Jets game." Actually, don't do the Jets, that's terrible. "I got two tickets for the Steelers game. Come on down." Bribery works. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You're trying to make friends and influence people, bring in cake, bring them candy, do what you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: Not the Jets tickets, that would be insulting, that's how bad the Jets are. With that, we asked Wayfair's own Neha Khanna: how she goes about and what metaphors she uses to explain SEO to non-SEOs that you can use when you're explaining SEO to other non-SEOs. Or, if you're not an SEO, here's a great way to understand SEO, from Neha. Neha Khanna: I love going back to the basics. Today, we talk about search engine optimization or SEO. So the first thing is think of it as a roadmap of getting your website or content noticed by search engines, like Google. Imagine the internet as a vast library of billions and billions of books inside. Now think of these books as your websites. Now, when people want to find information, they often turn to a librarian for help, right? Think of this case, librarian is a search engine. Now, SEO is all about helping the librarian find and recommend your book, which is a website in this case, when someone asks for a specific topic. Now this topic becomes a keyword. Keyword is the basic foundation of SEO. Think of keywords as phrases or words that people use when asking the librarian for a book. Now, SEO helps you to choose the right keywords that match what your website is all about. For example, if your website is about cooking, your keywords might be easy recipes or cooking tips. The second way to go about it is organization. Now, just like books in a library are organized by categories, your website should be well organized, too. SEO helps you to structure your content so that it's easy for both the librarian, that is a search engine, and the readers to understand. In this case, the customers are your readers that are coming on search engine to look for your book or your website. Quality content. Now, in our library story, the librarian wants to recommend the best books to the readers. SEO encourages you to create high-quality content that provides valuable information, answers question, and solves the problems for your readers. Now, in this case, your readers are looking to find something, which is why they're on Google, and your website is helping them find that right answer. Popularity. In library, popular books get recommended more often. Similarly, SEO considers how many other reputable sources or other websites link to your website. Now, these are like recommendations from other librarians and they can boost your website's credibility. User experience. A well-organized library, with clear signs and comfy chairs, really makes readers happy, right? So SEO focuses on improving your website's user experience, ensuring it's easy to navigate, it loads quickly, and looks great on all the devices. And last but not the least, regular updates. Now, libraries adds books and new books, and removes the old ones. Similarly, SEO encourages you to update your content regularly to keep it fresh and relevant to the current environment. In a nutshell, SEO is all about making a website or content more visible and accessible in the vast online library of information. It helps ensure that when someone asks the librarian, that is the search engine, for a specific topic, your book or your website is one of the top recommendations. It's all about helping people find what they're looking for on the internet. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Neha. We definitely appreciate that. Always love a good SEO metaphor to explain SEO. By the way, we will absolutely link to Neha's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. But yes, I always love a good SEO metaphor, and that was an SEO metaphor on steroids. Crystal Carter: She's brilliant. I've seen her speak at SearchLove, and she used some really great metaphors there as well. And I think that her real skill is just making things really, really clear. I think that if you're working on the team with her, it'd be really great to explain whatever you needed to. And I think that that patience with folks who are maybe new to SEO, maybe understand the value but maybe don't understand the implementation, is really, really important when you're working with various teams. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Now, with that, so it's always hard to balance working well as part of a team and balancing your own personal needs and goals and whatnot. But more often than not, you could probably find a way to balance both. If not to balance both, you can actually leverage your own personal oomph for the sake of the team. The question is how does that work and how do you do that? That's why we're going deep into how to work well as a team, but also build up your own personal brand, with a very special deep thought with Crystal and Mordy, as our own social media extraordinaire here at Wix, Marissa Brower joins us for a deep thought with Crystal, Mordy, and Marissa. Crystal Carter: Welcome, Marissa. Marissa Brower: Thanks for having me. Hi, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hi, Marissa. Happy to have you here. It's so fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: You're all so happy, because you both grew up in the same place and you all know the same thing. Marissa Brower: Yeah, we're Californians. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Marissa Brower: Right. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Just like all of that Golden State shine, just shine, shine, shine. Mordy Oberstein: All that sunshine. I'm just from grumpy New York. "Get out of my way. I'm walking here." Marissa Brower: We don't walk, we drive. Crystal Carter: No. Okay. Marissa Brower: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With lots and lots of traffic, too. Mordy Oberstein: I know about traffic. It's on my website. Marissa Brower: Oh. Crystal Carter: Oh. Very nice! Marissa Brower: That was a good one. Mordy Oberstein: So before you joined us at Wix, and according to Google, you have your own knowledge panel, which in our little SEO world is quite the thing. Marissa Brower: I'm so happy you to find that for me. Because I looked that up the other day and I was like, what? I mean, first of all, who did that? And secondly, what's it called? I just told my parents, I'm like, "Someone's calling me an internet personality on the internet, and I don't know who, but I love it." Crystal Carter: They found you. Marissa Brower: It's a knowledge panel. They found... they identified me. Crystal Carter: It means they found you. It means that, it's normally, as an indicator that you're doing great stuff and that you're involved in lots of really great projects, and that you're yeah, involved with some great stuff. I don't have a knowledge panel yet. I'm working on it. Mordy has one, which he's very proud of. Marissa Brower: Mordy, you have one? Crystal Carter: Mordy has one. It's very exhaustive, and so does George as well. Marissa Brower: Okay, that's good. Mordy Oberstein: We write a lot of content. But Crystal, you also have a ton of content. Why is that? Maybe Google doesn't... See, I always had to think about Google not liking me, because I had a search console problem that maybe Daniel Waisberg had a thing. Maybe Daniel's doing it to you now, because my search console works now. Crystal Carter: Shout out to Daniel Waisberg. Where's my knowledge panel? But I think also a lot of it has to do with data and projects that you've worked on and things like that. Yeah, but well done. Fantastic and well-earned, I think. Marissa Brower: Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think, if people aren't aware, Marissa has an incredible following on Instagram, makes incredible content, and has a fantastic doggo who is adorable, who you should also follow. Mordy Oberstein: With you being an internet personality... Marissa Brower: Uh-huh. Mordy Oberstein: ... and that was before you started at Wix. How did that help your career being this internet personality? Marissa Brower: Well, I actually had a very interesting career... I studied statistics in college. So I have a degree in statistics. And then I moved to Israel, and I lived... When you move to Israel, I feel like there's not a lot for English speakers to do, so I was pretty fresh. I was 21, so I started working in customer support and I hated it. So I was doing that for a little bit. And then also, I'm living really far. I'm in the Middle East, my parents have no idea what's going on, so I started making YouTube videos so that my parents could... More of a way to connect with my family and friends to show them like, "Hey, everything's same-old. I'm just, this is my routine here." So I was making these YouTube videos weekly, and then I got this opportunity with my work to relocate to Boston. And then this was during COVID, right when COVID started, March, 2020. And TikTok was just taking off. It was the early days of TikTok, right when all those kids were hitting... And I was like, "You know what, I want to try it, too." So I'm in Boston, quarantining and trying to get a flight back to Israel. And I noticed when I was in Boston that the only people that would see my videos, even though I'm experimenting with the app, were people that were in Boston. And then, as soon as I flew back to Israel, the only people that would see my videos were Israelis. So I realized it was based off of my location. So I thought to myself, I can't do anything in English. If I'm going to be in Israel, I have to start making Hebrew videos if I want to... I was just really doing it for fun. So I made one video about translation fails, stupid translation fails that I've made as an American trying to learn Hebrew, and it just blew up. And at that moment I thought, okay, this is the niche that I'm going to go into is being an American in a foreign country. And then from there, I just, I kept leveling up. I did different kinds of stuff with translation and just being an American expat. But it's not consistent. When you're a freelancer, it's stressful. So I wanted to leverage what I had done into a more professional career, and that's how I found Wix. Very different brands, web design and American translation fails. Crystal Carter: So I think there's a couple of fantastic things there in what you're saying that I'd like to pick up on. One is that one of the things about being a, so-called influencer or being somebody who is building up a personal brand is that you're able to learn at your own pace and you're able to apply different knowledge as you see it when you want to. And certainly, in my experience, I have people and they're like, "Oh, I can't do SEO, I don't have a website." I'm like, "Make a website. Make a website." People are like, "How do I get good at digital marketing?" I'm like, "Do digital marketing. Make something. Make a YouTube channel, make a Instagram, make a Facebook, make a TikTok." How much of the stuff that you taught yourself do you apply to the work that you do for the brand? Now, I don't know if we mentioned it, but Marissa is one of the masterminds behind the Wix social things. No disrespect to the rest of Wix social team, they're fantastic, but Marissa does a lot of great stuff as well. So how much of the things that you learned, while you were learning all those different platforms and applying all these different techniques, are you applying daily in your work? Marissa Brower: Absolutely, 100%. I'm self-taught. I have no background in video creation. I know nothing about cameras, but I just had to teach myself doing green screen, editing programs. Everything started as doing it for my YouTube channel and for my TikTok account. And then technically, my job is a social media manager, it's not a video editor. But I have this background in video, and so it's really helps me create content and get it out really fast, which is all, it's the nature of social media. It's fast, short-paced, snackable content. So it's been really helpful for me to have that base, and everything was really just self-taught. Crystal Carter: And I think also, the other thing that I thought was really interesting, you said you studied statistics. My degree is in English literature. I know somebody else who's a fantastic SEO and his degree is in archeology. How much of your statistical background are you bringing into your work? I imagine quite a lot, actually, with some of the content. Marissa Brower: Isn't it funny, how I think they'd say in college, "You're probably going to major in something and do nothing with that major and do something completely else." But luckily for me, statistics does play a little bit of a part in social media. We're always looking at performance, like how a video, the engagement, saves, likes, all that kinds of stuff, and trying to identify why a video outperformed another video. So I think I wish statistics came in more of a play. It's very basic statistics. Yeah, there's definitely a need for it with social media and trying to just figure out what your audience likes, and it's all based on numbers. Mordy Oberstein: So if we can move away from math forever- Marissa Brower: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... and numbers. Because you have such a strong personal background and what you're doing and all things you've done in the personal success that you've had, do you feel when you're now going back to the team and saying, "Hey, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, what do you think about this?" That it gives you a different, I guess, weight to your voice, because you have that personal background and that personal success that came along with it? As opposed to somebody who's like, "I've been working..." I guess what I'm asking is, if you have somebody who's working as social media manager for, forget Wix for a second, just for a company and they're on your team, and then you are on the same team with that person, but you have your own personal history, your own personal experience to doing social media, in this particular case, and I think would apply to any other vertical, does that give you a different kind of voice? Not maybe more weighty, but does it give you different outlook and different perspective? Does it help you bring a fresh perspective to the team? Wow, I finally got the question out. Marissa Brower: I think it does, but it's totally different working for your personal brand than a brand like Wix. I have learned so much just trying to make a strategy for Wix. It's completely different... As a viewer, I think you're more skeptical of taking advice from a brand than you are of taking advice from just a regular individual on the internet. So it's trying to like... Something that I would do on my own TikTok account or my own Instagram account wouldn't come off the same way on a branded account. So I think I do have a little bit more experience just working within the app, knowing there's a lot to do with SEO and TikTok, and knowing how to write a good caption and what hashtags to use and just navigating the app itself. I think I have a lot of expertise in that. But in terms of strategy, that was a whole new learning experience for me when I came from my personal brand to Wix, trying to build that strategy, see what resonates with your viewers. It's very different than being an individual creator. Mordy Oberstein: And do you think that's helped your personal content creation process for your own channels? Marissa Brower: No. I like to keep my personal content very authentic. What I'm making for Wix is there's a lot of heavy editing, a lot of green screen. I don't think it translates well. My videos are comedic, my personal videos. I'm not really trying to teach someone something. I think if I were, I would take more of that professional aspect that we've used in the Wix strategy. But no, I think for personal creators, the best thing, especially right now, is authenticity. I think we've had so much in the past, the previous years of very filtered, perfect videos, circulating in pictures, circulating the internet, and now people find just authentic content really relatable, and that's what people stay around for. So I try and, I really have to separate the two, personal creation and branded creation, because it's super different. Mordy Oberstein: On behalf of my generation, we apologize for all that perfect content that was completely just schlock. Anyway... Crystal Carter: I think it can be very important. I certainly, I think that brings into the idea of channels and brand voice and things like that. Because I think that that awareness is really important when people are thinking about bringing some of the knowledge that they have from their personal branding, development experience, into other avenues. So people might have a personal blog and then start writing for a company blog, or people might have a personal Facebook account that gets a lot of engagement, or I know, bless Facebook. And then maybe they're writing for the company one. And I've seen this when working with juniors, working with people who are just getting started, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I can do the same thing. I'll just share these same..." And it's maybe sort of sometimes, but you really do have to experiment with that. Can you give any advice of when people should draw the lines between one brand voice and another brand voice? Marissa Brower: I think it takes so much experimentation to understand what works on a particular channel. I'm only working on TikTok, and when I came into Wix's TikTok, it was really underdeveloped, one post a month compared to what we're doing now, which is three to four a week. And the ones that we were posting before I joined was just recycled content. It was nothing specific for TikTok. So when I came in, it was like, "Let's build a strategy and let's figure out what to do for our channel." And we tried a bunch of different stuff. Trending sounds, it's huge and it still is huge. And then the user showcases, educational content tutorials, and just the educational content and the tutorials just blew out all the other ideas. Once we started really figuring out what do our viewers stick around for? It was really providing value for them. So on TikTok, even though it's really this fun, light app that a younger generation is engaging with, I think that people still want to walk away from the app retaining something, especially from a brand. So that's how we got into these tutorials. Whereas on Instagram, I think that there's an opportunity to be more, to use more design on TikTok. Using design is the worst thing you can do on TikTok. We try and stay away from design, because we want to keep it still authentic to TikTok. So it's just learning what each platform... When you're on Instagram scrolling, you want to see something beautiful. On TikTok, you won't want to walk away feeling like you learn something or that video wasn't a waste of your time. So it's just learning the landscapes of different social media apps, I think. Mordy Oberstein: To quote Jimi Hendrix quoting Bob Dylan, "The hour is getting late." Where can people find you, Marissa? Marissa Brower: My Instagram is @marissabrower, and my TikTok account is @marissabrow. That's pretty... And then I have a YouTube account that I've deleted. Same thing @marissabrow. Mordy Oberstein: Links in the show notes, so look for Marissa there. Help build up her knowledge panel by linking to her content all over the place. Marissa, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you around on TikTok, or at least Crystal will, because I don't do TikTok. Marissa Brower: Thanks, guys, for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Again, major kudos to Marissa. The stuff that she does on TikTok is awesome. She did a great one. We did Semrush and StudioHawk reviewed a Wix website called WhatSugar, and they put out a whole SEO audit template based on WhatSugar is doing and the SEO success. It's very awesome Wix website has seen. And then Marissa took that SEO template and created a whole Instagram and TikTok wrap-up of it that we posted on our TikTok and Instagram account. So it was super cool. It was full-circle infographic, SEO audit thing into TikTok, Instagram content. So a way to knock it out of the park without repurposing, Marissa. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I always have a good repurposing, right? You know who doesn't repurpose a lot of content? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz does not repurpose a lot of content. It's always fresh and always new. Crystal Carter: So fresh, like a summer's breeze. Mordy Oberstein: Although sometimes, it is semi-repackaged, like, "Here's Google again telling you for the eight millionth time, word count doesn't matter." Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is when he, well, to be fair, he does do the, in-case-you-missed-its, which I'm very grateful for, because he publishes so much. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I'm a different time zone, so I get the, in case you missed it in the morning sometimes. So yeah, I do appreciate that. That is repurposing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I insulted you. Crystal Carter: He also does pull out those pictures from random bits of Google around, which are really fun. Mordy Oberstein: It's a Google cake in Tel Aviv. Crystal Carter: Right. There was a fantastic one of Daniel Waisberg blowing a horn from- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the shofar. Crystal Carter: ... his balcony or something? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I said that to Barry, like, "Oh, you-" Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oh, you did. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: I was so wrong again, Barry. I'm wrong. You're right, Barry does repurpose content. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Admitting that you're wrong is a really important part of working with teams. Mordy Oberstein: It's the first step to recovery. And with that, here's the snappy SEO news. Snappy News, snappy news, snappy news. Got three for you this week, and the first one's not from Barry Schwartz. Sorry, Barry, they can't all be from you. From Nicola Agius, from SearchEngineLand. Google testing ads between organic results. There's been a spattering of examples from across the web of people seeing Google ads among the search results. Meaning you usually see ads at the top of the results or at the bottom of the set of results. But now, lots of folks are seeing ads within the results. I think, by the way, this has a lot to do with the fact that I think users are wiser than they were before, and they're looking to not be sold to in the same way. So perhaps they're not clicking on those ads up top the way that they used to before, and Google wants to be more subtle about it. Number two, article number two from, okay, it's from Barry Schwartz. This from Search Engine Roundtable. Google about this image. About this image now live, recency of image, AI details and more. This is really interesting. Google's now offering the ability to see some history or some information about an image. You go to image search, there's a little three button setting thing that you can click on and it will show you how old the image is. Google said it may also indicate if the image has been generated by AI and so forth. Have a look at the GIF that Barry shares in the article, which we'll link to in the show notes. It's really interesting to look at. Obviously, this makes a lot of sense, because the web is going, it already is inundated with AI images, and it's good for people to know what's real than what's AI, if we want to put it that way. So it makes a lot of great sense to have something like that. I think it's a really nice little feature. Okay, this one, well, I guess it comes from Barry. I saw it first on seroundtable.com, but it's actually announced by Google. We'll link to both sources. There's your link. Barry, from Google's own blog. Three new ways to check images and sources online. So Google has an About This Result feature that'll let you get some more context about why that particular result shows in their search results for you and some information about that result. We'll link to the article in the show notes. You can have a look at where that actually is and what it looks like. But just know there's this little feature out there that gives context to a result shown to you on the SERP. Google is now using AI to generate information or a description about a result that you may see among your search results within this About This Result feature. I'll just read to you what Google themselves wrote. It'll make this a little bit clearer, because without seeing it, it's hard to understand it. Google writes, "One of the best ways to evaluate information online is to learn more about the source. Say you stumble upon some cool new hiking boots, but they're from a small merchant you're not familiar with. You might want to do research on the seller, but in some cases, it can be hard to find information about lesser-known sites. Now we're starting to experiment how generative AI can do some of that digging for you to help you search with confidence." So the AI will generate a little bit of a description about who the seller actually is or who the website actually is, so you can better understand, contextually, who they are and may say, "You know what? I do want to buy it from them. They do seem reliable." I think it's really interesting that Google's using AI for this. I think it's a little bit of a shame that it's hard to actually know that this feature even exists unless you stumble on it, like you are now, if you haven't heard of it before and you're listening to this podcast. I think it's fabulous that Google is trying to democratize the web even more than it currently is. And I think Google really is trying to democratize the web in a lot of ways. I know some may push back on my claim that they are doing that, but I think they are doing that, or trying to do that, rather. And I think giving context to smaller or lesser-known websites is a great way to do that. So kudos to Google. I like the feature. I think it's cool. And that's this week's Snappy News. And once again, as always, thank you Barry and the other SEO news authors who are out there. Crystal Carter: Yes, other people talk about new things, too. Mordy Oberstein: Barry, and it's not just you. Crystal Carter: Other people, too. Mordy Oberstein: There are other people, like Matt Southern and Roger Montti, Denny Goodwin, Loren Baker, Kristi Hines. Crystal Carter: Kristi Hines, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: A lot of great people. Crystal Carter: Ellie DeMasellis. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, Glenn Gabe's always covering something. Crystal Carter: Billy Ray. Things are happening, things are happening- Mordy Oberstein: Things are happy- Crystal Carter: ... moving, shaking. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's always moving and shaking, our follow of the week, who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness over on social media. This one is former Wix SEO advisory board member Nikki Mossier, over at Niki Mosier, SEO. It's N-I-K-I-M-O-S-I-E-R-S-E-O, over on Twitter, the platform I formally call X. Did I get that backwards? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But Niki's a great follow. She's really, really good at talking about lots of different SEO stuff, and she's also, she's a consultant, so she works across lots of different groups. So she's a great person to follow for SEO. Mordy Oberstein: And she has a course for non-SEO, is about SEO. Crystal Carter: Which is incredibly valuable. Mordy Oberstein: It's the perfect tie-in. Crystal Carter: I think that's why we picked her. Mordy Oberstein: Was that on purpose? Crystal Carter: I think we did it deliberately. Mordy Oberstein: No. We were deliberate? Crystal Carter: Brilliant. I think brilliant, genius. Mordy Oberstein: Brilliance. I will say brilliance is deliberate. Crystal Carter: We're delivering brilliance. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Deliberately. Well, thank you for joining us for the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episodes. We dive into the money bin itself. We're looking at, too, how much should SEO cost? That's a taboo topic right there. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: I will tell you it was hard to find a guest who wanted to talk about it. Little spoiler alert. Anyway, look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars over at the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Neha Khanna Marissa Brower Niki Mosier Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google testing ads between organic results? Google About This Image Now Live Recency Of Image, AI Details & More Google Search Generative Experience Gains "Supportive" Links In About This Result 3 new ways to check images and sources online Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Neha Khanna Marissa Brower Niki Mosier Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google testing ads between organic results? Google About This Image Now Live Recency Of Image, AI Details & More Google Search Generative Experience Gains "Supportive" Links In About This Result 3 new ways to check images and sources online Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahala. We're joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by she who works well with others, plays nicely with the sandbox, with everybody. She is our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hi. Yes, it is very important to work well with others, to get along, to make friends, and influence people- Mordy Oberstein: Play nicely in the sandbox. Crystal Carter: ... It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's very hard, because in a sandbox, the one thing you want to do was fling sand at other children. Not that I am an adult, go into the sandbox and fling sand at children, but when I was a child. Crystal Carter: No. I was all about digging a hole from one side, digging a tunnel, a full tunnel, so that you had the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... sand... I mean, because that was a challenge. You'd have to maintain the integrity and you also have to judge it correctly, because otherwise it will collapse. That was my favorite thing. I was like, "Can we dig a tunnel? Yes or no? Let's see." Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. You right- Crystal Carter: Can I step up? Mordy Oberstein: ... when I dig a tunnel and I'm like, "Hey, can I fling sand at this kid over here?" Look at what we both turned out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there you go. Mordy Oberstein: This SERF's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also manage projects in one unified workspace of multiple teammates, work on one site at the same time while sharing live comments, and all while setting specific roles for specific team members on specific sites, with our new agency first offering with Studio. Learn more about that over at wix.com/studios. Today, we talk about working well with non-SEO teams, or as my language, don't fling sand at the design team or the dev team. Work well with them. We're diving into joining together with the band to make beautiful music on the site that you're working on, as we cover why jargon is not an SEO's best friend when working with other teams. Why everyone is different and their different priorities are A-okay. Why common sense ain't so common when working with non-SEO teams. It ain't so common, to be honest with you, when working with anybody, but whatever. To help us make SEO accessible to non-SEO teams, Neha Khanna: will stop by to help us make SEO accessible for non-SEO teams. Hello, redundancy. I think I has said that. Anyway, we'll also talk with one of our in-house influencers, Marissa Brower on how to build your personal brand, but do it in a way that works well, not just for you but for your whole team. We're all team this week. So put on your cooperation caps as episode number 60 of the SERF's Up podcast takes Sesame Street's cooperation makes it happen to a whole other level. (singing) Remember that song? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, it's a classic Sesame Street song. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. I mean, I was a big fan of Sesame Street's. Still am. Still absolutely am, but I don't remember Cooperation. I remember (singing)- Mordy Oberstein: Also a classic. Crystal Carter: That's a good one. Also- Mordy Oberstein: That's the classic. Crystal Carter: Right? Also, Martina, know is a tennis player is a person in your neighborhood, and they had Martina Navratilova, and I was like, "What's up, Martina? Okay." Mordy Oberstein: "This isn't my neighborhood." Crystal Carter: She's not, she's really not. Mordy Oberstein: It's like on Park Avenue somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. I think I'd know if Martina Navratilova lived in my neighborhood. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: But also, what was the, the other one is put down the ducky. That is like... Mordy Oberstein: That's, also B is for Bubble is one of my classic favorite ones. (singing) Crystal Carter: There was a New York Giants one that they did or something as well, I think. Mordy Oberstein: Billy Joel was on Sesame Street. Wow, we- Crystal Carter: Ooh. Sorry, last one. The best one is it's like that Paul Simon song, You got to get on- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... make a new plan, Stan. And it was like, God, what was it? Oh no, I'm sorry, it's Kermit the Frog. It's Kermit the Frog, and I think it's a wrench or something? What's the name of that song? It's like make a news plan stand. You don't need to be coy, Roy, just listen to me. Mordy Oberstein: Didn't Kermit sing that Carpenter song also? Maybe the Carpenters sang the Kermit song. Crystal Carter: Lever. It was love your lever. It wasn't learn to love your... leave your lover, it was Learn to Love Your Lever. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Crystal Carter: That's what they did. It was brilliant. Anyway, it was worth it. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we're talking about not-Sesame Street today, although really we could. Talking about creating, managing, and growing a website and a business along with it. And when you're doing it, it's like an onion, or for fans of Shrek, like an ogre, it has layers. And the success of the site, as much as it pains me to say this, is not all about SEO. I know, hot take, right? Everyone's, "Oh, no. It's about SEO." It is, and it's also not. There are multiple things going on, from the organic success to the branding, to the social media marketing, to dev, to whatever that means. Getting along with others in the wider sandbox and not flinging sand at them. Nay, it means more than getting along with them. That means actually being productive. It means digging tunnels in the sandbox together. And I can tell you from personal experience, that's very hard. It's hard, because it means you have to not only explain things the right way, but it also means bringing in other teams at the right time, which can be tricky, but your ability as an SEO can make or break the efficiency of getting that site going. And at that level of organization, especially on bigger sites and bigger organizations, it's really, really tricky. And it means being very well organized, I think, and very well aware of what's happening around you in the organization. And it also means, in my personal opinion, hard it is for me to say, because I have a hard time with this, being able to let go. I feel like SEO's hard because we fight for every inch of the internet, but when working with non-SEO teams, you need to know how to accommodate their goals and their needs and how they see things. And it's going to mean knowing when to and when not to push the envelope. If there's a big branding push on the site's homepage, and that may impact some small SEO tasks, maybe don't fight it. Save your capital. And that's not always very easy, because at times, you do want to push the SEO agenda, but not all the way, meaning you have to be strategic and know how to start a conversation without finishing it so that in the future, other teams may eventually adopt your SEO outlook. Meaning you're starting even though you think, "Yes, we should do this SEO thing." Sometimes you want to start the conversation but not finish it. Let it simmer, let it stew, and all those sorts of cooking analogies. Crystal Carter: Let it marinate. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. That's another one. Wow, good pull. Good pull. That's why you're my favorite co-host. You're also my only co-host. Whatever it is, when working with non-SEO teams, my opinion is play the long game. Crystal, your take. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I totally think so. And also I think it's really important to understand what's important to them and how you can make SEO important to them based on what they value. So if you're working with sales teams, how can you connect SEO to sales? If you're working with PPC teams, how can you connect the value of your SEO to making their ads cost less? Because if your SEO is good on the pages that you're using for PPC as well, then that's going to help you to get a good value there. If you're seeing that you're getting good PPC traffic... I think I saw a really good presentation at Brighton SEO, and I cannot remember who it was off the top of my head just now, but they were talking about prioritization. And they were saying that sometimes you can have a look at your information and your keyword research and you can say, "This keyword should be used for PPC," "This keyword, we're crushing it on SEO, so we should not be doing PPC on that, because we're getting that traffic anyway." "But this one is something that we're in the ballpark, and if we did a little PPC on there, we could get some good reaction there." So I think don't just go to people with your own agenda, go to them with something that's of value to them and understand what things are of value to them so that you can work genuinely together. Genuinely. Mordy Oberstein: At the same time, it's also explain the value to you. If you want something done, if you're able to explain, "Hey, this is why I think it's really important and here's the impact and the outcomes, and maybe the long-term impact," or whatever it is, if you're able to educate and explain why it's important to you. So even just outside of, okay, now they understand what you're looking for and why it's important, but they know that it's something that actually is important to you for a real reason, and they'll identify with that and identify with you. And that identification, not to get too psychological here, is super important working with non-SEO teams. Crystal Carter: Right. And it also means that they'll come to you ahead of time next time. So- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... if if you're working with a PR team or something and they're doing all this stuff and you're like, "Hey, can we just make sure that we get a link there and that the link doesn't say learn more, the link doesn't say click here, the link doesn't say something completely useless. And if they're like, "Oh yeah, we can get a link." You're like, "Cool. If we can get a link there, then we can track some of the value of the PR that you're doing." So make it a give and take. How can you help them to help you? Think about those opportunities? And also feedback. Right? So in the PR example, for instance, sometimes people will say, "Oh, we're sponsoring this event." It's like, "Have we got an event page or have we got a sponsor page with a link on it to us and with some keywords around that?" So let's say, I've had it before where I had clients sponsoring the local marathon or half-marathon or whatever it is, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, we're sponsoring this thing. We got things on the banner, we have the logo on the finish line and all that stuff." And I'm like, "Do we have some real estate on the webpage?" And they're like, "No." I'm like, "Can we get some? Can we get a paragraph? Can we get a logo link? Can we get a page? Can we get a blog? Can we get a quote somewhere? Can we get something online?" Because that will give us a long-term value out of that. They're like, "Oh, okay." And make sure that you make it as easy for them as possible to help you to achieve your SEO goals. And then after the event, for instance, let's say this marathon example, after the event, tell them what information you got from that. So, "We found that this many people clicked through the website, this page had that many views, this helped our rankings this much, we saw this uplift." And then they'll go, "Oh, hey, I do see the value of that.: And next time they have a sponsorship, they'll say, "Hey, talk to the SEO team, just to make sure that we're ticking any boxes that we can to also get a little SEO lift off of that." So make sure that you're illustrating to them the opportunities. And make them as simple as possible. Lay it out for them, because they don't need to know the technical details of link-building and all of the ranking algorithms. They don't need to know that. They just need to know that they need to put a paragraph or something on the page that has a link back to your website that includes the keyword that is relevant to you. That's what you need to do. So write them that paragraph. Give it to them. Spoonfeed them if you have to, but get that done and then give them the feedback, and then you will get buy-in from them, because they'll be able to see the value from that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Two great points, then, right? You don't want to use jargon when you don't have to use jargon. Oh, this is... Imagine it's a page, you want to add author bios onto the page. You need to put a dev ticket in order to have that done."Oh, it's very important, we're in a Y and YL niche, and it's very important for our EEAT. Of course, I'm so smart, they look at the abbreviations I know." It doesn't help if you actually get rid of the jargon and flush out, hey, look, one of the things the algorithm that Google's looking for is actual experience from actual people. One of the ways you can send us signals by having an author bio there, but our pages just don't have them. What can you do there? And a second point is being specific. And I've had this a lot of times where I'm trying to do a run an experiment and try to see what's going on, and I need the help of the dev team to do that. And whatever it is that you want, in this particular case, I wanted to set up the experiment, be as specific as possible. Because if they're left trying to even figure out the smallest details, they're out. They're just out right away. Unless you have a really good dev who's like, "Hey, let me help you here." And I have had that, but sometimes I haven't had that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that brings up another point, is that you need to know your team. So it's really worth introducing yourself to multiple teams, having, and I think this is something that Eli Schwartz talked about in his in-house enterprise SEO tactics as well. It's really worth introducing yourself to some of the other marketing channels and the teams there in a casual space. It could be that you're all doing CPD and you're doing some CPD that's nothing to do with anything, but I don't know, it's like health and safety training, and the marketing person is there, or the PPC person is there and you're like, "Oh, hey. Just saying hi, nice to meet you," that sort of thing, so that you get to know them. Because the devs really vary. Sometimes with devs, you have some devs who you literally have to give them every single thing, or you have a dev where you're like, "Hey, I want to get from A to B. I've seen this website that does this, I've seen that website that does that." And they're like, "Cool, I'll get in the kitchen. I'll cook you up something nice." And they come back to you with a surprise. And some devs want a recipe and they want all of the different things. So depending on which kind of dev. But you need to know which kind of dev you're working with. Because the one who's more like, "Oh, yeah, I'll make something that's beautiful la, la, la, la, la," they don't want you to be super prescriptive. In fact, they find that irritating. Whereas, the ones who really want a recipe, it's like, "Yeah, do what you like," they find that really, really off-putting as well. So it's really important to know what kind of teams you're working with and their schedule, their calendar, all those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to our last point, that common sense isn't always so common. You might think this is quite obvious. And by the... I'll say this, if you're listening to this podcast, you're not an SEO. In fact, you're looking to hire an SEO, let's say. You're looking to hire an SEO agency and your business and your goals are quite obvious to you when you're communicating them to the SEO, because from your perspective, the SEO is a non-business team. They're not part of your business team, they're not an SEO. They don't always understand the full scope of what you're doing in your business model. What might be obvious to you and common sense to you is completely not obvious to us SEOs. I have no idea. It's the same thing with a dev. What's obvious to you and obvious to you if you... Don't use a PNG. Obvious to me. That thing is massive. GIFs? God no. Although I love a good GIF. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: But to someone on the design team, JPEG is less quality. Why would I use a JPEG? That's crazy. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And I think it's important to understand those things. And I think that when you're working with folks, you have to meet them at their level in order to get the results that you want and in order to get the results that they want and stuff. And think in terms of common sense. The way I always describe it is two things. First of all, if you're hiring an SEO company and they're using jargon, they're using language that you don't understand or they're taking for granted certain things that you know, don't be afraid to ask what people call "stupid questions." Don't be afraid to ask those questions. Because I've definitely been in meetings where somebody was telling me this acronym or that acronym, and I just raised my hand and I was like, "What does that acronym mean?" And they were like, "I don't know." I was like, "Well, what the F is going on here?" So don't be afraid to ask that question, because if you're spending money, they should be able to tell you. And if they can't explain it to you in plain English, then they don't know what they're doing. The other thing I would say on that is, in terms of common sense is, make sure that you know what you want out of it when you're going into it. And also, make sure that... If you've ever been to a hotel, every hotel shower is completely different. Right? And I've been in hotels before and I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to turn on the hot water. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's the most annoying thing, then you burn yourself and flood the bathroom at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. So whole drama. So sometimes, even if it's something that you take for granted, just say to them and be like, "Look, I'm not trying to patronize you, but let me just explain this to you quickly for five minutes and then it might save you another half an hour of faffing around with whatever this thing is. Give me these couple minutes just to explain it, and if you know all of this, cool. You can just go, 'I know all of that.' If you don't know all of this, then great, we've made sure that we have a baseline here." So make sure that you know what you want out of it and that you know which things they need to know. So it might be that they need to know that you don't work on a certain day of the week, or they need to know that you only have one receptionist. So on this SEO campaign, if you're setting up a, "Yeah, we'll get you lots of phone calls." And let's say you only have one receptionist and she can't handle all those phone calls, that's something that they need to know when they're getting that stuff together. There's going to be certain things that they need to know. Make sure that they know those things and make sure that you have, you are like, "Oh, well, actually, we have a quarterly report that we have to do and that we need to have those metrics by that..." Make sure that you know, that they know those things. Don't take these things for granted. And it might seem obvious, that's fine. Just quickly tell them the obvious thing quickly. If it's obvious, they'll go, "Great." And if not, they'll go, "What?" And then you know that you need to spend some more time on that. Mordy Oberstein: Last point, real, real quick, bribery. Bribery works. The point that Jack Chambers-Ward made to me a long time ago over at Candour, bribery. So like, "Hey, dev, I got your tickets for the Jets game." Actually, don't do the Jets, that's terrible. "I got two tickets for the Steelers game. Come on down." Bribery works. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You're trying to make friends and influence people, bring in cake, bring them candy, do what you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: Not the Jets tickets, that would be insulting, that's how bad the Jets are. With that, we asked Wayfair's own Neha Khanna: how she goes about and what metaphors she uses to explain SEO to non-SEOs that you can use when you're explaining SEO to other non-SEOs. Or, if you're not an SEO, here's a great way to understand SEO, from Neha. Neha Khanna: I love going back to the basics. Today, we talk about search engine optimization or SEO. So the first thing is think of it as a roadmap of getting your website or content noticed by search engines, like Google. Imagine the internet as a vast library of billions and billions of books inside. Now think of these books as your websites. Now, when people want to find information, they often turn to a librarian for help, right? Think of this case, librarian is a search engine. Now, SEO is all about helping the librarian find and recommend your book, which is a website in this case, when someone asks for a specific topic. Now this topic becomes a keyword. Keyword is the basic foundation of SEO. Think of keywords as phrases or words that people use when asking the librarian for a book. Now, SEO helps you to choose the right keywords that match what your website is all about. For example, if your website is about cooking, your keywords might be easy recipes or cooking tips. The second way to go about it is organization. Now, just like books in a library are organized by categories, your website should be well organized, too. SEO helps you to structure your content so that it's easy for both the librarian, that is a search engine, and the readers to understand. In this case, the customers are your readers that are coming on search engine to look for your book or your website. Quality content. Now, in our library story, the librarian wants to recommend the best books to the readers. SEO encourages you to create high-quality content that provides valuable information, answers question, and solves the problems for your readers. Now, in this case, your readers are looking to find something, which is why they're on Google, and your website is helping them find that right answer. Popularity. In library, popular books get recommended more often. Similarly, SEO considers how many other reputable sources or other websites link to your website. Now, these are like recommendations from other librarians and they can boost your website's credibility. User experience. A well-organized library, with clear signs and comfy chairs, really makes readers happy, right? So SEO focuses on improving your website's user experience, ensuring it's easy to navigate, it loads quickly, and looks great on all the devices. And last but not the least, regular updates. Now, libraries adds books and new books, and removes the old ones. Similarly, SEO encourages you to update your content regularly to keep it fresh and relevant to the current environment. In a nutshell, SEO is all about making a website or content more visible and accessible in the vast online library of information. It helps ensure that when someone asks the librarian, that is the search engine, for a specific topic, your book or your website is one of the top recommendations. It's all about helping people find what they're looking for on the internet. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Neha. We definitely appreciate that. Always love a good SEO metaphor to explain SEO. By the way, we will absolutely link to Neha's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. But yes, I always love a good SEO metaphor, and that was an SEO metaphor on steroids. Crystal Carter: She's brilliant. I've seen her speak at SearchLove, and she used some really great metaphors there as well. And I think that her real skill is just making things really, really clear. I think that if you're working on the team with her, it'd be really great to explain whatever you needed to. And I think that that patience with folks who are maybe new to SEO, maybe understand the value but maybe don't understand the implementation, is really, really important when you're working with various teams. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Now, with that, so it's always hard to balance working well as part of a team and balancing your own personal needs and goals and whatnot. But more often than not, you could probably find a way to balance both. If not to balance both, you can actually leverage your own personal oomph for the sake of the team. The question is how does that work and how do you do that? That's why we're going deep into how to work well as a team, but also build up your own personal brand, with a very special deep thought with Crystal and Mordy, as our own social media extraordinaire here at Wix, Marissa Brower joins us for a deep thought with Crystal, Mordy, and Marissa. Crystal Carter: Welcome, Marissa. Marissa Brower: Thanks for having me. Hi, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hi, Marissa. Happy to have you here. It's so fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: You're all so happy, because you both grew up in the same place and you all know the same thing. Marissa Brower: Yeah, we're Californians. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Marissa Brower: Right. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Just like all of that Golden State shine, just shine, shine, shine. Mordy Oberstein: All that sunshine. I'm just from grumpy New York. "Get out of my way. I'm walking here." Marissa Brower: We don't walk, we drive. Crystal Carter: No. Okay. Marissa Brower: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With lots and lots of traffic, too. Mordy Oberstein: I know about traffic. It's on my website. Marissa Brower: Oh. Crystal Carter: Oh. Very nice! Marissa Brower: That was a good one. Mordy Oberstein: So before you joined us at Wix, and according to Google, you have your own knowledge panel, which in our little SEO world is quite the thing. Marissa Brower: I'm so happy you to find that for me. Because I looked that up the other day and I was like, what? I mean, first of all, who did that? And secondly, what's it called? I just told my parents, I'm like, "Someone's calling me an internet personality on the internet, and I don't know who, but I love it." Crystal Carter: They found you. Marissa Brower: It's a knowledge panel. They found... they identified me. Crystal Carter: It means they found you. It means that, it's normally, as an indicator that you're doing great stuff and that you're involved in lots of really great projects, and that you're yeah, involved with some great stuff. I don't have a knowledge panel yet. I'm working on it. Mordy has one, which he's very proud of. Marissa Brower: Mordy, you have one? Crystal Carter: Mordy has one. It's very exhaustive, and so does George as well. Marissa Brower: Okay, that's good. Mordy Oberstein: We write a lot of content. But Crystal, you also have a ton of content. Why is that? Maybe Google doesn't... See, I always had to think about Google not liking me, because I had a search console problem that maybe Daniel Waisberg had a thing. Maybe Daniel's doing it to you now, because my search console works now. Crystal Carter: Shout out to Daniel Waisberg. Where's my knowledge panel? But I think also a lot of it has to do with data and projects that you've worked on and things like that. Yeah, but well done. Fantastic and well-earned, I think. Marissa Brower: Thank you. Crystal Carter: I think, if people aren't aware, Marissa has an incredible following on Instagram, makes incredible content, and has a fantastic doggo who is adorable, who you should also follow. Mordy Oberstein: With you being an internet personality... Marissa Brower: Uh-huh. Mordy Oberstein: ... and that was before you started at Wix. How did that help your career being this internet personality? Marissa Brower: Well, I actually had a very interesting career... I studied statistics in college. So I have a degree in statistics. And then I moved to Israel, and I lived... When you move to Israel, I feel like there's not a lot for English speakers to do, so I was pretty fresh. I was 21, so I started working in customer support and I hated it. So I was doing that for a little bit. And then also, I'm living really far. I'm in the Middle East, my parents have no idea what's going on, so I started making YouTube videos so that my parents could... More of a way to connect with my family and friends to show them like, "Hey, everything's same-old. I'm just, this is my routine here." So I was making these YouTube videos weekly, and then I got this opportunity with my work to relocate to Boston. And then this was during COVID, right when COVID started, March, 2020. And TikTok was just taking off. It was the early days of TikTok, right when all those kids were hitting... And I was like, "You know what, I want to try it, too." So I'm in Boston, quarantining and trying to get a flight back to Israel. And I noticed when I was in Boston that the only people that would see my videos, even though I'm experimenting with the app, were people that were in Boston. And then, as soon as I flew back to Israel, the only people that would see my videos were Israelis. So I realized it was based off of my location. So I thought to myself, I can't do anything in English. If I'm going to be in Israel, I have to start making Hebrew videos if I want to... I was just really doing it for fun. So I made one video about translation fails, stupid translation fails that I've made as an American trying to learn Hebrew, and it just blew up. And at that moment I thought, okay, this is the niche that I'm going to go into is being an American in a foreign country. And then from there, I just, I kept leveling up. I did different kinds of stuff with translation and just being an American expat. But it's not consistent. When you're a freelancer, it's stressful. So I wanted to leverage what I had done into a more professional career, and that's how I found Wix. Very different brands, web design and American translation fails. Crystal Carter: So I think there's a couple of fantastic things there in what you're saying that I'd like to pick up on. One is that one of the things about being a, so-called influencer or being somebody who is building up a personal brand is that you're able to learn at your own pace and you're able to apply different knowledge as you see it when you want to. And certainly, in my experience, I have people and they're like, "Oh, I can't do SEO, I don't have a website." I'm like, "Make a website. Make a website." People are like, "How do I get good at digital marketing?" I'm like, "Do digital marketing. Make something. Make a YouTube channel, make a Instagram, make a Facebook, make a TikTok." How much of the stuff that you taught yourself do you apply to the work that you do for the brand? Now, I don't know if we mentioned it, but Marissa is one of the masterminds behind the Wix social things. No disrespect to the rest of Wix social team, they're fantastic, but Marissa does a lot of great stuff as well. So how much of the things that you learned, while you were learning all those different platforms and applying all these different techniques, are you applying daily in your work? Marissa Brower: Absolutely, 100%. I'm self-taught. I have no background in video creation. I know nothing about cameras, but I just had to teach myself doing green screen, editing programs. Everything started as doing it for my YouTube channel and for my TikTok account. And then technically, my job is a social media manager, it's not a video editor. But I have this background in video, and so it's really helps me create content and get it out really fast, which is all, it's the nature of social media. It's fast, short-paced, snackable content. So it's been really helpful for me to have that base, and everything was really just self-taught. Crystal Carter: And I think also, the other thing that I thought was really interesting, you said you studied statistics. My degree is in English literature. I know somebody else who's a fantastic SEO and his degree is in archeology. How much of your statistical background are you bringing into your work? I imagine quite a lot, actually, with some of the content. Marissa Brower: Isn't it funny, how I think they'd say in college, "You're probably going to major in something and do nothing with that major and do something completely else." But luckily for me, statistics does play a little bit of a part in social media. We're always looking at performance, like how a video, the engagement, saves, likes, all that kinds of stuff, and trying to identify why a video outperformed another video. So I think I wish statistics came in more of a play. It's very basic statistics. Yeah, there's definitely a need for it with social media and trying to just figure out what your audience likes, and it's all based on numbers. Mordy Oberstein: So if we can move away from math forever- Marissa Brower: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... and numbers. Because you have such a strong personal background and what you're doing and all things you've done in the personal success that you've had, do you feel when you're now going back to the team and saying, "Hey, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, what do you think about this?" That it gives you a different, I guess, weight to your voice, because you have that personal background and that personal success that came along with it? As opposed to somebody who's like, "I've been working..." I guess what I'm asking is, if you have somebody who's working as social media manager for, forget Wix for a second, just for a company and they're on your team, and then you are on the same team with that person, but you have your own personal history, your own personal experience to doing social media, in this particular case, and I think would apply to any other vertical, does that give you a different kind of voice? Not maybe more weighty, but does it give you different outlook and different perspective? Does it help you bring a fresh perspective to the team? Wow, I finally got the question out. Marissa Brower: I think it does, but it's totally different working for your personal brand than a brand like Wix. I have learned so much just trying to make a strategy for Wix. It's completely different... As a viewer, I think you're more skeptical of taking advice from a brand than you are of taking advice from just a regular individual on the internet. So it's trying to like... Something that I would do on my own TikTok account or my own Instagram account wouldn't come off the same way on a branded account. So I think I do have a little bit more experience just working within the app, knowing there's a lot to do with SEO and TikTok, and knowing how to write a good caption and what hashtags to use and just navigating the app itself. I think I have a lot of expertise in that. But in terms of strategy, that was a whole new learning experience for me when I came from my personal brand to Wix, trying to build that strategy, see what resonates with your viewers. It's very different than being an individual creator. Mordy Oberstein: And do you think that's helped your personal content creation process for your own channels? Marissa Brower: No. I like to keep my personal content very authentic. What I'm making for Wix is there's a lot of heavy editing, a lot of green screen. I don't think it translates well. My videos are comedic, my personal videos. I'm not really trying to teach someone something. I think if I were, I would take more of that professional aspect that we've used in the Wix strategy. But no, I think for personal creators, the best thing, especially right now, is authenticity. I think we've had so much in the past, the previous years of very filtered, perfect videos, circulating in pictures, circulating the internet, and now people find just authentic content really relatable, and that's what people stay around for. So I try and, I really have to separate the two, personal creation and branded creation, because it's super different. Mordy Oberstein: On behalf of my generation, we apologize for all that perfect content that was completely just schlock. Anyway... Crystal Carter: I think it can be very important. I certainly, I think that brings into the idea of channels and brand voice and things like that. Because I think that that awareness is really important when people are thinking about bringing some of the knowledge that they have from their personal branding, development experience, into other avenues. So people might have a personal blog and then start writing for a company blog, or people might have a personal Facebook account that gets a lot of engagement, or I know, bless Facebook. And then maybe they're writing for the company one. And I've seen this when working with juniors, working with people who are just getting started, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I can do the same thing. I'll just share these same..." And it's maybe sort of sometimes, but you really do have to experiment with that. Can you give any advice of when people should draw the lines between one brand voice and another brand voice? Marissa Brower: I think it takes so much experimentation to understand what works on a particular channel. I'm only working on TikTok, and when I came into Wix's TikTok, it was really underdeveloped, one post a month compared to what we're doing now, which is three to four a week. And the ones that we were posting before I joined was just recycled content. It was nothing specific for TikTok. So when I came in, it was like, "Let's build a strategy and let's figure out what to do for our channel." And we tried a bunch of different stuff. Trending sounds, it's huge and it still is huge. And then the user showcases, educational content tutorials, and just the educational content and the tutorials just blew out all the other ideas. Once we started really figuring out what do our viewers stick around for? It was really providing value for them. So on TikTok, even though it's really this fun, light app that a younger generation is engaging with, I think that people still want to walk away from the app retaining something, especially from a brand. So that's how we got into these tutorials. Whereas on Instagram, I think that there's an opportunity to be more, to use more design on TikTok. Using design is the worst thing you can do on TikTok. We try and stay away from design, because we want to keep it still authentic to TikTok. So it's just learning what each platform... When you're on Instagram scrolling, you want to see something beautiful. On TikTok, you won't want to walk away feeling like you learn something or that video wasn't a waste of your time. So it's just learning the landscapes of different social media apps, I think. Mordy Oberstein: To quote Jimi Hendrix quoting Bob Dylan, "The hour is getting late." Where can people find you, Marissa? Marissa Brower: My Instagram is @marissabrower, and my TikTok account is @marissabrow. That's pretty... And then I have a YouTube account that I've deleted. Same thing @marissabrow. Mordy Oberstein: Links in the show notes, so look for Marissa there. Help build up her knowledge panel by linking to her content all over the place. Marissa, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you around on TikTok, or at least Crystal will, because I don't do TikTok. Marissa Brower: Thanks, guys, for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Again, major kudos to Marissa. The stuff that she does on TikTok is awesome. She did a great one. We did Semrush and StudioHawk reviewed a Wix website called WhatSugar, and they put out a whole SEO audit template based on WhatSugar is doing and the SEO success. It's very awesome Wix website has seen. And then Marissa took that SEO template and created a whole Instagram and TikTok wrap-up of it that we posted on our TikTok and Instagram account. So it was super cool. It was full-circle infographic, SEO audit thing into TikTok, Instagram content. So a way to knock it out of the park without repurposing, Marissa. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I always have a good repurposing, right? You know who doesn't repurpose a lot of content? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz does not repurpose a lot of content. It's always fresh and always new. Crystal Carter: So fresh, like a summer's breeze. Mordy Oberstein: Although sometimes, it is semi-repackaged, like, "Here's Google again telling you for the eight millionth time, word count doesn't matter." Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is when he, well, to be fair, he does do the, in-case-you-missed-its, which I'm very grateful for, because he publishes so much. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I'm a different time zone, so I get the, in case you missed it in the morning sometimes. So yeah, I do appreciate that. That is repurposing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I insulted you. Crystal Carter: He also does pull out those pictures from random bits of Google around, which are really fun. Mordy Oberstein: It's a Google cake in Tel Aviv. Crystal Carter: Right. There was a fantastic one of Daniel Waisberg blowing a horn from- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the shofar. Crystal Carter: ... his balcony or something? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I said that to Barry, like, "Oh, you-" Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oh, you did. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: I was so wrong again, Barry. I'm wrong. You're right, Barry does repurpose content. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Admitting that you're wrong is a really important part of working with teams. Mordy Oberstein: It's the first step to recovery. And with that, here's the snappy SEO news. Snappy News, snappy news, snappy news. Got three for you this week, and the first one's not from Barry Schwartz. Sorry, Barry, they can't all be from you. From Nicola Agius, from SearchEngineLand. Google testing ads between organic results. There's been a spattering of examples from across the web of people seeing Google ads among the search results. Meaning you usually see ads at the top of the results or at the bottom of the set of results. But now, lots of folks are seeing ads within the results. I think, by the way, this has a lot to do with the fact that I think users are wiser than they were before, and they're looking to not be sold to in the same way. So perhaps they're not clicking on those ads up top the way that they used to before, and Google wants to be more subtle about it. Number two, article number two from, okay, it's from Barry Schwartz. This from Search Engine Roundtable. Google about this image. About this image now live, recency of image, AI details and more. This is really interesting. Google's now offering the ability to see some history or some information about an image. You go to image search, there's a little three button setting thing that you can click on and it will show you how old the image is. Google said it may also indicate if the image has been generated by AI and so forth. Have a look at the GIF that Barry shares in the article, which we'll link to in the show notes. It's really interesting to look at. Obviously, this makes a lot of sense, because the web is going, it already is inundated with AI images, and it's good for people to know what's real than what's AI, if we want to put it that way. So it makes a lot of great sense to have something like that. I think it's a really nice little feature. Okay, this one, well, I guess it comes from Barry. I saw it first on seroundtable.com, but it's actually announced by Google. We'll link to both sources. There's your link. Barry, from Google's own blog. Three new ways to check images and sources online. So Google has an About This Result feature that'll let you get some more context about why that particular result shows in their search results for you and some information about that result. We'll link to the article in the show notes. You can have a look at where that actually is and what it looks like. But just know there's this little feature out there that gives context to a result shown to you on the SERP. Google is now using AI to generate information or a description about a result that you may see among your search results within this About This Result feature. I'll just read to you what Google themselves wrote. It'll make this a little bit clearer, because without seeing it, it's hard to understand it. Google writes, "One of the best ways to evaluate information online is to learn more about the source. Say you stumble upon some cool new hiking boots, but they're from a small merchant you're not familiar with. You might want to do research on the seller, but in some cases, it can be hard to find information about lesser-known sites. Now we're starting to experiment how generative AI can do some of that digging for you to help you search with confidence." So the AI will generate a little bit of a description about who the seller actually is or who the website actually is, so you can better understand, contextually, who they are and may say, "You know what? I do want to buy it from them. They do seem reliable." I think it's really interesting that Google's using AI for this. I think it's a little bit of a shame that it's hard to actually know that this feature even exists unless you stumble on it, like you are now, if you haven't heard of it before and you're listening to this podcast. I think it's fabulous that Google is trying to democratize the web even more than it currently is. And I think Google really is trying to democratize the web in a lot of ways. I know some may push back on my claim that they are doing that, but I think they are doing that, or trying to do that, rather. And I think giving context to smaller or lesser-known websites is a great way to do that. So kudos to Google. I like the feature. I think it's cool. And that's this week's Snappy News. And once again, as always, thank you Barry and the other SEO news authors who are out there. Crystal Carter: Yes, other people talk about new things, too. Mordy Oberstein: Barry, and it's not just you. Crystal Carter: Other people, too. Mordy Oberstein: There are other people, like Matt Southern and Roger Montti, Denny Goodwin, Loren Baker, Kristi Hines. Crystal Carter: Kristi Hines, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: A lot of great people. Crystal Carter: Ellie DeMasellis. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, Glenn Gabe's always covering something. Crystal Carter: Billy Ray. Things are happening, things are happening- Mordy Oberstein: Things are happy- Crystal Carter: ... moving, shaking. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's always moving and shaking, our follow of the week, who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness over on social media. This one is former Wix SEO advisory board member Nikki Mossier, over at Niki Mosier, SEO. It's N-I-K-I-M-O-S-I-E-R-S-E-O, over on Twitter, the platform I formally call X. Did I get that backwards? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But Niki's a great follow. She's really, really good at talking about lots of different SEO stuff, and she's also, she's a consultant, so she works across lots of different groups. So she's a great person to follow for SEO. Mordy Oberstein: And she has a course for non-SEO, is about SEO. Crystal Carter: Which is incredibly valuable. Mordy Oberstein: It's the perfect tie-in. Crystal Carter: I think that's why we picked her. Mordy Oberstein: Was that on purpose? Crystal Carter: I think we did it deliberately. Mordy Oberstein: No. We were deliberate? Crystal Carter: Brilliant. I think brilliant, genius. Mordy Oberstein: Brilliance. I will say brilliance is deliberate. Crystal Carter: We're delivering brilliance. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Deliberately. Well, thank you for joining us for the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episodes. We dive into the money bin itself. We're looking at, too, how much should SEO cost? That's a taboo topic right there. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: I will tell you it was hard to find a guest who wanted to talk about it. Little spoiler alert. Anyway, look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars over at the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Your resource is ready Use this SEO competitor audit Google Sheet 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

Myriam Jessier is an SEO consultant and trainer with 15+ years of experience. She loves to share her knowledge of SEO and keyword research because it helps everyone make the web a bit more human and bot-friendly. Myriam Jessier SEO Trainer, PRAGM Myriam Jessier is an SEO consultant and trainer with 15+ years of experience. She loves to share her knowledge of SEO and keyword research because it helps everyone make the web a bit more human and bot-friendly. Articles & Resources 15 Feb 2023 Use keyword matrixes for long tail eCommerce SEO success 8 Dec 2022 How to identify long tail keywords for B2B marketers 4 Oct 2022 Long tail SEO keywords: Leverage your market niche for better visibility 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 Content distribution toolkit Learn how to drive traffic to your posts with Wix Blog’s content distribution tools. 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 This toolkit outlines how to: Automate your posts with RSS Share your posts on social in a click Create an email campaign about your posts Generate graphics and videos to enhance social content Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Crystal Carter is an SEO & digital marketing professional whose previous clients include Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. She hosts SEO webinars and podcasts and her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush, and more. More about this topic Watch this webinar on the Wix SEO Hub for more insights into content distribution strategies. 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