Search Results

Google's recent updates to its algorithms have been about providing information that is user-friendly and trustworthy. They’re trying to think like a human user to give the best possible results. The algorithm aligns more closely with the user's intent more than ever. Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, pilot this very helpful (get it?) conversation on providing content that the user needs to make decisions. Essentially, User-First SEO is like if you asked someone for advice, and they gave you sound advice based on their experience and qualifications. You would want to know that the person giving you the advice had your best interests at heart. User-first SEO is just that: focused on helping the user more than ranking. “Putting the user first, thinking about their pain points, and solving the user’s problem is the goal, ” says Michel Fortin, as he helps us understand the concept even further. Back First things first - User-first SEO Google's recent updates to its algorithms have been about providing information that is user-friendly and trustworthy. They’re trying to think like a human user to give the best possible results. The algorithm aligns more closely with the user's intent more than ever. Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, pilot this very helpful (get it?) conversation on providing content that the user needs to make decisions. Essentially, User-First SEO is like if you asked someone for advice, and they gave you sound advice based on their experience and qualifications. You would want to know that the person giving you the advice had your best interests at heart. User-first SEO is just that: focused on helping the user more than ranking. “Putting the user first, thinking about their pain points, and solving the user’s problem is the goal, ” says Michel Fortin, as he helps us understand the concept even further. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 08 | October 12, 2022 | 41 MIN 00:00 / 41:26 This week’s guests Michel Fortin Michel Fortin is a marketing advisor, fractional CMO, and senior SEO consultant helping professionals and firms grow their visibility and their businesses. He’s an author, speaker, and consultant with 30 years of experience in digital marketing and marketing communications. Einat Hoobian-Seybold Einat has more than 8 years experience creating organic strategies for leading global brands. After a well-established career focused on SEO execution she fell in love with product development and management. Today Einat combines her love of product management with her experience in SEO as Wix’s SEO Product Manager where she works to build products that make SEO accessible and easy for over 200M users around the world. 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 groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding at Wix. And I'm joined by the one, the only, the head of SEO communications at Wix, Crystal Carter. What's up, Crystal? Crystal Carter: Hello, good people of the internet. Hello. Many things are up. Things are up. Mordy Oberstein: Hopefully your rankings are up. Dad joke/SEO joke. Crystal Carter: We want all green arrows, every time. Mordy Oberstein: Someone was telling me that, because we're in the middle of, as we're recording this, some fluctuations on the SERP, and their boss was asking about, "Oh, why did our rankings on page two go down?" And they're like, "Why do we care?" Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: We went from page two to page three, whatever shall we do? Crystal Carter: How come no one's coming to my MySpace page? Because what? Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Crystal Carter: Don't worry. Pick your battles there. Mordy Oberstein: Bigger fish to fry. Or if you don't like frying fish, bigger fish to bake. Crystal Carter: This is true. You could bake it. Mordy Oberstein: I like fish baked more than I like it fried. Anyway, the SERP’s Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can empower your [SEO] content strategy with the power of Semrush directly inside of the Wix platform. It's all part of Wix's SEO set up checklist, research keywords and topics, along with metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and even user intent with our Semrush integration. It's like my two worlds combined with that one. So on today's show, geez, Crystal, we better make sure the bots are happy, happy, happy, right? Crystal Carter: S-bots must be very happy. Mordy Oberstein: But wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Crystal Carter: Bots have happy. Mordy Oberstein: Do bots, or search engines, do they pay you money? Crystal Carter: No. No. I've asked. Mordy Oberstein: But I do not get a positive response, because guess what? People, people pay you money. But if I worry about the people, who will worry about the bots? Don't worry, Optimus Prime will. He's their father. Anyway. But if you're worrying about not worrying about the bots, fear not fair SEO for thou art in great luck, for the days of user first SEO are not just nigh, they are upon thee. That is correct. Today we are talking about why worrying about the user and not the bot, believe it or not, is actually good for the bots. That was circular. But who would've thunk. From the research phase to how the Google algorithm is structured, we're diving into why user first SEO matters, with tips of the trade from SEO's own John Bonham, Little Zeppelin reference for you there. Michel Fortin will stop by and share some of his tips with you. We'll also sit down with Wix's own SEO product manager, Einat Hoobian-Seybold, to talk about her approach to putting users first and how that plays out in SEO product development. And of course, we have the snappiest of news for you and who you should be following. Actually a bonus, two people who you should be following on social for SEO awesomeness. Let's let the good times roll, as episode eight of the SERP’s Up podcast is on. Crystal Carter: It's on. Mordy Oberstein: It's on. I almost feel like breaking to song, let the good times roll. Crystal Carter: You bet. This is a very musical introduction there, Mordy, with the John Bonham there. Mordy Oberstein: Totally by accident. Totally by accident. Michel Fortin, by the way, plays the drums and he's awesome, and he's going to stop by. Crystal Carter: He's a really good drummer. He's got his drumming on his website and it's exceptional. He's a very funky drummer. He's a very good drummer. Mordy Oberstein: It's awesome. And he's an awesome SEO who talks a lot about user first SEO, so it's completely makes so much sense. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of user first SEO, Crystal, what are we talking about, user first SEO? Crystal Carter: Yeah, so the thing about user first SEO, one of the reasons why we're talking about this, one of the reasons why it's a little bit of a hot topic is because with their recent algorithm update, Google's announced that they are sort of encouraging or incentivizing people to be creating content. Specifically, they said, "Create content for people, not search engines." Who'd have thunk it? Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thunk that? That's crazy talk. Crystal Carter: Right. In their documentation, they say that the goal is to make sure that when users visit the site, they can find original, helpful content written by people for people, and that it has a satisfying user experience for site visitors. Now, the thing about this is that this is essentially user first content. This is content that is thinking about what the user wants, not necessarily thinking about what hacks, what gimmicks you can use to get to the top of the SERP, but rather thinking about something that's actually made for humans. And this follows on from some of the updates that Google updated in the past, like the Panda update, which really rocked this SEO landscape because it was talking about reducing black hat SEO techniques and reducing the prevalence of that information in the SERP. And when I say SERP, I mean search engine result pages. And what that means is that when people go to Google, they can actually achieve their goals, because I think what people forget sometimes is we think that Google and SEO is about websites, and it pretty much is, but if you go to Google's page how Search works, they explained that their goal is to provide information. They don't say that their goal is to drive traffic to websites. They say their goal is to provide information. And so, this kind of algorithm update, like Panda before it, is the kind that makes sure that they're providing high quality information for people that visit Google. And in order to make it high quality, you need to put the user first. So content creators who do this, and you'll know these content creators when you find them, whether it's on a website or whether it's on YouTube or whether it's on any other platform, they're very clear to address their user's needs. So they'll say, "A lot of people have asked me about this topic and I want to talk about it now." Or they'll share content that people that users have requested. So this is something that Google themselves do. They have a series called Ask Google Bot. And John Mueller will say, "Mordy Oberstein asked me this question on Twitter and I'm answering it here." And there's YouTube channels that I follow where they'll say, "What do you want me to cover next?" And the users will say that and they will cover that for them. They'll test content with their users before publishing it. So Instagram, good Instagramers will do a story and they'll see who replies to it and what kinds of things people are interested in, and then they'll do a longer post later on. There's lots of different techniques that you could do, but putting your user first is really important. And it's something that Google's laid out in a lot of different documentation. The information about the helpful content update from Google is very, very clear with information around that. And also, if you want to do a really deep dive, you can have a look at something called the Quality Rater Guidelines, which is the documentation that Google gives to their team, to their humans and their team to help them determine what is a good quality website. Yeah, it's a really good idea. It gives you lots really good ideas of what makes good content that is made for users. Mordy Oberstein: And that's really the point. Back in the day with the algorithm, there was one way of running for humans and one way of running for bots, and even helpful content updates aside, what Google's been doing, I would say since circa 2018 with the new series of core algorithm updates... And if you look at their documentation around how should you respond to being hit by one of the core algorithm updates, it's very similar. It's all about writing really good content, really helpful content. And what they've been doing algorithmically is basically trying to think qualitatively the way a human could, and sort of mimicking that. And Danny Sullivan from Google's talking about, "Yeah, we look at quality," by the way, quality is for the entire site, a site wide metric, not a per page metric, "And we try to mimic through the algorithms how a person would qualitatively assess the quality of the webpage." So now the algorithm and the user have been synced up in a lot of ways. Is it a hundred percent perfect? Is it a hundred percent there? No. Will it every be? Probably not. But directionally, and way, way, way more than it ever was before. And if you look at people like, I'll say Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray, Marie Haynes, maybe myself, Dr. Pete from over at Moz, when they write about their analysis of the updates, so basically showing you, "Yeah, Google's looking at things like tone and looking at things like the quality in this way and the quality in that way," and now when you put the user first, at the same time, and this is a key point, you're also putting Google first. It's not different anymore. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that what we're seeing is Google puts a lot of emphasis on EAT, which is expertise, authority, and trust. And that document that you mentioned, the one that they always put out whenever there's an algorithm, what SEO should know about or website owners should know about Google updates, talks about expertise, authority, and trust. And there's lots of different ways that you can demonstrate that on a website. And it's essentially like if you asked someone for advice and they gave you advice on something, you would want to know how they were qualified to give you that advice. So if you go and talk to a doctor and then they say, "Oh, I think it might be," I don't know, appendicitis or something like that, you assume that they know what they're talking about, because they're in a doctor's office, they've got their certificates up on the wall, you know who they are. Similarly, if you go to a website and they're giving you advice or they're giving you information about one topic or another, it's very important that you know who they are, that they have an about page that talks about who they are. We recently did a webinar with Semrush around about pages, to talk about some of those elements. But it's also important that you have an address if it's a place of business. I saw recently someone, there was somebody who got in touch or somebody who was online saying, "Oh, I don't know why my webpage for a hotel isn't ranking," and it was a hotel that didn't have an address. And I was like, "That is red flags." Mordy Oberstein: Conceptual hotel. Crystal Carter: That's red flags. Mordy Oberstein: It's where my mind stays. Crystal Carter: It's, "Oh, book, book where, where is this?" Mordy Oberstein: In the ether. It's in the ether. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you think about some of the websites that do really well, if you think about something, so Airbnb, for instance, is something like that, that they have doubled down. They have multiple layers of verifying who is who and trying to make sure that it's very clear, that you're talking to an actual person that's actually in a place and these people are... Then there's agreements and there's all this sort of stuff. Similarly, Google's trying to make sure that when somebody comes to their website and tries to find out, I don't know, how far it is from the earth to the moon or any kind of information, that they're able to get it from a valid source. Because if people are not getting good quality information from Google, then people won't come to Google. And Google wants to make sure that they're keeping their users happy by giving them good quality information. Mordy Oberstein: You make a great point where you're talking about how people are looking at a website, "Can I trust this website? Are they authoritative? They have expertise?" And that's really, if you want to talk about how you create user first content, that's kind of how you do it. You look at it from the lens of the user. One way, I call it the brand sniff test. You go to a webpage and you immediately, because you're a brand, they're going to realize it's, "Oh, machines and AI and Google's so smart and machines are so smart." Your brain is AI on steroids. It takes a look at something, and in three seconds or 0.3 seconds, it takes a million different signals. And without you consciously being aware of it, it's like, "Yeah, I've completely judged this already." You go to a webpage and it's an HTML table from 1999, you go, "I'm not trusting this thing." Even might have great content. If you think, "Okay, how do I know I've created user first content, outside the fact that you know where your heart is? Leaving that aside for a second, if you look at the page and you think, "Okay," from a branding point of view, "What are the latent signals that this page sends? Is the tone right, is the layout friendly? Is it digestible? Is it well structured? Does it give off a sense that this page is well intentioned, trustworthy, and has my best interest in mind?" And if you feel like you know it does, then you've probably created user first content. Crystal Carter: And I think, also, if you're getting good feedback from your users, then that will also tell you this. For instance, if you've got people coming to your Google business profile and they're asking the same questions over and over again, they probably can't find that information on your website. If you're having people calling you and asking you for the same information over and over again, they probably can't find that information on your website. You should probably make some information, that kind of information on your website. If you've got people who, "Oh, yeah. I saw this on your page and I thought it was great," or "This was really...", then that's information that you're providing that's clearly good for users. So there's lots of different signals that you can get around that. I know some people put reviews on their blog, just regular blogs, not necessarily a recipe blog, but just a regular blog, "Did you find this content helpful? What do you think of this content?" Three stars, five stars, whatever it is. And you can sort of understand, you can get actual direct feedback from people about whether or not it's helpful, whether or not it's useful. And there's lots of different elements and different factors that can help you to demonstrate that and help you to understand that. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. And it really all starts with your mindset. I know you have a whole article about this, I think, where if you're looking at it, I'm was going to go to a keyword research tool and I'm going to plug it in and whatever, and pull out the data and I'm going to... that's probably not the place to start, in my mind. When you're trying to start writing content for the web, for both bots and users, it starts with empathy and understanding your audience, and being able to tap into their mindset. Because now you're going to create content that actually helps them because you actually feel bad for them. Like, "Oh, you have a pain point here? I would love to help you with that." Crystal Carter: Right. I've sometimes written articles, so I remember writing a piece that was around different sources for structured data or something like that. And I use it myself. It was basically, it was a bookmark thing that I put together. And the reason why I put it together was because I couldn't find one. So I think that's one of the things, if you're trying to think about user first, try to be mindful of your experience as a user and the things that irritate you as a user, the content that you don't like as a user. It says something in the description and you get to the page and it's completely different. That can be annoying. Or Google in their helpful content notes talks about the kinds of things where they're saying, "Are you trying to give an answer to a question that doesn't have an answer?" Like when is this show coming out and they haven't announced it and you're just trying to get on the SERP or something, that sort of thing. If you find that irritating, don't make that content. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Remember that. When I was looking at this, a lot of the people that... I spoke to lots of different SEOs about how they create content for users, and they talk to users. And sometimes this can be interviews or sometimes this can be going through CRM information. So if you are using something like Salesforce or that sort of thing where people are raising tickets regularly or raising customer service queries, you can go through that information and see the ones that come up regularly, and you can help your customer service team by giving them the information that they need and help users at the same time. And with regards to the keywords, not to say that keywords and using keywords tools, not to say you shouldn't use them, but think of the user first and then use the keyword tools just to make sure that you're actually hitting some of the actual terms. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you're refining and gaps you haven't missed, those sort of things, because I've done this before myself. The questions you get from, actually, users are completely different. Crystal Carter: Right, completely. And especially if you're looking into a new space where you think about keyword tools, a lot of times they're using historical data. And it's fantastic. It's amazing to have that kind of data there. But Google said, I think, 15% of queries are new queries. So if you're going into a new space, you're launching a new product, then you're going to need to get new content for that and you're going to need to get that to users. And if you're not somebody who wants to do lots and lots of interviews and stuff, that's okay. There's lots of different things you can look- Mordy Oberstein: Forums and social. Crystal Carter: Forums. Yeah. Reviews. You can do a poll. I sometimes go through Slack channels, Slack messages. You can talk to juniors if you're trying to... Training juniors is incredibly useful because juniors will go, "What is a acronym? I don't know what that means." And they want to know. They want to know. So you can create something that's good for the juniors in your team and also is useful for users who are in the same place, where they want to know desperately, so they need it to be- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... accessible. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're still doubting, well, doing all of this and putting the user first and, I want to say abandoning, slightly abandoning traditional, what you might think is traditional SEO, is that's not going to help me rank, think about what's coming down the pike. MUM is coming down the pike, it's Google's new AI 1000, machine learning rather, 1000 times more powerful than Byrd, it's previous most powerful machine learning property, blah blah blah. One of the things that MUM is doing, it's Google's own example, and they gave an example of something like, "I hiked Mount Adams, now I want to hike Mount Fiji in the fall. What do I need to do to prepare differently?" Something like that. Crystal Carter: That's so many words. That's got too many words, by the way. Mordy Oberstein: But the coolest part is that they show you how they parse the word prepare. Does it mean to equipment, I need to know what equipment I need, or training? Is that what you mean to prepare? And Google's like, "Now we're going to show results about both." And you could probably parse it a million times over. So if Google's going to be parsing topics into smaller subtopics like, "Oh, preparing for a hike." It means equipment. It could mean tips, it could mean food, it could mean trading. The only way that you are going to be able to parse a topic down the same way so that you have the opportunities to rank, that are afforded to you on what's going to be the new search results page is by identifying and empathizing with your audience. Like oh, if someone's going on a hike and they have to prepare, what do they really need? Well, they might need this, they might need that, they might need that. Let me create content about that. So we will most definitely help you rank to put the user first, because that's the only way you're going to be able to create the right content. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that if you're thinking about actually answering the question... Again talking to children is another good one. I have a kid and he asks me questions all the time and he's very capable of understanding if I explain it to him the way that he wants, but he wants a full answer. Kids will just keep asking why, so make sure that you give a full answer for whatever the question, and genuinely get involved. Mordy Oberstein: Like a real substance targeted, nuanced content. Now speaking of questions, we have a question for Michel Fortin, the director of search marketing over at seoplus+. Hey Michel, how do you check yourself to ensure you always keep the user first, not bots? Take it away. Michel Fortin: In SEO and in business, in general, many people tend to think the other way around. They think that we should focus on our product, it's the best things since sliced bread, and then we focus on our marketing because we think that people just need our product. The thing is, is actually the other way around, we should be solving a problem, we should be helping out our market. SEO is no different. We have to keep the user first in mind. Yes, we should be leading with our product, but we also are creating a solution to a problem. So it makes sense that we should focus on the problems that our users are experiencing and we help to solve them, in that case when they're making a search. So to keep the user first, you need to at least start with the user first. To borrow a quote from Steven Covey, "First things first is to put first things first." And it really does mean that in the case of SEO, as in any other form of marketing, because SEO is just a channel for marketing, it's really about putting the user first and thinking about their pain points. I always say this, that to really rank well, to be visible actually is a better way to say it, to really be visible in search engines, you need to do what Google really wants you to do. It's the same thing, we share the same goal, which is to create quality content and a quality user experience. So appeal to your market and optimize those things for their sake and you will naturally appeal to search engines too. In marketing, I think the single biggest challenge is to think like our audience. And I say it's a challenge because we tend to always think that our audience are like us or that we know what our audience wants or what they're thinking about or what their needs are. And there's a famous quote from a mentor of mine from many, many years ago who said, "You are never your own market." And in my previous life, I was a copywriter, we always focused on trying to tell our clients that they are never their own market. Well, SEO is the same. Either we think we know or we expect they know. And that's true also for research engines as it is for the audiences that we are trying to go after. And both are wrong. Both of those notions are wrong. We have to think of our market, we have to think like our market. Think about it this way, Google is always doing split tests all the time. It's always testing and changing and adding new search features. And if things don't work out, I mean how many products have we seen Google put out and it basically didn't last too too long because it just flopped or it didn't really do well or it wasn't... The man wasn't there. Remember Google+? But the thing is, with SEO is that we have to think like our market. We have to think for a market. We have to provide the solution that our market wants. I want to end with this, there's a book on marketing in general, but it's called Scientific Advertising. It was written in 1923 by Claude C. Hopkins. And he said something that was really interesting, "The product itself should be its own best salesman." But here's what he said next in his book that is the most important part, "Almost any question can be answered by a test campaign. The court of last resort is the buyers of your product. No one knows people's desires enough to get an average viewpoint. If you want to know whether your product will work, do a test campaign." Now, the reason why I mentioned this in the context of SEO is when we try to optimize something before we put it up, we are thinking about how Google will see it, but we are ignoring the users of our product. Don't think of the ranking factor or factors first and then create content and the user experience to match that. Think of the user first. Create great content, great experience for them. Then think how you can match that to the ranking factors. I think in SEO we tend to forget that there's a word in there called optimization. And optimization applies that it has to be done after something already exists. We optimize something like content or user experience. We optimize what we provide our users so that they're seen by or ranked by or indexed by search engines. Too often we create content and user experience that focuses on search engines, or we will focus on the user but the search engines are dictating the development, so that's why it's not really optimizing after the fact. We're doing it as we go along. Yes, there's always going to be a place for technical SEO. There's always going to be a place for things that we can apply and optimize that will be appealing to the search engines. But put the user first, then optimize. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? He's so right. And it really, as we spoke about, comes out to mindset. The way I put it is started thinking like a marketer almost, because marketers have been doing this for a long time. I know in SCL, "This is so new, think about the user," but marketer doing this forever. It's time to start thinking more like a traditional marketer in a lot of ways as part of your SEO process. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. And I think that when you do that it makes it more than just ranking. It actually means that you're actually connecting with the audience. So some of the YouTubers, for instance, that I really like, do this a lot. The last audience are together, and then it feels like it's a conversation. When you're literally user first, when a user says to you, "Oh, I don't understand this thing, can you help me?" And you write them a blog or you do the thing, and then you come back to them and you're like, "Hey, remember that thing you asked me about? Here it is." Do you know, they will go to you first the next time they need something that's in your niche, they will go to you first because they'll say, "Well, I trust this person. And if I get stuck, I trust that they'll help me in some way." So it's more than just ranking. It's also about building literal trust, building relationships with your audience. And I think that Google talks a lot about audiences. He was talking a lot about audiences there as well, and about making sure that you are thinking about something that is actually of value to the people that you're connecting with. Mordy Oberstein: Do you know who thinks of value with the people that they're connecting with and who always puts users first and not? Crystal Carter: Oh, yes, [inaudible 00:24:18] she absolutely does. Mordy Oberstein: Einat is a master at this. And she's a master of getting into the minds of the people that she's trying to help. Einat is also the product manager here at Wix for SEO tool set and development. So who would've thunk? What better person then to sit down and chat about how to put users first within an SEO context other than Einat? So join us now as we reach for the stars and go across the Wixverse with our own SEO product manager Einat Hoobian-Seybold. Audio: Three, two, one, ignition, lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So we're here with Einat. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We've cornered you. We finally got you on the podcast. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: I'm happy to be here. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. We're really happy to have you because when we were sitting down, we were talking about doing an episode on user first SEO and how important that is. The person who immediately came to both of our minds was Einat, because your job is literally to put users first. And so many different kinds of users and it's so complicated. So we just wanted to pick your brain about how you put Wix's users first when developing our SEO product. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Well, that's an interesting questions because, first of all, what is Wix users, because we have a variety of users? We have the DIYs, the self-creators, the moms and pops, if you would like, which are just building their small business and they don't know much about SEO. And we have the professionals ones that are SEO professional, that are marketers. They need a lot more things and we need to dance in between. And every time I build a product, I don't build it for one of them, I build it for all of them. And that's the tricky part, because I need to take into consideration all their needs. I need to give the DIY users everything they need in order to have the best SEO without them understanding or without them knowing a lot. So that's why I will create lots of defaults and things that will be created for them with minimum effort or knowledge for their side. But in the same time, I will want to create full customization for the professional users. I want to allow them to have workflows. I want to allow them to have automation to save their time, that they will be able to do anything they want in the platform. I don't want the platform to minimize them in any way. Every time I build a product, I need to cater both of them. So I need to protect the DIYs and I need to give the full customization for our users. And it varies, so a lot of time I will give the basic information in the first view and then I will allow users, advanced users, to find what they can do more. Like I said, I will build a lot of defaults for the users, which is also beneficial for the professional one. For example, in Wix we create a lot of default structure data. I can recognize the page of the user, I know what it is. And for example, if you have a product page, I can already build you the structure data with all the information that you need. So it's, of course, extremely valuable for our DIYs, so they don't know structured data, they for sure don't know how to write it, so I already did it for them. And it's also extremely beneficial for the professional because I saved their time. It's automatically built to work in scale and, of course, they can customize it. If the default that I build is not enough for them, they want to change, they want to edit, they can do it as well. Crystal Carter: And I think this is a great example because one of the things I really like about the structure data customization options is that you have the default, which is great out of the box but, for instance, if you wanted to edit it, it also has a validator, so it tells you if you've misplaced your syntax and won't let you submit incorrect schema markup. The other thing I think is great about Wix is structured data customization options is there are variables, so variables already exist within the platform. I've previously had to build these myself and it can be very time consuming and sometimes inconsistent. So I think that's a great example of something that works for lots of different users. One of the things I also think is great, from observing you and the way that you roll out these products, is how you test them. Can you talk to us a little bit more about your testing process, about how you test to make sure that what you're building is good for your users? Einat Hoobian-Seybold: It's true that almost everything that we do in Wix, we test, because we don't know everything. Even if I know SEO and I know product and I know my users, still, reality is different and we really need to see how users behave and if users understand what they see and what they need to do, so we test everything. Every time I will make a major product or a major change, I will run an A/B test. I will start with 50% of the population. I will start with one market, because in Wix we have over 20 market. I will start with one dedicated one in order to really understand the effect of this new feature or this new tool. And I really will, I will run it 50% A/B test and I will see the effect, first of all, on the existing reality that we live in. We live in Wix in SEO, specifically in a very complex environment. We have lots of tools, again, we have lots of users, so I want to make sure that I didn't harm anything else, that by creating this new feature or by creating this new tool that everything else that our users are known and used to, stays the same and I didn't shake the boat too much. So I will test this and I will test also regarding the feature that I just launched. I will test the specific APIs that I want to reach with this tool, whether if there's usage in the tool, I will understand really how users behave in the tool. And I think one thing that is important to note, we don't only look on the quantitative data, we also look on the quality of data. I will see sometimes numbers and this is working well and this is not, but I want to understand why. For example, right now we ran a test, we added, we have the SEO wiz, we just added a new section GBP, the Google Business Profile to it, and it worked amazingly for Google Business Profile users, created extremely well, more locations as success verification. Was amazing. But it did affect the SEO with the checklist that we have. The KPIs of this affected it. I know that those KPIs, if you complete the checklist, if you move forward, it's improve your SEO, so I don't want to do that. I don't want to create any new feature, I will kind of sabotage the user success because this is really what lead us; user success, how we guide them to success. So what we did is we look at the data and we try to understand what's going on. And we understand that a lot of users, in order to create a Google Business Profile, they need to go out to Google Business Profile, which is in another place. And we participated this. We already added some CTAs to go back to the SEO wiz, to the checklist, but they weren't permanent enough and we saw that users are not seeing this. They are being sent out by me, but they don't come back. So what we did is, first of all, I looked at the full story, which is a tool that we use a lot to understand how user interact with our tools because sometimes just the data of the CTA is not enough. We need to know what he did before and if did he get lost or not. And we understand that they don't see the way to go back to where they were. So now we are improving it in terms of UI and in terms of content. And I will be glad to update you once the test will be done. Mordy Oberstein: We would love to be updated. So let me ask you real quick, because I know we're reaching the end of our allotted time together. Let's take it back a step. When you have so many things to develop, let's say, or multiple things you could be developing, how do you decide which one to do first? What goes through your thought process and how does the user factor into that and how do you really know which makes the most sense? Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Yeah, that's true. I think the most painful part of being a product manager that you have to prioritize is you have to decide what you do now and you won't do everything that you want. Because I have tons of plans, but I need to prioritize and I need to scale them down a lot of times. So I have lots of, I will say information sources that I use in order to decide what I do now. The bottom line is impact, is how do I help my users? What I do now is for my users. Will it, like I said, drive them towards success or not? So I have lots of information. I have, first of all, data. I look a lot of data of users and what they do and what they are missing and where they get stuck. And we have an SEO in Wix. We have a team, a dedicated team of SEO domain experts, data, the guys that are connected the most of the industry and they know what is needed, what are we lacking of, what do we need to do next. And so, I rely a lot of their recommendation. I do a lot of research and I really, really look at support information, support tickets, what our users are struggling with, what are coming to support. I talk a lot with the users and I really call our users and we talk about them. And all of this is driving me towards decision of what I need to do. That's the first step, what is missing. And then how do I prioritize this? It will be mainly on a impact. What will close a gap that I missing the most that will help our users? Or what will bring more value to my users? And this is what guides me when I prioritize the products. Crystal Carter: And I love these conversations because whenever we're like, "Oh, what about this?" you're like, "What about the users? How is this going to help the users?" Mordy Oberstein: Yep, so true. Crystal Carter: "How is this going to help the users? This is very interesting, Crystal, how are we going to help the users with this?" Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Einat, thank you so much for stopping by. It's really been a first class look into the mindset of putting a user first and what that looks take from a product point of view. And it really applies to anytime you put a user first, whether it be for a product or service or for a website itself. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Exactly. Thank you. I really enjoyed being with you. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we'll have to have you back again. Talk to you later. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Bye. Audio: Three, two, one, ignition, lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: She is so lovely. Always. Every time I speak with her, I always enjoy... Super calm under pressure too. Always pleasant. Everyone's like, "Oh no, what do we do?" She's always so calm. Crystal Carter: I am always in awe whenever I hear... Einat will give us presentations on all the different stuff that we do and she just. Yeah, exactly, always super calm, super organized, very committed to the project of making Wix SEO stack as best as it can possibly be for our users. It's phenomenal to work alongside Einat. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And it's great talking to her and being able to talk to her with our audience, because now you actually know one of the key people who has made our SEO product so evolved. And it's really, was a great pleasure to talk to Einat. Crystal Carter: And user first, just user first stuff, she constantly Slack messages, she's constantly, "Yeah, I'm just responding to questions that our users have about various different things." She's very much involved with making sure that things are user first. Mordy Oberstein: 1000%. Let's snap to it, because now it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Well, I guess the pandemic is behind us. I mean, Google did just announce that Google Business Profile health and safety attributes are being kicked to the curb. That's right. Per Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Business Profile removes health and safety attributes." Google business profile attributes, by the way, are little tidbits of info that help users better understand services and structure of a business, for example, that are attributes that let you know of an establishment is wheelchair accessible or there are attributes that let you know that a business is owned by a woman, it's woman led or it's veteran led or so forth. During COVID, Google introduced the option to display health and safety attributes like a mask being required or staff gets temperature checks, et cetera. These are now gone. Why is that important? Well, less so for SEO or there's no ranking that's involved in it if it's gone from all business profiles and users won't expect it to be there at all, so if you don't have it, it's not like your competitors have it. This is more, in my mind, a general marketing point, as it's a strong statement of where the world is and where your potential customers might be currently at. And with that, this is the snappiest of Snappy News. Another wonderful week of SEO news. Crystal Carter: So newsy. Mordy Oberstein: So newsy. It's always newsy in the SEO world. All right, before we have to duly depart, it's really important that we share with you who we think you should be following for more SEO knowledge. And when it comes to being user first and user first friendly, we have two people for you, because it's such an important topic, we thought what person wasn't enough. And we couldn't decide on which person to showcase. So we're like, "Let's do both. Why not do both?" Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Two is better than one. When you have pie, they're like, "Oh, do you want the cherry pie and the blueberry pie?" Then they have a combination of it too. Oh, my god, I'll take that. Crystal Carter: Which pie do you want? Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All. Yes. I love pie, by the way. Crystal Carter: Pie's good. Mordy Oberstein: Here, by the way, is the cherry on your pie in the SEO industry when you're trying to think of being user first. I did it on the fly, I'm so proud of myself. What do we have? Who's your follow of the week or our follow week, but who are you going to showcase, Crystal? Crystal Carter: I would love to give a shoutout to Adriana Stein. She is a writer, she's in SEO and does some incredible user first content. One of the things that she does really often is she regularly speaks directly to people about how they approach content, how they approach different technical tactics, so she'll get on her Twitter account and she'll ask questions. She'll say, "How do you do this? What do you think of that?" And people respond to her and she uses that to help shape her content and how she makes content. And I think it's a great approach and I think she's really good at it. I think her content's really great. So she's someone who's really worth following. She does a lot of stuff with some of the industry's best publications, so it's really good to follow her for that advice and for just seeing how she works. Mordy Oberstein: And her Twitter account is so conversational and so engaging, so it's absolutely worth the follow. It's @adrianakstein, A-D-R-I-A-N-A-K-S-T-E-I-N. Of course, we'll link to her profile in the show notes. And bonus follow of the week- Crystal Carter: Bonus. Mordy Oberstein: ... the man who I will say is so dedicated and passionate to making sure the web actually has good content on there. He's Google's own John Mueller. Crystal Carter: John Mueller. Mordy Oberstein: Is a saint by the way, an absolute saint. I love John. He's hilarious as well. So it's a great follow for many reasons. But I remember when the product review update was first rolling out, maybe it was the second iteration of it, I can't remember which one it was. And people were saying, "Oh, why do we need this? Why is it there?" And John was just calling it as he saw it. No, because there's a lot of really not great content out there around product reviews. And it's so true. And John will literally just tell you like, "No, this is how it really is and this is why we needed improvement." I always say John Mueller is an advocate for Google, but he is also an advocate for a better web and a better web starter, I think, with better content. I think John is a prime example of someone who speaks of that. And I really do appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I think he's great. I think also the other thing that's great about John is that SEO, everyone's coming to SEO from different spaces. You might be an expert in one field and a beginner in another, and he speaks to everyone in the same way. So in his Webmaster Office Hours would very regularly speak to users from all different backgrounds, whatever questions they had. And he always did his best to answer every single question in those spaces. And it is something that is incredibly user first because that gives you a very clear finger on the pulse of the kinds of questions that people have. And he uses that to shape the content that he shares. I think that he's a pillar in that community. Mordy Oberstein: He's just simply wonderful. He's simply wonderful and- Crystal Carter: He's great. Mordy Oberstein: ... honestly, he brings joy to my day sometimes when you're on Twitter and is like things are not going great. John is wonderful. Anyway, it's @john, J-O-H-N-M-U, as in Mueller, John Mueller. And we'll link, of course, to John's profile in the show notes. And that's going to do it for us. Thank you for joining us on The SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into the controversy that is AI writers. AaaaaaaaaI writers, if you're Fonzie. Crystal Carter: Can we just call it AI the whole time? Mordy Oberstein: AI writers. Wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars that we have on the Wix SEO Learning, I bet 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 Michel Fortin Einat Hoobian-Seybold Adrian Stein John Mueller Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub User-first SEO What creators should know about Google's helpful content update What site owners should know about Google's core updates How to source ideas for user-first content News: Google Business Profiles Removes Health & Safety Attributes Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Michel Fortin Einat Hoobian-Seybold Adrian Stein John Mueller Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub User-first SEO What creators should know about Google's helpful content update What site owners should know about Google's core updates How to source ideas for user-first content News: Google Business Profiles Removes Health & Safety Attributes 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 groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding at Wix. And I'm joined by the one, the only, the head of SEO communications at Wix, Crystal Carter. What's up, Crystal? Crystal Carter: Hello, good people of the internet. Hello. Many things are up. Things are up. Mordy Oberstein: Hopefully your rankings are up. Dad joke/SEO joke. Crystal Carter: We want all green arrows, every time. Mordy Oberstein: Someone was telling me that, because we're in the middle of, as we're recording this, some fluctuations on the SERP, and their boss was asking about, "Oh, why did our rankings on page two go down?" And they're like, "Why do we care?" Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: We went from page two to page three, whatever shall we do? Crystal Carter: How come no one's coming to my MySpace page? Because what? Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Crystal Carter: Don't worry. Pick your battles there. Mordy Oberstein: Bigger fish to fry. Or if you don't like frying fish, bigger fish to bake. Crystal Carter: This is true. You could bake it. Mordy Oberstein: I like fish baked more than I like it fried. Anyway, the SERP’s Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can empower your [SEO] content strategy with the power of Semrush directly inside of the Wix platform. It's all part of Wix's SEO set up checklist, research keywords and topics, along with metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and even user intent with our Semrush integration. It's like my two worlds combined with that one. So on today's show, geez, Crystal, we better make sure the bots are happy, happy, happy, right? Crystal Carter: S-bots must be very happy. Mordy Oberstein: But wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Crystal Carter: Bots have happy. Mordy Oberstein: Do bots, or search engines, do they pay you money? Crystal Carter: No. No. I've asked. Mordy Oberstein: But I do not get a positive response, because guess what? People, people pay you money. But if I worry about the people, who will worry about the bots? Don't worry, Optimus Prime will. He's their father. Anyway. But if you're worrying about not worrying about the bots, fear not fair SEO for thou art in great luck, for the days of user first SEO are not just nigh, they are upon thee. That is correct. Today we are talking about why worrying about the user and not the bot, believe it or not, is actually good for the bots. That was circular. But who would've thunk. From the research phase to how the Google algorithm is structured, we're diving into why user first SEO matters, with tips of the trade from SEO's own John Bonham, Little Zeppelin reference for you there. Michel Fortin will stop by and share some of his tips with you. We'll also sit down with Wix's own SEO product manager, Einat Hoobian-Seybold, to talk about her approach to putting users first and how that plays out in SEO product development. And of course, we have the snappiest of news for you and who you should be following. Actually a bonus, two people who you should be following on social for SEO awesomeness. Let's let the good times roll, as episode eight of the SERP’s Up podcast is on. Crystal Carter: It's on. Mordy Oberstein: It's on. I almost feel like breaking to song, let the good times roll. Crystal Carter: You bet. This is a very musical introduction there, Mordy, with the John Bonham there. Mordy Oberstein: Totally by accident. Totally by accident. Michel Fortin, by the way, plays the drums and he's awesome, and he's going to stop by. Crystal Carter: He's a really good drummer. He's got his drumming on his website and it's exceptional. He's a very funky drummer. He's a very good drummer. Mordy Oberstein: It's awesome. And he's an awesome SEO who talks a lot about user first SEO, so it's completely makes so much sense. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of user first SEO, Crystal, what are we talking about, user first SEO? Crystal Carter: Yeah, so the thing about user first SEO, one of the reasons why we're talking about this, one of the reasons why it's a little bit of a hot topic is because with their recent algorithm update, Google's announced that they are sort of encouraging or incentivizing people to be creating content. Specifically, they said, "Create content for people, not search engines." Who'd have thunk it? Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thunk that? That's crazy talk. Crystal Carter: Right. In their documentation, they say that the goal is to make sure that when users visit the site, they can find original, helpful content written by people for people, and that it has a satisfying user experience for site visitors. Now, the thing about this is that this is essentially user first content. This is content that is thinking about what the user wants, not necessarily thinking about what hacks, what gimmicks you can use to get to the top of the SERP, but rather thinking about something that's actually made for humans. And this follows on from some of the updates that Google updated in the past, like the Panda update, which really rocked this SEO landscape because it was talking about reducing black hat SEO techniques and reducing the prevalence of that information in the SERP. And when I say SERP, I mean search engine result pages. And what that means is that when people go to Google, they can actually achieve their goals, because I think what people forget sometimes is we think that Google and SEO is about websites, and it pretty much is, but if you go to Google's page how Search works, they explained that their goal is to provide information. They don't say that their goal is to drive traffic to websites. They say their goal is to provide information. And so, this kind of algorithm update, like Panda before it, is the kind that makes sure that they're providing high quality information for people that visit Google. And in order to make it high quality, you need to put the user first. So content creators who do this, and you'll know these content creators when you find them, whether it's on a website or whether it's on YouTube or whether it's on any other platform, they're very clear to address their user's needs. So they'll say, "A lot of people have asked me about this topic and I want to talk about it now." Or they'll share content that people that users have requested. So this is something that Google themselves do. They have a series called Ask Google Bot. And John Mueller will say, "Mordy Oberstein asked me this question on Twitter and I'm answering it here." And there's YouTube channels that I follow where they'll say, "What do you want me to cover next?" And the users will say that and they will cover that for them. They'll test content with their users before publishing it. So Instagram, good Instagramers will do a story and they'll see who replies to it and what kinds of things people are interested in, and then they'll do a longer post later on. There's lots of different techniques that you could do, but putting your user first is really important. And it's something that Google's laid out in a lot of different documentation. The information about the helpful content update from Google is very, very clear with information around that. And also, if you want to do a really deep dive, you can have a look at something called the Quality Rater Guidelines, which is the documentation that Google gives to their team, to their humans and their team to help them determine what is a good quality website. Yeah, it's a really good idea. It gives you lots really good ideas of what makes good content that is made for users. Mordy Oberstein: And that's really the point. Back in the day with the algorithm, there was one way of running for humans and one way of running for bots, and even helpful content updates aside, what Google's been doing, I would say since circa 2018 with the new series of core algorithm updates... And if you look at their documentation around how should you respond to being hit by one of the core algorithm updates, it's very similar. It's all about writing really good content, really helpful content. And what they've been doing algorithmically is basically trying to think qualitatively the way a human could, and sort of mimicking that. And Danny Sullivan from Google's talking about, "Yeah, we look at quality," by the way, quality is for the entire site, a site wide metric, not a per page metric, "And we try to mimic through the algorithms how a person would qualitatively assess the quality of the webpage." So now the algorithm and the user have been synced up in a lot of ways. Is it a hundred percent perfect? Is it a hundred percent there? No. Will it every be? Probably not. But directionally, and way, way, way more than it ever was before. And if you look at people like, I'll say Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray, Marie Haynes, maybe myself, Dr. Pete from over at Moz, when they write about their analysis of the updates, so basically showing you, "Yeah, Google's looking at things like tone and looking at things like the quality in this way and the quality in that way," and now when you put the user first, at the same time, and this is a key point, you're also putting Google first. It's not different anymore. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that what we're seeing is Google puts a lot of emphasis on EAT, which is expertise, authority, and trust. And that document that you mentioned, the one that they always put out whenever there's an algorithm, what SEO should know about or website owners should know about Google updates, talks about expertise, authority, and trust. And there's lots of different ways that you can demonstrate that on a website. And it's essentially like if you asked someone for advice and they gave you advice on something, you would want to know how they were qualified to give you that advice. So if you go and talk to a doctor and then they say, "Oh, I think it might be," I don't know, appendicitis or something like that, you assume that they know what they're talking about, because they're in a doctor's office, they've got their certificates up on the wall, you know who they are. Similarly, if you go to a website and they're giving you advice or they're giving you information about one topic or another, it's very important that you know who they are, that they have an about page that talks about who they are. We recently did a webinar with Semrush around about pages, to talk about some of those elements. But it's also important that you have an address if it's a place of business. I saw recently someone, there was somebody who got in touch or somebody who was online saying, "Oh, I don't know why my webpage for a hotel isn't ranking," and it was a hotel that didn't have an address. And I was like, "That is red flags." Mordy Oberstein: Conceptual hotel. Crystal Carter: That's red flags. Mordy Oberstein: It's where my mind stays. Crystal Carter: It's, "Oh, book, book where, where is this?" Mordy Oberstein: In the ether. It's in the ether. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you think about some of the websites that do really well, if you think about something, so Airbnb, for instance, is something like that, that they have doubled down. They have multiple layers of verifying who is who and trying to make sure that it's very clear, that you're talking to an actual person that's actually in a place and these people are... Then there's agreements and there's all this sort of stuff. Similarly, Google's trying to make sure that when somebody comes to their website and tries to find out, I don't know, how far it is from the earth to the moon or any kind of information, that they're able to get it from a valid source. Because if people are not getting good quality information from Google, then people won't come to Google. And Google wants to make sure that they're keeping their users happy by giving them good quality information. Mordy Oberstein: You make a great point where you're talking about how people are looking at a website, "Can I trust this website? Are they authoritative? They have expertise?" And that's really, if you want to talk about how you create user first content, that's kind of how you do it. You look at it from the lens of the user. One way, I call it the brand sniff test. You go to a webpage and you immediately, because you're a brand, they're going to realize it's, "Oh, machines and AI and Google's so smart and machines are so smart." Your brain is AI on steroids. It takes a look at something, and in three seconds or 0.3 seconds, it takes a million different signals. And without you consciously being aware of it, it's like, "Yeah, I've completely judged this already." You go to a webpage and it's an HTML table from 1999, you go, "I'm not trusting this thing." Even might have great content. If you think, "Okay, how do I know I've created user first content, outside the fact that you know where your heart is? Leaving that aside for a second, if you look at the page and you think, "Okay," from a branding point of view, "What are the latent signals that this page sends? Is the tone right, is the layout friendly? Is it digestible? Is it well structured? Does it give off a sense that this page is well intentioned, trustworthy, and has my best interest in mind?" And if you feel like you know it does, then you've probably created user first content. Crystal Carter: And I think, also, if you're getting good feedback from your users, then that will also tell you this. For instance, if you've got people coming to your Google business profile and they're asking the same questions over and over again, they probably can't find that information on your website. If you're having people calling you and asking you for the same information over and over again, they probably can't find that information on your website. You should probably make some information, that kind of information on your website. If you've got people who, "Oh, yeah. I saw this on your page and I thought it was great," or "This was really...", then that's information that you're providing that's clearly good for users. So there's lots of different signals that you can get around that. I know some people put reviews on their blog, just regular blogs, not necessarily a recipe blog, but just a regular blog, "Did you find this content helpful? What do you think of this content?" Three stars, five stars, whatever it is. And you can sort of understand, you can get actual direct feedback from people about whether or not it's helpful, whether or not it's useful. And there's lots of different elements and different factors that can help you to demonstrate that and help you to understand that. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. And it really all starts with your mindset. I know you have a whole article about this, I think, where if you're looking at it, I'm was going to go to a keyword research tool and I'm going to plug it in and whatever, and pull out the data and I'm going to... that's probably not the place to start, in my mind. When you're trying to start writing content for the web, for both bots and users, it starts with empathy and understanding your audience, and being able to tap into their mindset. Because now you're going to create content that actually helps them because you actually feel bad for them. Like, "Oh, you have a pain point here? I would love to help you with that." Crystal Carter: Right. I've sometimes written articles, so I remember writing a piece that was around different sources for structured data or something like that. And I use it myself. It was basically, it was a bookmark thing that I put together. And the reason why I put it together was because I couldn't find one. So I think that's one of the things, if you're trying to think about user first, try to be mindful of your experience as a user and the things that irritate you as a user, the content that you don't like as a user. It says something in the description and you get to the page and it's completely different. That can be annoying. Or Google in their helpful content notes talks about the kinds of things where they're saying, "Are you trying to give an answer to a question that doesn't have an answer?" Like when is this show coming out and they haven't announced it and you're just trying to get on the SERP or something, that sort of thing. If you find that irritating, don't make that content. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Remember that. When I was looking at this, a lot of the people that... I spoke to lots of different SEOs about how they create content for users, and they talk to users. And sometimes this can be interviews or sometimes this can be going through CRM information. So if you are using something like Salesforce or that sort of thing where people are raising tickets regularly or raising customer service queries, you can go through that information and see the ones that come up regularly, and you can help your customer service team by giving them the information that they need and help users at the same time. And with regards to the keywords, not to say that keywords and using keywords tools, not to say you shouldn't use them, but think of the user first and then use the keyword tools just to make sure that you're actually hitting some of the actual terms. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you're refining and gaps you haven't missed, those sort of things, because I've done this before myself. The questions you get from, actually, users are completely different. Crystal Carter: Right, completely. And especially if you're looking into a new space where you think about keyword tools, a lot of times they're using historical data. And it's fantastic. It's amazing to have that kind of data there. But Google said, I think, 15% of queries are new queries. So if you're going into a new space, you're launching a new product, then you're going to need to get new content for that and you're going to need to get that to users. And if you're not somebody who wants to do lots and lots of interviews and stuff, that's okay. There's lots of different things you can look- Mordy Oberstein: Forums and social. Crystal Carter: Forums. Yeah. Reviews. You can do a poll. I sometimes go through Slack channels, Slack messages. You can talk to juniors if you're trying to... Training juniors is incredibly useful because juniors will go, "What is a acronym? I don't know what that means." And they want to know. They want to know. So you can create something that's good for the juniors in your team and also is useful for users who are in the same place, where they want to know desperately, so they need it to be- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... accessible. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're still doubting, well, doing all of this and putting the user first and, I want to say abandoning, slightly abandoning traditional, what you might think is traditional SEO, is that's not going to help me rank, think about what's coming down the pike. MUM is coming down the pike, it's Google's new AI 1000, machine learning rather, 1000 times more powerful than Byrd, it's previous most powerful machine learning property, blah blah blah. One of the things that MUM is doing, it's Google's own example, and they gave an example of something like, "I hiked Mount Adams, now I want to hike Mount Fiji in the fall. What do I need to do to prepare differently?" Something like that. Crystal Carter: That's so many words. That's got too many words, by the way. Mordy Oberstein: But the coolest part is that they show you how they parse the word prepare. Does it mean to equipment, I need to know what equipment I need, or training? Is that what you mean to prepare? And Google's like, "Now we're going to show results about both." And you could probably parse it a million times over. So if Google's going to be parsing topics into smaller subtopics like, "Oh, preparing for a hike." It means equipment. It could mean tips, it could mean food, it could mean trading. The only way that you are going to be able to parse a topic down the same way so that you have the opportunities to rank, that are afforded to you on what's going to be the new search results page is by identifying and empathizing with your audience. Like oh, if someone's going on a hike and they have to prepare, what do they really need? Well, they might need this, they might need that, they might need that. Let me create content about that. So we will most definitely help you rank to put the user first, because that's the only way you're going to be able to create the right content. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that if you're thinking about actually answering the question... Again talking to children is another good one. I have a kid and he asks me questions all the time and he's very capable of understanding if I explain it to him the way that he wants, but he wants a full answer. Kids will just keep asking why, so make sure that you give a full answer for whatever the question, and genuinely get involved. Mordy Oberstein: Like a real substance targeted, nuanced content. Now speaking of questions, we have a question for Michel Fortin, the director of search marketing over at seoplus+. Hey Michel, how do you check yourself to ensure you always keep the user first, not bots? Take it away. Michel Fortin: In SEO and in business, in general, many people tend to think the other way around. They think that we should focus on our product, it's the best things since sliced bread, and then we focus on our marketing because we think that people just need our product. The thing is, is actually the other way around, we should be solving a problem, we should be helping out our market. SEO is no different. We have to keep the user first in mind. Yes, we should be leading with our product, but we also are creating a solution to a problem. So it makes sense that we should focus on the problems that our users are experiencing and we help to solve them, in that case when they're making a search. So to keep the user first, you need to at least start with the user first. To borrow a quote from Steven Covey, "First things first is to put first things first." And it really does mean that in the case of SEO, as in any other form of marketing, because SEO is just a channel for marketing, it's really about putting the user first and thinking about their pain points. I always say this, that to really rank well, to be visible actually is a better way to say it, to really be visible in search engines, you need to do what Google really wants you to do. It's the same thing, we share the same goal, which is to create quality content and a quality user experience. So appeal to your market and optimize those things for their sake and you will naturally appeal to search engines too. In marketing, I think the single biggest challenge is to think like our audience. And I say it's a challenge because we tend to always think that our audience are like us or that we know what our audience wants or what they're thinking about or what their needs are. And there's a famous quote from a mentor of mine from many, many years ago who said, "You are never your own market." And in my previous life, I was a copywriter, we always focused on trying to tell our clients that they are never their own market. Well, SEO is the same. Either we think we know or we expect they know. And that's true also for research engines as it is for the audiences that we are trying to go after. And both are wrong. Both of those notions are wrong. We have to think of our market, we have to think like our market. Think about it this way, Google is always doing split tests all the time. It's always testing and changing and adding new search features. And if things don't work out, I mean how many products have we seen Google put out and it basically didn't last too too long because it just flopped or it didn't really do well or it wasn't... The man wasn't there. Remember Google+? But the thing is, with SEO is that we have to think like our market. We have to think for a market. We have to provide the solution that our market wants. I want to end with this, there's a book on marketing in general, but it's called Scientific Advertising. It was written in 1923 by Claude C. Hopkins. And he said something that was really interesting, "The product itself should be its own best salesman." But here's what he said next in his book that is the most important part, "Almost any question can be answered by a test campaign. The court of last resort is the buyers of your product. No one knows people's desires enough to get an average viewpoint. If you want to know whether your product will work, do a test campaign." Now, the reason why I mentioned this in the context of SEO is when we try to optimize something before we put it up, we are thinking about how Google will see it, but we are ignoring the users of our product. Don't think of the ranking factor or factors first and then create content and the user experience to match that. Think of the user first. Create great content, great experience for them. Then think how you can match that to the ranking factors. I think in SEO we tend to forget that there's a word in there called optimization. And optimization applies that it has to be done after something already exists. We optimize something like content or user experience. We optimize what we provide our users so that they're seen by or ranked by or indexed by search engines. Too often we create content and user experience that focuses on search engines, or we will focus on the user but the search engines are dictating the development, so that's why it's not really optimizing after the fact. We're doing it as we go along. Yes, there's always going to be a place for technical SEO. There's always going to be a place for things that we can apply and optimize that will be appealing to the search engines. But put the user first, then optimize. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? He's so right. And it really, as we spoke about, comes out to mindset. The way I put it is started thinking like a marketer almost, because marketers have been doing this for a long time. I know in SCL, "This is so new, think about the user," but marketer doing this forever. It's time to start thinking more like a traditional marketer in a lot of ways as part of your SEO process. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. And I think that when you do that it makes it more than just ranking. It actually means that you're actually connecting with the audience. So some of the YouTubers, for instance, that I really like, do this a lot. The last audience are together, and then it feels like it's a conversation. When you're literally user first, when a user says to you, "Oh, I don't understand this thing, can you help me?" And you write them a blog or you do the thing, and then you come back to them and you're like, "Hey, remember that thing you asked me about? Here it is." Do you know, they will go to you first the next time they need something that's in your niche, they will go to you first because they'll say, "Well, I trust this person. And if I get stuck, I trust that they'll help me in some way." So it's more than just ranking. It's also about building literal trust, building relationships with your audience. And I think that Google talks a lot about audiences. He was talking a lot about audiences there as well, and about making sure that you are thinking about something that is actually of value to the people that you're connecting with. Mordy Oberstein: Do you know who thinks of value with the people that they're connecting with and who always puts users first and not? Crystal Carter: Oh, yes, [inaudible 00:24:18] she absolutely does. Mordy Oberstein: Einat is a master at this. And she's a master of getting into the minds of the people that she's trying to help. Einat is also the product manager here at Wix for SEO tool set and development. So who would've thunk? What better person then to sit down and chat about how to put users first within an SEO context other than Einat? So join us now as we reach for the stars and go across the Wixverse with our own SEO product manager Einat Hoobian-Seybold. Audio: Three, two, one, ignition, lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So we're here with Einat. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We've cornered you. We finally got you on the podcast. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: I'm happy to be here. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. We're really happy to have you because when we were sitting down, we were talking about doing an episode on user first SEO and how important that is. The person who immediately came to both of our minds was Einat, because your job is literally to put users first. And so many different kinds of users and it's so complicated. So we just wanted to pick your brain about how you put Wix's users first when developing our SEO product. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Well, that's an interesting questions because, first of all, what is Wix users, because we have a variety of users? We have the DIYs, the self-creators, the moms and pops, if you would like, which are just building their small business and they don't know much about SEO. And we have the professionals ones that are SEO professional, that are marketers. They need a lot more things and we need to dance in between. And every time I build a product, I don't build it for one of them, I build it for all of them. And that's the tricky part, because I need to take into consideration all their needs. I need to give the DIY users everything they need in order to have the best SEO without them understanding or without them knowing a lot. So that's why I will create lots of defaults and things that will be created for them with minimum effort or knowledge for their side. But in the same time, I will want to create full customization for the professional users. I want to allow them to have workflows. I want to allow them to have automation to save their time, that they will be able to do anything they want in the platform. I don't want the platform to minimize them in any way. Every time I build a product, I need to cater both of them. So I need to protect the DIYs and I need to give the full customization for our users. And it varies, so a lot of time I will give the basic information in the first view and then I will allow users, advanced users, to find what they can do more. Like I said, I will build a lot of defaults for the users, which is also beneficial for the professional one. For example, in Wix we create a lot of default structure data. I can recognize the page of the user, I know what it is. And for example, if you have a product page, I can already build you the structure data with all the information that you need. So it's, of course, extremely valuable for our DIYs, so they don't know structured data, they for sure don't know how to write it, so I already did it for them. And it's also extremely beneficial for the professional because I saved their time. It's automatically built to work in scale and, of course, they can customize it. If the default that I build is not enough for them, they want to change, they want to edit, they can do it as well. Crystal Carter: And I think this is a great example because one of the things I really like about the structure data customization options is that you have the default, which is great out of the box but, for instance, if you wanted to edit it, it also has a validator, so it tells you if you've misplaced your syntax and won't let you submit incorrect schema markup. The other thing I think is great about Wix is structured data customization options is there are variables, so variables already exist within the platform. I've previously had to build these myself and it can be very time consuming and sometimes inconsistent. So I think that's a great example of something that works for lots of different users. One of the things I also think is great, from observing you and the way that you roll out these products, is how you test them. Can you talk to us a little bit more about your testing process, about how you test to make sure that what you're building is good for your users? Einat Hoobian-Seybold: It's true that almost everything that we do in Wix, we test, because we don't know everything. Even if I know SEO and I know product and I know my users, still, reality is different and we really need to see how users behave and if users understand what they see and what they need to do, so we test everything. Every time I will make a major product or a major change, I will run an A/B test. I will start with 50% of the population. I will start with one market, because in Wix we have over 20 market. I will start with one dedicated one in order to really understand the effect of this new feature or this new tool. And I really will, I will run it 50% A/B test and I will see the effect, first of all, on the existing reality that we live in. We live in Wix in SEO, specifically in a very complex environment. We have lots of tools, again, we have lots of users, so I want to make sure that I didn't harm anything else, that by creating this new feature or by creating this new tool that everything else that our users are known and used to, stays the same and I didn't shake the boat too much. So I will test this and I will test also regarding the feature that I just launched. I will test the specific APIs that I want to reach with this tool, whether if there's usage in the tool, I will understand really how users behave in the tool. And I think one thing that is important to note, we don't only look on the quantitative data, we also look on the quality of data. I will see sometimes numbers and this is working well and this is not, but I want to understand why. For example, right now we ran a test, we added, we have the SEO wiz, we just added a new section GBP, the Google Business Profile to it, and it worked amazingly for Google Business Profile users, created extremely well, more locations as success verification. Was amazing. But it did affect the SEO with the checklist that we have. The KPIs of this affected it. I know that those KPIs, if you complete the checklist, if you move forward, it's improve your SEO, so I don't want to do that. I don't want to create any new feature, I will kind of sabotage the user success because this is really what lead us; user success, how we guide them to success. So what we did is we look at the data and we try to understand what's going on. And we understand that a lot of users, in order to create a Google Business Profile, they need to go out to Google Business Profile, which is in another place. And we participated this. We already added some CTAs to go back to the SEO wiz, to the checklist, but they weren't permanent enough and we saw that users are not seeing this. They are being sent out by me, but they don't come back. So what we did is, first of all, I looked at the full story, which is a tool that we use a lot to understand how user interact with our tools because sometimes just the data of the CTA is not enough. We need to know what he did before and if did he get lost or not. And we understand that they don't see the way to go back to where they were. So now we are improving it in terms of UI and in terms of content. And I will be glad to update you once the test will be done. Mordy Oberstein: We would love to be updated. So let me ask you real quick, because I know we're reaching the end of our allotted time together. Let's take it back a step. When you have so many things to develop, let's say, or multiple things you could be developing, how do you decide which one to do first? What goes through your thought process and how does the user factor into that and how do you really know which makes the most sense? Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Yeah, that's true. I think the most painful part of being a product manager that you have to prioritize is you have to decide what you do now and you won't do everything that you want. Because I have tons of plans, but I need to prioritize and I need to scale them down a lot of times. So I have lots of, I will say information sources that I use in order to decide what I do now. The bottom line is impact, is how do I help my users? What I do now is for my users. Will it, like I said, drive them towards success or not? So I have lots of information. I have, first of all, data. I look a lot of data of users and what they do and what they are missing and where they get stuck. And we have an SEO in Wix. We have a team, a dedicated team of SEO domain experts, data, the guys that are connected the most of the industry and they know what is needed, what are we lacking of, what do we need to do next. And so, I rely a lot of their recommendation. I do a lot of research and I really, really look at support information, support tickets, what our users are struggling with, what are coming to support. I talk a lot with the users and I really call our users and we talk about them. And all of this is driving me towards decision of what I need to do. That's the first step, what is missing. And then how do I prioritize this? It will be mainly on a impact. What will close a gap that I missing the most that will help our users? Or what will bring more value to my users? And this is what guides me when I prioritize the products. Crystal Carter: And I love these conversations because whenever we're like, "Oh, what about this?" you're like, "What about the users? How is this going to help the users?" Mordy Oberstein: Yep, so true. Crystal Carter: "How is this going to help the users? This is very interesting, Crystal, how are we going to help the users with this?" Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Einat, thank you so much for stopping by. It's really been a first class look into the mindset of putting a user first and what that looks take from a product point of view. And it really applies to anytime you put a user first, whether it be for a product or service or for a website itself. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Exactly. Thank you. I really enjoyed being with you. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we'll have to have you back again. Talk to you later. Einat Hoobian-Seybold: Bye. Audio: Three, two, one, ignition, lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: She is so lovely. Always. Every time I speak with her, I always enjoy... Super calm under pressure too. Always pleasant. Everyone's like, "Oh no, what do we do?" She's always so calm. Crystal Carter: I am always in awe whenever I hear... Einat will give us presentations on all the different stuff that we do and she just. Yeah, exactly, always super calm, super organized, very committed to the project of making Wix SEO stack as best as it can possibly be for our users. It's phenomenal to work alongside Einat. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And it's great talking to her and being able to talk to her with our audience, because now you actually know one of the key people who has made our SEO product so evolved. And it's really, was a great pleasure to talk to Einat. Crystal Carter: And user first, just user first stuff, she constantly Slack messages, she's constantly, "Yeah, I'm just responding to questions that our users have about various different things." She's very much involved with making sure that things are user first. Mordy Oberstein: 1000%. Let's snap to it, because now it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Well, I guess the pandemic is behind us. I mean, Google did just announce that Google Business Profile health and safety attributes are being kicked to the curb. That's right. Per Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Business Profile removes health and safety attributes." Google business profile attributes, by the way, are little tidbits of info that help users better understand services and structure of a business, for example, that are attributes that let you know of an establishment is wheelchair accessible or there are attributes that let you know that a business is owned by a woman, it's woman led or it's veteran led or so forth. During COVID, Google introduced the option to display health and safety attributes like a mask being required or staff gets temperature checks, et cetera. These are now gone. Why is that important? Well, less so for SEO or there's no ranking that's involved in it if it's gone from all business profiles and users won't expect it to be there at all, so if you don't have it, it's not like your competitors have it. This is more, in my mind, a general marketing point, as it's a strong statement of where the world is and where your potential customers might be currently at. And with that, this is the snappiest of Snappy News. Another wonderful week of SEO news. Crystal Carter: So newsy. Mordy Oberstein: So newsy. It's always newsy in the SEO world. All right, before we have to duly depart, it's really important that we share with you who we think you should be following for more SEO knowledge. And when it comes to being user first and user first friendly, we have two people for you, because it's such an important topic, we thought what person wasn't enough. And we couldn't decide on which person to showcase. So we're like, "Let's do both. Why not do both?" Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Two is better than one. When you have pie, they're like, "Oh, do you want the cherry pie and the blueberry pie?" Then they have a combination of it too. Oh, my god, I'll take that. Crystal Carter: Which pie do you want? Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All. Yes. I love pie, by the way. Crystal Carter: Pie's good. Mordy Oberstein: Here, by the way, is the cherry on your pie in the SEO industry when you're trying to think of being user first. I did it on the fly, I'm so proud of myself. What do we have? Who's your follow of the week or our follow week, but who are you going to showcase, Crystal? Crystal Carter: I would love to give a shoutout to Adriana Stein. She is a writer, she's in SEO and does some incredible user first content. One of the things that she does really often is she regularly speaks directly to people about how they approach content, how they approach different technical tactics, so she'll get on her Twitter account and she'll ask questions. She'll say, "How do you do this? What do you think of that?" And people respond to her and she uses that to help shape her content and how she makes content. And I think it's a great approach and I think she's really good at it. I think her content's really great. So she's someone who's really worth following. She does a lot of stuff with some of the industry's best publications, so it's really good to follow her for that advice and for just seeing how she works. Mordy Oberstein: And her Twitter account is so conversational and so engaging, so it's absolutely worth the follow. It's @adrianakstein, A-D-R-I-A-N-A-K-S-T-E-I-N. Of course, we'll link to her profile in the show notes. And bonus follow of the week- Crystal Carter: Bonus. Mordy Oberstein: ... the man who I will say is so dedicated and passionate to making sure the web actually has good content on there. He's Google's own John Mueller. Crystal Carter: John Mueller. Mordy Oberstein: Is a saint by the way, an absolute saint. I love John. He's hilarious as well. So it's a great follow for many reasons. But I remember when the product review update was first rolling out, maybe it was the second iteration of it, I can't remember which one it was. And people were saying, "Oh, why do we need this? Why is it there?" And John was just calling it as he saw it. No, because there's a lot of really not great content out there around product reviews. And it's so true. And John will literally just tell you like, "No, this is how it really is and this is why we needed improvement." I always say John Mueller is an advocate for Google, but he is also an advocate for a better web and a better web starter, I think, with better content. I think John is a prime example of someone who speaks of that. And I really do appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I think he's great. I think also the other thing that's great about John is that SEO, everyone's coming to SEO from different spaces. You might be an expert in one field and a beginner in another, and he speaks to everyone in the same way. So in his Webmaster Office Hours would very regularly speak to users from all different backgrounds, whatever questions they had. And he always did his best to answer every single question in those spaces. And it is something that is incredibly user first because that gives you a very clear finger on the pulse of the kinds of questions that people have. And he uses that to shape the content that he shares. I think that he's a pillar in that community. Mordy Oberstein: He's just simply wonderful. He's simply wonderful and- Crystal Carter: He's great. Mordy Oberstein: ... honestly, he brings joy to my day sometimes when you're on Twitter and is like things are not going great. John is wonderful. Anyway, it's @john, J-O-H-N-M-U, as in Mueller, John Mueller. And we'll link, of course, to John's profile in the show notes. And that's going to do it for us. Thank you for joining us on The SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into the controversy that is AI writers. AaaaaaaaaI writers, if you're Fonzie. Crystal Carter: Can we just call it AI the whole time? Mordy Oberstein: AI writers. Wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars that we have on the Wix SEO Learning, I bet 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

Have we grown past the pursuit of the almighty link above every other SEO tactic? Certainly, since Google released the Penguin update in 2012, addressing link farms and other issues associated with people gaming the system, the idea of getting as many links as you can is not the path toward ranking. But still, links are a factor. So where do links legitimately fit into a solid SEO strategy? Mordy and Crystal carve up the links and their role in SEO like the Halloween Jack-o-lantern. There’s a shift of mindset that has to occur in SEO. Both Mordy and Crystal agree that there is an over-emphasis on links for SEO. To them, links are fundamentally about traffic and helping users. Creating quality content that makes sense to link to is fundamental and earns market credibility, not “link juice.” Back Are links everything SEOs make them out to be? Have we grown past the pursuit of the almighty link above every other SEO tactic? Certainly, since Google released the Penguin update in 2012, addressing link farms and other issues associated with people gaming the system, the idea of getting as many links as you can is not the path toward ranking. But still, links are a factor. So where do links legitimately fit into a solid SEO strategy? Mordy and Crystal carve up the links and their role in SEO like the Halloween Jack-o-lantern. There’s a shift of mindset that has to occur in SEO. Both Mordy and Crystal agree that there is an over-emphasis on links for SEO. To them, links are fundamentally about traffic and helping users. Creating quality content that makes sense to link to is fundamental and earns market credibility, not “link juice.” Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 10 | October 26, 2022 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 34:06 This week’s guests Debbie Chew Debbie Chew is an SEO Manager at Dialpad with over 8 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and is passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by our ever awesome, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. I'm sorry I'm joking. Crystal Carter: Too much awesomeness. This was... and this when were doing the hello. It's like, "Let's get ready to optimize." Mordy Oberstein: So I don't know if you can hear this cause we were editing at or not, but I'm coughing because I'm still choking on a piece of cereal that I ate three hours ago. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: And you know... Yeah, and you know where you get a little tiny piece of like whatever stuck in the way, way back? It's like a piece of cereal dust that's stuck in the back of my throat and when I talk I feel like I'm like going to cough every time. Crystal Carter: Well, okay, what kind of cereal are you working with? Coco Puffs or Mordy Oberstein: I wish it's like this really high fiber, low taste. Crystal Carter: Oh, mate, mate, that's so grown up. Mordy Oberstein: I know, right? Crystal Carter: You need to optimize your breakfast for fun, too. Mordy Oberstein: So I buy, buy the sugar cereals for the kids and my mom's like, "Why are you buying?" Because it's so good. Everyone loves them. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves it. And it turns the milk pink. Drink water. Mordy Oberstein: I've been drinking water. It's all gone. Not good. Crystal Carter: It's the Crystal podcast. Okay. SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can leverage your client's SEO budget to the max by taking advantage of our enterprise level security and reliability. So you don't spend as much time fixing things that are broken as much as you spend time creating and expanding the growing and maximizing your client's budget along the way. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for doing that. I clearly can't... I don't know how we're going to get through this show because every time I start talking that piece of cereal comes right back up in my throat. Crystal Carter: It's a cereal... Mordy Oberstein: It's a cereal podcast killer. Anyway, let's all join together today and talk about, not about cereal or killers. Let's talk about what's was probably killing your SEO strategy, an overabundance of conversation about links. I love them. You love them. I don't pay for them, but I love them. They're better than getting a free meal on your birthday at Taco Bell. It's links. But how important are links really for SEO? How important will they be in the future? How do you build links the right way? It's link a'licious today on the SERP's Up podcast as we talk about the true SEO value of links with some tips from Debbie Chew who stops by to pass on her link lineage to you. We'll also have a look at the top of the SERP to see what's up with a funky little SERP feature called "From sources around the web," and as always, a bit of snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Episode 10 of the SERP's Up podcast is on. Crystal Carter: It's our 10th episode? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's crazy. I didn't realize 10, the big 10, o. Crystal Carter: Yay, we're double digit. Mordy Oberstein: Happy birthday to us. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Yay. I should get us a present. Mordy Oberstein: We should have got a cake. Crystal Carter: Yes, we should get a cake. Mordy Oberstein: A whole wheat cereal cake. Crystal Carter: High fiber. Mordy Oberstein: High fiber. Crystal Carter: Very healthy, low sugar, whole wheat. Mordy Oberstein: No taste cake. Crystal Carter: No taste cake. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, links, we're talking about links today. Crystal Carter: We are talking about links. So I'm going to give us just a little background on links. So when we say we're talking about links, in this particular episode, we're not going to be talking about internal links. We're going to be talking about external links. If you want to know more about internal links, if you go to the Wix SEO hub, we had a fantastic webinar with Cyrus Shepherd where he talked all about internal links. And internal links are essentially links on your website to pages within your website. And they're really, really great for lots of things, for navigation and for helping users to find what they need, and lots of great things like that. Cyrus Shepherd has some great resources and some great information about internal links. So do check out that webinar. We're today going to be talking a little bit about external links, also known as backlinks , also known as inbound links. And those are links that go from one website to your website, so from an external website to your website. I sometimes like to think of these as if you were standing in line trying to get into Club Page One, the external link is somebody who's already in the club saying, "Oh, that person's with me," and they're pointing, they're saying, "That person's with me," and they're associating themselves with you to give you a bit more kudos and to maybe get you where you need to get. Now one of the reasons why we're talking about this is because SEOs talk about links all the time. Now why do SEOs talk about links all the time? Mordy, I can see that you want to come in... Mordy Oberstein: Because of, because links have link juice. Crystal Carter: Links have link juice. Links have link juice. I'll get to that. Way back in the day in Google's infancy there was something called page rank algo. And this was a foundational algorithm for Google and it was essentially, the core of it, if you look it up, was about them sort of counting the number of quality links to a page to determine whether or not the page had value. And this was something that they used to estimate the value of the page, and this is something that worked really well for them in 1998 and in the first few years of Google when there were around two million websites in 1998, a few million websites going along there. But by 2011 there were sort of content farms that were taking advantage of this algorithm and Google made their Panda update to try to address link farms and other issues associated with people sort of gaming the system. Today there are billions of websites and we have around 200 signals that tell Google the value of a website when they're looking at it. Links are still a part of it and they're tracked in Google's search console. You can see how many external links and how many internal links you have on your website, but they're not the only factor. However, there's something that can help give Google more signals about the quality of your website, more signals about the content of your website. And they also help Google to find your website through pulling the websites that are linking into you. So that's one of the reasons why we're talking about this today. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and no one's saying, "Links are not important or links are not valuable." I think our point of contention is this idea that links are the ultimate panacea to all things SEO, the ultimate thing you should be doing, you should be buying as many as possible. You should never buy links, by the way, please don't buy links. That's ridiculous nonsense. But it's gotten overstated and I feel like we're in an era of Google and machine learning and natural language processing. They're trying very much to actually understand the content on the page. And what I think people don't realize is that links are a secondary signal. Links are a way, kind of like you said before. "Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm in the club, I'm going to bring you in with me, he's good. He's with me. We're all okay." Turns out I'm a giant nerd and I should never be in the club. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But anyway. Crystal Carter: So, right, and I just say... But I'm not saying right that you're a giant nerd, but if you have a lot of links or if you have a lot of good quality links, it is a signal that says, "Okay, this person's got some backing from some solid folks." But at the end of the day you have to deliver, Google will get to your site and they will see what's on your site. And if the stuff that's on your site isn't relevant to the link that you got, or if the content of your site is a mess or doesn't make sense or is low value or if you have a lot of technical issues, then the value of that link isn't as effective as if it was something that was good and was relevant. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And the whole point is that links are a secondary signal. Google can't use a link to actually understand your content, which is why Google's invested in natural language processing, machine learning so that it can actually understand the content. So we're talking about in the same breath, it's hard to say that Google is doubling down on getting a greater understanding of your actual content through natural language processing and machine learning and links are just as important as they used to be before. It's a total contradiction in my mind conceptually because they do two very different things. Links were initially and still are kind of a way of getting around the fact that we can't fully understand content algorithmically, so let's use links. But if we're better understanding content, then why rely on the link the same way? Doesn't make sense to me. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that also people overlook the functionality of a link. So Google has spiders that crawl websites and they will crawl via links. So they crawl from one link to another link to another link. So if you have lots of links around and if you have good quality links, then you will get crawled more often. Your website will get indexed more regularly. Google will get more information about your website. One of the reasons why people talk about high DA, "high DA websites..." And again DA is not a metric from Google. DA is essentially when a private company is calculating value of the website based on some linking signals that they're able to see. It's kind of a shorthand. It can be useful when you're trying to organize information, but it is not be all end all. But if you think about something like Forbes for instance, that will have a high DA that gets crawled a lot because they're creating a lot of content. And so if you have a link on that website, you're more likely to have that page get crawled by Google than if you don't have a link on that website. Similarly, if you're a website that has no links at all, that's like a tree falls in the woods, nobody hears it. It's essentially you're one website standing alone all by yourself. It's like a house with no driveway, like a house with no road to it. How can anybody get to you? How can anyone find you if you have no links at all? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're going, we don't need roads. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: We have links. Crystal Carter: Right. So it can help a website, but you do, you have to have the quality of website and the quality of the content when people get to it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Especially, in my mind... I hate to say this... I don't think links are about SEO. I think links are about traffic, fundamentally, having a great link from a great relevant website. Let's say you get you a, you like... I don't know, you sell lawnmowers and there's like this ultimate lawnmower website. It's like the ultimate Wikipedia of lawnmowers and you get a link from them to your website and all the lawnmower people who love lawnmowers are going to go to that website, see your link theoretically, and click on... That brings you traffic, that brings you revenue. Good links, meaning links on pages that are relevant from strong high-traffic websites that are not buried 500 clicks deep into their website can bring you more traffic and can bring you more revenue, leaving those aside the SEO value for a minute. Crystal Carter: And I think it's the audience value as well. So I think a lot of times, certainly in the days like pre-Panda and back in the day, SEO people would post on lots of forums and stuff. They put links on there and that, one of the reasons why is because organically speaking, if you have a genuine forum that's lots of people that are interested in lawnmowers or whatever it is, and someone says, "Oh, my gosh, how do I solve this problem?" And someone says, "Oh, I read this great article that was really good, you should check it out. It has all the details. I followed these instructions and it works really well," then that is fantastic for a number of reasons. One, because you've got a link there and other people can see it. It's crawlable, it's searchable. Two, you have someone vouching for your content there. Number three, you also have it in a space where Google understands that people talk about this content regularly and so you're getting information from that website and taking it to your website. So there's lots of different things there. I had a client that used to have a piece of content around equestrian law. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: And they did remarkably well, but they had one site, one piece of content that always did really, really well because it was referenced in a forum in a magazine like an equestrian magazine, where someone's like, "Oh, how do I sort out this litigation issue about my horse?" And they were like, "Yeah, this article's great." And they always ranked really, really well for it. And it was for years, for years and years and years. Because you're saying it's not just about SEO, it's also about customer value. Those are people, are customers, like potential customers who are really interested in that topic and who could really do with some help on that topic. And they're finding somebody who can find them the solution. And that should be what links are about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and by the way, even in that case, maybe it's a Nofollow link, but someone reads it, so this is a great piece of content and they link to it on their website." Crystal Carter: Right, right. And the Dofollow, Nofollow things. So a Dofollow link is what essentially where it's like if we're going back to the Club Page One thing. It's like if someone goes, "Oh, I don't know them," "But they're in your group," "Yeah, but I don't know them." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So Nofollow means that the surgeon is not going to go follow that link through. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So it doesn't count for "your link juice." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or SEO value, per se. Crystal Carter: Right, I'm pretty sure John Mueller said that they use it as a hint. If you have lots and lots of Nofollow links that are all around the same topic, Google can still understand the information there. They just might not put the same weight on it when they're trying to understand it. So for Dofollow it's saying like, "Oh, yeah, they're with me. Absolutely, this is my best friend." Mordy Oberstein: And then Google goes from that page to your page and says, "Oh, I found this new page. Great, and now maybe we'll index it where we didn't index it before." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But I think the overall problem that I think people get, just to bring it all back, that people get kind of messed up with is really the mindset as opposed to this particular link practice versus that particular link practice. I think the core root of it all is this mindset that there's some kind of way to hack the system or there's some kind of way to really quickly without having to create quality user experience or a quality content and a quality whatever, whatever, whatever, "I can just build links. If I could just get someone to link to me that will improve my SEO." And it's created this environment where there's almost an over-emphasis on links and it's really, really easy to get caught up in that, especially if you're newer to SEO for some reason. That's where this sort of link panacea kind of content exists. But the overall point I think we want to get across is that, yes, links are really important for a variety of reasons, but they're not the be all, end all part. They are one part of your SEO strategy. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of the best people that are really, really good at link building, people like Debbie Chew, people like Patty Mugin, people like Amanda Milligan... Mordy Oberstein: Judith Lewis. Crystal Carter: Right, and Bryce at Seven as another good team that does a lot of good actual link building. What they do is they make interesting content, they make really interesting content that people want to link to. So for instance, like reports or information that is really, really interesting, that people really want to actually link to. And also they tend to get people involved. So they'll get people involved as partners in creating the content so that they share it. So if you think about a family photo, if you get everybody in the family photo, they're all going to want to share it and you can tag them all and they'll share it all across their different thing, for instance. Whereas if it's just you, like just a selfie of yourself and you're like, "Isn't my selfie great?" People may or may not share that. You know what I mean? So when you're trying to think of link building, think of it, campaigns tend to work really well and actually giving people information that people actually want to link to rather than going, "Please can I have a link?" Mordy Oberstein: That's like the fundamental point about link building, which we're going to get in some great tips from Debbie Chew in a second. If there's no substance to the thing that you want them to link to, it doesn't work. So that's what I mean. Link building is really part of the whole process. It really should naturally flow with your content creation. It's really like the flip side of it in a lot of ways. And with that, let's get some tips from Debbie Chew on some legitimate link-building tactics. So what are some legit link-building tactics at work? Turning it over to you, Debbie Chew. Debbie Chew: So there are a number of white hat ways to get links . Let me share my top three. So first is guest posting. I think this is quite a common tactic to get links where you publish a blog post on someone else's blog and then within that blog post you'll link to relevant pages on your site. So what's great about guest posting is that you have some control over where that backlink goes to, the anchor text. And if the guest post is genuinely helpful to the blog that you're posting it on, you can raise awareness about your brand and bring in valuable traffic to your site. So most guides out there tell you to google some combination of niche that you want to guest post in and the word guest post or contributor guidelines, things like that. And that'll help uncover some opportunities to get links, but you'll eventually exhaust that list. So what I like to do instead is try to find those needles in the haystack, try to find the industry blogs that are relevant to you and then send them personalized outreach even if they are not advertising that they do guest posts. The second is stats posts. So this is where you choose a topic related to your product and then you find and create a list of stats. So this type of content helps you get links because you're making someone else's life easier. So let's say I have a product that I sell, which is like a social media scheduler tool. So for that I could write a blog post for Twitter stats and someone who is writing a blog post about how to write viral Twitter threads might come across my Twitter stats blog posts. And then they might mention one of the stats that I found and link to my page. And then now the third tactic is to create research reports. So instead of the tactic that I just mentioned earlier about compiling stats from potentially other sources, for this tactic, you're going to create your own. I think it's really overlooked way of getting backlinks. But if we think about what journalists and other writers link to, you'll notice that they tend to link to a recent study, an interesting finding that they came across. So they usually use this to add context to their story or strengthen whatever argument they're making. So doing a research report is all about creating a study that uncovers interesting data on a certain topic, then doing outreach to the right people to link to your findings. What I really like about this tactic of creating a research report is that you, number one, position your business as a thought leader on the topic. Number two, you can get a large number of links and press from just creating one single research report. And then number three, because it takes a lot of effort to do, it's much harder for your competitors to replicate. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Debbie, and that kind of feeds into what we were talking about before, creating that quality content that really makes sense to be linked to is paramount to everything. It's fundamental to everything. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And then she talked about guest posting, she talked about creating big banks of stats and things like that. Where you're doing guest posting, where you're creating banks of stats, statistics, in both cases you will be doing the best for your brand and the best for your customers if you're creating something that's interesting, that is of value to that audience. So if you are guest posting on someone else's blog and you're actually bringing good quality content for that audience, then great, they will link to you. They will link to the resources that you share and that's fantastic. You can also, those links are put there, but also you might get more links off of that if it's of good quality content. And again, the people who you're guest posting with may very well ask you to post again because you're doing something good quality, making the resources, not only do you get more links off of that with people referencing your research, but also people will regularly return to it. So from a traffic point of view, like you were talking about before, there's a couple of big studies. We mentioned Cyrus Shepherd, he did a great study on internal links for instance, which talks about lots of statistics and has lots of different information about the value of links. Lots of people reference that and lots of people go back to it regularly to see... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, it is a great way, [inaudible 00:20:08] that is a great way because you do go back and referencing and it's just so, but especially when it's ever greenish kind of data. Crystal Carter: Right, and it takes time, it takes effort. But a lot of times if you're working in marketing, if you're working in search, a lot of times you're creating a lot of that information anyway. A lot of times you're doing a lot of that research for yourself anyway. So if you can possibly spin that out into something that's public facing. So maybe that one, don't want to share all of the family silver or whatever, if you can spin that into something that's public facing, then that can be something that's beneficial to everyone. And also it positions you as somebody who has expertise and authority in that niche, which is really, really valuable. Not just for links but for your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Theoretically, I've seen this a million times before, as my own data. People will take that data and feature it at conferences when they're doing their talks and so forth. There are really a lot of really good ways to build links. You should definitely do some research around that. I know Ethan [inaudible 00:21:00] has a really cool technique. I'll link to it in the show notes, called the Teammate Technique. I think it's very interesting. I'll again, I'll link to it, have a look at it. So do some research. There are a lot of really creative white hat legit ways of building links that make sense for you and your business. We'd love to dive into this more, but we have a little twist on our little segment that we have called From the Top of the Server. We've done in the past was to take sites that rank well and sites that don't rank well. And we compare the two to pull out some good old SEO lessons. Today though, we want to look at one SERP feature that Google shows at the top of the SERP, to discuss what it might mean for you. Welcome to From the Sources Across the Web version From the Top of the SERP. So when you Google things, I don't know, 50 Books to Read Before You Die or Fruits with Omega Three in them, depending on your geolocation, Google may show a feature at the top of the SERP called Sources from Across the Web, typically more on mobile. And basically it's a list to answer your question. So for Fruits with Omega Three, you get a list that says avocado, mangoes, berries. And you can expand each answer, or in this case each fruit to see a carousel of different pages with different information about the topic or subtopic. Again, in this case fruit. And of course those are all more URLs, more organic exposure theoretically for you. But it's a really, I'm going to say complicated SERP feature. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So I first came across this with the 50 Books to Read Before You Die list and you also see it with some other things around, around things like locations, Wonders of the World and stuff like that, and it's a tricky... Mordy Oberstein: It's really weird ones, by the way. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Like Best Companies to Work For brings it up, at least for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. It's interesting because they're essentially aggregating the information here. They're aggregating what they've seen across the web in lots of different ways. But one of the things that's tricky about it is there aren't as many clear sources as to where it comes from, where they're getting that list. And also it's tricky from a rankings point of view because for instance, with the 50 Books to Read Before You Die, I've got it so that I'm able to see nine of the entries of the 50. Now I know there's 50 because it's 50 Books to Read Before You Die and I can, I'm able to see nine, then it says 15 more and then there's 15 more. So which one's ranking number one there and then underneath 1984, which is the one that shows top, there's another four or five links there, and then there's an opportunity to click through to 1984 and learn more about that and et cetera, et cetera. So when you're trying to understand the positioning of that content, of where your content fits in, when this kind of features at the top of the SERP, it can be a little bit tricky to understand where you fit, what ranks where, what that means. And also I think from a sources point of view, it's interesting to understand where they're getting this content from. Because if I said, "Oh, where'd you hear that from?" And someone said, "Oh, around the web," I'd be like, "Huh, I need more information than that. Like where did you, who told you that?" Mordy Oberstein: It would be good to get more information about it. And what's interesting about it is like, for example, I search for Omega Three Rich Vegetarian Food. So the first thing I get is walnuts, and then I get chia seeds. So first of all, why is walnut first and not chia seed? That's really interesting in its own, right? And it happens to be on mobile this shows up more often, which means that it takes up a lot of space above the fold and you have option to see 12 more of these things. But what I found, check this out, because you might be like, "Okay, you know what, there's actually organic opportunity here." And Google, just so you know, is doing this more and more with Carousel. So for example, if you Google a Best SEO podcast and you click on SERP's Up, it will theoretically show you articles that include the SERP's Up podcast as one of the best SEO podcasts out there, whatever it is. They're doing this more and more and more across the board with these Carousel kind of things. And you might think, "Great, that's more opportunity to get my URL from my website into these things." Just so you know, most SEO, I don't think any SEO rank trackers will be able to track this for you. So that makes it kind of complicated. I think your biggest clue in will be if all of a sudden you see a spike in your search console day, "Where did this come from? Oh, I'm the first URL in one of these sub-expandable tabs in the sources around the web." But let's take Walnut, right? Omega Three Rich Vegetarian Foods, again, I get walnut, I get chia seed, I get flaxseed and I get industrial hemp. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Whatever. And then I expand the Carousel and add a tab and I get a Carousel of articles related to walnut and I open up chia seed, I get a bunch of articles related to chia seed. Guess what? The first URL on the first Carousel card for walnut comes from Medical News Today. The first one for chia seed, Medical News Today. The first one from flax seed, Medical News Today. The first one from industrial hemp, not Medical News Today. By the way, I looked at this for multiple versions of this. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not like just spitting off. There is enormous amount of overlap between the cards and the URLs that they're showing. Crystal Carter: Right, so on the 50 Books to Read Before... Mordy Oberstein: So if you get in one, you're in a bunch. Crystal Carter: So in 50 Books to Read Before You Die, it's greatestbooks.org, the greatestbooks.org is showing 1984 as the first one. So there's Wikipedia and then there's this one, and then it's showing for to Kill a Mockingbird, showing for Pride and Prejudice. And then also they're the first plain blue link on it as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: So it's very interesting in that regard. But it's interesting if they're using that as a main source. It's interesting that it's not referenced in the top part. Instead of it just saying "Sources from around the web," it's interesting that they don't reference from that because if you go to Bing and you look up Omega Three Foods, it says, "Your Omega Three Shopping List" and it has a similar list and then it says, "Data from web.md and earth. this or eatthis.com." So it's interesting that they're able to do it and Google has not done it yet, but maybe they will, going forward. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and again, it makes it difficult if you're trying to rank for one of these kind of keywords and you're not one of these websites that are showing up in the Carousel, what do you do? Because Google seems to, again, I looked it up for Best Companies to Work For, the first URL was in all four of the initial cards that Google showed. One thing I did see that might give you hope, if you're not this dominant URL, because again, it's kind of one of these super authority situations where Google's kind of just pulling in the super authority and showing that URL over and over and over again throughout the different subtopics in the SERP feature. But every once in a while Google throws a YouTube video in there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of YouTube. So yeah, there's a good amount of YouTube in there. So for instance, on the 50 Books Read Before You Die, there's a few of them that include YouTube. They have [inaudible 00:27:42] in there... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so some of these cards use a lot of YouTube. Crystal Carter: So for this one, they've got links to Google Books, as well. So yeah, there's a lot of different elements. It's not just websites that are showing in it. And I think that this is about them creating it... It's kind of rich content. It's not schema enabled, but it's essentially working the same way as a sort of rich content feature would work. But yeah, I think it's an interesting thing and it's interesting to see how they are doing this across the web and how many different topics and ways of repackaging content or displaying content are showing up. Mordy Oberstein: So if you're looking at your data and you're like, "Hey, I'm ranking number one for something or number two for something and I don't get any clicks, what's going on?" Always go to the actual SERP, very helpful. And if you see one of these from Sources Across the Web that's dominating on mobile, the above the fold space on the SERP, and you're not in one of these cards, and you're... "I don't know how I'm going to get into one of these cards." Maybe the best way is a YouTube video. You never know. Crystal Carter: And this is a really good opportunity to sort of make sure that you don't have all your eggs in one basket with regards to your content. So making sure that you're thinking about your content in lots of different ways. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And speaking of not putting all of your eggs in one basket, we need to talk about the news. What does that have to do with eggs in one basket? I have absolutely no idea. But anyway, here is The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Who said you could ever have too many Google updates? Because if it was you take it back. Take it back now. Anyway, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, Google releases October 2022, Spam update. The update actually completed in less than 42 hours. This is Google releasing improvements to the AI that catches a web spam. So if you're doing things like creating helpful, decent content and not engaging in any sort of deceptive practices, you should be fine. If you see your rankings got clobbered, well, then two things. One, have a look at Google's documentation on Web Spam and, two, search your soul. Next item of business from Matt Southern over Search Engine Journal, Google Shopping Searches on Desktop Get more Visual. This is part of the changes Google announced at Search on 2022 about a more visual shopping experience. Well, it hit desktop and now that makes a desktop experience, when it comes to shopping, very similar to mobile. Essentially when you add the word shop to the beginning of a search query, like for example, "Shop kids' toys" and so forth, you're getting mobile like experience with multiple series of cards representing products along with multiple sites where you can buy these products. So it mean there are multiple sites where you could buy a particular product. Anyway, there are more image thumbnails. The SERP seems to be expanded, meaning it's longer, which means more ads by the way. It also means more results I guess to make up for all the space, the multiple series of cards take up. If you sell stuff on the internet and you rely on organic search to sell desktop, you need to check out what the SERP now looks like on desktop and perhaps adjust accordingly. And with that, that is today's Snappy News. Boy, was that newsy and snappy. Crystal Carter: That was news. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That was news, eggs in the basket. Crystal Carter: Those were some new things. And I mean, I was surprised at how egg-based the news was. Mordy Oberstein: It was egg all over my face. Now, before we wrap up, as we always have to do, we love sharing people for you to follow on social media so you can get some more SEO information and some more fun people to follow on Twitter. This week we're talking one of SEO's, premier link building experts. She's been doing SEO for a very long time and is one of the predominant experts on link building. She's the one, she is the only one of my favorites, Judith Lewis. Crystal Carter: Judith Lewis. Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: We love, we love Judith. She's hilarious, first off. So she's a great follow in general, such a great sense of humor. Crystal Carter: She has absolute great sense of humor and she's very active in the SEO community. She's a judge for lots of different... Mordy Oberstein: Search awards, yeah. Crystal Carter: Search awards, and she's very much on top of everything. So she shares a lot of great content and she's somebody who is worth following. So yeah, I would absolutely have a look at what she's doing. She speaks at lot of conferences as well. So she just recently spoke at, I think it was the SEO Octoberfest and she's doing some really great work there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you Google her around link building, there's a lot of great stuff that she has out there. I've interviewed her on another podcast about link building myself, to have firsthand conversations with her about this. She is phenomenal. Definitely keep an eye out for Judith Lewis. You could follow her on Twitter @JudithLewis, amazingly enough. Right? But that's J-U-D-I-T-H, L-E-W-I-S, Judith Lewis, we'll link to that in the show notes. So you can have her Twitter profile and follow her on Twitter. We're basically trying to tell you follow her on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Do that. Crystal Carter: You'll thank us later. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to the end of our podcast. We're done. Crystal Carter: And to Mordy's lunchtime. He's so excited. Mordy Oberstein: I know. So where we schedule this podcast, you don't really care about this, dear audience, but the way this goes, they have to schedule this weekly right before my lunch. I'm a very particular person about when I eat lunch, I need to eat lunch. Crystal Carter: Mordy gets hangry. We need to make sure that he gets lunch. Mordy Oberstein: I do, I get hangry. Crystal Carter: He needs his lunch. Mordy Oberstein: We just taught my 11 year old that word. "Hey, you're hangry." He's like, "What?" "Let me explain this to you. This is why you're upset right now." Crystal Carter: There we go. So he's going to make some links, but... Link between some sandwich events... Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to grab some link juice for lunch. Crystal Carter: No link juice. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Anyway, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new podcast as we dive into our favorite SERP features. Got a bit of a surprise for you with this one. Anyway, look for wherever you could consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check on all of the great content, webinars or resources on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love at SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Debbie Chew Judith Lewis Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Link Building Tactics that Actually Work Link Building Myths for SMBs Internal Link Study by Cyrus Shepard News: Google releases October 2022 spam update Google Shopping Searches On Desktop Get More Visual Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Debbie Chew Judith Lewis Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Link Building Tactics that Actually Work Link Building Myths for SMBs Internal Link Study by Cyrus Shepard News: Google releases October 2022 spam update Google Shopping Searches On Desktop Get More Visual Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by our ever awesome, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. I'm sorry I'm joking. Crystal Carter: Too much awesomeness. This was... and this when were doing the hello. It's like, "Let's get ready to optimize." Mordy Oberstein: So I don't know if you can hear this cause we were editing at or not, but I'm coughing because I'm still choking on a piece of cereal that I ate three hours ago. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: And you know... Yeah, and you know where you get a little tiny piece of like whatever stuck in the way, way back? It's like a piece of cereal dust that's stuck in the back of my throat and when I talk I feel like I'm like going to cough every time. Crystal Carter: Well, okay, what kind of cereal are you working with? Coco Puffs or Mordy Oberstein: I wish it's like this really high fiber, low taste. Crystal Carter: Oh, mate, mate, that's so grown up. Mordy Oberstein: I know, right? Crystal Carter: You need to optimize your breakfast for fun, too. Mordy Oberstein: So I buy, buy the sugar cereals for the kids and my mom's like, "Why are you buying?" Because it's so good. Everyone loves them. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves it. And it turns the milk pink. Drink water. Mordy Oberstein: I've been drinking water. It's all gone. Not good. Crystal Carter: It's the Crystal podcast. Okay. SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can leverage your client's SEO budget to the max by taking advantage of our enterprise level security and reliability. So you don't spend as much time fixing things that are broken as much as you spend time creating and expanding the growing and maximizing your client's budget along the way. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for doing that. I clearly can't... I don't know how we're going to get through this show because every time I start talking that piece of cereal comes right back up in my throat. Crystal Carter: It's a cereal... Mordy Oberstein: It's a cereal podcast killer. Anyway, let's all join together today and talk about, not about cereal or killers. Let's talk about what's was probably killing your SEO strategy, an overabundance of conversation about links. I love them. You love them. I don't pay for them, but I love them. They're better than getting a free meal on your birthday at Taco Bell. It's links. But how important are links really for SEO? How important will they be in the future? How do you build links the right way? It's link a'licious today on the SERP's Up podcast as we talk about the true SEO value of links with some tips from Debbie Chew who stops by to pass on her link lineage to you. We'll also have a look at the top of the SERP to see what's up with a funky little SERP feature called "From sources around the web," and as always, a bit of snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Episode 10 of the SERP's Up podcast is on. Crystal Carter: It's our 10th episode? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's crazy. I didn't realize 10, the big 10, o. Crystal Carter: Yay, we're double digit. Mordy Oberstein: Happy birthday to us. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Yay. I should get us a present. Mordy Oberstein: We should have got a cake. Crystal Carter: Yes, we should get a cake. Mordy Oberstein: A whole wheat cereal cake. Crystal Carter: High fiber. Mordy Oberstein: High fiber. Crystal Carter: Very healthy, low sugar, whole wheat. Mordy Oberstein: No taste cake. Crystal Carter: No taste cake. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, links, we're talking about links today. Crystal Carter: We are talking about links. So I'm going to give us just a little background on links. So when we say we're talking about links, in this particular episode, we're not going to be talking about internal links. We're going to be talking about external links. If you want to know more about internal links, if you go to the Wix SEO hub, we had a fantastic webinar with Cyrus Shepherd where he talked all about internal links. And internal links are essentially links on your website to pages within your website. And they're really, really great for lots of things, for navigation and for helping users to find what they need, and lots of great things like that. Cyrus Shepherd has some great resources and some great information about internal links. So do check out that webinar. We're today going to be talking a little bit about external links, also known as backlinks , also known as inbound links. And those are links that go from one website to your website, so from an external website to your website. I sometimes like to think of these as if you were standing in line trying to get into Club Page One, the external link is somebody who's already in the club saying, "Oh, that person's with me," and they're pointing, they're saying, "That person's with me," and they're associating themselves with you to give you a bit more kudos and to maybe get you where you need to get. Now one of the reasons why we're talking about this is because SEOs talk about links all the time. Now why do SEOs talk about links all the time? Mordy, I can see that you want to come in... Mordy Oberstein: Because of, because links have link juice. Crystal Carter: Links have link juice. Links have link juice. I'll get to that. Way back in the day in Google's infancy there was something called page rank algo. And this was a foundational algorithm for Google and it was essentially, the core of it, if you look it up, was about them sort of counting the number of quality links to a page to determine whether or not the page had value. And this was something that they used to estimate the value of the page, and this is something that worked really well for them in 1998 and in the first few years of Google when there were around two million websites in 1998, a few million websites going along there. But by 2011 there were sort of content farms that were taking advantage of this algorithm and Google made their Panda update to try to address link farms and other issues associated with people sort of gaming the system. Today there are billions of websites and we have around 200 signals that tell Google the value of a website when they're looking at it. Links are still a part of it and they're tracked in Google's search console. You can see how many external links and how many internal links you have on your website, but they're not the only factor. However, there's something that can help give Google more signals about the quality of your website, more signals about the content of your website. And they also help Google to find your website through pulling the websites that are linking into you. So that's one of the reasons why we're talking about this today. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and no one's saying, "Links are not important or links are not valuable." I think our point of contention is this idea that links are the ultimate panacea to all things SEO, the ultimate thing you should be doing, you should be buying as many as possible. You should never buy links, by the way, please don't buy links. That's ridiculous nonsense. But it's gotten overstated and I feel like we're in an era of Google and machine learning and natural language processing. They're trying very much to actually understand the content on the page. And what I think people don't realize is that links are a secondary signal. Links are a way, kind of like you said before. "Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm in the club, I'm going to bring you in with me, he's good. He's with me. We're all okay." Turns out I'm a giant nerd and I should never be in the club. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But anyway. Crystal Carter: So, right, and I just say... But I'm not saying right that you're a giant nerd, but if you have a lot of links or if you have a lot of good quality links, it is a signal that says, "Okay, this person's got some backing from some solid folks." But at the end of the day you have to deliver, Google will get to your site and they will see what's on your site. And if the stuff that's on your site isn't relevant to the link that you got, or if the content of your site is a mess or doesn't make sense or is low value or if you have a lot of technical issues, then the value of that link isn't as effective as if it was something that was good and was relevant. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And the whole point is that links are a secondary signal. Google can't use a link to actually understand your content, which is why Google's invested in natural language processing, machine learning so that it can actually understand the content. So we're talking about in the same breath, it's hard to say that Google is doubling down on getting a greater understanding of your actual content through natural language processing and machine learning and links are just as important as they used to be before. It's a total contradiction in my mind conceptually because they do two very different things. Links were initially and still are kind of a way of getting around the fact that we can't fully understand content algorithmically, so let's use links. But if we're better understanding content, then why rely on the link the same way? Doesn't make sense to me. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that also people overlook the functionality of a link. So Google has spiders that crawl websites and they will crawl via links. So they crawl from one link to another link to another link. So if you have lots of links around and if you have good quality links, then you will get crawled more often. Your website will get indexed more regularly. Google will get more information about your website. One of the reasons why people talk about high DA, "high DA websites..." And again DA is not a metric from Google. DA is essentially when a private company is calculating value of the website based on some linking signals that they're able to see. It's kind of a shorthand. It can be useful when you're trying to organize information, but it is not be all end all. But if you think about something like Forbes for instance, that will have a high DA that gets crawled a lot because they're creating a lot of content. And so if you have a link on that website, you're more likely to have that page get crawled by Google than if you don't have a link on that website. Similarly, if you're a website that has no links at all, that's like a tree falls in the woods, nobody hears it. It's essentially you're one website standing alone all by yourself. It's like a house with no driveway, like a house with no road to it. How can anybody get to you? How can anyone find you if you have no links at all? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're going, we don't need roads. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: We have links. Crystal Carter: Right. So it can help a website, but you do, you have to have the quality of website and the quality of the content when people get to it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Especially, in my mind... I hate to say this... I don't think links are about SEO. I think links are about traffic, fundamentally, having a great link from a great relevant website. Let's say you get you a, you like... I don't know, you sell lawnmowers and there's like this ultimate lawnmower website. It's like the ultimate Wikipedia of lawnmowers and you get a link from them to your website and all the lawnmower people who love lawnmowers are going to go to that website, see your link theoretically, and click on... That brings you traffic, that brings you revenue. Good links, meaning links on pages that are relevant from strong high-traffic websites that are not buried 500 clicks deep into their website can bring you more traffic and can bring you more revenue, leaving those aside the SEO value for a minute. Crystal Carter: And I think it's the audience value as well. So I think a lot of times, certainly in the days like pre-Panda and back in the day, SEO people would post on lots of forums and stuff. They put links on there and that, one of the reasons why is because organically speaking, if you have a genuine forum that's lots of people that are interested in lawnmowers or whatever it is, and someone says, "Oh, my gosh, how do I solve this problem?" And someone says, "Oh, I read this great article that was really good, you should check it out. It has all the details. I followed these instructions and it works really well," then that is fantastic for a number of reasons. One, because you've got a link there and other people can see it. It's crawlable, it's searchable. Two, you have someone vouching for your content there. Number three, you also have it in a space where Google understands that people talk about this content regularly and so you're getting information from that website and taking it to your website. So there's lots of different things there. I had a client that used to have a piece of content around equestrian law. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: And they did remarkably well, but they had one site, one piece of content that always did really, really well because it was referenced in a forum in a magazine like an equestrian magazine, where someone's like, "Oh, how do I sort out this litigation issue about my horse?" And they were like, "Yeah, this article's great." And they always ranked really, really well for it. And it was for years, for years and years and years. Because you're saying it's not just about SEO, it's also about customer value. Those are people, are customers, like potential customers who are really interested in that topic and who could really do with some help on that topic. And they're finding somebody who can find them the solution. And that should be what links are about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and by the way, even in that case, maybe it's a Nofollow link, but someone reads it, so this is a great piece of content and they link to it on their website." Crystal Carter: Right, right. And the Dofollow, Nofollow things. So a Dofollow link is what essentially where it's like if we're going back to the Club Page One thing. It's like if someone goes, "Oh, I don't know them," "But they're in your group," "Yeah, but I don't know them." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So Nofollow means that the surgeon is not going to go follow that link through. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So it doesn't count for "your link juice." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or SEO value, per se. Crystal Carter: Right, I'm pretty sure John Mueller said that they use it as a hint. If you have lots and lots of Nofollow links that are all around the same topic, Google can still understand the information there. They just might not put the same weight on it when they're trying to understand it. So for Dofollow it's saying like, "Oh, yeah, they're with me. Absolutely, this is my best friend." Mordy Oberstein: And then Google goes from that page to your page and says, "Oh, I found this new page. Great, and now maybe we'll index it where we didn't index it before." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But I think the overall problem that I think people get, just to bring it all back, that people get kind of messed up with is really the mindset as opposed to this particular link practice versus that particular link practice. I think the core root of it all is this mindset that there's some kind of way to hack the system or there's some kind of way to really quickly without having to create quality user experience or a quality content and a quality whatever, whatever, whatever, "I can just build links. If I could just get someone to link to me that will improve my SEO." And it's created this environment where there's almost an over-emphasis on links and it's really, really easy to get caught up in that, especially if you're newer to SEO for some reason. That's where this sort of link panacea kind of content exists. But the overall point I think we want to get across is that, yes, links are really important for a variety of reasons, but they're not the be all, end all part. They are one part of your SEO strategy. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of the best people that are really, really good at link building, people like Debbie Chew, people like Patty Mugin, people like Amanda Milligan... Mordy Oberstein: Judith Lewis. Crystal Carter: Right, and Bryce at Seven as another good team that does a lot of good actual link building. What they do is they make interesting content, they make really interesting content that people want to link to. So for instance, like reports or information that is really, really interesting, that people really want to actually link to. And also they tend to get people involved. So they'll get people involved as partners in creating the content so that they share it. So if you think about a family photo, if you get everybody in the family photo, they're all going to want to share it and you can tag them all and they'll share it all across their different thing, for instance. Whereas if it's just you, like just a selfie of yourself and you're like, "Isn't my selfie great?" People may or may not share that. You know what I mean? So when you're trying to think of link building, think of it, campaigns tend to work really well and actually giving people information that people actually want to link to rather than going, "Please can I have a link?" Mordy Oberstein: That's like the fundamental point about link building, which we're going to get in some great tips from Debbie Chew in a second. If there's no substance to the thing that you want them to link to, it doesn't work. So that's what I mean. Link building is really part of the whole process. It really should naturally flow with your content creation. It's really like the flip side of it in a lot of ways. And with that, let's get some tips from Debbie Chew on some legitimate link-building tactics. So what are some legit link-building tactics at work? Turning it over to you, Debbie Chew. Debbie Chew: So there are a number of white hat ways to get links . Let me share my top three. So first is guest posting. I think this is quite a common tactic to get links where you publish a blog post on someone else's blog and then within that blog post you'll link to relevant pages on your site. So what's great about guest posting is that you have some control over where that backlink goes to, the anchor text. And if the guest post is genuinely helpful to the blog that you're posting it on, you can raise awareness about your brand and bring in valuable traffic to your site. So most guides out there tell you to google some combination of niche that you want to guest post in and the word guest post or contributor guidelines, things like that. And that'll help uncover some opportunities to get links, but you'll eventually exhaust that list. So what I like to do instead is try to find those needles in the haystack, try to find the industry blogs that are relevant to you and then send them personalized outreach even if they are not advertising that they do guest posts. The second is stats posts. So this is where you choose a topic related to your product and then you find and create a list of stats. So this type of content helps you get links because you're making someone else's life easier. So let's say I have a product that I sell, which is like a social media scheduler tool. So for that I could write a blog post for Twitter stats and someone who is writing a blog post about how to write viral Twitter threads might come across my Twitter stats blog posts. And then they might mention one of the stats that I found and link to my page. And then now the third tactic is to create research reports. So instead of the tactic that I just mentioned earlier about compiling stats from potentially other sources, for this tactic, you're going to create your own. I think it's really overlooked way of getting backlinks. But if we think about what journalists and other writers link to, you'll notice that they tend to link to a recent study, an interesting finding that they came across. So they usually use this to add context to their story or strengthen whatever argument they're making. So doing a research report is all about creating a study that uncovers interesting data on a certain topic, then doing outreach to the right people to link to your findings. What I really like about this tactic of creating a research report is that you, number one, position your business as a thought leader on the topic. Number two, you can get a large number of links and press from just creating one single research report. And then number three, because it takes a lot of effort to do, it's much harder for your competitors to replicate. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Debbie, and that kind of feeds into what we were talking about before, creating that quality content that really makes sense to be linked to is paramount to everything. It's fundamental to everything. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And then she talked about guest posting, she talked about creating big banks of stats and things like that. Where you're doing guest posting, where you're creating banks of stats, statistics, in both cases you will be doing the best for your brand and the best for your customers if you're creating something that's interesting, that is of value to that audience. So if you are guest posting on someone else's blog and you're actually bringing good quality content for that audience, then great, they will link to you. They will link to the resources that you share and that's fantastic. You can also, those links are put there, but also you might get more links off of that if it's of good quality content. And again, the people who you're guest posting with may very well ask you to post again because you're doing something good quality, making the resources, not only do you get more links off of that with people referencing your research, but also people will regularly return to it. So from a traffic point of view, like you were talking about before, there's a couple of big studies. We mentioned Cyrus Shepherd, he did a great study on internal links for instance, which talks about lots of statistics and has lots of different information about the value of links. Lots of people reference that and lots of people go back to it regularly to see... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, it is a great way, [inaudible 00:20:08] that is a great way because you do go back and referencing and it's just so, but especially when it's ever greenish kind of data. Crystal Carter: Right, and it takes time, it takes effort. But a lot of times if you're working in marketing, if you're working in search, a lot of times you're creating a lot of that information anyway. A lot of times you're doing a lot of that research for yourself anyway. So if you can possibly spin that out into something that's public facing. So maybe that one, don't want to share all of the family silver or whatever, if you can spin that into something that's public facing, then that can be something that's beneficial to everyone. And also it positions you as somebody who has expertise and authority in that niche, which is really, really valuable. Not just for links but for your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Theoretically, I've seen this a million times before, as my own data. People will take that data and feature it at conferences when they're doing their talks and so forth. There are really a lot of really good ways to build links. You should definitely do some research around that. I know Ethan [inaudible 00:21:00] has a really cool technique. I'll link to it in the show notes, called the Teammate Technique. I think it's very interesting. I'll again, I'll link to it, have a look at it. So do some research. There are a lot of really creative white hat legit ways of building links that make sense for you and your business. We'd love to dive into this more, but we have a little twist on our little segment that we have called From the Top of the Server. We've done in the past was to take sites that rank well and sites that don't rank well. And we compare the two to pull out some good old SEO lessons. Today though, we want to look at one SERP feature that Google shows at the top of the SERP, to discuss what it might mean for you. Welcome to From the Sources Across the Web version From the Top of the SERP. So when you Google things, I don't know, 50 Books to Read Before You Die or Fruits with Omega Three in them, depending on your geolocation, Google may show a feature at the top of the SERP called Sources from Across the Web, typically more on mobile. And basically it's a list to answer your question. So for Fruits with Omega Three, you get a list that says avocado, mangoes, berries. And you can expand each answer, or in this case each fruit to see a carousel of different pages with different information about the topic or subtopic. Again, in this case fruit. And of course those are all more URLs, more organic exposure theoretically for you. But it's a really, I'm going to say complicated SERP feature. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So I first came across this with the 50 Books to Read Before You Die list and you also see it with some other things around, around things like locations, Wonders of the World and stuff like that, and it's a tricky... Mordy Oberstein: It's really weird ones, by the way. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Like Best Companies to Work For brings it up, at least for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. It's interesting because they're essentially aggregating the information here. They're aggregating what they've seen across the web in lots of different ways. But one of the things that's tricky about it is there aren't as many clear sources as to where it comes from, where they're getting that list. And also it's tricky from a rankings point of view because for instance, with the 50 Books to Read Before You Die, I've got it so that I'm able to see nine of the entries of the 50. Now I know there's 50 because it's 50 Books to Read Before You Die and I can, I'm able to see nine, then it says 15 more and then there's 15 more. So which one's ranking number one there and then underneath 1984, which is the one that shows top, there's another four or five links there, and then there's an opportunity to click through to 1984 and learn more about that and et cetera, et cetera. So when you're trying to understand the positioning of that content, of where your content fits in, when this kind of features at the top of the SERP, it can be a little bit tricky to understand where you fit, what ranks where, what that means. And also I think from a sources point of view, it's interesting to understand where they're getting this content from. Because if I said, "Oh, where'd you hear that from?" And someone said, "Oh, around the web," I'd be like, "Huh, I need more information than that. Like where did you, who told you that?" Mordy Oberstein: It would be good to get more information about it. And what's interesting about it is like, for example, I search for Omega Three Rich Vegetarian Food. So the first thing I get is walnuts, and then I get chia seeds. So first of all, why is walnut first and not chia seed? That's really interesting in its own, right? And it happens to be on mobile this shows up more often, which means that it takes up a lot of space above the fold and you have option to see 12 more of these things. But what I found, check this out, because you might be like, "Okay, you know what, there's actually organic opportunity here." And Google, just so you know, is doing this more and more with Carousel. So for example, if you Google a Best SEO podcast and you click on SERP's Up, it will theoretically show you articles that include the SERP's Up podcast as one of the best SEO podcasts out there, whatever it is. They're doing this more and more and more across the board with these Carousel kind of things. And you might think, "Great, that's more opportunity to get my URL from my website into these things." Just so you know, most SEO, I don't think any SEO rank trackers will be able to track this for you. So that makes it kind of complicated. I think your biggest clue in will be if all of a sudden you see a spike in your search console day, "Where did this come from? Oh, I'm the first URL in one of these sub-expandable tabs in the sources around the web." But let's take Walnut, right? Omega Three Rich Vegetarian Foods, again, I get walnut, I get chia seed, I get flaxseed and I get industrial hemp. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Whatever. And then I expand the Carousel and add a tab and I get a Carousel of articles related to walnut and I open up chia seed, I get a bunch of articles related to chia seed. Guess what? The first URL on the first Carousel card for walnut comes from Medical News Today. The first one for chia seed, Medical News Today. The first one from flax seed, Medical News Today. The first one from industrial hemp, not Medical News Today. By the way, I looked at this for multiple versions of this. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not like just spitting off. There is enormous amount of overlap between the cards and the URLs that they're showing. Crystal Carter: Right, so on the 50 Books to Read Before... Mordy Oberstein: So if you get in one, you're in a bunch. Crystal Carter: So in 50 Books to Read Before You Die, it's greatestbooks.org, the greatestbooks.org is showing 1984 as the first one. So there's Wikipedia and then there's this one, and then it's showing for to Kill a Mockingbird, showing for Pride and Prejudice. And then also they're the first plain blue link on it as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: So it's very interesting in that regard. But it's interesting if they're using that as a main source. It's interesting that it's not referenced in the top part. Instead of it just saying "Sources from around the web," it's interesting that they don't reference from that because if you go to Bing and you look up Omega Three Foods, it says, "Your Omega Three Shopping List" and it has a similar list and then it says, "Data from web.md and earth. this or eatthis.com." So it's interesting that they're able to do it and Google has not done it yet, but maybe they will, going forward. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and again, it makes it difficult if you're trying to rank for one of these kind of keywords and you're not one of these websites that are showing up in the Carousel, what do you do? Because Google seems to, again, I looked it up for Best Companies to Work For, the first URL was in all four of the initial cards that Google showed. One thing I did see that might give you hope, if you're not this dominant URL, because again, it's kind of one of these super authority situations where Google's kind of just pulling in the super authority and showing that URL over and over and over again throughout the different subtopics in the SERP feature. But every once in a while Google throws a YouTube video in there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of YouTube. So yeah, there's a good amount of YouTube in there. So for instance, on the 50 Books Read Before You Die, there's a few of them that include YouTube. They have [inaudible 00:27:42] in there... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so some of these cards use a lot of YouTube. Crystal Carter: So for this one, they've got links to Google Books, as well. So yeah, there's a lot of different elements. It's not just websites that are showing in it. And I think that this is about them creating it... It's kind of rich content. It's not schema enabled, but it's essentially working the same way as a sort of rich content feature would work. But yeah, I think it's an interesting thing and it's interesting to see how they are doing this across the web and how many different topics and ways of repackaging content or displaying content are showing up. Mordy Oberstein: So if you're looking at your data and you're like, "Hey, I'm ranking number one for something or number two for something and I don't get any clicks, what's going on?" Always go to the actual SERP, very helpful. And if you see one of these from Sources Across the Web that's dominating on mobile, the above the fold space on the SERP, and you're not in one of these cards, and you're... "I don't know how I'm going to get into one of these cards." Maybe the best way is a YouTube video. You never know. Crystal Carter: And this is a really good opportunity to sort of make sure that you don't have all your eggs in one basket with regards to your content. So making sure that you're thinking about your content in lots of different ways. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And speaking of not putting all of your eggs in one basket, we need to talk about the news. What does that have to do with eggs in one basket? I have absolutely no idea. But anyway, here is The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Who said you could ever have too many Google updates? Because if it was you take it back. Take it back now. Anyway, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, Google releases October 2022, Spam update. The update actually completed in less than 42 hours. This is Google releasing improvements to the AI that catches a web spam. So if you're doing things like creating helpful, decent content and not engaging in any sort of deceptive practices, you should be fine. If you see your rankings got clobbered, well, then two things. One, have a look at Google's documentation on Web Spam and, two, search your soul. Next item of business from Matt Southern over Search Engine Journal, Google Shopping Searches on Desktop Get more Visual. This is part of the changes Google announced at Search on 2022 about a more visual shopping experience. Well, it hit desktop and now that makes a desktop experience, when it comes to shopping, very similar to mobile. Essentially when you add the word shop to the beginning of a search query, like for example, "Shop kids' toys" and so forth, you're getting mobile like experience with multiple series of cards representing products along with multiple sites where you can buy these products. So it mean there are multiple sites where you could buy a particular product. Anyway, there are more image thumbnails. The SERP seems to be expanded, meaning it's longer, which means more ads by the way. It also means more results I guess to make up for all the space, the multiple series of cards take up. If you sell stuff on the internet and you rely on organic search to sell desktop, you need to check out what the SERP now looks like on desktop and perhaps adjust accordingly. And with that, that is today's Snappy News. Boy, was that newsy and snappy. Crystal Carter: That was news. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That was news, eggs in the basket. Crystal Carter: Those were some new things. And I mean, I was surprised at how egg-based the news was. Mordy Oberstein: It was egg all over my face. Now, before we wrap up, as we always have to do, we love sharing people for you to follow on social media so you can get some more SEO information and some more fun people to follow on Twitter. This week we're talking one of SEO's, premier link building experts. She's been doing SEO for a very long time and is one of the predominant experts on link building. She's the one, she is the only one of my favorites, Judith Lewis. Crystal Carter: Judith Lewis. Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: We love, we love Judith. She's hilarious, first off. So she's a great follow in general, such a great sense of humor. Crystal Carter: She has absolute great sense of humor and she's very active in the SEO community. She's a judge for lots of different... Mordy Oberstein: Search awards, yeah. Crystal Carter: Search awards, and she's very much on top of everything. So she shares a lot of great content and she's somebody who is worth following. So yeah, I would absolutely have a look at what she's doing. She speaks at lot of conferences as well. So she just recently spoke at, I think it was the SEO Octoberfest and she's doing some really great work there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you Google her around link building, there's a lot of great stuff that she has out there. I've interviewed her on another podcast about link building myself, to have firsthand conversations with her about this. She is phenomenal. Definitely keep an eye out for Judith Lewis. You could follow her on Twitter @JudithLewis, amazingly enough. Right? But that's J-U-D-I-T-H, L-E-W-I-S, Judith Lewis, we'll link to that in the show notes. So you can have her Twitter profile and follow her on Twitter. We're basically trying to tell you follow her on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Do that. Crystal Carter: You'll thank us later. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to the end of our podcast. We're done. Crystal Carter: And to Mordy's lunchtime. He's so excited. Mordy Oberstein: I know. So where we schedule this podcast, you don't really care about this, dear audience, but the way this goes, they have to schedule this weekly right before my lunch. I'm a very particular person about when I eat lunch, I need to eat lunch. Crystal Carter: Mordy gets hangry. We need to make sure that he gets lunch. Mordy Oberstein: I do, I get hangry. Crystal Carter: He needs his lunch. Mordy Oberstein: We just taught my 11 year old that word. "Hey, you're hangry." He's like, "What?" "Let me explain this to you. This is why you're upset right now." Crystal Carter: There we go. So he's going to make some links, but... Link between some sandwich events... Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to grab some link juice for lunch. Crystal Carter: No link juice. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Anyway, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new podcast as we dive into our favorite SERP features. Got a bit of a surprise for you with this one. Anyway, look for wherever you could consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check on all of the great content, webinars or resources on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love at 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

Aoife McIlraith is owner and MD of Luminosity Digital marketing agency and founder of Searchmastermind.org and Speakerlineup.com. With 22+ years of international marketing expertise, Aoife helps brands get the right content to the right audience at the right time to drive sales. Aoife McIlraith Managing Director, Luminosity Digital Aoife McIlraith is owner and MD of Luminosity Digital marketing agency and founder of Searchmastermind.org and Speakerlineup.com. With 22+ years of international marketing expertise, Aoife helps brands get the right content to the right audience at the right time to drive sales. Articles & Resources 17 May 2024 Judges share how to write a successful industry awards entry 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

Simon Cox has been building, managing, optimizing, measuring, and taking websites apart since 1995. In-house at a global financial corporate for many years, he now offers freelance SEO consultancy, bakes bread, and crafts technical SEO Audits. Find him at simoncox.com. Simon Cox Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co Creative Simon Cox has been building, managing, optimizing, measuring, and taking websites apart since 1995. In-house at a global financial corporate for many years, he now offers freelance SEO consultancy, bakes bread, and crafts technical SEO Audits. Find him at simoncox.com . Articles & Resources 20 Oct 2022 A collaborative Google Docs content template for Wix Blogs Resources Simon Cox Blog optimization collaborative Google doc Use this collaborative document to streamline your blog publication process and improve on-page optimization. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back SEO toolkit for Wix web design Make SEO an integral part of your web design process effectively and efficiently with this toolkit. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this SEO toolkit for designers to: Analyze your audience, their user journey and what your competitors are doing in search Follow a comprehensive checklist for a successful website launch, from the research phase to post handover Access a set of free SEO tools Learn to elevate your SEO with a guide to Wix’s built-in optimization features and their functionality Understand SEO terminology at a glance with a handy glossary 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 designing Wix sites with SEO in mind for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Michel Fortin is a marketing advisor, author, speaker, and the VP of Digital Marketing at Musora Media, the company behind Drumeo. For nearly 30 years, he has worked with clients from around the globe to improve their visibility, build their authority, and grow their businesses with coordianted digital marketing and SEO strategies. Michel Fortin VP of Digital Marketin, Musora Media Michel Fortin is a marketing advisor, author, speaker, and the VP of Digital Marketing at Musora Media, the company behind Drumeo. For nearly 30 years, he has worked with clients from around the globe to improve their visibility, build their authority, and grow their businesses with coordianted digital marketing and SEO strategies. Articles & Resources 22 Feb 2023 How to improve semantic SEO with disambiguation 20 Dec 2022 Semantic SEO: How to drive more meaningful traffic 12 Jul 2022 User-first SEO: A modern approach to growing your online 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

Tamara Sykes is a Caribbean-born PR pro who shapes brands through impactful content and communication strategies. With 10+ years of experience, she is a brand consultant and the head of client content strategy at Stacker.  Tamara Sykes Head of Client Content Strategy, Stacker Tamara Sykes is a Caribbean-born PR pro who shapes brands through impactful content and communication strategies. With 10+ years of experience, she is a brand consultant and the head of client content strategy at Stacker. Articles & Resources 2 Apr 2025 When to publish your eCommerce 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

How can SEO agencies accelerate client growth while driving greater revenue along the way? Wix’s Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by the head of organic search at Connective3, Ben Barker, to discuss how to avoid getting lost in unattainable goals by focusing on achieving realistic incremental growth for your clients. Buckle up as we hit the accelerator… on your clients’ growth on episode 95 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back How SEO agencies can drive client growth How can SEO agencies accelerate client growth while driving greater revenue along the way? Wix’s Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by the head of organic search at Connective3, Ben Barker, to discuss how to avoid getting lost in unattainable goals by focusing on achieving realistic incremental growth for your clients. Buckle up as we hit the accelerator… on your clients’ growth on episode 95 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 95 | July 10, 2024 | 45 MIN 00:00 / 45:17 This week’s guests Ben Barker With over 12 years’ experience in SEO, as Group Head of Organic Search, Ben oversees connective3's organic search offering including technical SEO, strategy and content. In his career, Ben has worked across a variety of different projects and verticals and has experience working on everything from SME's right through to global enterprise brands. His passion is creating and executing strategies that drive incremental value to businesses. He leverages his cross-channel experience and applies an ROI lens across all activity to ensure that he is driving profitable and sustainable growth for client brand. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is oh so specific and oh so incremental, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. Incremental. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm just talking nonsense. I don't know what that means. Crystal Carter: It's an interesting adjective. So yes, I guess so? Mordy Oberstein: Methodical. It's like saying you're methodical. Crystal Carter: Incremental, I think it's like small movements over time, I guess. And I guess that's life. Is that life? Mordy Oberstein: That's SEO and life, small movement over time. Crystal Carter: Life, life, life, life, life. Mordy Oberstein: Life is SEO. Crystal Carter: Sure. I'll take it. Fine. Yeah. What's up, podcast people? Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: Incrementally. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go incrementally into who the podcast is brought to you by, which is Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use the advanced permission settings in Wix Studio to assign the right team member to the right task for the right page at the right time. Because SEO success depends upon being as targeted as you can for your clients, as this week, our Wix Studio series focuses on being focused and targeted for incremental growth. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is when creating- Crystal Carter: Wheat. Mordy Oberstein: Huh? Crystal Carter: You sort the wheat from the chaff. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but it's only if you're separating wheat. Let's say you're separating in like peanuts from the chaff. Crystal Carter: Peanuts have chaff? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That little, that shell, the inner shell, like the soft shell. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's chaff. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is, which is not just wheat, when creating an SEO plan for your clients, why you should even separate said chaff, and how it spurs client growth. And why SEO agencies often don't separate this chaff to begin with and how to avoid making the same mistake. To help us sift and winnow all of this proverbial chaff, Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3 will join us in just a few minutes. Plus we'll share a new tool that you can use to help you refine your rank tracking focus. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So join us as we place the flower that is your growth strategy for your clients through the SEO seed on this second episode of our Wix Studio series, AKA episode 95 of the SERP's Up Podcast. I don't know why I went with the whole chaff thing. Crystal Carter: I don't know, it was- Mordy Oberstein: But it's good. It's good. It's good a visual. Crystal Carter: Yeah? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, in my mind it's throwing things up in the air and you're just separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff. Crystal Carter: Okay, cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're just going to go with it. Crystal Carter: Let's go with it. That is the theme of the show. Let's just go with it. It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: That's the theme of my life. Back to our life tips. Just for the audience, that's worked out for me about 50% of the time. You can look at that half empty or half full Crystal Carter: As you get older, I think you kind of realize it'll be fine. It'll be fine. I think I used to worry about a lot of things when I was younger that I do not worry about so much anymore. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me too, like hair. Crystal Carter: And you figure it'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it'll be fine. Crystal Carter: It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's fine. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So what'll be fine is that this week, I had the lovely opportunity to chat with Ben, so we're going to dive into that. So here is my little chat with Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3. So this is our second episode of our Wix Studio series. Wix Studio being a platform that helps digital marketers better manage your clients, projects and teams. All sorts of features such as reusable page assets and reusable widgets and apps and built-in AI code assistant to help you accelerate client growth and so forth and so forth and so forth, which is why this series is focused on helping agencies do just that, accelerate client growth and your own revenue along the way. To help us do this and understand how you can accelerate client growth, please welcome to the show Ben Barker, the Group Head of Organic Search at connective3. Ben Barker: Hi, Mordy. Thank you. Thank you for the intro. It's really, really nice to be here and I'm very much looking forward to chatting through everything with you today. Do you want me to give a little bit of background on myself? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so we're marketers here, so full pitch. Who are you and what does connective3 deal? Ben Barker: I've personally been working in SEO for probably twelve, thirteen years now, which is a very long time in the digital landscape. I think we've seen so much change over that time. I started back in the times when it was okay to go on forums and add random comments with links and style them- Mordy Oberstein: Hey, is that okay anymore? That's how I spend most of my day. Ben Barker: Yeah, I'm not sure if that's still cool or okay to do. Mordy Oberstein: It might be cool again with Reddit on the SERP. Ben Barker: Yeah, I mean, we don't know. To be fair, and this is a different topic, but I actually find a lot of results from Reddit are actually better than some of the results you get from Google for a lot of searches these days, but that's a kind of whole- Mordy Oberstein: A different can of wow. You just stepped on a landmine right there. We're going to just gloss right over that and keep going into your background. Ben Barker: I started out in SEO, started out doing a bit of link building as I've just mentioned. Well, some form of link building, and then I kind of moved into the more technical strategical side of it. And then maybe five or six years ago I did branch out into other channels as well, but SEO is my primary focus. That's my first love, if you like, and that's kind of where I spend most of my time these days. Connective3 were founded in 2019. They've seen huge growth over the last few years. We work with a variety of clients, really: E-comm, lead generation across finance, travel. We do really good work with clients. I know that's kind of a bit of a cliche to say. If you look at our client retention rates, they're really, really strong. We've been working with some clients pretty much since we started the agency, or since the founder started the agency, sorry. So we've got a really strong track record and I think the key thing for us, which kind of feed into the topic of conversation today, I would guess, is that we're always looking for ways to show incremental growth. That is the really, really key thing, especially when it comes to SEO. As you know, Mordy, SEO is a bit of a black box. It's a bit of a dark art to a lot of senior stakeholders, especially within businesses that they know they need to do it, but they don't understand the why. And I think one thing that connective3 is really good at is helping them understand the why, and also connecting everything together. It's kind of in the name, but that's really, really what we do. That's just a bit of an intro from me. Mordy Oberstein: Look, that ties right in. I've always said SEO is for long-term stable growth. The trade-off to that is if you're looking to grow immediately right away and you see all those hockey stick graphs on social media, whatever, that's not actually what's going to look like. So let's lean into this. We spoke about this when we were deciding what to talk about and one of the things you mentioned I thought was really interesting, that sometimes agencies make the mistake where they're taking too broad of a stroke when they're looking to improve client growth. So let's maybe start, what do you mean by that and what do you mean exactly by honing in and incremental growth? What are we talking about? Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a few different facets to it, but the main one that I'll kind of talk about maybe to begin with is probably how agencies would forecast. Because when you are speaking to clients or prospects I think, you're always going to have to put a forecast together. When I'm talking about broad strokes in the context of forecasting, and you may have seen this yourself in the past, I've definitely seen this because I've worked in-house and agency side, so I've kind of seen both sides of it, but you'll quite often get, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, here's your projected growth." And what the agency will have done is they will have looked in Google Analytics, they will have looked at previous year's data and they will just forecast a rough 10% growth on top of that, right? And whilst that's not necessarily wrong, what does that actually mean? Because when we do forecast as an example, when I do or my team do forecast for organic traffic, you almost have to take it back to the base. You need a lot more context of how the business works and what they've done previously. So as an example, I used to work for a big retail brand and they would often run above the line activity, so TV activity as an example. Now the challenge comes in where when you come to forecast the year after, quite often you will see a big halo effect from the TV activity across brand and in some cases non-brand traffic. You can't use that then to forecast your projected growth because it is almost artificially inflated. What you have to do is you have to exclude any other marketing campaigns or anything outside of the normal growth of what you may see. A lot of agencies don't tend to do that because they don't tend to dig into the context of, okay, what have you done previously and how has that affected your growth? So first of all, you need to strip it back to the basics. A, what growth would we get had we done nothing at all and the market grew the way it grew? So the market might grow by 5 or 10% year-on-year. That's fine. That's your baseline. Then what you need to do is you need to sort of figure out from that growth and what we want to achieve for you as our client, what areas, what products, what services, what categories are you looking for specific growth within? And do you also have any new products, services, or categories coming in this year? Because you need to then factor that in potentially. What you would then do is you quite often find that, in the sense of an e-commerce brand as an example, you might have 20% of your products which make 80% of your revenue. So therefore it makes more sense to do an initial forecast at least on the projected growth within those areas. So you would then take those categories and then everybody has a different process for forecasting, but you can take things like search volume, click-through rate sessions, et cetera, et cetera, average transaction value. And then you can sort of build a forecast based off specific growth for those categories. Now, I'm not saying you'd only do those categories, but that's where you would start. And then what you would do is say, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, we've built this forecast for you on your specific or your key services products areas," and then you can almost do a secondary forecast then for everything else. What that then means is that you're not just presenting your client with an overall number that says, "We're going to give you 15% growth. We haven't really specified whether it's brand or non brand. We haven't really told you what categories." I think quite often what happens is really awkward conversations will come about maybe six to nine to twelve months later in that if you don't do that, you may have grown their traffic by 10 or 15%, but it may be via kind of lower relevancy informational type content. So they may not actually be making more money from that traffic, which is a problem because SEO isn't just about driving traffic. SEO or organic as a kind of channel, it does many different things. It is informative. That's what we need to do. It is a direct response channel. It is a brand retention channel, and it's even a brand awareness channel to a degree. You kind of have to think about all of those things and you have to factor that in when you're your forecasting because otherwise, like I said, you can end up having a conversation down the road whereby you may have increased traffic significantly, but it might be from lower relevancy blogs, which actually... Or not lower relevancy blogs, sorry, but it might be from a lot of informational traffic that just isn't relevant in the context of driving sales or leads or revenue for the business, and therefore that makes the investment that they've made inorganic. They kind of look at that and go, "Well, what have we just paid you for for the last twelve months? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, which is why you have to figure out what are their goals, where is the business even at? Are they at a point where they're able to convert yet? Are they still at a stage where they're still building up that awareness? Really understanding where the business is at and also where the products are at. I'm a big sports nut, so let's imagine for example, I don't know, tomorrow LeBron James retires. He's not, but let's just say he did. Maybe he should, I don't know. And you sell LeBron James' shoes, so imagine you have to figure out the predicted demand on that product, which may go down if LeBron retires. It may not. I have no idea if it would or wouldn't, but you would need to figure that out and that's not easy. Ben Barker: No, it's definitely not. Definitely not. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's trying to be as specific as we can with the information that we have. SEO isn't as... Head of PPC may be common sense, but it's not in some cases as black and white as PPC. I'm not saying PPC is black and white. There's a lot of complexity to it, but when you are forecasting for PPC or anything like that, it's a lot easier in a lot of ways because you have the data there. You can take previous data, you can see what keywords convert, you can see how users interact via different ads, et cetera. Whereas with SEO, we kind of have to just take the information that we have, and in some cases that will include paid data, sure. But yeah, you're absolutely right in that sense. You almost have to figure out and guesstimate. It's almost best guess in terms of how you think the demand for that will go. And then you obviously can factor that into the work that you are doing and then that feeds then back into the overall numbers. Mordy Oberstein: So how do you separate all that out? It's a lot of separating chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is. I don't really know, but the good stuff, the peanut. How do you do that? Ben Barker: Our team internally built a really, really good tool for us to use, actually. You can plug keywords into it and you can categorize the keywords. So your inputs are essentially keyword, search volume, category. So in the context of what you've just said about LeBron, your keyword might be LeBron James' shoes, category would be basketball, and then your search volume would be whatever your search volume is. Once you've populated that, we basically run the tool and what it does, it does a few things. It'll pull where you are versus other competitors within the search results, and then it effectively presents you with almost a chart to show you where you are versus your competitors. We do often, or we do always actually input competitors into there as well. So we can put specific competitors in there, and what it does is it shows you where you are in the context of that landscape. Now because you are using specific keywords that you're really wanting to target across your categories, what that then means is that it gives you an output which is effectively almost your projected or available traffic for those keywords. And what we tend to then do is we would start by building the forecast around that specifically because we know that those keywords are really important to the business, so therefore the search... Obviously your actual traffic in real terms is usually different than what the tool outputs, but again, the tool outputs what it outputs based on search volume and click-through rates, et cetera. So it really depends on your inputs, but generally that's a really good place for us to start because we can then present that back to the client and show them actually, "We've really focused on your key areas, your key categories. This is what we believe the available traffic is." What I tend to do on top of that is I'll run the tool and then we'll have a look in GA4 and sort of see how that fares up in terms of what traffic they've actually had over the last twelve months as an example for those key categories versus what we have available. And generally you can then build out a pretty good baseline from there. That's how we do it. Mordy Oberstein: So how do you do, let's say for example it's a case where the brand's not ready to convert yet? So for example, let's go with the LeBron shoes just for a minute. They need to rank for LeBron James sneakers or buy LeBron James sneakers and they're not anywhere near that. They just started six months ago. So how do you filter out and refine like, okay, you need to get this money, you need to rank for this, but there's probably five or six preliminary steps that you need to do beforehand. Do you map all of that out and tell them that? How does that look for you? Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. It is a really, really great question. The kind of approach that we tend to take would be, obviously you've got your LeBron sneakers, trainers, however you want to frame that. Obviously that would be assumed to be a really, really high volume, high intent, really competitive keyword. So like you just said, if we're a new business, you ain't going to rank for that keyword in six months. It's just not going to happen realistically, if you look at the kind of competition of the market. Now in some rare cases it may happen, but chances are it probably isn't. So what you then have to do is say, "Okay, well how else can we get relevant traffic to our website for these types of keywords?" The process that we take I guess, is we would kind of do some research around what are the kind of secondary or tertiary search terms, categories, et cetera that people may be searching for that aren't directly LeBron sneakers. Then you would effectively look at the way that we would manage this with the client is we would say, "Okay, we're not going to rank for this keyword in six months. We'll be really, really honest with you." And again, I'm sure there'll be other people out there that will promise the earth and say that you can, but again, that's a different conversation. We would sort of say, "What we can do though is we've identified these types of opportunities around the topic of this particular product, and therefore what we'll do is we'll build you a content strategy which will almost eventually support ranking for that keyword." So if you think about LeBron sneakers as your head term, and again, if we think about that in the context of let's just assume that he is retiring, that's why he's selling them, you can then build content around queries related to that. So is LeBron James retiring? Again, this is just examples, but when is LeBron James retiring? And then you can almost build content around that and you can talk about his career and then you can almost feed that back in. So it's almost like head term is at your top and then underneath you have an almost, I don't like using this word because in SEO terms it always sounds really shady, but almost like a network of supporting content, which then feeds back into EAT and things like that, which then Google will obviously look at and go, "Okay, we can see that you guys aren't just trying to push this to show sales. We can see that you actually know what you're talking about on this topic." So therefore eventually maybe twelve months, maybe eighteen months or whatever, you will have a really good shot at ranking for those keywords because you've actually put the effort and the time into building up a really authoritive hub, which actually shows what you're talking about, that sort of thing. So that's how we would frame it. It would almost be your short to medium term tactics would be that effectively, building that content network and the informational area of it. Mordy Oberstein: When I do this for clients, so what I like to do, if I have a client who's very long-term minded, they know where they're at, they know where they need to go, so I'll build up the SEO plan or the SEO proposal in phases. Phase one is X and phase one will take six months and you're going to focus on X, Y, and Z. Phase two will be this, and phase three will be that. Which maybe is not the best way to nab the client, if you want to put it in those terms, because it's not an easy... It's a long process. There's multiple phases of it, and each phase is probably usually very intricate and very involved, which kind of can be a little bit of a turnoff, but I generally feel laying it out that are mapping it out there so they understand what's going to happen, what the expectations are after phase one is it's usually not earning a lot of money, kind of sets up the client for success. And for the longer term relationship to feel like, okay, I'm with you, I understand you, and I'm willing to pay you for the next six months, seven months, eight months, whatever it is to do this, because I know where we're going and where the map is. Ben Barker: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think again, that sort of feeds into one of my other points around incrementality, which effectively is how you manage stakeholders within a business, which you've kind of hit the nail on the head there in that you have a really clear plan. You've laid that out. I think one of the things that, again, at certain areas where I think collectively as an industry we probably should be better at is you need to manage the people outside of your immediate contact. So again, coming from an in-house perspective, I had a pretty generous budget that I could spend on or invest, and SEO is an investment channel. A lot of senior stakeholders think, oh, SEO is free traffic. It's not free traffic because you either in some way or another have to pay for that, whether it's hiring headcount, whether it's- Mordy Oberstein: I'm not working for free, are you? Ben Barker: No, I'm definitely not. I love my job, but yeah, I don't think I can do it for free. Mordy Oberstein: Got to feed my family. Ben Barker: Yeah. It's an investment channel, so that's your first step. So there'll be a period of time where you are paying us to do a job for you, you're probably not going to see a return maybe for six months, maybe nine months, maybe twelve months. However, and again, it's kind of a new thing that I've started saying which some people kind of understand, is that SEO is almost like investing, so it does compound over time. So year one, you might break even, you might be a little bit less. Year two, you might be 10% off. Year three, you might be 15% off. And if you think about even if you factor in, if you're an agency and you work with a client for two, three, four years, obviously over years and over time your fees may increase, but it won't increase to the level where it will outweigh the returns that they get. And if it does, to be fair, you're probably pricing it incorrectly. You can still make good money as an agency or a consultant and your client can still make great money as well, as long as assuming everything is priced correctly. I think that's the key thing. And another thing, again from an in-house perspective, and coming back to the budgets and stuff like that that I was talking about earlier, if I wanted to spend budget on something, it was my budget to spend. I held the purse strings, if you like, but I would still have to justify that internally to other stakeholders because they would need to understand what I'm doing, because that investment obviously affects the profit and loss. One thing that I would encourage and urge anybody in SEO to do is to try and be great friends or build good relationships with your finance contact. Because they're generally the people, if you get them on side, you will be in such a good place. So internally at my previous place, I actually had a really good relationship with the finance team. They were fantastic. They didn't understand the nuance of SEO or what we were doing, but if you can explain it in really simple terms, they're like, "Yep, okay, fine. We're totally cool. We understand this investment. We understand that we're going to see a loss for a few months, but based on what you've said we should start seeing some improvement in the backend." So your finance people are absolutely paramount. And as well, I think your contacts, like your chief technical officers, your technical directors, because ultimately again, if you get sign off and work with the client, but then all of a sudden you've got a load of tech work, your CTO or your tech contact doesn't really understand the value of what you are trying to do. So if you send recommendations off the back of an audit for example, but you don't actually monetize those things, they're going to look at it and go, "Well, I've got all of this stuff to fix over here. Why should I fix this? Because you've not told me how much this is worth, so I'm just going to put this in a list somewhere and it's going to stay there." Mordy Oberstein: That's why if you're listening to this podcast, you listen to regularly, we have an episode on site maturity and understanding why and where the site is at, and why that's so important. It's really understanding where the business is at, the maturity of the business and maturity of the website and understanding that one thing compounds to the next thing and it compounds to the next thing, and that what you're able to do with each phase of site or business maturity differs, but it all compounds and adds up to itself. And you really understand where it's supposed to end up and result will actually be, and realizing that what's possible at what stage of the site's evolution and what naturally should come next as it naturally evolves. Before time kind of slips away with us here, once you've understand the forecast, you understand what you're going to do with the business and what you will want to focus on, how do you know where to start exactly? What's your rubric look like? Okay, I understand the forecast, where we want to go, what we're going to end up doing, but where do you start and how do you decide where to start? Ben Barker: Do you mean in terms of if I pick up or the agency picks up a client, what do we prioritize? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've got five keywords I think are the money keywords that business is ready to ring for now that we can really start focusing on. Let's assume for a second, let's make it difficult, all five keywords are the exact same search volume. Ben Barker: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Where do you start and how do you start? Ben Barker: Yeah, it's a good question. First thing I would do would be to actually validate the keywords. So when I say validate the keywords, I don't mean that I would take them from the client and say, I don't really believe what you are saying here is actually right for you. But what I would do is I would take that away and we would do some research around it and actually see, okay, we do things that analyze the search results. Because quite often you'll find that clients want to rank for keywords more from a vanity perspective, just to be there because the competitor's there. But actually in real terms, when you look at those results and the quality of those results, it doesn't really feel like it's a transactional place, if of course it is a transactional keyword. Assuming it would be. I think first of all, you would validate those five keywords, so you would make sure that actually it would be worth our time to focus on these. And again, we would send relevant traffic that would convert in the context of search results and how that looks. Then I think beyond that, assuming again all five are the same, you kind of from an... And I think this is what can kind of trip a lot of people up, is that you may take all five of those keywords and go, "Yeah, no worries. We can focus on all of these keywords at once and we'll get you some great results." Again, that isn't the case. So I think where you need to then look is to apply a more commercial lens. "Okay, Mr. or Mrs. Client, you've given me these five keywords that relate to these categories. What is a conversion worth across each of these categories for you?" What you might find is that four out of five of those keywords, again, this is just a bit of W data, but it might be worth $25 per conversion, but then one keyword might be worth 150. So assuming that all of those keywords are the same search volume again, but even if they weren't, in fairness, I would always look at what value each of those categories would drive. And for me, that's probably how I would determine where the focus would be. And then beyond that, in terms of how you would prioritize work and where you would look to start would really be, it differs. It's the classic SEO answer, but it really would depend on the state of the website. You might have a website that's really technically sound, but actually their content is really lacking, so then your content would be the focus area. You might have a website which actually has really great content, but their technical isn't great. So in terms of how you would feed that through into the strategy would really depend on the state of the website, the state of the content and those sorts of things probably where I would... And the backlinks, of course. Again, they might have really good content, they might have really strong tech, but actually they might not be doing too much from a digital PR perspective to actually draw in those backlinks and coverage, so therefore you would probably start there as a point. Mordy Oberstein: In a nutshell, you have to qualify. There's no way around qualifying it, whether it's the SERP, wherever their ongoing SEO practices aren't really qualifying, are those actually effective? You have to qualify everything. There's no way around it. Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. And again, the beauty of that is you've qualified those five keywords, you know what each of the conversion is worth based on the keywords. Again, you then feed that into your forecast because you know what that conversion's worth. So you can use that data in your forecast then as revenue data, and then that means that your forecast looks a lot better. Because when your client asks you to justify it, you can talk them through it really clearly rather than just saying, "Oh, I had a look at your numbers. You saw 10% growth last year, so I've given you 20% growth this year. There's no real thought behind it, but that's what I thought. That's what felt good to me-" Mordy Oberstein: 10% is always a good number. It feels safe. Ben Barker: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those safe numbers. It's enough growth, but it's safe. Ben Barker: Definitely. Mordy Oberstein: With that, where can people find you if they want to ask you questions about your SEO refinement strategy? Ben Barker: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm also more than happy for people to drop me an email. And also c3 or connective3, we run a couple of events as well, which I think- Mordy Oberstein: yeah. Ben Barker: ... really great thing. So we have an event in the UK called Up North, which is coming up in the next month. So yeah, basically there. And I'm also going to be doing more speaking as well, so hopefully people will see me on the speaking circuit very soon. Mordy Oberstein: Good for you, man. All right, so we'll link to all of those links in the show notes. Ben, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with us. Ben Barker: Oh, thank you very much, Mordy. It's been an absolute pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, talk to you soon. Ben Barker: Yeah, I'll speak you soon. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Ben is a great guy. Make sure you give him a follow. Connective3, they do great stuff. If you're ever at BrightonSEO in the UK, they're always there with their team. They're great fun. They have great swag, by the way, so make sure you check them out when you visit BrightonSEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they're a great team. I've met them at some other events as well, and they're always a lot of enthusiasm and always really interested in what's going on. So yeah, great team. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Now speaking of getting a little specific with your SEO, and I have said many things about rank tracking, many of them not great, but one of the things that you might want to do is get a little bit more specific with how you rank track. So we're going to show you a little tool that can help you do that as we go tool time on SERP's Up. So the folks over a Pro Rank Tracker created a little app in the Wix at Market called Rankix, and I didn't even know about it. They happened to let me know after the fact that they created the thing, and I had a look at it. I've worked for SEMRush in the past, I've worked for Rank Ranger in the past. I've worked for many folks who track rank, and I like rank tracking and I do rank tracking, but I also have some spicy things to say about rank tracking. So I go, "All right, let me see what this is because I'm very spicy about my rank tracking," and I saw them like, "Oh, this is great." And I'm not saying that literally because it's in the Wix app market and I'm being paid to say that. I'm saying that because it not only tracks your rank on Google, it tracks it on Bing, it tracks it on Amazon and it tracks it on YouTube. I'm like, "Oh, snap. I thought I was going to get your typical watered down version of a rank tracker, which is your typical water down version of actually a good SEO tool in general, that's a spicy take on rank tracking, and it's not. It's actually like omnichannel rank tracking and it's really helpful." I actually use it on my podcast because I integrated YouTube created RSS feed where you can pull in... They didn't create RSS feed, let me rephrase that. They created the ability to pull in your podcast RSS feed and it automatically uploads and creates YouTube videos for your podcast. And I did that for a podcast that I run. I'm like, "Oh, this is great. Let me track the rank. I want to track the and how do I track the rank of this? I don't pay for a YouTube rank tracker." Well, now I do in RankiX. Crystal Carter: Nice. And I think it's such a good tool for people who are working across multiple channels, as I think most people are these days. I think there's very few teams who are doing SEO, who are doing audience management, audience growth management specifically just on one channel. And that's a primary, that's a great example of how people can use multiple tracking across multiple things because it is going to affect your Google visibility because Google is putting YouTube all over the SERP. So for instance, if you go to the video tab, nine times out of ten you're going to get a YouTube video unless you specifically search for TikTok, and then you'll see a TikTok video. But yeah, I think that it's super useful to be able to have visibility on that. And anybody who's working in the e-commerce space, if you're selling on Amazon, knowing where you rank on Amazon is going to be incredibly useful. Mordy Oberstein: Don't just throw stuff into rank and expect to get anything out of it. You have to be a little more specific on what you're trying to get out of it. I appreciate what the RankiX app did here. For example, if you're using one of your all in one SEO tools, sometimes the rank tracking abilities will be a little bit thin as opposed to the specific rank tracking tools, which are a little bit different. I like what RankiX did here because it kind of brought a little bit of that more in-depth functionality and more nuanced functionality or insights to the app. For example, and this is not often or easily found in some of the all in one tools, I could see my rank for yesterday, I can see the rank for the week, month, in one table. And that helps me get a general sense of like, okay, yes, I'm ranking number one now. Yes, I'm ranking number one last week, but last month I was 25. That's an act. Okay, cool. And I can easily dive into that and see the actual trend. So being able to get a little bit more a nuanced or detailed view of the trend itself is really helpful. Crystal Carter: And also it gives you an idea of the volatility overall of the SERP. So if you know that you go up and down maybe, and I've had this before with clients and projects and stuff where there's a couple of key players and you sort of keep swapping back and forth of who's number one or who's in the top three set, and it's really useful to know how tight that is because for some verticals you can swoop in, you can move to number one, and your competitors won't notice particularly, and you could just take that traffic and have that traffic and enjoy it. And for some other verticals, as soon as you move to number one, they will do something on their website. And as soon as you move to number one, the other competitor will do something on their website. And you need to know whether or not you're in a super competitive space where they are also doing the SEO and they are also mindful of that traffic. And being able to see the trend over time will give you some really good insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, there's a lot of cool stuff in there, like the YouTube thing on the YouTube tracker, they give you the volumes for the keywords that you're tracking. Really helpful to understand because you're otherwise just shooting into the dark. So yeah, it's a great tool. Check it out, it's in the Wix at market, just search for RankiX. We'll link to it in the show notes here, so you can just find it, add it to your Wix account, and it's really super helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think also it's a freemium tool and the free one, so if you're a small business for instance, and you got one website that you look after, it's great because you get lots and lots of really good insights on the one website. If you want to expand into something a bit more, they have a paid plan that's really reasonably priced and it's all available within your Wix platform. So yeah, highly recommend. I was really impressed when we had a look at it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, really impressed and thanks for mentioning that it's a free. Man, totally forgot about that, but yes, it is. So you should use that. Now, you know who's very incremental in how he approaches SEO? One small change at a time for Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's true. I would say that. Or sometimes not many changes. Search Engine Roundtable's been going for a long time. I think it's a good thing. Mordy Oberstein: So that's one small step for Barry, one giant leap for SEO kind, as we leap into this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, we're going for a three for from seroundtable.com and the great Barry Schwartz. First up, Google Search Console working to fix search performance delays and latency. Back on July 2nd, Barry Schwarz started reporting, "Hey, looks like Search Console data is delayed." Barry was showing the last update to se roundtable.com Search Console data was 50 hours ago, and then 90 hours ago the next day, which Barry said it might be a record. I saw that get up to 95 hours. As the days progressed, Google did. We did start to see that Google was catching up. Barry reported a few days later, "It looks like Google's catching up, but there was a significant amount of time where your Search Console data was not being updated, which happened to coincide with reporting time for a lot of SEOs, which made this a little bit frustrating." Again, Barry started to report later on in the week that things were catching up, Google was starting to refresh the data. What I am seeing now and what I've seen people talk about across social media say, "Hey, we're back. My Search Console was last updated two hours ago." If yours is not, you might have a problem. It's good to know that this has happened. This does happen from time to time. It's happened in the past. No one is perfect, nothing is perfect. So just makes sense to keep an eye on social media when these things kind of happen or just go to seroundtable.com because Barry will report it. Just so you know, hey, wait a second. Maybe my data's not as fresh as I think it is and I didn't notice. Anyway, okay, continuing with seroundtable.com, Google's Zero-Click study now at 58.5% in 2024. A study done by Rand Fishkin who's done historical analysis on the number of zero click search, meaning where users go to Google and they don't click on anything. And that could be for a variety of reasons. They might Google Yankee score and Google tells them the Yankee scores, so there's nothing to actually click on, which is a contentious topic in the SEO world. I personally think a lot of that is just content consumption trends changing. I think we've talked about it on this podcast before, like, forget Google. I don't even need to go to Google to see the Yankee score. I get a notification pop on my phone every morning. So there's a lot to do with content consumption trends in my opinion, and not Google being nefarious, trying to take away traffic. In this study, Rand shows 58.5% of searches are zero click. It needs to be qualified because around 21% of the time, that zero click is just people not clicking at anything on that search and then trying a new one. So someone might search for, buy a laptop, don't like any of the results, and then search for, cheap laptops, and maybe click on something there. So that's being counted as a zero click search. 37% of the sessions ended with nothing, meaning either the user walked away, said, "Oh, I don't want any of this, or I found it from somewhere else, or I did whatever." Or they found the answer right on the result page, like when you Google, what's the weather right now? And don't want to stick your head out the window and want Google to tell you the answer. Part of this was, and the reason why I'm covering this from scroundtable.com is because Barry's the only one who got this right. Part of the data that Rand showed, which is really interesting, is that he looked at a breakdown between the US and the EU in Google search behavior and showed in May there were fewer searches on mobile in the EU and the US, not on desktop, and a nice little drop off there. Some speculation was, oh, that might be because of the AI overviews that rolled out at the same time. That really would dominate the above the fold landscape on mobile. Maybe folks didn't like that, moved on from Google search. The issue is that the AI overviews didn't roll out in the EU, so it wouldn't explain the EU data. Rand did actually amend that in the post that he has on SparkToro. I'll link to that post in the show notes as well, so thank you Rand for doing that, and thanks for Barry for the great coverage. Okay, last up again from the Barry, from the SE round table. This one, there's no practical difference about this story. I just thought it was interesting. No, Reddit is not blocking Google search. So folks started looking at Reddit's robots.txt file. It looked like, oh, Reddit is blocking all the search engines, but that might just be what you and I see. Because Pedro Dias did some investigation, you run reddit.com through the Google Rich results test, you can see what Google is really allowed and not allowed to access within Reddit from this robots.txt file. And it looks fine. It's totally fine. You can see it right there, it's in the article. I'll link to it in the show notes. Our robots.txt is for search engine. It shows what they're allowing and disallowing, and it would seem that Google is allowed to go ahead and crawl reddit.com, which makes sense because they're paying for the data. As Barry points out, it would be insane to think that Reddit is blocking Google and because they're paying for the data and they get a lot of traffic from there. So good job Pedro Dias and I think it was somebody else, Pedro Dias and Ryan Siddle for realizing that's what was going on. But it was just an interesting little moment in time in the SEO space. Like, wait a second, is there hope? Reddit is gone from the SERP because they're blocking Google? But no, no. It turns out that that's not what's going on. What they're actually showing Google is something different from what we're seeing when we access the robots.txt file the way we usually do. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Thank you so much, Barry, for each small incremental and sometimes leaping article that you write. And to all the SEO news coverage folks, appreciate your coverage that we feature here. Again, going to pitch, if you're looking for news, you are a SEO news junkie, check out It's New, where we cover the SEO news each and every day, except for Fridays, and Saturday and Sunday on the Wix SEO hub. It's right there at the very top with Barry Schwartz himself, or you can look forward on Barry's YouTube channel also. You know who offers great incremental substantive SEO advice and tips? Our follow the week, Chris Long. Crystal Carter: Chris Long. Chris Long is great. Mordy Oberstein: We've been doing this podcast too long to only be featuring Chris now. That's crazy. Crystal Carter: Chris Long is great. He has these fantastic little deep dives that he does on the LinkedIn where he goes into... He will go into a crawl or he'll diagnose some problems on a website or something like that, and it's really rad. I really appreciate the level of geekery that he gets into. Basically, it's just a lot of good tools, a lot of good insights, a lot of good data, and he really goes into it. I've heard him speak at MozCon and he was fantastic there as well. Also, a super nice guy, super personable, and just really into the craft. I think that he's the kind of person that's an SEO. An SEO's SEO, like somebody who really enjoys SEO and really enjoys the investigative data led insights part of it, and I think that's really cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, absolute great follow. Really thoughtful, very thoughtful advice and information about SEO. Definitely give Chris a follow over on LinkedIn and on X @gofishchris. Great, because he works at Go Fish Digital, the Go Fish Chris. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Go fish yourself some SEO insights, Chris. That out, huh? Crystal Carter: You'll thank us. Promise. Mordy Oberstein: I like fishing. You like fishing? Crystal Carter: I don't eat fish anymore. I appreciate the fishing community. In California, you get these really long piers and people go night fishing. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I think they say they come out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they bring - for mackerel and people just hang out on the pier. They bring a boombox. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great time. It's like baseball. You could sit there and not actually do anything for a long time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's cool and people just seem really happy. I think it's also cool that they're hanging out and then they've just got a bunch of fish they can eat for... I think that's awesome. I think it's really cool. And yeah, I've seen it and in Southern California there's lots of really long piers. They're really cool. And people put glow sticks on the ends of their fishing lines, which is cool. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. I haven't gone fishing in a long time. I used to love fishing. It's just quiet. I like quiet, and we're quietly going to pivot out of the podcast. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast but not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to pitch to SEO clients as our Wix Studio series continues. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning app 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 Ben Barker Chris Long Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Connective3 Rankix Wix App News: No - Reddit Is Not Blocking Google Search Google Zero Click Study Now At 58.5% In 2024 2024 Zero-Click Search Study Google Search Console Working To Fix Search Performance Delays & Latency Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ben Barker Chris Long Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Connective3 Rankix Wix App News: No - Reddit Is Not Blocking Google Search Google Zero Click Study Now At 58.5% In 2024 2024 Zero-Click Search Study Google Search Console Working To Fix Search Performance Delays & Latency Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is oh so specific and oh so incremental, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. Incremental. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm just talking nonsense. I don't know what that means. Crystal Carter: It's an interesting adjective. So yes, I guess so? Mordy Oberstein: Methodical. It's like saying you're methodical. Crystal Carter: Incremental, I think it's like small movements over time, I guess. And I guess that's life. Is that life? Mordy Oberstein: That's SEO and life, small movement over time. Crystal Carter: Life, life, life, life, life. Mordy Oberstein: Life is SEO. Crystal Carter: Sure. I'll take it. Fine. Yeah. What's up, podcast people? Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: Incrementally. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go incrementally into who the podcast is brought to you by, which is Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use the advanced permission settings in Wix Studio to assign the right team member to the right task for the right page at the right time. Because SEO success depends upon being as targeted as you can for your clients, as this week, our Wix Studio series focuses on being focused and targeted for incremental growth. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is when creating- Crystal Carter: Wheat. Mordy Oberstein: Huh? Crystal Carter: You sort the wheat from the chaff. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but it's only if you're separating wheat. Let's say you're separating in like peanuts from the chaff. Crystal Carter: Peanuts have chaff? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That little, that shell, the inner shell, like the soft shell. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's chaff. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is, which is not just wheat, when creating an SEO plan for your clients, why you should even separate said chaff, and how it spurs client growth. And why SEO agencies often don't separate this chaff to begin with and how to avoid making the same mistake. To help us sift and winnow all of this proverbial chaff, Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3 will join us in just a few minutes. Plus we'll share a new tool that you can use to help you refine your rank tracking focus. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So join us as we place the flower that is your growth strategy for your clients through the SEO seed on this second episode of our Wix Studio series, AKA episode 95 of the SERP's Up Podcast. I don't know why I went with the whole chaff thing. Crystal Carter: I don't know, it was- Mordy Oberstein: But it's good. It's good. It's good a visual. Crystal Carter: Yeah? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, in my mind it's throwing things up in the air and you're just separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff. Crystal Carter: Okay, cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're just going to go with it. Crystal Carter: Let's go with it. That is the theme of the show. Let's just go with it. It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: That's the theme of my life. Back to our life tips. Just for the audience, that's worked out for me about 50% of the time. You can look at that half empty or half full Crystal Carter: As you get older, I think you kind of realize it'll be fine. It'll be fine. I think I used to worry about a lot of things when I was younger that I do not worry about so much anymore. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me too, like hair. Crystal Carter: And you figure it'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it'll be fine. Crystal Carter: It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's fine. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So what'll be fine is that this week, I had the lovely opportunity to chat with Ben, so we're going to dive into that. So here is my little chat with Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3. So this is our second episode of our Wix Studio series. Wix Studio being a platform that helps digital marketers better manage your clients, projects and teams. All sorts of features such as reusable page assets and reusable widgets and apps and built-in AI code assistant to help you accelerate client growth and so forth and so forth and so forth, which is why this series is focused on helping agencies do just that, accelerate client growth and your own revenue along the way. To help us do this and understand how you can accelerate client growth, please welcome to the show Ben Barker, the Group Head of Organic Search at connective3. Ben Barker: Hi, Mordy. Thank you. Thank you for the intro. It's really, really nice to be here and I'm very much looking forward to chatting through everything with you today. Do you want me to give a little bit of background on myself? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so we're marketers here, so full pitch. Who are you and what does connective3 deal? Ben Barker: I've personally been working in SEO for probably twelve, thirteen years now, which is a very long time in the digital landscape. I think we've seen so much change over that time. I started back in the times when it was okay to go on forums and add random comments with links and style them- Mordy Oberstein: Hey, is that okay anymore? That's how I spend most of my day. Ben Barker: Yeah, I'm not sure if that's still cool or okay to do. Mordy Oberstein: It might be cool again with Reddit on the SERP. Ben Barker: Yeah, I mean, we don't know. To be fair, and this is a different topic, but I actually find a lot of results from Reddit are actually better than some of the results you get from Google for a lot of searches these days, but that's a kind of whole- Mordy Oberstein: A different can of wow. You just stepped on a landmine right there. We're going to just gloss right over that and keep going into your background. Ben Barker: I started out in SEO, started out doing a bit of link building as I've just mentioned. Well, some form of link building, and then I kind of moved into the more technical strategical side of it. And then maybe five or six years ago I did branch out into other channels as well, but SEO is my primary focus. That's my first love, if you like, and that's kind of where I spend most of my time these days. Connective3 were founded in 2019. They've seen huge growth over the last few years. We work with a variety of clients, really: E-comm, lead generation across finance, travel. We do really good work with clients. I know that's kind of a bit of a cliche to say. If you look at our client retention rates, they're really, really strong. We've been working with some clients pretty much since we started the agency, or since the founder started the agency, sorry. So we've got a really strong track record and I think the key thing for us, which kind of feed into the topic of conversation today, I would guess, is that we're always looking for ways to show incremental growth. That is the really, really key thing, especially when it comes to SEO. As you know, Mordy, SEO is a bit of a black box. It's a bit of a dark art to a lot of senior stakeholders, especially within businesses that they know they need to do it, but they don't understand the why. And I think one thing that connective3 is really good at is helping them understand the why, and also connecting everything together. It's kind of in the name, but that's really, really what we do. That's just a bit of an intro from me. Mordy Oberstein: Look, that ties right in. I've always said SEO is for long-term stable growth. The trade-off to that is if you're looking to grow immediately right away and you see all those hockey stick graphs on social media, whatever, that's not actually what's going to look like. So let's lean into this. We spoke about this when we were deciding what to talk about and one of the things you mentioned I thought was really interesting, that sometimes agencies make the mistake where they're taking too broad of a stroke when they're looking to improve client growth. So let's maybe start, what do you mean by that and what do you mean exactly by honing in and incremental growth? What are we talking about? Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a few different facets to it, but the main one that I'll kind of talk about maybe to begin with is probably how agencies would forecast. Because when you are speaking to clients or prospects I think, you're always going to have to put a forecast together. When I'm talking about broad strokes in the context of forecasting, and you may have seen this yourself in the past, I've definitely seen this because I've worked in-house and agency side, so I've kind of seen both sides of it, but you'll quite often get, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, here's your projected growth." And what the agency will have done is they will have looked in Google Analytics, they will have looked at previous year's data and they will just forecast a rough 10% growth on top of that, right? And whilst that's not necessarily wrong, what does that actually mean? Because when we do forecast as an example, when I do or my team do forecast for organic traffic, you almost have to take it back to the base. You need a lot more context of how the business works and what they've done previously. So as an example, I used to work for a big retail brand and they would often run above the line activity, so TV activity as an example. Now the challenge comes in where when you come to forecast the year after, quite often you will see a big halo effect from the TV activity across brand and in some cases non-brand traffic. You can't use that then to forecast your projected growth because it is almost artificially inflated. What you have to do is you have to exclude any other marketing campaigns or anything outside of the normal growth of what you may see. A lot of agencies don't tend to do that because they don't tend to dig into the context of, okay, what have you done previously and how has that affected your growth? So first of all, you need to strip it back to the basics. A, what growth would we get had we done nothing at all and the market grew the way it grew? So the market might grow by 5 or 10% year-on-year. That's fine. That's your baseline. Then what you need to do is you need to sort of figure out from that growth and what we want to achieve for you as our client, what areas, what products, what services, what categories are you looking for specific growth within? And do you also have any new products, services, or categories coming in this year? Because you need to then factor that in potentially. What you would then do is you quite often find that, in the sense of an e-commerce brand as an example, you might have 20% of your products which make 80% of your revenue. So therefore it makes more sense to do an initial forecast at least on the projected growth within those areas. So you would then take those categories and then everybody has a different process for forecasting, but you can take things like search volume, click-through rate sessions, et cetera, et cetera, average transaction value. And then you can sort of build a forecast based off specific growth for those categories. Now, I'm not saying you'd only do those categories, but that's where you would start. And then what you would do is say, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, we've built this forecast for you on your specific or your key services products areas," and then you can almost do a secondary forecast then for everything else. What that then means is that you're not just presenting your client with an overall number that says, "We're going to give you 15% growth. We haven't really specified whether it's brand or non brand. We haven't really told you what categories." I think quite often what happens is really awkward conversations will come about maybe six to nine to twelve months later in that if you don't do that, you may have grown their traffic by 10 or 15%, but it may be via kind of lower relevancy informational type content. So they may not actually be making more money from that traffic, which is a problem because SEO isn't just about driving traffic. SEO or organic as a kind of channel, it does many different things. It is informative. That's what we need to do. It is a direct response channel. It is a brand retention channel, and it's even a brand awareness channel to a degree. You kind of have to think about all of those things and you have to factor that in when you're your forecasting because otherwise, like I said, you can end up having a conversation down the road whereby you may have increased traffic significantly, but it might be from lower relevancy blogs, which actually... Or not lower relevancy blogs, sorry, but it might be from a lot of informational traffic that just isn't relevant in the context of driving sales or leads or revenue for the business, and therefore that makes the investment that they've made inorganic. They kind of look at that and go, "Well, what have we just paid you for for the last twelve months? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, which is why you have to figure out what are their goals, where is the business even at? Are they at a point where they're able to convert yet? Are they still at a stage where they're still building up that awareness? Really understanding where the business is at and also where the products are at. I'm a big sports nut, so let's imagine for example, I don't know, tomorrow LeBron James retires. He's not, but let's just say he did. Maybe he should, I don't know. And you sell LeBron James' shoes, so imagine you have to figure out the predicted demand on that product, which may go down if LeBron retires. It may not. I have no idea if it would or wouldn't, but you would need to figure that out and that's not easy. Ben Barker: No, it's definitely not. Definitely not. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's trying to be as specific as we can with the information that we have. SEO isn't as... Head of PPC may be common sense, but it's not in some cases as black and white as PPC. I'm not saying PPC is black and white. There's a lot of complexity to it, but when you are forecasting for PPC or anything like that, it's a lot easier in a lot of ways because you have the data there. You can take previous data, you can see what keywords convert, you can see how users interact via different ads, et cetera. Whereas with SEO, we kind of have to just take the information that we have, and in some cases that will include paid data, sure. But yeah, you're absolutely right in that sense. You almost have to figure out and guesstimate. It's almost best guess in terms of how you think the demand for that will go. And then you obviously can factor that into the work that you are doing and then that feeds then back into the overall numbers. Mordy Oberstein: So how do you separate all that out? It's a lot of separating chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is. I don't really know, but the good stuff, the peanut. How do you do that? Ben Barker: Our team internally built a really, really good tool for us to use, actually. You can plug keywords into it and you can categorize the keywords. So your inputs are essentially keyword, search volume, category. So in the context of what you've just said about LeBron, your keyword might be LeBron James' shoes, category would be basketball, and then your search volume would be whatever your search volume is. Once you've populated that, we basically run the tool and what it does, it does a few things. It'll pull where you are versus other competitors within the search results, and then it effectively presents you with almost a chart to show you where you are versus your competitors. We do often, or we do always actually input competitors into there as well. So we can put specific competitors in there, and what it does is it shows you where you are in the context of that landscape. Now because you are using specific keywords that you're really wanting to target across your categories, what that then means is that it gives you an output which is effectively almost your projected or available traffic for those keywords. And what we tend to then do is we would start by building the forecast around that specifically because we know that those keywords are really important to the business, so therefore the search... Obviously your actual traffic in real terms is usually different than what the tool outputs, but again, the tool outputs what it outputs based on search volume and click-through rates, et cetera. So it really depends on your inputs, but generally that's a really good place for us to start because we can then present that back to the client and show them actually, "We've really focused on your key areas, your key categories. This is what we believe the available traffic is." What I tend to do on top of that is I'll run the tool and then we'll have a look in GA4 and sort of see how that fares up in terms of what traffic they've actually had over the last twelve months as an example for those key categories versus what we have available. And generally you can then build out a pretty good baseline from there. That's how we do it. Mordy Oberstein: So how do you do, let's say for example it's a case where the brand's not ready to convert yet? So for example, let's go with the LeBron shoes just for a minute. They need to rank for LeBron James sneakers or buy LeBron James sneakers and they're not anywhere near that. They just started six months ago. So how do you filter out and refine like, okay, you need to get this money, you need to rank for this, but there's probably five or six preliminary steps that you need to do beforehand. Do you map all of that out and tell them that? How does that look for you? Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. It is a really, really great question. The kind of approach that we tend to take would be, obviously you've got your LeBron sneakers, trainers, however you want to frame that. Obviously that would be assumed to be a really, really high volume, high intent, really competitive keyword. So like you just said, if we're a new business, you ain't going to rank for that keyword in six months. It's just not going to happen realistically, if you look at the kind of competition of the market. Now in some rare cases it may happen, but chances are it probably isn't. So what you then have to do is say, "Okay, well how else can we get relevant traffic to our website for these types of keywords?" The process that we take I guess, is we would kind of do some research around what are the kind of secondary or tertiary search terms, categories, et cetera that people may be searching for that aren't directly LeBron sneakers. Then you would effectively look at the way that we would manage this with the client is we would say, "Okay, we're not going to rank for this keyword in six months. We'll be really, really honest with you." And again, I'm sure there'll be other people out there that will promise the earth and say that you can, but again, that's a different conversation. We would sort of say, "What we can do though is we've identified these types of opportunities around the topic of this particular product, and therefore what we'll do is we'll build you a content strategy which will almost eventually support ranking for that keyword." So if you think about LeBron sneakers as your head term, and again, if we think about that in the context of let's just assume that he is retiring, that's why he's selling them, you can then build content around queries related to that. So is LeBron James retiring? Again, this is just examples, but when is LeBron James retiring? And then you can almost build content around that and you can talk about his career and then you can almost feed that back in. So it's almost like head term is at your top and then underneath you have an almost, I don't like using this word because in SEO terms it always sounds really shady, but almost like a network of supporting content, which then feeds back into EAT and things like that, which then Google will obviously look at and go, "Okay, we can see that you guys aren't just trying to push this to show sales. We can see that you actually know what you're talking about on this topic." So therefore eventually maybe twelve months, maybe eighteen months or whatever, you will have a really good shot at ranking for those keywords because you've actually put the effort and the time into building up a really authoritive hub, which actually shows what you're talking about, that sort of thing. So that's how we would frame it. It would almost be your short to medium term tactics would be that effectively, building that content network and the informational area of it. Mordy Oberstein: When I do this for clients, so what I like to do, if I have a client who's very long-term minded, they know where they're at, they know where they need to go, so I'll build up the SEO plan or the SEO proposal in phases. Phase one is X and phase one will take six months and you're going to focus on X, Y, and Z. Phase two will be this, and phase three will be that. Which maybe is not the best way to nab the client, if you want to put it in those terms, because it's not an easy... It's a long process. There's multiple phases of it, and each phase is probably usually very intricate and very involved, which kind of can be a little bit of a turnoff, but I generally feel laying it out that are mapping it out there so they understand what's going to happen, what the expectations are after phase one is it's usually not earning a lot of money, kind of sets up the client for success. And for the longer term relationship to feel like, okay, I'm with you, I understand you, and I'm willing to pay you for the next six months, seven months, eight months, whatever it is to do this, because I know where we're going and where the map is. Ben Barker: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think again, that sort of feeds into one of my other points around incrementality, which effectively is how you manage stakeholders within a business, which you've kind of hit the nail on the head there in that you have a really clear plan. You've laid that out. I think one of the things that, again, at certain areas where I think collectively as an industry we probably should be better at is you need to manage the people outside of your immediate contact. So again, coming from an in-house perspective, I had a pretty generous budget that I could spend on or invest, and SEO is an investment channel. A lot of senior stakeholders think, oh, SEO is free traffic. It's not free traffic because you either in some way or another have to pay for that, whether it's hiring headcount, whether it's- Mordy Oberstein: I'm not working for free, are you? Ben Barker: No, I'm definitely not. I love my job, but yeah, I don't think I can do it for free. Mordy Oberstein: Got to feed my family. Ben Barker: Yeah. It's an investment channel, so that's your first step. So there'll be a period of time where you are paying us to do a job for you, you're probably not going to see a return maybe for six months, maybe nine months, maybe twelve months. However, and again, it's kind of a new thing that I've started saying which some people kind of understand, is that SEO is almost like investing, so it does compound over time. So year one, you might break even, you might be a little bit less. Year two, you might be 10% off. Year three, you might be 15% off. And if you think about even if you factor in, if you're an agency and you work with a client for two, three, four years, obviously over years and over time your fees may increase, but it won't increase to the level where it will outweigh the returns that they get. And if it does, to be fair, you're probably pricing it incorrectly. You can still make good money as an agency or a consultant and your client can still make great money as well, as long as assuming everything is priced correctly. I think that's the key thing. And another thing, again from an in-house perspective, and coming back to the budgets and stuff like that that I was talking about earlier, if I wanted to spend budget on something, it was my budget to spend. I held the purse strings, if you like, but I would still have to justify that internally to other stakeholders because they would need to understand what I'm doing, because that investment obviously affects the profit and loss. One thing that I would encourage and urge anybody in SEO to do is to try and be great friends or build good relationships with your finance contact. Because they're generally the people, if you get them on side, you will be in such a good place. So internally at my previous place, I actually had a really good relationship with the finance team. They were fantastic. They didn't understand the nuance of SEO or what we were doing, but if you can explain it in really simple terms, they're like, "Yep, okay, fine. We're totally cool. We understand this investment. We understand that we're going to see a loss for a few months, but based on what you've said we should start seeing some improvement in the backend." So your finance people are absolutely paramount. And as well, I think your contacts, like your chief technical officers, your technical directors, because ultimately again, if you get sign off and work with the client, but then all of a sudden you've got a load of tech work, your CTO or your tech contact doesn't really understand the value of what you are trying to do. So if you send recommendations off the back of an audit for example, but you don't actually monetize those things, they're going to look at it and go, "Well, I've got all of this stuff to fix over here. Why should I fix this? Because you've not told me how much this is worth, so I'm just going to put this in a list somewhere and it's going to stay there." Mordy Oberstein: That's why if you're listening to this podcast, you listen to regularly, we have an episode on site maturity and understanding why and where the site is at, and why that's so important. It's really understanding where the business is at, the maturity of the business and maturity of the website and understanding that one thing compounds to the next thing and it compounds to the next thing, and that what you're able to do with each phase of site or business maturity differs, but it all compounds and adds up to itself. And you really understand where it's supposed to end up and result will actually be, and realizing that what's possible at what stage of the site's evolution and what naturally should come next as it naturally evolves. Before time kind of slips away with us here, once you've understand the forecast, you understand what you're going to do with the business and what you will want to focus on, how do you know where to start exactly? What's your rubric look like? Okay, I understand the forecast, where we want to go, what we're going to end up doing, but where do you start and how do you decide where to start? Ben Barker: Do you mean in terms of if I pick up or the agency picks up a client, what do we prioritize? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've got five keywords I think are the money keywords that business is ready to ring for now that we can really start focusing on. Let's assume for a second, let's make it difficult, all five keywords are the exact same search volume. Ben Barker: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Where do you start and how do you start? Ben Barker: Yeah, it's a good question. First thing I would do would be to actually validate the keywords. So when I say validate the keywords, I don't mean that I would take them from the client and say, I don't really believe what you are saying here is actually right for you. But what I would do is I would take that away and we would do some research around it and actually see, okay, we do things that analyze the search results. Because quite often you'll find that clients want to rank for keywords more from a vanity perspective, just to be there because the competitor's there. But actually in real terms, when you look at those results and the quality of those results, it doesn't really feel like it's a transactional place, if of course it is a transactional keyword. Assuming it would be. I think first of all, you would validate those five keywords, so you would make sure that actually it would be worth our time to focus on these. And again, we would send relevant traffic that would convert in the context of search results and how that looks. Then I think beyond that, assuming again all five are the same, you kind of from an... And I think this is what can kind of trip a lot of people up, is that you may take all five of those keywords and go, "Yeah, no worries. We can focus on all of these keywords at once and we'll get you some great results." Again, that isn't the case. So I think where you need to then look is to apply a more commercial lens. "Okay, Mr. or Mrs. Client, you've given me these five keywords that relate to these categories. What is a conversion worth across each of these categories for you?" What you might find is that four out of five of those keywords, again, this is just a bit of W data, but it might be worth $25 per conversion, but then one keyword might be worth 150. So assuming that all of those keywords are the same search volume again, but even if they weren't, in fairness, I would always look at what value each of those categories would drive. And for me, that's probably how I would determine where the focus would be. And then beyond that, in terms of how you would prioritize work and where you would look to start would really be, it differs. It's the classic SEO answer, but it really would depend on the state of the website. You might have a website that's really technically sound, but actually their content is really lacking, so then your content would be the focus area. You might have a website which actually has really great content, but their technical isn't great. So in terms of how you would feed that through into the strategy would really depend on the state of the website, the state of the content and those sorts of things probably where I would... And the backlinks, of course. Again, they might have really good content, they might have really strong tech, but actually they might not be doing too much from a digital PR perspective to actually draw in those backlinks and coverage, so therefore you would probably start there as a point. Mordy Oberstein: In a nutshell, you have to qualify. There's no way around qualifying it, whether it's the SERP, wherever their ongoing SEO practices aren't really qualifying, are those actually effective? You have to qualify everything. There's no way around it. Ben Barker: Yeah, absolutely. And again, the beauty of that is you've qualified those five keywords, you know what each of the conversion is worth based on the keywords. Again, you then feed that into your forecast because you know what that conversion's worth. So you can use that data in your forecast then as revenue data, and then that means that your forecast looks a lot better. Because when your client asks you to justify it, you can talk them through it really clearly rather than just saying, "Oh, I had a look at your numbers. You saw 10% growth last year, so I've given you 20% growth this year. There's no real thought behind it, but that's what I thought. That's what felt good to me-" Mordy Oberstein: 10% is always a good number. It feels safe. Ben Barker: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those safe numbers. It's enough growth, but it's safe. Ben Barker: Definitely. Mordy Oberstein: With that, where can people find you if they want to ask you questions about your SEO refinement strategy? Ben Barker: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm also more than happy for people to drop me an email. And also c3 or connective3, we run a couple of events as well, which I think- Mordy Oberstein: yeah. Ben Barker: ... really great thing. So we have an event in the UK called Up North, which is coming up in the next month. So yeah, basically there. And I'm also going to be doing more speaking as well, so hopefully people will see me on the speaking circuit very soon. Mordy Oberstein: Good for you, man. All right, so we'll link to all of those links in the show notes. Ben, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with us. Ben Barker: Oh, thank you very much, Mordy. It's been an absolute pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, talk to you soon. Ben Barker: Yeah, I'll speak you soon. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Ben is a great guy. Make sure you give him a follow. Connective3, they do great stuff. If you're ever at BrightonSEO in the UK, they're always there with their team. They're great fun. They have great swag, by the way, so make sure you check them out when you visit BrightonSEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they're a great team. I've met them at some other events as well, and they're always a lot of enthusiasm and always really interested in what's going on. So yeah, great team. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Now speaking of getting a little specific with your SEO, and I have said many things about rank tracking, many of them not great, but one of the things that you might want to do is get a little bit more specific with how you rank track. So we're going to show you a little tool that can help you do that as we go tool time on SERP's Up. So the folks over a Pro Rank Tracker created a little app in the Wix at Market called Rankix, and I didn't even know about it. They happened to let me know after the fact that they created the thing, and I had a look at it. I've worked for SEMRush in the past, I've worked for Rank Ranger in the past. I've worked for many folks who track rank, and I like rank tracking and I do rank tracking, but I also have some spicy things to say about rank tracking. So I go, "All right, let me see what this is because I'm very spicy about my rank tracking," and I saw them like, "Oh, this is great." And I'm not saying that literally because it's in the Wix app market and I'm being paid to say that. I'm saying that because it not only tracks your rank on Google, it tracks it on Bing, it tracks it on Amazon and it tracks it on YouTube. I'm like, "Oh, snap. I thought I was going to get your typical watered down version of a rank tracker, which is your typical water down version of actually a good SEO tool in general, that's a spicy take on rank tracking, and it's not. It's actually like omnichannel rank tracking and it's really helpful." I actually use it on my podcast because I integrated YouTube created RSS feed where you can pull in... They didn't create RSS feed, let me rephrase that. They created the ability to pull in your podcast RSS feed and it automatically uploads and creates YouTube videos for your podcast. And I did that for a podcast that I run. I'm like, "Oh, this is great. Let me track the rank. I want to track the and how do I track the rank of this? I don't pay for a YouTube rank tracker." Well, now I do in RankiX. Crystal Carter: Nice. And I think it's such a good tool for people who are working across multiple channels, as I think most people are these days. I think there's very few teams who are doing SEO, who are doing audience management, audience growth management specifically just on one channel. And that's a primary, that's a great example of how people can use multiple tracking across multiple things because it is going to affect your Google visibility because Google is putting YouTube all over the SERP. So for instance, if you go to the video tab, nine times out of ten you're going to get a YouTube video unless you specifically search for TikTok, and then you'll see a TikTok video. But yeah, I think that it's super useful to be able to have visibility on that. And anybody who's working in the e-commerce space, if you're selling on Amazon, knowing where you rank on Amazon is going to be incredibly useful. Mordy Oberstein: Don't just throw stuff into rank and expect to get anything out of it. You have to be a little more specific on what you're trying to get out of it. I appreciate what the RankiX app did here. For example, if you're using one of your all in one SEO tools, sometimes the rank tracking abilities will be a little bit thin as opposed to the specific rank tracking tools, which are a little bit different. I like what RankiX did here because it kind of brought a little bit of that more in-depth functionality and more nuanced functionality or insights to the app. For example, and this is not often or easily found in some of the all in one tools, I could see my rank for yesterday, I can see the rank for the week, month, in one table. And that helps me get a general sense of like, okay, yes, I'm ranking number one now. Yes, I'm ranking number one last week, but last month I was 25. That's an act. Okay, cool. And I can easily dive into that and see the actual trend. So being able to get a little bit more a nuanced or detailed view of the trend itself is really helpful. Crystal Carter: And also it gives you an idea of the volatility overall of the SERP. So if you know that you go up and down maybe, and I've had this before with clients and projects and stuff where there's a couple of key players and you sort of keep swapping back and forth of who's number one or who's in the top three set, and it's really useful to know how tight that is because for some verticals you can swoop in, you can move to number one, and your competitors won't notice particularly, and you could just take that traffic and have that traffic and enjoy it. And for some other verticals, as soon as you move to number one, they will do something on their website. And as soon as you move to number one, the other competitor will do something on their website. And you need to know whether or not you're in a super competitive space where they are also doing the SEO and they are also mindful of that traffic. And being able to see the trend over time will give you some really good insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, there's a lot of cool stuff in there, like the YouTube thing on the YouTube tracker, they give you the volumes for the keywords that you're tracking. Really helpful to understand because you're otherwise just shooting into the dark. So yeah, it's a great tool. Check it out, it's in the Wix at market, just search for RankiX. We'll link to it in the show notes here, so you can just find it, add it to your Wix account, and it's really super helpful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think also it's a freemium tool and the free one, so if you're a small business for instance, and you got one website that you look after, it's great because you get lots and lots of really good insights on the one website. If you want to expand into something a bit more, they have a paid plan that's really reasonably priced and it's all available within your Wix platform. So yeah, highly recommend. I was really impressed when we had a look at it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, really impressed and thanks for mentioning that it's a free. Man, totally forgot about that, but yes, it is. So you should use that. Now, you know who's very incremental in how he approaches SEO? One small change at a time for Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: I mean, that's true. I would say that. Or sometimes not many changes. Search Engine Roundtable's been going for a long time. I think it's a good thing. Mordy Oberstein: So that's one small step for Barry, one giant leap for SEO kind, as we leap into this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, we're going for a three for from seroundtable.com and the great Barry Schwartz. First up, Google Search Console working to fix search performance delays and latency. Back on July 2nd, Barry Schwarz started reporting, "Hey, looks like Search Console data is delayed." Barry was showing the last update to se roundtable.com Search Console data was 50 hours ago, and then 90 hours ago the next day, which Barry said it might be a record. I saw that get up to 95 hours. As the days progressed, Google did. We did start to see that Google was catching up. Barry reported a few days later, "It looks like Google's catching up, but there was a significant amount of time where your Search Console data was not being updated, which happened to coincide with reporting time for a lot of SEOs, which made this a little bit frustrating." Again, Barry started to report later on in the week that things were catching up, Google was starting to refresh the data. What I am seeing now and what I've seen people talk about across social media say, "Hey, we're back. My Search Console was last updated two hours ago." If yours is not, you might have a problem. It's good to know that this has happened. This does happen from time to time. It's happened in the past. No one is perfect, nothing is perfect. So just makes sense to keep an eye on social media when these things kind of happen or just go to seroundtable.com because Barry will report it. Just so you know, hey, wait a second. Maybe my data's not as fresh as I think it is and I didn't notice. Anyway, okay, continuing with seroundtable.com, Google's Zero-Click study now at 58.5% in 2024. A study done by Rand Fishkin who's done historical analysis on the number of zero click search, meaning where users go to Google and they don't click on anything. And that could be for a variety of reasons. They might Google Yankee score and Google tells them the Yankee scores, so there's nothing to actually click on, which is a contentious topic in the SEO world. I personally think a lot of that is just content consumption trends changing. I think we've talked about it on this podcast before, like, forget Google. I don't even need to go to Google to see the Yankee score. I get a notification pop on my phone every morning. So there's a lot to do with content consumption trends in my opinion, and not Google being nefarious, trying to take away traffic. In this study, Rand shows 58.5% of searches are zero click. It needs to be qualified because around 21% of the time, that zero click is just people not clicking at anything on that search and then trying a new one. So someone might search for, buy a laptop, don't like any of the results, and then search for, cheap laptops, and maybe click on something there. So that's being counted as a zero click search. 37% of the sessions ended with nothing, meaning either the user walked away, said, "Oh, I don't want any of this, or I found it from somewhere else, or I did whatever." Or they found the answer right on the result page, like when you Google, what's the weather right now? And don't want to stick your head out the window and want Google to tell you the answer. Part of this was, and the reason why I'm covering this from scroundtable.com is because Barry's the only one who got this right. Part of the data that Rand showed, which is really interesting, is that he looked at a breakdown between the US and the EU in Google search behavior and showed in May there were fewer searches on mobile in the EU and the US, not on desktop, and a nice little drop off there. Some speculation was, oh, that might be because of the AI overviews that rolled out at the same time. That really would dominate the above the fold landscape on mobile. Maybe folks didn't like that, moved on from Google search. The issue is that the AI overviews didn't roll out in the EU, so it wouldn't explain the EU data. Rand did actually amend that in the post that he has on SparkToro. I'll link to that post in the show notes as well, so thank you Rand for doing that, and thanks for Barry for the great coverage. Okay, last up again from the Barry, from the SE round table. This one, there's no practical difference about this story. I just thought it was interesting. No, Reddit is not blocking Google search. So folks started looking at Reddit's robots.txt file. It looked like, oh, Reddit is blocking all the search engines, but that might just be what you and I see. Because Pedro Dias did some investigation, you run reddit.com through the Google Rich results test, you can see what Google is really allowed and not allowed to access within Reddit from this robots.txt file. And it looks fine. It's totally fine. You can see it right there, it's in the article. I'll link to it in the show notes. Our robots.txt is for search engine. It shows what they're allowing and disallowing, and it would seem that Google is allowed to go ahead and crawl reddit.com, which makes sense because they're paying for the data. As Barry points out, it would be insane to think that Reddit is blocking Google and because they're paying for the data and they get a lot of traffic from there. So good job Pedro Dias and I think it was somebody else, Pedro Dias and Ryan Siddle for realizing that's what was going on. But it was just an interesting little moment in time in the SEO space. Like, wait a second, is there hope? Reddit is gone from the SERP because they're blocking Google? But no, no. It turns out that that's not what's going on. What they're actually showing Google is something different from what we're seeing when we access the robots.txt file the way we usually do. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Thank you so much, Barry, for each small incremental and sometimes leaping article that you write. And to all the SEO news coverage folks, appreciate your coverage that we feature here. Again, going to pitch, if you're looking for news, you are a SEO news junkie, check out It's New, where we cover the SEO news each and every day, except for Fridays, and Saturday and Sunday on the Wix SEO hub. It's right there at the very top with Barry Schwartz himself, or you can look forward on Barry's YouTube channel also. You know who offers great incremental substantive SEO advice and tips? Our follow the week, Chris Long. Crystal Carter: Chris Long. Chris Long is great. Mordy Oberstein: We've been doing this podcast too long to only be featuring Chris now. That's crazy. Crystal Carter: Chris Long is great. He has these fantastic little deep dives that he does on the LinkedIn where he goes into... He will go into a crawl or he'll diagnose some problems on a website or something like that, and it's really rad. I really appreciate the level of geekery that he gets into. Basically, it's just a lot of good tools, a lot of good insights, a lot of good data, and he really goes into it. I've heard him speak at MozCon and he was fantastic there as well. Also, a super nice guy, super personable, and just really into the craft. I think that he's the kind of person that's an SEO. An SEO's SEO, like somebody who really enjoys SEO and really enjoys the investigative data led insights part of it, and I think that's really cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, absolute great follow. Really thoughtful, very thoughtful advice and information about SEO. Definitely give Chris a follow over on LinkedIn and on X @gofishchris. Great, because he works at Go Fish Digital, the Go Fish Chris. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Go fish yourself some SEO insights, Chris. That out, huh? Crystal Carter: You'll thank us. Promise. Mordy Oberstein: I like fishing. You like fishing? Crystal Carter: I don't eat fish anymore. I appreciate the fishing community. In California, you get these really long piers and people go night fishing. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I think they say they come out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they bring - for mackerel and people just hang out on the pier. They bring a boombox. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great time. It's like baseball. You could sit there and not actually do anything for a long time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think it's cool and people just seem really happy. I think it's also cool that they're hanging out and then they've just got a bunch of fish they can eat for... I think that's awesome. I think it's really cool. And yeah, I've seen it and in Southern California there's lots of really long piers. They're really cool. And people put glow sticks on the ends of their fishing lines, which is cool. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. I haven't gone fishing in a long time. I used to love fishing. It's just quiet. I like quiet, and we're quietly going to pivot out of the podcast. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast but not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to pitch to SEO clients as our Wix Studio series continues. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning app 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

Geoff Kennedy is a UK based SEO consultant with over 15 years experience working with clients around the globe. He works with a wide variety of businesses, including well-known brands, specializing in SEO audits and providing strategic support. Geoff Kennedy SEO and Digital Marketing Consultant Geoff Kennedy is a UK based SEO consultant with over 15 years experience working with clients around the globe. He works with a wide variety of businesses, including well-known brands, specializing in SEO audits and providing strategic support. Articles & Resources 23 Mar 2023 Do you really need tools to do SEO? Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What contributing factors differentiate successful SEO agencies from the rest? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive into the world of agency success & failures with Simon Schnieders, CEO of Blue Array - The UK’s largest SEO agency. Together they investigate the highs and lows that shape an agency’s growth trajectory. Plus, understand why building your own SEO tool can be the x-factor that sets your agency apart. Tune in as we get to the bottom line of SEO agency success on episode 97 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back The success & failures of an SEO agency What contributing factors differentiate successful SEO agencies from the rest? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive into the world of agency success & failures with Simon Schnieders, CEO of Blue Array - The UK’s largest SEO agency. Together they investigate the highs and lows that shape an agency’s growth trajectory. Plus, understand why building your own SEO tool can be the x-factor that sets your agency apart. Tune in as we get to the bottom line of SEO agency success on episode 97 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 97 | July 24, 2024 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:40 This week’s guests Simon Schnieders Schnieders spent over a decade working at the coalface of SEO, heading up in-house teams at companies like Zoopla, Yell and Mail Online prior to starting his own agency, Blue Array. Having previously worked with SEO agencies as a client, Simon had an acute understanding of some of the frustrations clients can encounter with traditional agencies. Taking what he learned from this and from the big SEO campaigns he’d worked on, Simon struck out on his own to launch Blue Array, trademarking the term ‘consulgency’ to describe a unique blend of consultancy and agency concentrating on SEO services and nothing else. And the rest, as they say, is history. In addition to heading up Blue Array, Simon also finds time to pass on his business expertise as an investor and advisor at ClickMechanic.com, SonicJobs and more. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP'S Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous, incredibly amazing, the uncomparable head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, incredible, stupendous, magnificent, oh gosh, I ran out of, it's really- Mordy Oberstein: It's hard. Crystal Carter: You make it seem easy. Mordy Oberstein: It's hard. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that great introduction, that was lovely. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. You know Barry Schwarz said we have to redo the intro because we've been doing the podcast... We're inching towards a hundred episodes and we've been doing the podcast for basically two years now. How is it the new wave if we've been doing it for two years? Crystal Carter: SEO is new every day. Every day there's something new. I wish it wasn't new, but it is. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we have a whole series. It's new but also new wave lasted the whole eighties. That was fine. Crystal Carter: That's true. It did, it did. I was little at the time, but I think I would've been involved with that hair situation. It was very exciting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me too when I had hair. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to a rest your newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which comes out each and every month, but where you can also better manage your agency's team with advanced user permission settings and set your clients up for success with direct feedback channels built right into Wix Studio's backend. It's with that, that today we're focusing on the success and failures of the UK's largest SEO agency. No, we're not picking on anyone, but we're going to be joined by Simon Schneiders, the CEO of Blue Array, AKA, the UK's largest SEO agency, who will share both tales from the crypt and fairytale endings as we get the story straight from someone who is in the frontline of it all. Plus we'll explore the value of your agency building its own custom tool stack. Of course we have these snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. If you haven't had your Raisin Bran just yet, don't worry, as we have two scoops of agency side defeat and conquest as we give you the scoop straight from the source on this, the 97th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Also, if you don't get the Raisin brand reference or you just hate Raisin Bran, pretend I said two scoops of ice cream. Crystal Carter: I don't tend to scoop my cereal if I'm completely honest. I tend to spoon. Mordy Oberstein: Also, what size is the scoop of raisins? You can have a tiny, tiny ass scoop, it doesn't say anything? Crystal Carter: I suppose so I guess. Mordy Oberstein: Is that even still a thing? Do they even market it like that, like they have two raisins? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never been that into Raisin Bran, nor have I- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was going to say raisins aren't that great anyway, so like "Oh great, thanks, two scoops of them." Crystal Carter: We digress. Mordy Oberstein: We digress. Please welcome to the show, as I mentioned before, the CEO of the largest SEO agency in the entire UK. Simon Schneiders, welcome to SERP's Up. Simon Schnieders: Great to join you Mordy and Crystal, it's lovely to be in the company of Americans and the enthusiasm that you bring to just a general conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Is that passive aggression or I don't know how to take English compliments? Simon Schnieders: No, honestly, I lived in Miami for about seven years and I really do miss the enthusiasm for life that Americans seem to have, whereas we Europeans just trudging, drudging get on with our existences. But yeah, it's great to be around Americans again, love the enthusiasm. Mordy Oberstein: Before we get started, please, please pitch whatever you want. We like to say Mark is going to Mark and it'd be awkward if you didn't. Simon Schnieders: Actually, great, that's a very generous of you, Mordy. I think one thing I'd like perhaps your listeners to do for me is to go to the URL, askSEO.AI, so A-S-K S-E-O .ai and we've got a tool there in beta we're looking for beta testers for, so this is a tool that we've been building in the background at Blue Array that allows us to find corroboration and citation for SEO recommendations. As everybody's aware, SEO is a very subjective field and people like Maile Ohye in the past as well, Maile Ohye from Google, have said that when you are working with an SEO professional or an agency, ask them to cite their sources when they're making recommendations for you. We decided to build a tool that does that for you as SEOs and we're looking for beta testers for that. You can either upload a document or cut and paste an email in there and then it will corroborate and cite your recommendations. We're hoping ultimately to transform this into a Gmail plugin as well, but for now it's a desktop SaaS application that we're hoping really helps SEOs do a better job and perhaps standardizes the industry to some degree as well. Crystal Carter: That's a super genuinely helpful tool and I think it's also useful for a reverse engineering if you're looking at someone's recommendations, they're giving them to you and maybe they haven't given you citations, you can run that through as well. Simon Schnieders: Exactly. It can be used in that way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Wow. Crystal Carter: I think for talks and stuff, sometimes people quote stats and you're like, "Where did you get that stat from?" It's useful to go through the PDF or whatever and find out where they got that information from. It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really great tool. Honestly, when we build out the content for our own SEO hub, we include, I'll call them foundational topics, not only for the average person but also because we know agencies or consultants when you're doing SEO work, you should be citing information. We create that information for people to share. Now, you're doing it with AI. You're making us a little bit obsolete, but hopefully you're citing us also, so maybe not. Simon Schnieders: Well, you get to choose your sources when you are using the tool, so you can say, "I only want to include," because you've obviously got things like hreflang where you'll get different recommendations. Bing doesn't utilize hreflang for instance, so you can use Bing's help files versus Google's help files or combine the pair of them or so you get to choose your sources with the tool. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's so cool. Wow, that's amazing. Okay, I already have it in the show notes, so it'll be in the show notes, ask.seo.ai. I got it, right, yeah? Simon Schnieders: Brilliant. Thank you Mordy. Yeah, that's it. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. That's so cool. Okay. When we were deciding about what topic we're going to talk about, and I love this about you, you said, "Oh, let's talk about success and failures," and one of the things that's so great and people should follow you on LinkedIn, wherever else you are on social media, but I see you the most on LinkedIn. You share your personal stories and behind the scenes of what's happening and it's so connective and it's so personal and it's such a great topic. I don't know where you want to start with this, but we're talking about the successes and the failures of an SEO agency and I'm really happy to have you here to talk about it. Wherever you want to go, the floor is yours. Simon Schnieders: Thanks. I like to be transparent about my background, where I've come from. I think people think that you have to be from a certain background to be successful in the SEO industry. I come from quite a challenging background. I was an alcoholic for two decades and found sobriety and through sobriety became very successful SEO, working for a number of big brands here in the UK, people like MailOnline and Zoopla. As a result of that then had lots of requests for consultancy to then start my own agency and I've been completely bootstrapped to success, bootstrapped meaning I've never taken on any funding. I think the most funding I ever had was a few hundred pounds to register the company name and build a website. We've grown as a business customer by customer, employee by employee, and desk by desk. I started off in co-working spaces where we were able to rent a desk at a time and grow the business until we got too big and then had to go to a big leased office. It's been a journey that I think is replicable for most people. I think if you've cut your teeth in SEO, you are successful at what you do, and you want to replicate and scale what you do and make other people successful through that, then there is a blueprint, I hope, through me. I hope I connect with people in a way that I'm not somehow unique, or special, or different from any of you. If you want to start your own agency, go for it. Crystal Carter: I think one of the things that is great about that story is what it's like... I've known you for a few years now and it's just an accurate depiction of who you are. You're very much an open book, you're very, very honest with things. I think the other thing that really strikes me is you share your personal story and through that I hear resilience. Resilience is so important with being an SEO, you hear people saying about what happens with algorithm updates and various things like that, particularly with being an agency owner, because I think agency owners have had quite a complicated ride in the last few years between Covid and other economic challenges and things like that. Did you find challenges during that and did you find that your resilience helped you? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I think there's a few things to unpack there. One is perhaps why I feel like, or you may feel as though I'm very honest and transparent. I have to practice honesty. It's part of my recovery, by the way, is that I have to be rigorously honest with myself and I try to be that way with others as well. In terms of macro factors challenging the business, yeah, it's been an awful few years. 2020, everybody was very uncertain about the future. There was no light at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel. Thankfully, when light did start to appear then the appetite for SEO services was absolutely ferocious. During '21, that was when we had what was called the great musical chairs event. Musical chairs being a fun game. I don't know if it's an American. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. Simon Schnieders: Okay, all right, fine. Yeah, so the great musical chairs event where everybody's shuffling to different businesses and we had a really high job with retention there, particularly as you've got people moving to London agencies with London waiting and being able to offer vastly bigger salaries. We've seen SEO juniors, so executives, we call them, going off and getting double the money that we were able to pay for and they weren't ready for those roles. We told them they weren't ready for those roles, but whoever's offering me that kind of salary seems to think I'm ready, so I'm off. Yeah, although we had a real resurgence in SEO, it was almost impossible as an agency only to keep up with demand. You just couldn't staff for it. We were turning away business, as I imagine other agencies were doing as well during that time. I think in '22 we were starting to see that I think the wheels are going to fall off this. This is just completely unsustainable. We use something called attrition where you're essentially as people are leaving the business, not backfilling those roles to make sure that we're in the position we're in today where we're probably one of the very few agencies that haven't had to make any redundancies. That was just because we had the foresight to see the wheels were definitely going to fall off this thing and we had to prepare for that. We made sure that we were staffed up correctly for a recession, which is ultimately what we went into. I would say that we're starting to see business buoyancy coming back again, but it's a very different type of business. It's very much project work at the moment that we're getting and the challenge then becomes how do we turn that project work into retained work? Because as an agency you need to have retained business in order make sensible decisions about the future for the agency and your customers as well in terms of resourcing the business. That's where we're at today is we've got the challenge of how do we pivot that business into retainer business and we think we're doing a pretty good job in that area. That's just mostly about making sure that whoever we're working with on a project basis understands the longer term opportunity with us and what that could look like for transforming their business. That's a challenge for us rather than a macro challenge, I think. All agencies we need to be thinking about that is how do we turn this project business into retainer? Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that's so astute. Also, I love the thing that I can hear in that story as well is hoping for the best, planning for the worst sort of thing, which I think is something that business owners and agency owners have to think about as well. I think one of the things that I've seen in my time as an agency is the importance of a contract, for instance, it's really important for... Some people are like, "We don't have any contracts," and I'm like, "It's better that you do for everyone," that you have a contract so everyone knows what the terms of engagements are and things because you want to plan for the best but also plan for the worst as well, that sort of thing. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I think you don't necessarily need to have long-term contracts that customers feel uncomfortable with. We've always, since the inception of the business, had the ability to serve notice on us with two or three months notice. You could say you're signing a year contract, but it's meaningless because you can serve notice at any stage for three months. It's just a rolling three months, basically. The one I like particularly about that is it puts the onus on us as an agency to deliver value. If you've got a customer locked in for a one-year contract, you can take your foot off the gas if you want to and they're locked in for a year. But I feel that it's better... I've been on the other side of the table as a client hiring agencies that the onus should be on us to make sure that they're seeing success and we're delivering results and they're happy with the relationship. I think that's a good way to turn things around and make sure you are more customer focused as an agency. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I want to pivot back to something you had mentioned before that you built up the agency desk by desk, employee by employee and so forth. I'm just curious, because you've grown exponentially, it's an amazing amount of growth. You're running your own conference, you have SEO courses, it's really, even a newsletter. What do you think contributed to that growth? Simon Schnieders: Well, I can tell you about how deliberate we are about things. Everything we do is quite strategic and to give you an example of that, when you're first starting an agency, you really need to figure out who are we going to be targeting? Who is our customer? In the early days of the business, I very quickly figured out that startups and scale-ups were booming in London and they all talked to each other, they were all very well networked. If I could get in with a few of them, then I would be networked with all of them very, very quickly. I think when you're starting off, you need to make those very deliberate strategic moves, like who am I going after? If you're just doing SEO generally, then I don't think you are going to find your space in the market nowadays. I think there are some agencies that might be seen as competitors of ours. I don't see them particularly as competitors, but I see what they're doing and I think it's quite clever. For instance, Novus and Re:signal have a couple of agencies over here, which I have a lot of respect for, they've niched down into e-commerce and so e-commerce SEO agency, and I could see that if I was starting an agency from scratch today, that's the thing I do. I'd niche down into a SEO for B2B websites or find a niche within that. That's probably what I'd do to start to be successful. I think when we started Blue Array, we were quite unique in that we were just a specialist SEO agency. I could see at that particular time, and timing is very important and understanding what's going on in the market is very important. At that particular time there was a book that was being bounded around called the Marketing Agency Blueprint, which everybody seemed to be reading and following, which said that you needed to have an array of different services, so you needed to not be dependent on one particular service line, otherwise you're at the mercy of perhaps that service line not being as popular anymore and you needed to diversify your business. I thought, "Well, if that's the common wisdom, then if I'm uncommon with my wisdom, then I'm going to find a niche." I ignored all of that advice and all of the other SEO agencies at that time had become generalist agencies. They were offering paid search, and paid social and everything else, these ancillary services. I thought, "Well, if we can just go in as a pure play SEO agency, we'd have our niche." That seemed to be incredibly effective. I knew that lots of companies were seemingly in housing, a lot of digital marketing skills, but SEO was one of those things that's very difficult to hire for, very difficult to retain talent around as well. There will always be a place for an SEO agency, I thought. That was the deliberate or some of the deliberate strategic thinking behind why we did what we did, but it had to do with what was going on in the market at that particular time as well. Say, if I was starting from scratch today, I'd have a different approach to things. Certainly, when I was starting out and focusing on startup and scale up scene, it was very easy. I could go to these big coworking spaces and offer office hours and I'd have lots of people coming wanting to talk to me about SEO. It's not as easy nowadays, you just don't get that anymore. I'd be thinking about a slightly different approach, yeah. Crystal Carter: I've heard people discuss the niching strategy for agencies and part of me is like, "Yes, I totally get that." Part of me is like, "Is there a risk? Is there a risk?" What if you say, "I'm going to niche down to just do SEO for, I don't know, cryptocurrency or something. I'm just going to niche-" Mordy Oberstein: SaaS just for SaaS. Everyone loves doing SaaS. Crystal Carter: When you're picking your niche, you talked about some of the ways that you picked that you picked SEO and things, but are there particular strategic considerations? I presume that one needs to look at the size of the market. If you say to yourself, "I'm going to specialize in SEO for people that knit sweaters for cats," that might not be a good niche. Simon Schnieders: No, you are right, and if you were focused on the travel niche during Covid, you were in a very bad spot. I think there are macro factors that can come into play there as well rather than just needing to understand the market. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I think the idea behind it is that you don't stay in that niche, I think. You build your business within that niche and you build a name and reputation within that niche, but then you come out of that at some stage. It's a way for you to build a name, build a reputation, and then start to pivot into the broader, more generalist opportunities. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Is that something that you all still struggle with a little bit? Because if you're saying that the SEO agency world has gone a little bit niche and you've created your agency way back when it wasn't like that, is that a struggle now to figure out a way "How do we kind of keep who we are, but how do we find a niche? Do we care to find a niche? Do we not care to find a niche?" How does it all play out for you? Simon Schnieders: We've verticalized the business where we've got three offerings, one of which is we call it Ignite, which is for startups and scale-ups, and we offer a vastly reduced day rate for startups and scale up because that's still an incredibly effective marketing flywheel for us. An example of that would be when we're talking to growth managers at startups, we're actually talking to the next generation of CMOs for incumbent businesses in two, three years time. For us, that's a particular area we still want to keep quite focused on. Then we've got something called Advantage, which is our core offering, and then we go into a particular offering that is a performance based model, so we call it performance SEO, but it's for particular clients where they want us to come and take the risk with them. We've got some actual skin in the game, but you have to be a certain size and shape for that to work out. At the moment, we're just offering that to e-commerce customers and typically the customer that we go for would be really great battling profile, but immature facets and filters, so we know that there's a massive opportunity there and we're willing to take the risk with them and we can go into that relationship happily breaking even knowing that in six months to a year we'll start to see some really great ROI from them in a way. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: In a way, does it almost feel like starting over, you have to find a new angle and find a new vertical and find a new audience? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, that's just the roller coaster of running an agency is you've got to keep reinventing yourself and some agencies just manage to do that bull-**** their way through it. The amount of agencies that are out there saying, "We're AI first." If you actually scratch behind that and figure out what that means, it doesn't mean anything. Mordy Oberstein: Is it recommended you drink urine to treat your kidney stones? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's an awful lot of bull-****. We try and we hopefully cut through all of that. We're serious about what we do and so we're not just strap lines, but there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. Mordy, you mentioned about you seem to have done really well with the education elements, that side of things. We've got something called the Blue Array Academy. There's about 20,000 students in there, by the way, doing our courses, most of them the free course that we do, the technical SEO course. But for us, that's a loss-leader by the way. We don't actually make any money out of the Blue Array Academy. For us, that's about elevating and educating those in the industry and for us, if we can, to some degree, open source what we do, and you can get to that through the SEO manager course, like this is the actual stuff we're doing for our clients that helps to raise the standards of the industry as a whole. We come from, and we still are an unregulated industry, I would say it's not the Wild West it used to be, but there's still a lot more we could and should be doing, and that's partly our contribution towards that is hoping we elevate and raise the standards across the industry by open sourcing what we do a little bit more. Mordy Oberstein: If it makes you feel any better, the reason why we brought you in, one of the reasons why we brought you into our own SEO course, which is I think still forthcoming by the time this episode comes out was a direct result of your own SEO course. I saw that course. I really liked it. I'm like, "Oh, let's pull Blue Array in for our own course because they did a great job with their course," so direct lead right from the course. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, there's an incredible team here. I'm proud of every single one of them. They're just amazing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: No, they're great. I spoke at London SEO XL in 2022, and it was an absolute joy to see the team in action. Lots of people really, really engaged and really dedicated. That particular event took place on May the fourth, and there were people walking around in Star Wars outfits and if anyone didn't know that was Blue Array's team members, that was actual folks from Blue Array who were making the extra effort to make the event particularly eventful. I think that it was very much appreciated and I think that that's something that the team are really dedicated to and I think it really, really shows. I think that you have some very, very smart folks on your team. The other thing that really struck me at the event was the commitment that y'all have to supporting the wider community as well. Not only are you doing things online with the course, but also supporting local folks London to make the London area more robust, I guess you would say, and I think that that's really important as well. How valuable is that corporate responsibility to you as a team? Simon Schnieders: In simple terms, they've got my back, I've got their back, and I guess there's some testament to that. I've burned through roughly the equivalent of a million dollars worth of our cashflow in order to keep everybody in the business at the moment. We've had some pretty difficult years since 2020. I haven't made a single redundancy here, but that hasn't come without cost. The cost has been, we've through our cash reserves in order to keep everybody in the business and they know that I'm that kind of employer, that I genuinely put people before profit. We actually haven't made any profit last year. I don't think we made any profit at all, yeah, year before that was quite slim. This year we're looking at probably no to very, very low profitability again. I think as an agency only, you've got to demonstrate that on a regular basis as well that you've got their backs. It is been a while since I fired a client, but that's a way that I also like to demonstrate that I've got their backs is that if I find any client is being particularly tyrannical, is a bully to the team, for instance, I will fire them without hesitation and move them on from the business and they know that's the way that I deal with things and I've always got their back. Reciprocally, I get so much more in return from them. They're so dedicated and professional in what they do. Mordy Oberstein: I want to say before time slips away from us that if you're listening to this, I just want you to appreciate, I appreciate just how honest and open you are. There's not a lot of people who will come on a podcast and talk about their business as openly the way that you are right now, and I just want to say that I really appreciate it and I really hope the audience really appreciates it, because it's a treat. Simon Schnieders: Oh, that's lovely. Thank you. Yeah, like I say, I have to practice rigorous honesty. It's my makeup now, but I find that it works incredibly well. There's no point in papering over things. You might as well just be honest about stuff and I try to be as much as I can. At the same time, you have to also be a leader in a business and you have to protect people at their times as well and not be fully transparent. I hopefully balance that thing quite well. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you have to keep a poker face. I think you're probably still allowed to have a poker face, yes? Simon Schnieders: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay, good. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Simon, if people wanted to follow you and learn more from you, where could they find you? Simon Schnieders: Well, I've just started exploring short form video, so you could probably find me on TikTok, Insta Reels, YouTube shorts- Crystal Carter: You have TikTok? Simon Schnieders: But I've just started getting involved, yeah, so I finally succumbed to TikTok, but I'm most active on LinkedIn, so if you want to engage with me there, please do, I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments. I regularly open questions up to anybody that's willing to read. Crystal Carter: I'll find you on TikTok and I'll direct my 200 very elite followers to follow you as well. Simon Schnieders: Lovely. Mordy Oberstein: I have no followers on TikTok. Sorry. I'm just not a TikTok person yet. Maybe you'll inspire me because I haven't- Crystal Carter: You can just do more of my videos, Mordy and- Mordy Oberstein: You just do more of my videos. Crystal Carter: Literally just do Mordy tries. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know if I can handle that. It's a lot. Simon, thank you again for coming on and we'll see you out there in the ether that is the SEO universe. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I look forward to it, Mordy and lovely to see you again Crystal. I look forward to meeting up in person again. Crystal Carter: See you again soon. Mordy Oberstein: Bye now. Well, this worked out perfectly. This was not planned by the way, but Simon was talking about their own internal SEO tool that they built over at Blue Array. Before we even knew Simon was even doing that, Crystal and I were like, "A lot of SEO agencies build out their own tools." It's a trend, it's a thing. The question is why. We're going to run through a few good examples of agency side tools as we go through a very unique version of Tool Time. There's a whole bunch that you don't really think about that necessarily as being agency tools, like AlsoAsked. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Probably one of the best SEO tools out there. I will say, it is one of the best SEO tools out there. Crystal Carter: It's a great tool and Mark from Candor Agency was saying basically it was something that they were using to help their clients to understand and to access and do better with people as they asked questions. He was presenting on it at an event and somebody was like, "Oh my God, can I get access to this? This would be really cool if we could." They built it out into a tool and it's something that the industry at large is very, very grateful for and I've shown it to people who are not SEOs and it can be really, really useful for helping them to understand the value of content and the user journey because it really maps out a user journey for you on a particular topic really, really easily. Yeah, it's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: You see there's this this trend where agencies build out tool stacks and it's interesting why. Why do they do that mean? Well, I was going to say it's like an obvious lead gen. It's a great way to bring in leads, but it's interesting you would think that wouldn't because your marketing to other SEOs for the most part. How does that work? Crystal Carter: What I've seen people do is people will often create a tool, and I think it aligns you next to people that you want to be aligned with, similar agencies, people who are working in similar industries. It also opens you up to a lot more different customers, a lot more potential customers who can see the knowledge and expertise and interest that your agency has. I think a lot of people forget that Screaming Frog comes from an agency tool that's an agency that has a tool that everyone uses that every other agency uses, and that's something that's foundational to SEO, really, particularly for technical SEO now, and it's really valuable. I think it's a great showcase. It's a great show, don't tell around the kinds of things that you can bring for clients. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's great brand building and because of that brand building, you're reaching a larger audience. I'm going to get to in-house in a second. I didn't forget about that, but if you're an SEO and you're like, "Oh, I love AlsoAsked," and you're sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, you're sharing Candor Agency at the same time, basically, and it's extending Marks... We're using also as the example, but it's extending out that reach exponentially. At the same time, by the way, whether it's Blue Arrays tool or whether it's Screaming Frog, you're reaching in-house teams at the same time. Yes, the tool is applicable to other SEOs and other agencies who may not be your target audience, but in-house SEOs might very well be your target audience, especially if their team is not built out or if they're a smaller organization or whatever it is. They might say, "You know what? Let's have an SEO agency handle this for us." Crystal Carter: I think so. I think also if you are able to create tools for clients, which is another thing that I've started to see, then that could be a real differentiator for you as an agency. I've seen it before where there are agencies who are building tools that are specific for the client, and sometimes it can be the case that maybe the client doesn't necessarily want their services from you anymore, but they do want the tool or maybe somebody wants the tool. If you've been using the tool for ages and they go, "Hey, could you help me with some additional agency services?" This is something that they do over at Keyword Insights. Andy Chadwick over at Keyword Insights was saying that he built the tool and he started getting service leads from it. Now, he offers services on top of the tool because people who love the tool and love the insights and love, the logic that they can see from Keyword Insights where I would also like some support with this. That's a great way to show people how you think about search, how you think about content, how you think about technical SEO, whatever in practice. Very often people will come to you for additional tools, as well. Another classic example is the Chrome extension that I use literally 70 million times a day, which is the SEO Pro Chrome extension from Kristina Azarenko over at Marketing Syrup. That is an incredible growth engine for her because there's links in there that go straight to her agency, straight to her training platform and things like that. It's incredibly valuable and I tell people about it all the time because it's so useful and it really just speaks to the expertise and the value that Kristina's able to offer. Mordy Oberstein: Especially if you're someone who has a particular identity or a particular focus, if you're, say an e-comm SEO agency or whatever it is, you can build up that specialty and that brand identity and around that and pull in leads or people who are looking at something specifically like that, what Simon was talking about earlier with agencies trying to be a little bit more niche or a little more focused than in the past. That can lean right into that, but whatever it is, it's a momentum builder, which is what you want if you're an agency. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think that we see in the Wix app market, we have lots of tools that are created by lots of different teams, including folks who are coming from an agency background. It creates a lot of leavers and a lot of new opportunities. Even on Wix, we have the logo builder for instance, which is a tool that we have available for free for people to use. We have a QR code generator, we have a few other tools as well, and that gives you an opportunity to speak to people and to show people that you're able to provide a solution. People say, "This thing is broken, I want it fixed." You're able to say, "Here's a solution to this," and to be able to provide that to them, and around the clock, it's not necessarily passive income depending on how you're configuring it. Our logo gen is free. There's a free version as well, but it can give you a lot of reach and particularly tools also can transcend language for instance. With something like a logo generator, even if it was in a different language, I could probably figure out whether or not I wanted it to have a rocket going to the moon or whatever on my logo and it would help me to achieve my goals. I think that that's really, really valuable as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I would love to have or create a tool and you can call the naming itself would just be amazing, Barry. Barry should have tools. He does have a tool, wait, I'm wrong. Doesn't he have some algorithm update, like history tracker website thing? Crystal Carter: Yes, I'm sure Barry has tools. I'm sure he has something. Mordy Oberstein: The Barrinator, RustyBricker. Crystal Carter: The Schwartzkoff, I don't know. I don't know. Something like... I don't know, something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: Schwartz and SERP. Crystal Carter: Schwartzen Ranker. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Schwartzen Ranker. Nice. That's it, trademark. Barry, if you want it, you got to pay for it now, I guess until he creates tools, we'll just have to read his news in the meantime. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: This week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Now, if you're saying, "Hey, wait a second, you didn't cover this breaking news story that happened in the SEO industry," that's because, breaking the fourth wall for you, I'm recording this section of the podcast a little bit earlier than I usually do because of our New York City digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal, that by the time you listen to this just happened. Okay, with that, three articles for you from Barry Schwarz, but from two different sources. First up from seroundtable.com, Google core update expected in the coming weeks. Google's Danny Sullivan, the search liaison was in the comments over seroundtable.com and wrote in the comments and replied back to somebody, whoever, whatever. "I would expect we'll see one," meaning a core update, "In the coming weeks because that fits in with our general cycle," but precisely when that's just not known yet. First, that's really interesting. They have a general cycle because sometimes it doesn't feel like they do. I wonder and am speculating if they do have a regular cycle of the refresh, but they sometimes hold off when they actually look at the dataset and say, "Wait a second, what we've tested doesn't seem to have actually worked the way we want it to. Let's hold off retest or whatever. Or we have other things going on that we have to prioritize and we'll push it off until later." I wonder if they have a regular schedule like Danny is saying, but that it often gets altered for various reasons. By the way, this doesn't mean that it's... Coming weeks can mean two weeks, it can mean 12 weeks. We don't exactly know, but there's one coming, which I guess you already knew anyway, there's always one coming. On to Barry Schwartz, but this time from search engine land, Google ending notes on search by the end of the month. Who cares? Oh, that's salty. Google had this feature called notes where users could leave little comments, I guess, or running records on search results. Imagine you had a recipe for best meatloaf, you're running the query best meatloaf, you have all the results, and on whatever recipe website you listed like, "Yeah, I tried this, it was really good, but it was a little bit too dry." You could leave like a running record. Google was basically running these inconsistently, not very often, not extremely very helpful. It's not surprising that they're gone. I feel like this was Google over, not overreaching. That's a bad way of putting it. Overzealously trying to get user generated content onto the SERP because they saw a trend where people want user generated content and there isn't enough across the web, which is why you have the same issue with too much Reddit, too much Quora, whatever, the same kind of thing. That's why they put the notes there. It didn't really work out the way they thought it would. That happens sometimes with products, so by the end of this month, they are going to be gone. Will you miss them? Will you even notice that they're gone? Good question. On to Barry Schwartz again from Search Engine Roundtable, again. Google artificially, by the way, I split the order up this week just so we go from Search Engine Roundtable to Search Engine Land, back to Search Engine Roundtable. That's how my mind works. Google artificially generated content, AGC classification score, this goes back to the lease that we've spoken about before many, many times. You probably know about them already. Juan Gonzalez Villa found in those, because again, the document is enormous and we're finding new things all the time, something that seems to show some site level AGC classification score, artificially generated content like AI content, score. Is Google using the score? We don't know. Have they ever used this score? We don't know, but there seems to be some kind of score at some point. Barry points out in the article that from what's written there in the leaks, I hate calling them leaks that this might be related to a really outdated content. Perhaps this is something Google used in the way, way, way past. However, it wouldn't surprise me and I think wouldn't surprise many if Google had some kind of way of classifying either content that was automatically generated like AI content or in reverse classifying content that seems to be written based on actual human experience. It's a whole separate topic. We actually covered it in our recent webinar with Mike King and Lily Ray, so you can watch the recording on the SEO hub. I'll link to that in the show notes. We actually brought it up at some point, I think later on in the Q&A section we brought it up there. You can listen to our thoughts on that scoring system, what that might be or not be like in that webinar. With that, that is this week's snappy news. Maybe he should just create his own algorithm update tracker, like the volatility tracker, like "Why rely on SEMrush," and whatever, just rely on Barry. Crystal Carter: Well, and if he did, he could do it on Wix Apps builder. He could use the Wix studio apps. He could make an app and he could make a widget and he could sell it in the app store. Mordy Oberstein: Make a widget, Barry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that'd be great. Mordy Oberstein: When the volatility gets high, it's like an angry Barry face. When it's low, it's a happy Barry face, which happens to be the same Barry face. Crystal Carter: Same face. Mordy Oberstein: Same face. Crystal Carter: Same face. Mordy Oberstein: The entire time. It's not the same, our follow of the week every week must be different. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a follow of the week. It'd just be the follow of the podcast forever. Yeah. This week's follow is Jim Banks. He's got 25 years of high search volume media buying for rapid growth businesses. Check out Jim Banks over on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Jim Banks is a great follow. He has a great LinkedIn. He also has a great podcast that he does, which he also syndicates to TikTok, and I follow him on TikTok and things. His podcast is centered around some of the challenges and some of the things I wish I'd known as an agency owner and things as well. He really, really expects people to be honest about their agency journey. Mordy Oberstein: That's topical. Crystal Carter: I think it's really great. That's one of the reasons why I thought he'd be a great follow of the week. If you're interested in people telling true stories about the agency journey, he's a great follow. His podcast is called Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, and really, he talks about lots of things. He had a recent podcast with one of the founders or one of the leaders over at Optimizer, for instance, and they're talking about very openly about some of the challenges there. But he's great. Great follow, great guy. Follow Jim Banks. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? That's a great name for a podcast. I'm going to start a podcast like that, Bad Decisions with Mordy Oberstein, and the first person we can interview is my wife. Crystal Carter: Shout out Mrs. Oberstein for- Mordy Oberstein: For having a good heart. Crystal Carter: Right, having a good heart- Mordy Oberstein: And saying yes. Crystal Carter: Long, long suffering, Mrs. Oberstein. No, I'm kidding. She's lovely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think so. Then I'm not paid to say that. Anyway, that'll do it for this week's SERP's Up. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to become indispensable to your clients. When I say indispensable, I think of indestructible from The Simpsons where Mr. Burns says, "Indestructible." Anyway, indispensable. Look for it 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 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 Simon Schnieders Jim Banks Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Blue Array SEO Agency AskSEO Webinar on Understanding Google's Algorithm News: Google Artificially Generated Content AGC Classification Score? Google: Core Update Expected In The Coming Weeks Google ending Notes on Search by end of the month Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Simon Schnieders Jim Banks Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Blue Array SEO Agency AskSEO Webinar on Understanding Google's Algorithm News: Google Artificially Generated Content AGC Classification Score? Google: Core Update Expected In The Coming Weeks Google ending Notes on Search by end of the month Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP'S Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous, incredibly amazing, the uncomparable head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, incredible, stupendous, magnificent, oh gosh, I ran out of, it's really- Mordy Oberstein: It's hard. Crystal Carter: You make it seem easy. Mordy Oberstein: It's hard. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that great introduction, that was lovely. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. You know Barry Schwarz said we have to redo the intro because we've been doing the podcast... We're inching towards a hundred episodes and we've been doing the podcast for basically two years now. How is it the new wave if we've been doing it for two years? Crystal Carter: SEO is new every day. Every day there's something new. I wish it wasn't new, but it is. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we have a whole series. It's new but also new wave lasted the whole eighties. That was fine. Crystal Carter: That's true. It did, it did. I was little at the time, but I think I would've been involved with that hair situation. It was very exciting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me too when I had hair. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to a rest your newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which comes out each and every month, but where you can also better manage your agency's team with advanced user permission settings and set your clients up for success with direct feedback channels built right into Wix Studio's backend. It's with that, that today we're focusing on the success and failures of the UK's largest SEO agency. No, we're not picking on anyone, but we're going to be joined by Simon Schneiders, the CEO of Blue Array, AKA, the UK's largest SEO agency, who will share both tales from the crypt and fairytale endings as we get the story straight from someone who is in the frontline of it all. Plus we'll explore the value of your agency building its own custom tool stack. Of course we have these snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. If you haven't had your Raisin Bran just yet, don't worry, as we have two scoops of agency side defeat and conquest as we give you the scoop straight from the source on this, the 97th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Also, if you don't get the Raisin brand reference or you just hate Raisin Bran, pretend I said two scoops of ice cream. Crystal Carter: I don't tend to scoop my cereal if I'm completely honest. I tend to spoon. Mordy Oberstein: Also, what size is the scoop of raisins? You can have a tiny, tiny ass scoop, it doesn't say anything? Crystal Carter: I suppose so I guess. Mordy Oberstein: Is that even still a thing? Do they even market it like that, like they have two raisins? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never been that into Raisin Bran, nor have I- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was going to say raisins aren't that great anyway, so like "Oh great, thanks, two scoops of them." Crystal Carter: We digress. Mordy Oberstein: We digress. Please welcome to the show, as I mentioned before, the CEO of the largest SEO agency in the entire UK. Simon Schneiders, welcome to SERP's Up. Simon Schnieders: Great to join you Mordy and Crystal, it's lovely to be in the company of Americans and the enthusiasm that you bring to just a general conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Is that passive aggression or I don't know how to take English compliments? Simon Schnieders: No, honestly, I lived in Miami for about seven years and I really do miss the enthusiasm for life that Americans seem to have, whereas we Europeans just trudging, drudging get on with our existences. But yeah, it's great to be around Americans again, love the enthusiasm. Mordy Oberstein: Before we get started, please, please pitch whatever you want. We like to say Mark is going to Mark and it'd be awkward if you didn't. Simon Schnieders: Actually, great, that's a very generous of you, Mordy. I think one thing I'd like perhaps your listeners to do for me is to go to the URL, askSEO.AI, so A-S-K S-E-O .ai and we've got a tool there in beta we're looking for beta testers for, so this is a tool that we've been building in the background at Blue Array that allows us to find corroboration and citation for SEO recommendations. As everybody's aware, SEO is a very subjective field and people like Maile Ohye in the past as well, Maile Ohye from Google, have said that when you are working with an SEO professional or an agency, ask them to cite their sources when they're making recommendations for you. We decided to build a tool that does that for you as SEOs and we're looking for beta testers for that. You can either upload a document or cut and paste an email in there and then it will corroborate and cite your recommendations. We're hoping ultimately to transform this into a Gmail plugin as well, but for now it's a desktop SaaS application that we're hoping really helps SEOs do a better job and perhaps standardizes the industry to some degree as well. Crystal Carter: That's a super genuinely helpful tool and I think it's also useful for a reverse engineering if you're looking at someone's recommendations, they're giving them to you and maybe they haven't given you citations, you can run that through as well. Simon Schnieders: Exactly. It can be used in that way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Wow. Crystal Carter: I think for talks and stuff, sometimes people quote stats and you're like, "Where did you get that stat from?" It's useful to go through the PDF or whatever and find out where they got that information from. It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really great tool. Honestly, when we build out the content for our own SEO hub, we include, I'll call them foundational topics, not only for the average person but also because we know agencies or consultants when you're doing SEO work, you should be citing information. We create that information for people to share. Now, you're doing it with AI. You're making us a little bit obsolete, but hopefully you're citing us also, so maybe not. Simon Schnieders: Well, you get to choose your sources when you are using the tool, so you can say, "I only want to include," because you've obviously got things like hreflang where you'll get different recommendations. Bing doesn't utilize hreflang for instance, so you can use Bing's help files versus Google's help files or combine the pair of them or so you get to choose your sources with the tool. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's so cool. Wow, that's amazing. Okay, I already have it in the show notes, so it'll be in the show notes, ask.seo.ai. I got it, right, yeah? Simon Schnieders: Brilliant. Thank you Mordy. Yeah, that's it. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. That's so cool. Okay. When we were deciding about what topic we're going to talk about, and I love this about you, you said, "Oh, let's talk about success and failures," and one of the things that's so great and people should follow you on LinkedIn, wherever else you are on social media, but I see you the most on LinkedIn. You share your personal stories and behind the scenes of what's happening and it's so connective and it's so personal and it's such a great topic. I don't know where you want to start with this, but we're talking about the successes and the failures of an SEO agency and I'm really happy to have you here to talk about it. Wherever you want to go, the floor is yours. Simon Schnieders: Thanks. I like to be transparent about my background, where I've come from. I think people think that you have to be from a certain background to be successful in the SEO industry. I come from quite a challenging background. I was an alcoholic for two decades and found sobriety and through sobriety became very successful SEO, working for a number of big brands here in the UK, people like MailOnline and Zoopla. As a result of that then had lots of requests for consultancy to then start my own agency and I've been completely bootstrapped to success, bootstrapped meaning I've never taken on any funding. I think the most funding I ever had was a few hundred pounds to register the company name and build a website. We've grown as a business customer by customer, employee by employee, and desk by desk. I started off in co-working spaces where we were able to rent a desk at a time and grow the business until we got too big and then had to go to a big leased office. It's been a journey that I think is replicable for most people. I think if you've cut your teeth in SEO, you are successful at what you do, and you want to replicate and scale what you do and make other people successful through that, then there is a blueprint, I hope, through me. I hope I connect with people in a way that I'm not somehow unique, or special, or different from any of you. If you want to start your own agency, go for it. Crystal Carter: I think one of the things that is great about that story is what it's like... I've known you for a few years now and it's just an accurate depiction of who you are. You're very much an open book, you're very, very honest with things. I think the other thing that really strikes me is you share your personal story and through that I hear resilience. Resilience is so important with being an SEO, you hear people saying about what happens with algorithm updates and various things like that, particularly with being an agency owner, because I think agency owners have had quite a complicated ride in the last few years between Covid and other economic challenges and things like that. Did you find challenges during that and did you find that your resilience helped you? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I think there's a few things to unpack there. One is perhaps why I feel like, or you may feel as though I'm very honest and transparent. I have to practice honesty. It's part of my recovery, by the way, is that I have to be rigorously honest with myself and I try to be that way with others as well. In terms of macro factors challenging the business, yeah, it's been an awful few years. 2020, everybody was very uncertain about the future. There was no light at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel. Thankfully, when light did start to appear then the appetite for SEO services was absolutely ferocious. During '21, that was when we had what was called the great musical chairs event. Musical chairs being a fun game. I don't know if it's an American. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. Simon Schnieders: Okay, all right, fine. Yeah, so the great musical chairs event where everybody's shuffling to different businesses and we had a really high job with retention there, particularly as you've got people moving to London agencies with London waiting and being able to offer vastly bigger salaries. We've seen SEO juniors, so executives, we call them, going off and getting double the money that we were able to pay for and they weren't ready for those roles. We told them they weren't ready for those roles, but whoever's offering me that kind of salary seems to think I'm ready, so I'm off. Yeah, although we had a real resurgence in SEO, it was almost impossible as an agency only to keep up with demand. You just couldn't staff for it. We were turning away business, as I imagine other agencies were doing as well during that time. I think in '22 we were starting to see that I think the wheels are going to fall off this. This is just completely unsustainable. We use something called attrition where you're essentially as people are leaving the business, not backfilling those roles to make sure that we're in the position we're in today where we're probably one of the very few agencies that haven't had to make any redundancies. That was just because we had the foresight to see the wheels were definitely going to fall off this thing and we had to prepare for that. We made sure that we were staffed up correctly for a recession, which is ultimately what we went into. I would say that we're starting to see business buoyancy coming back again, but it's a very different type of business. It's very much project work at the moment that we're getting and the challenge then becomes how do we turn that project work into retained work? Because as an agency you need to have retained business in order make sensible decisions about the future for the agency and your customers as well in terms of resourcing the business. That's where we're at today is we've got the challenge of how do we pivot that business into retainer business and we think we're doing a pretty good job in that area. That's just mostly about making sure that whoever we're working with on a project basis understands the longer term opportunity with us and what that could look like for transforming their business. That's a challenge for us rather than a macro challenge, I think. All agencies we need to be thinking about that is how do we turn this project business into retainer? Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that's so astute. Also, I love the thing that I can hear in that story as well is hoping for the best, planning for the worst sort of thing, which I think is something that business owners and agency owners have to think about as well. I think one of the things that I've seen in my time as an agency is the importance of a contract, for instance, it's really important for... Some people are like, "We don't have any contracts," and I'm like, "It's better that you do for everyone," that you have a contract so everyone knows what the terms of engagements are and things because you want to plan for the best but also plan for the worst as well, that sort of thing. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I think you don't necessarily need to have long-term contracts that customers feel uncomfortable with. We've always, since the inception of the business, had the ability to serve notice on us with two or three months notice. You could say you're signing a year contract, but it's meaningless because you can serve notice at any stage for three months. It's just a rolling three months, basically. The one I like particularly about that is it puts the onus on us as an agency to deliver value. If you've got a customer locked in for a one-year contract, you can take your foot off the gas if you want to and they're locked in for a year. But I feel that it's better... I've been on the other side of the table as a client hiring agencies that the onus should be on us to make sure that they're seeing success and we're delivering results and they're happy with the relationship. I think that's a good way to turn things around and make sure you are more customer focused as an agency. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I want to pivot back to something you had mentioned before that you built up the agency desk by desk, employee by employee and so forth. I'm just curious, because you've grown exponentially, it's an amazing amount of growth. You're running your own conference, you have SEO courses, it's really, even a newsletter. What do you think contributed to that growth? Simon Schnieders: Well, I can tell you about how deliberate we are about things. Everything we do is quite strategic and to give you an example of that, when you're first starting an agency, you really need to figure out who are we going to be targeting? Who is our customer? In the early days of the business, I very quickly figured out that startups and scale-ups were booming in London and they all talked to each other, they were all very well networked. If I could get in with a few of them, then I would be networked with all of them very, very quickly. I think when you're starting off, you need to make those very deliberate strategic moves, like who am I going after? If you're just doing SEO generally, then I don't think you are going to find your space in the market nowadays. I think there are some agencies that might be seen as competitors of ours. I don't see them particularly as competitors, but I see what they're doing and I think it's quite clever. For instance, Novus and Re:signal have a couple of agencies over here, which I have a lot of respect for, they've niched down into e-commerce and so e-commerce SEO agency, and I could see that if I was starting an agency from scratch today, that's the thing I do. I'd niche down into a SEO for B2B websites or find a niche within that. That's probably what I'd do to start to be successful. I think when we started Blue Array, we were quite unique in that we were just a specialist SEO agency. I could see at that particular time, and timing is very important and understanding what's going on in the market is very important. At that particular time there was a book that was being bounded around called the Marketing Agency Blueprint, which everybody seemed to be reading and following, which said that you needed to have an array of different services, so you needed to not be dependent on one particular service line, otherwise you're at the mercy of perhaps that service line not being as popular anymore and you needed to diversify your business. I thought, "Well, if that's the common wisdom, then if I'm uncommon with my wisdom, then I'm going to find a niche." I ignored all of that advice and all of the other SEO agencies at that time had become generalist agencies. They were offering paid search, and paid social and everything else, these ancillary services. I thought, "Well, if we can just go in as a pure play SEO agency, we'd have our niche." That seemed to be incredibly effective. I knew that lots of companies were seemingly in housing, a lot of digital marketing skills, but SEO was one of those things that's very difficult to hire for, very difficult to retain talent around as well. There will always be a place for an SEO agency, I thought. That was the deliberate or some of the deliberate strategic thinking behind why we did what we did, but it had to do with what was going on in the market at that particular time as well. Say, if I was starting from scratch today, I'd have a different approach to things. Certainly, when I was starting out and focusing on startup and scale up scene, it was very easy. I could go to these big coworking spaces and offer office hours and I'd have lots of people coming wanting to talk to me about SEO. It's not as easy nowadays, you just don't get that anymore. I'd be thinking about a slightly different approach, yeah. Crystal Carter: I've heard people discuss the niching strategy for agencies and part of me is like, "Yes, I totally get that." Part of me is like, "Is there a risk? Is there a risk?" What if you say, "I'm going to niche down to just do SEO for, I don't know, cryptocurrency or something. I'm just going to niche-" Mordy Oberstein: SaaS just for SaaS. Everyone loves doing SaaS. Crystal Carter: When you're picking your niche, you talked about some of the ways that you picked that you picked SEO and things, but are there particular strategic considerations? I presume that one needs to look at the size of the market. If you say to yourself, "I'm going to specialize in SEO for people that knit sweaters for cats," that might not be a good niche. Simon Schnieders: No, you are right, and if you were focused on the travel niche during Covid, you were in a very bad spot. I think there are macro factors that can come into play there as well rather than just needing to understand the market. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I think the idea behind it is that you don't stay in that niche, I think. You build your business within that niche and you build a name and reputation within that niche, but then you come out of that at some stage. It's a way for you to build a name, build a reputation, and then start to pivot into the broader, more generalist opportunities. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Is that something that you all still struggle with a little bit? Because if you're saying that the SEO agency world has gone a little bit niche and you've created your agency way back when it wasn't like that, is that a struggle now to figure out a way "How do we kind of keep who we are, but how do we find a niche? Do we care to find a niche? Do we not care to find a niche?" How does it all play out for you? Simon Schnieders: We've verticalized the business where we've got three offerings, one of which is we call it Ignite, which is for startups and scale-ups, and we offer a vastly reduced day rate for startups and scale up because that's still an incredibly effective marketing flywheel for us. An example of that would be when we're talking to growth managers at startups, we're actually talking to the next generation of CMOs for incumbent businesses in two, three years time. For us, that's a particular area we still want to keep quite focused on. Then we've got something called Advantage, which is our core offering, and then we go into a particular offering that is a performance based model, so we call it performance SEO, but it's for particular clients where they want us to come and take the risk with them. We've got some actual skin in the game, but you have to be a certain size and shape for that to work out. At the moment, we're just offering that to e-commerce customers and typically the customer that we go for would be really great battling profile, but immature facets and filters, so we know that there's a massive opportunity there and we're willing to take the risk with them and we can go into that relationship happily breaking even knowing that in six months to a year we'll start to see some really great ROI from them in a way. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: In a way, does it almost feel like starting over, you have to find a new angle and find a new vertical and find a new audience? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, that's just the roller coaster of running an agency is you've got to keep reinventing yourself and some agencies just manage to do that bull-**** their way through it. The amount of agencies that are out there saying, "We're AI first." If you actually scratch behind that and figure out what that means, it doesn't mean anything. Mordy Oberstein: Is it recommended you drink urine to treat your kidney stones? Simon Schnieders: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's an awful lot of bull-****. We try and we hopefully cut through all of that. We're serious about what we do and so we're not just strap lines, but there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. Mordy, you mentioned about you seem to have done really well with the education elements, that side of things. We've got something called the Blue Array Academy. There's about 20,000 students in there, by the way, doing our courses, most of them the free course that we do, the technical SEO course. But for us, that's a loss-leader by the way. We don't actually make any money out of the Blue Array Academy. For us, that's about elevating and educating those in the industry and for us, if we can, to some degree, open source what we do, and you can get to that through the SEO manager course, like this is the actual stuff we're doing for our clients that helps to raise the standards of the industry as a whole. We come from, and we still are an unregulated industry, I would say it's not the Wild West it used to be, but there's still a lot more we could and should be doing, and that's partly our contribution towards that is hoping we elevate and raise the standards across the industry by open sourcing what we do a little bit more. Mordy Oberstein: If it makes you feel any better, the reason why we brought you in, one of the reasons why we brought you into our own SEO course, which is I think still forthcoming by the time this episode comes out was a direct result of your own SEO course. I saw that course. I really liked it. I'm like, "Oh, let's pull Blue Array in for our own course because they did a great job with their course," so direct lead right from the course. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, there's an incredible team here. I'm proud of every single one of them. They're just amazing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: No, they're great. I spoke at London SEO XL in 2022, and it was an absolute joy to see the team in action. Lots of people really, really engaged and really dedicated. That particular event took place on May the fourth, and there were people walking around in Star Wars outfits and if anyone didn't know that was Blue Array's team members, that was actual folks from Blue Array who were making the extra effort to make the event particularly eventful. I think that it was very much appreciated and I think that that's something that the team are really dedicated to and I think it really, really shows. I think that you have some very, very smart folks on your team. The other thing that really struck me at the event was the commitment that y'all have to supporting the wider community as well. Not only are you doing things online with the course, but also supporting local folks London to make the London area more robust, I guess you would say, and I think that that's really important as well. How valuable is that corporate responsibility to you as a team? Simon Schnieders: In simple terms, they've got my back, I've got their back, and I guess there's some testament to that. I've burned through roughly the equivalent of a million dollars worth of our cashflow in order to keep everybody in the business at the moment. We've had some pretty difficult years since 2020. I haven't made a single redundancy here, but that hasn't come without cost. The cost has been, we've through our cash reserves in order to keep everybody in the business and they know that I'm that kind of employer, that I genuinely put people before profit. We actually haven't made any profit last year. I don't think we made any profit at all, yeah, year before that was quite slim. This year we're looking at probably no to very, very low profitability again. I think as an agency only, you've got to demonstrate that on a regular basis as well that you've got their backs. It is been a while since I fired a client, but that's a way that I also like to demonstrate that I've got their backs is that if I find any client is being particularly tyrannical, is a bully to the team, for instance, I will fire them without hesitation and move them on from the business and they know that's the way that I deal with things and I've always got their back. Reciprocally, I get so much more in return from them. They're so dedicated and professional in what they do. Mordy Oberstein: I want to say before time slips away from us that if you're listening to this, I just want you to appreciate, I appreciate just how honest and open you are. There's not a lot of people who will come on a podcast and talk about their business as openly the way that you are right now, and I just want to say that I really appreciate it and I really hope the audience really appreciates it, because it's a treat. Simon Schnieders: Oh, that's lovely. Thank you. Yeah, like I say, I have to practice rigorous honesty. It's my makeup now, but I find that it works incredibly well. There's no point in papering over things. You might as well just be honest about stuff and I try to be as much as I can. At the same time, you have to also be a leader in a business and you have to protect people at their times as well and not be fully transparent. I hopefully balance that thing quite well. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you have to keep a poker face. I think you're probably still allowed to have a poker face, yes? Simon Schnieders: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay, good. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Simon, if people wanted to follow you and learn more from you, where could they find you? Simon Schnieders: Well, I've just started exploring short form video, so you could probably find me on TikTok, Insta Reels, YouTube shorts- Crystal Carter: You have TikTok? Simon Schnieders: But I've just started getting involved, yeah, so I finally succumbed to TikTok, but I'm most active on LinkedIn, so if you want to engage with me there, please do, I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments. I regularly open questions up to anybody that's willing to read. Crystal Carter: I'll find you on TikTok and I'll direct my 200 very elite followers to follow you as well. Simon Schnieders: Lovely. Mordy Oberstein: I have no followers on TikTok. Sorry. I'm just not a TikTok person yet. Maybe you'll inspire me because I haven't- Crystal Carter: You can just do more of my videos, Mordy and- Mordy Oberstein: You just do more of my videos. Crystal Carter: Literally just do Mordy tries. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know if I can handle that. It's a lot. Simon, thank you again for coming on and we'll see you out there in the ether that is the SEO universe. Simon Schnieders: Yeah, I look forward to it, Mordy and lovely to see you again Crystal. I look forward to meeting up in person again. Crystal Carter: See you again soon. Mordy Oberstein: Bye now. Well, this worked out perfectly. This was not planned by the way, but Simon was talking about their own internal SEO tool that they built over at Blue Array. Before we even knew Simon was even doing that, Crystal and I were like, "A lot of SEO agencies build out their own tools." It's a trend, it's a thing. The question is why. We're going to run through a few good examples of agency side tools as we go through a very unique version of Tool Time. There's a whole bunch that you don't really think about that necessarily as being agency tools, like AlsoAsked. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Probably one of the best SEO tools out there. I will say, it is one of the best SEO tools out there. Crystal Carter: It's a great tool and Mark from Candor Agency was saying basically it was something that they were using to help their clients to understand and to access and do better with people as they asked questions. He was presenting on it at an event and somebody was like, "Oh my God, can I get access to this? This would be really cool if we could." They built it out into a tool and it's something that the industry at large is very, very grateful for and I've shown it to people who are not SEOs and it can be really, really useful for helping them to understand the value of content and the user journey because it really maps out a user journey for you on a particular topic really, really easily. Yeah, it's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: You see there's this this trend where agencies build out tool stacks and it's interesting why. Why do they do that mean? Well, I was going to say it's like an obvious lead gen. It's a great way to bring in leads, but it's interesting you would think that wouldn't because your marketing to other SEOs for the most part. How does that work? Crystal Carter: What I've seen people do is people will often create a tool, and I think it aligns you next to people that you want to be aligned with, similar agencies, people who are working in similar industries. It also opens you up to a lot more different customers, a lot more potential customers who can see the knowledge and expertise and interest that your agency has. I think a lot of people forget that Screaming Frog comes from an agency tool that's an agency that has a tool that everyone uses that every other agency uses, and that's something that's foundational to SEO, really, particularly for technical SEO now, and it's really valuable. I think it's a great showcase. It's a great show, don't tell around the kinds of things that you can bring for clients. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's great brand building and because of that brand building, you're reaching a larger audience. I'm going to get to in-house in a second. I didn't forget about that, but if you're an SEO and you're like, "Oh, I love AlsoAsked," and you're sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, you're sharing Candor Agency at the same time, basically, and it's extending Marks... We're using also as the example, but it's extending out that reach exponentially. At the same time, by the way, whether it's Blue Arrays tool or whether it's Screaming Frog, you're reaching in-house teams at the same time. Yes, the tool is applicable to other SEOs and other agencies who may not be your target audience, but in-house SEOs might very well be your target audience, especially if their team is not built out or if they're a smaller organization or whatever it is. They might say, "You know what? Let's have an SEO agency handle this for us." Crystal Carter: I think so. I think also if you are able to create tools for clients, which is another thing that I've started to see, then that could be a real differentiator for you as an agency. I've seen it before where there are agencies who are building tools that are specific for the client, and sometimes it can be the case that maybe the client doesn't necessarily want their services from you anymore, but they do want the tool or maybe somebody wants the tool. If you've been using the tool for ages and they go, "Hey, could you help me with some additional agency services?" This is something that they do over at Keyword Insights. Andy Chadwick over at Keyword Insights was saying that he built the tool and he started getting service leads from it. Now, he offers services on top of the tool because people who love the tool and love the insights and love, the logic that they can see from Keyword Insights where I would also like some support with this. That's a great way to show people how you think about search, how you think about content, how you think about technical SEO, whatever in practice. Very often people will come to you for additional tools, as well. Another classic example is the Chrome extension that I use literally 70 million times a day, which is the SEO Pro Chrome extension from Kristina Azarenko over at Marketing Syrup. That is an incredible growth engine for her because there's links in there that go straight to her agency, straight to her training platform and things like that. It's incredibly valuable and I tell people about it all the time because it's so useful and it really just speaks to the expertise and the value that Kristina's able to offer. Mordy Oberstein: Especially if you're someone who has a particular identity or a particular focus, if you're, say an e-comm SEO agency or whatever it is, you can build up that specialty and that brand identity and around that and pull in leads or people who are looking at something specifically like that, what Simon was talking about earlier with agencies trying to be a little bit more niche or a little more focused than in the past. That can lean right into that, but whatever it is, it's a momentum builder, which is what you want if you're an agency. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think that we see in the Wix app market, we have lots of tools that are created by lots of different teams, including folks who are coming from an agency background. It creates a lot of leavers and a lot of new opportunities. Even on Wix, we have the logo builder for instance, which is a tool that we have available for free for people to use. We have a QR code generator, we have a few other tools as well, and that gives you an opportunity to speak to people and to show people that you're able to provide a solution. People say, "This thing is broken, I want it fixed." You're able to say, "Here's a solution to this," and to be able to provide that to them, and around the clock, it's not necessarily passive income depending on how you're configuring it. Our logo gen is free. There's a free version as well, but it can give you a lot of reach and particularly tools also can transcend language for instance. With something like a logo generator, even if it was in a different language, I could probably figure out whether or not I wanted it to have a rocket going to the moon or whatever on my logo and it would help me to achieve my goals. I think that that's really, really valuable as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I would love to have or create a tool and you can call the naming itself would just be amazing, Barry. Barry should have tools. He does have a tool, wait, I'm wrong. Doesn't he have some algorithm update, like history tracker website thing? Crystal Carter: Yes, I'm sure Barry has tools. I'm sure he has something. Mordy Oberstein: The Barrinator, RustyBricker. Crystal Carter: The Schwartzkoff, I don't know. I don't know. Something like... I don't know, something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: Schwartz and SERP. Crystal Carter: Schwartzen Ranker. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Schwartzen Ranker. Nice. That's it, trademark. Barry, if you want it, you got to pay for it now, I guess until he creates tools, we'll just have to read his news in the meantime. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: This week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Now, if you're saying, "Hey, wait a second, you didn't cover this breaking news story that happened in the SEO industry," that's because, breaking the fourth wall for you, I'm recording this section of the podcast a little bit earlier than I usually do because of our New York City digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal, that by the time you listen to this just happened. Okay, with that, three articles for you from Barry Schwarz, but from two different sources. First up from seroundtable.com, Google core update expected in the coming weeks. Google's Danny Sullivan, the search liaison was in the comments over seroundtable.com and wrote in the comments and replied back to somebody, whoever, whatever. "I would expect we'll see one," meaning a core update, "In the coming weeks because that fits in with our general cycle," but precisely when that's just not known yet. First, that's really interesting. They have a general cycle because sometimes it doesn't feel like they do. I wonder and am speculating if they do have a regular cycle of the refresh, but they sometimes hold off when they actually look at the dataset and say, "Wait a second, what we've tested doesn't seem to have actually worked the way we want it to. Let's hold off retest or whatever. Or we have other things going on that we have to prioritize and we'll push it off until later." I wonder if they have a regular schedule like Danny is saying, but that it often gets altered for various reasons. By the way, this doesn't mean that it's... Coming weeks can mean two weeks, it can mean 12 weeks. We don't exactly know, but there's one coming, which I guess you already knew anyway, there's always one coming. On to Barry Schwartz, but this time from search engine land, Google ending notes on search by the end of the month. Who cares? Oh, that's salty. Google had this feature called notes where users could leave little comments, I guess, or running records on search results. Imagine you had a recipe for best meatloaf, you're running the query best meatloaf, you have all the results, and on whatever recipe website you listed like, "Yeah, I tried this, it was really good, but it was a little bit too dry." You could leave like a running record. Google was basically running these inconsistently, not very often, not extremely very helpful. It's not surprising that they're gone. I feel like this was Google over, not overreaching. That's a bad way of putting it. Overzealously trying to get user generated content onto the SERP because they saw a trend where people want user generated content and there isn't enough across the web, which is why you have the same issue with too much Reddit, too much Quora, whatever, the same kind of thing. That's why they put the notes there. It didn't really work out the way they thought it would. That happens sometimes with products, so by the end of this month, they are going to be gone. Will you miss them? Will you even notice that they're gone? Good question. On to Barry Schwartz again from Search Engine Roundtable, again. Google artificially, by the way, I split the order up this week just so we go from Search Engine Roundtable to Search Engine Land, back to Search Engine Roundtable. That's how my mind works. Google artificially generated content, AGC classification score, this goes back to the lease that we've spoken about before many, many times. You probably know about them already. Juan Gonzalez Villa found in those, because again, the document is enormous and we're finding new things all the time, something that seems to show some site level AGC classification score, artificially generated content like AI content, score. Is Google using the score? We don't know. Have they ever used this score? We don't know, but there seems to be some kind of score at some point. Barry points out in the article that from what's written there in the leaks, I hate calling them leaks that this might be related to a really outdated content. Perhaps this is something Google used in the way, way, way past. However, it wouldn't surprise me and I think wouldn't surprise many if Google had some kind of way of classifying either content that was automatically generated like AI content or in reverse classifying content that seems to be written based on actual human experience. It's a whole separate topic. We actually covered it in our recent webinar with Mike King and Lily Ray, so you can watch the recording on the SEO hub. I'll link to that in the show notes. We actually brought it up at some point, I think later on in the Q&A section we brought it up there. You can listen to our thoughts on that scoring system, what that might be or not be like in that webinar. With that, that is this week's snappy news. Maybe he should just create his own algorithm update tracker, like the volatility tracker, like "Why rely on SEMrush," and whatever, just rely on Barry. Crystal Carter: Well, and if he did, he could do it on Wix Apps builder. He could use the Wix studio apps. He could make an app and he could make a widget and he could sell it in the app store. Mordy Oberstein: Make a widget, Barry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that'd be great. Mordy Oberstein: When the volatility gets high, it's like an angry Barry face. When it's low, it's a happy Barry face, which happens to be the same Barry face. Crystal Carter: Same face. Mordy Oberstein: Same face. Crystal Carter: Same face. Mordy Oberstein: The entire time. It's not the same, our follow of the week every week must be different. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a follow of the week. It'd just be the follow of the podcast forever. Yeah. This week's follow is Jim Banks. He's got 25 years of high search volume media buying for rapid growth businesses. Check out Jim Banks over on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Jim Banks is a great follow. He has a great LinkedIn. He also has a great podcast that he does, which he also syndicates to TikTok, and I follow him on TikTok and things. His podcast is centered around some of the challenges and some of the things I wish I'd known as an agency owner and things as well. He really, really expects people to be honest about their agency journey. Mordy Oberstein: That's topical. Crystal Carter: I think it's really great. That's one of the reasons why I thought he'd be a great follow of the week. If you're interested in people telling true stories about the agency journey, he's a great follow. His podcast is called Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, and really, he talks about lots of things. He had a recent podcast with one of the founders or one of the leaders over at Optimizer, for instance, and they're talking about very openly about some of the challenges there. But he's great. Great follow, great guy. Follow Jim Banks. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? That's a great name for a podcast. I'm going to start a podcast like that, Bad Decisions with Mordy Oberstein, and the first person we can interview is my wife. Crystal Carter: Shout out Mrs. Oberstein for- Mordy Oberstein: For having a good heart. Crystal Carter: Right, having a good heart- Mordy Oberstein: And saying yes. Crystal Carter: Long, long suffering, Mrs. Oberstein. No, I'm kidding. She's lovely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think so. Then I'm not paid to say that. Anyway, that'll do it for this week's SERP's Up. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to become indispensable to your clients. When I say indispensable, I think of indestructible from The Simpsons where Mr. Burns says, "Indestructible." Anyway, indispensable. Look for it 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 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

Lazarina is an organic marketing consultant specializing in SEO, CRO, and data science. She's worked with countless teams in B2B, SaaS, and big tech to improve their organic positioning. As an advocate of SEO automation, Lazarina speaks on webinars and at conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Lazarina Stoy SEO and Data Science Consultant Lazarina is an organic marketing consultant specializing in SEO, CRO, and data science. She's worked with countless teams in B2B, SaaS, and big tech to improve their organic positioning. As an advocate of SEO automation, Lazarina speaks on webinars and at conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Articles & Resources 1 Oct 2024 How semantic & traditional keyword research come together for better SEO 10 Jan 2024 Audit and fix duplicate content: A guide to helping Google choose what to rank 26 Oct 2023 A complete guide to preventing keyword cannibalization 6 Apr 2023 How to do on-page SEO: A guide for SMBs 13 Sept 2022 A beginner’s guide to CTAs: How to choose the right CTA for your business goals Resources Lazarina Stoy Incorporating semantics into keyword research Learn to incorporate query semantics, advanced concepts, and actionable steps with the help of this SEO checklist. 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 Keyword difficulty assessment matrix Complete this matrix to get a fully-reasoned breakdown of how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keywords in the SERPs. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this matrix to: Assess the true competition of the SERPs Analyze and track the SERPs landscape Understand keyword difficulty in clear language Abby Gleason SEO Product Manager LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Abby Gleason is a content-focused SEO with 7+ years experience leading successful organic search strategies for SaaS and eCommerce brands. She loves to share her learnings and has been published on Moz, Semrush, Search Engine Land and more. More about this topic Read this article about keyword difficulty on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO