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Goodness is an SEO analyst that specializes in technical and on-page SEO for eCommerce brands, helping them improve their organic visibility. She enjoys SEO audits, data analysis, and reading novels. Goodness Azubuogu SEO Analyst at Trek Marketing Goodness is an SEO analyst that specializes in technical and on-page SEO for eCommerce brands, helping them improve their organic visibility. She enjoys SEO audits, data analysis, and reading novels. Articles & Resources 29 Jun 2023 The fundamentals of internal linking for 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

If they measure it, it matters. The SERP’s Up team dive into the One SEO Tool to Rule Them All: Google Search Console. This free Google tool is, by far, the most important tool for site owners to understand how Google values their sites. Mordy and Crystal share their love of Google Search Console and unpack the importance of the platform. Google Search Console gives a wealth of information about your site: from page indexing to Google’s crawl frequency, the impressions that specific pages receive, and most importantly, what issues Google seems to be having with a website. This is the main conduit of communication from Google to the site owner, and trust us - if they measure something in there, it matters. SEOs should pay attention to Video Pages (hint, hint - get them going if you haven’t), Page Experience stats, mobile usability, and more. The team catches up with Lazarina Stoy, data scientist, and SEO, who shares one of her favorite features of GSC, the Links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. Back Google Search Console: One SEO tool to rule them all If they measure it, it matters. The SERP’s Up team dive into the One SEO Tool to Rule Them All: Google Search Console. This free Google tool is, by far, the most important tool for site owners to understand how Google values their sites. Mordy and Crystal share their love of Google Search Console and unpack the importance of the platform. Google Search Console gives a wealth of information about your site: from page indexing to Google’s crawl frequency, the impressions that specific pages receive, and most importantly, what issues Google seems to be having with a website. This is the main conduit of communication from Google to the site owner, and trust us - if they measure something in there, it matters. SEOs should pay attention to Video Pages (hint, hint - get them going if you haven’t), Page Experience stats, mobile usability, and more. The team catches up with Lazarina Stoy, data scientist, and SEO, who shares one of her favorite features of GSC, the Links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 12 | November 9, 2022 | 36 MIN 00:00 / 35:57 This week’s guests Lazarina Stoy Lazarina is an SEO consultant specializing in Data Science and is currently a senior manager at enterprise-level marketing agency Intrepid Digital. As a proponent of SEO automation, Lazarina often speaks at webinars and conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful Head of SEO Communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: It's me. Hello, internet people. Hi. Hello, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. You just gave me a recommendation for a show. That's first time you've ever recommended anything to me to... Oh, scratch that. You've made many recommendations to me, not a watching recommendation. So I'm excited. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's good. Mordy Oberstein: How about telling what the audience is. I'm not telling you what it is. Crystal Carter: I really enjoyed it. It was a good show. It had a lot of interesting things and the pace was good. I like a show that moves along and has a lot of pace. Mordy Oberstein: There was a show I was watching with my wife and it was a good show, but they could have wrapped it up in one episode and it was nine. Crystal Carter: Honestly, honestly, when they drag it out. Also, I don't like it when people introduce too many characters at once and too much information. I'm like, "Give me one character and fan out from there." If you give me 12 characters and all of their details straight at once, I cannot cope. But I love an ensemble cast. That's all good. But you need somebody who's like- Mordy Oberstein: Slowly, but surely. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they meet this person. Then you find out about them. Then they meet the next person, you find out about them. If they're like, "This person's here and that person." I'm like, "It's too much. I'm both bored and confused." I don't like it. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like marketers, there's a lot you can take away for your content strategy from what these shows do wrong so much. Crystal Carter: Honestly, do you know, I genuinely, when I'm doing deliverables for SEO projects, I structure them like soap operas. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? You have people who are in various scandals? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Marrying other people. Crystal Carter: Basically, in a soap opera, what will happen is during the season, there'll be one long story that runs in the background, like, who did that mysterious thing, or whose glove was it that was found in wherever? And they'll give you a little bit of that story every time for every episode. But then on every episode, there's also little stories that happen as well, and they will conclude a story on every episode. So every month, you should have something that you definitely finish. And over the course of say, six months of your deliverables, you should have something that you're chipping away at as you go. So it's the big thing that you want to build up to, like building up a content portfolio, or maybe you want to be more competitive on a certain thing. So you chip away at that every month, and it might be a long term project, but you move it forward a little bit every month. Mordy Oberstein: And who says soap operas were worthless, other than me? My grandma used to love them. I'm like, "I don't know what this thing is. This is terrible." But anyway, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for core web vitals are a thing of the past. Google Search Console not giving you field data that you so desire? Use Wix's speed dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual core web vitals are with Wix's site speed dashboard. That is absolutely novel, by the way. And I don't think people appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I love it so much because you want to do better. And with Google Search Console, we're going to talk loads about Google Search Console and you get some fantastic information from it. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic and amazing and wonderful. However, if you are a smaller site, you don't get a lot of that core web vitals information until you reach a certain threshold of traffic. In the meantime, you're just sort of wondering. Mordy Oberstein: Guessing. Crystal Carter: Guessing. Mordy Oberstein: Because the lab data and the field data, the data that Google's giving you, that's simulated to what users actually experience, also known as lab data, is not very close to the actual user experience. Crystal Carter: It's very different. It's very different and it might include you as well. And if you're a small site, then you checking your blog 20 times, let's say you're only getting, I don't know, 70 people coming to that blog, then that's going to be a big portion of the traffic, for instance. So anyway, I'm just saying it's really, really useful if you're trying to make these improvements and also, if you're trying to make these improvements for maybe future traffic that you're going to get. Because if you're like, "We're going to be huge, this blog's going to be amazing, this shop's going to be incredible," you want to make sure that you're able to build and to get off on the right footing. And that report is a great place to start. Mordy Oberstein: And you don't need to use total blocking time is a really bad simulation for FID, which is amazing. They're not similar at all. Anyway, on this show, one tool to rule them all, and it's not the speed dashboard we just mentioned, it's a different tool. Or conversely, you could say if you were stuck on a desert island and you can only bring one tool with you to do your SEO with, which would you bring? The answer of course is Search Console. But why? We'll get into the value of Google Search Console today and what it can provide you with, whether you're a business owner or an SEO or a marketer of any kind. Also, Lazarina Stoy will stop by and share how she extracts value out of Google Search Console. Plus, we'll dive into a little tool from Screaming Frog to help you maximize your Google Search Console prowess. Of course, we'll get into some Snappy News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness as episode 12 of the SERP's Up podcast is knocking on your audio doors. So much to get into with Search Console. But I think maybe we should sort of explain Search Console a little bit if you're not so familiar with it. Because when you talk about SEO tools, it can get complicated quickly. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Google Search Console is sometimes abbreviated GSC. If you're on Twitter, if you're online, if you see SEOs chatting with each other, they will talk about Google Search Console like this. Mordy Oberstein: Or just SC. Crystal Carter: SC. Okay, yeah. For the in crowd. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And essentially, what Google Search Console does is it gives you information on how Google is seeing your website. So it's not exactly the same as Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you information about all of the traffic that's coming through to your website that they can track. So you add a tag to your website and then they will tell you about all of the different channels. So from a marketing point of view, it's absolutely crucial for you to have Google Analytics. Sometimes, SEOs will almost exclusively have access to Google Search Console. But what Google Search Console is really, really good for is understanding how Google is seeing your content, both which rich results you might get and which result is some of those cards. For instance, if you ever Google and you see a recipe card, that's a rich result. If you see a job listing for instance, that's a rich result as well. Product listings, those are also rich results and they show at the top of the SERP. And Google Search Console will tell you about how many of them they are showing and will tell you about which pages they are pulling them from. Google Search Console will also tell you about ranking, where you're ranking on Google. They'll also tell you about which pages are actually in their index. And when we talk about indexing and crawling, Google Search Console will also tell you the difference. So they'll tell you, "We've crawled this page, but we have not put it in any index." And if you don't know what the difference between those two things are, it's essentially like if you were trying to be a pop star musician and you wanted to be top of the charts, you would have to get played on the radio at some point probably. So what being index is like being played on the radio. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be top of the charts, that you're going to have a Billboard Award or that sort of thing, but it means you've been played on the radio, so you registered on their index. If you have not been played on the radio, you can't necessarily be top of the charts first. So you need to make sure that you're indexed and that you're crawled. So just because your crawled doesn't mean that you're indexed, just because your indexed doesn't mean that you rank. Mordy Oberstein: Just because your content doesn't mean you deserve to be indexed because some content shouldn't be indexed. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So there's a lot of different nuances within that. Google Search Console breaks down all of the different parts of it. We, at Wix, have recently released our Google Search Console URL inspection tool. And as part of that, we've got a great blog on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which Mordy explains what the tool does. And one of the good things about that is we also put together a list of understanding, within our support tool documents, there's also a list of understanding what those things mean, what the different differentiations mean. So discovered in non-indexed and crawl, but non-indexed, that sort of thing. So dig into those as well. There's also lots of links in that documentation to lots of the Google details as well. So yeah, it can be complicated, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So they try to make sure that the reports are really easy to access for people of all different knowledge abilities. And you can also see lots of things about your links. You can also see lots of things about whether or not you've got security things, whether or not you've had a glitch in your server. You can carry out a very detailed technical SEO audit using Google Search Console almost exclusively if you need to. But one of the limitations of Google Search Consoles, it only tells you what's happening on Google, and it only tells you what's happening on Google organically. So you can't get information on your traffic from Facebook, you can't get information on your traffic from paid. You can't get information on your traffic from other search engines like say Bing or Baidu or whatever it is. So those are the limitations. Bing Webmaster Tools also has something very similar to Google Search Console and it can be interesting to compare the two to see how your site is being crawled. And yeah, it's a great tool. Publication called the State of Technical SEO asked over 800 SEOs, which tools they use for their technical SEO. And 93% of SEOs said they use Google Search Console. So if you want to do better with your SEO, getting into Google Search Console is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we kind of plan on doing today. But what we're kind of going to do is give you sort of an overview of some of the things that it can do and why it's so valuable. But I think the most important thing for you to do is after listening to this, if you are familiar with Search Console, to play around with it more. And if you're not familiar with Search Console, play around with it because it is kind of intuitive once you poke around a little bit and sort of experiment with what's going on in there. Out of all the tools, I would say Google Analytics, like, whoa, okay, you got to take a step back, you got to really get into it, especially GA4. But Search Console's not that way. A lot of the reporting is pretty straightforward. Some of the more technical things around indexing are not, but you can find good documentation around it. But kind of what you said is really the value of Search Console, that it does everything. It's so comprehensive, it talks to you about how many clicks you're getting. It talks how your pages are performing on Google. It also gives you a more technical analysis. You can look at things like which Google bots are crawling your website and how often are they crawling your website? There's a lot of great data in there and there's data around links and it's all free. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all free. I think we talk a lot about SEO generally. But if you are not familiar with Google Search Console and you are a Wix user, you have the ability to, within the SEO set of checklists, connect directly to Google Search Console as you set up your Wix website. And this is fantastic. You also have built into the CMS a URL inspection tool that allows you to see information about Google Search Console, about your index ability for individual pages. And that, I think, is testament to how important a team at Wix thinks Google Search Console is and I think it's a testament to how important we think it is for SEO success. So yeah, it's a great tool. And I think that you mentioned that it's fairly accessible and I've had before where people are like, "Oh, Google Search Console, what's so great about that?" And I think sometimes people look at it and they go, "This is really basic information," and it's actually not. It's almost deceptively simple. The way it's presented is pretty straightforward. But you can also get very clear information about which keywords you're actually ranking for, which is really interesting because you might be trying to rank for one thing, but the keywords that you're actually ranking for might be very, very different. So it's worth looking at the keywords that you're ranking for and the keywords that different pages are ranking for. You can also filter by region. So for instance, if you're seeing that you're getting a lot of traffic, but maybe it's not very relevant, you can filter by region and see maybe you're ranking really, really well in another country. I've seen this happen before. Maybe you're ranking it really, really well in a different country, but actually, you serve customers locally. And so you should be looking at the rankings for your country that you're in. So this can happen sometimes when countries share a similar language. So I've seen it where people based in England were ranking in the US and it wasn't that valuable to them because they could only serve clients in the UK. So we had to adjust our Search Console filters so that we were only looking at where we were ranking in the UK. And then we could make better, more actionable SEO strategies. Mordy Oberstein: You can definitely get super complicated with the filters. I implore you to look at the filters, but don't necessarily think it's super complicated either with the filters, there's just basic comparisons you can do. And again, you're seeing things like, okay, so three months ago, how many clicks did I get versus now, how many clicks am I getting? And that's also one of the things you can do great with Search Console. One of the unique things about Search Console is you can see the impressions that you're getting, meaning your pages are showing up on Google, but you're not getting any clicks. Why is that? Perhaps my title tags are just absolutely horrific and I don't know, they just say home for homepage. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I'm ranking but no one's clicking. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So that's a really, really interesting one. So people sometimes show impressions. Impressions aren't always great. Sometimes if the impressions you have are for keywords that aren't relevant for your website, then you need to retune your content. And when you're looking at the performance report, you can see total clicks. Total clicks, that's pretty straightforward. Those are themes that people actually clicked on. And your impressions is when somebody entered a query and your content was shown. They might not have clicked on it, but your content was shown after somebody entered a query. The click through rate is essentially one divided by the other. So for every 10 times that your content was shown, one person clicked on it. Is that 10% click through rate? I don't know. That would be really, really high. Mordy Oberstein: Math. It's really high by the way, 10% click through rate. Crystal Carter: That's really high. 10% click through rate is very high. You might have that for one particular query, like maybe for your brand or something like that. And then your average position is the average place where you rank. Mordy Oberstein: You should be careful with that one because it's not exactly accurate and it should give you a general sense of things. By the way, data in general gives you a general sense of things. The numbers are never going to be actually exact, even in Search Console, even though it's Google data. But it does kind of bring up why you sometimes, or best practice would be to use a third party tool for various things. If a queue were to super important to you, you see that you're getting a lot of impression and clicks for it in Search Console, then that's something you might want to track in a rank tracking tool. Because the average rank studies have shown is less than accurate all the time. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I almost never rely on a single data source for a particular bit of information because Google Search Console's obviously getting information from Google. Sometimes with Google Search Console, you don't get the information straight away. So sometimes, you might not see the data, like you might not see yesterday's data straight away. You might have to wait a couple of days before the data comes through, which sometimes if you've got a flash sale or if you've got some very important news that's dropping, then you might want to know where you were ranking on that day. So that can be tricky. But yeah, I would very rarely rely on a single source. Also, this is one of the reasons why I bring up Bing. Bing also gives you information on those things. So for instance, if your ranking suddenly drop in Google Search Console, it's worthwhile checking what your rankings are like on Bing to see if they've changed as well or if they're the same. And again, the other thing about Bing and Google Search Console is that if you're like, "I don't spend a lot of time on Bing," that's okay. When you go to Bing to set up your analytics, you go to Bing Webmaster, I think it's Bing Webmaster Tools, and you can connect to Google Search Console with one click and they will pull through all of the information you have from there into their system. So again, if you see your ranking suddenly change in Google Search Console and they don't change in Bing, then it might be that there was an algorithm update that affected you in Google and didn't affect you in Bing. If you see that they both change really quickly, then it might be that there's a technical issue on your website. Mordy Oberstein: Which again, the tools can help you with because you can check out indexing issues which is by the way, I think it's really important these days. Because I think things that are changing around indexing. I think Google is being a little more choosier about what it decides to index. So a little bit of a myth that every page should be in. No, if there's a page that's not really helpful. Imagine had a page and all it was, was like a sign up button for subscribe to an email, a newsletter. That's not a very useful page. Google's probably not going to index that page and nor should it really be indexed. It's really meant for people who are already on your site to follow through and subscribe to your newsletter, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think that you should be very, very much, it's all killer, no filler. You want to make sure that you've got your most important pages indexed. And sometimes, you look in the discover not indexed and you say, "There's a lot of URLs there." Well, look at which ones they are. Sometimes they're UTMs because sometimes those get indexed. Sometimes they're from different campaign ads, sometimes they are category pages that might not necessarily be- Mordy Oberstein: Archive pages. Crystal Carter: Archive pages. Sometimes they're old links from an old URL that Google knows about and they need to know about that so that they can manage the redirect so that they can pay attention to how that traffic flows and the value of those URLs. So for instance, if you had an old domain and you migrated it to, let's say it was HTTP and you migrated it to HTTPS, then those are two different URLs to Google. So they might very well still have in their record the old URL and that will be discovered but not indexed. That's something they know about, but they don't have that in the index because they're indexing the new one. They're doing you a favor. So that's something to think about as well. So look at which ones are discovered and not indexed. If you see something in there that you're like, "Wait a second, that should absolutely be indexed," then there's a couple of things that you can do, and we might talk about that on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and don't afraid because you're going to see all these different, crawl but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, all these different statuses. And they might seem confusing, but there's a lot of documentation Google has around them and there's a lot of great resources around what they mean and how to possibly fix them. So if you see them crawl but not indexed, it could be very much that you have a page that's very, very similar. And Google's like, "Well, we already have this page on the index so we're not going to put it there." But for you it's very different. And then a different intent or might be more of a commerce intent or transactional intent rather. So definitely pay attention to what's happening in there because Google, again is getting a little bit choosier. The way I think about it is if Google's better understanding content, it's going to be choosier about what it decides to index or not to index. And as it gets better at doing that, which it has been in more recent times is getting better that, it's going to get choosier and choosier about what gets indexed, which means there could be real issues for you. So don't be afraid of putting your toe into that index kind of stuff and to the page's reports that you have in there inside of Search Console. Research, ask questions, dig into it because it's super important, even though it might seem a little bit daunting to deal with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, don't be afraid of it and ask for help. The SEO community can be really helpful and there's absolutely opportunities for that. And I think the more signals you can give Google about which pages are most important to you, the better. We've talked about internal linking, for instance. Internal linking is a great signal for telling Google that something is an important page. It's like people sending lots of referrals to someone. If they're getting lots of referrals, then that's going to tell Google that it's an important page. So show them that it's important, don't just assume that they'll figure it out. Show them with links internally, externally, with relevant content, additional schema, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And we'll put some resource into the show notes that'll help you. If you see a certain status in your Search Console reporting, we'll give you some information and resources that you can use to come up some possible solutions to fix those problems. So check out the show notes. With that, we have a fabulous SEO who's going to share with you how she uses Google Search Console to make well informed SEO decisions, keyword well inform SEO decisions. Here's Lazarina Stoy and how she uses Search Console. Lazarina Stoy: I love Google Search Consult and use it daily. There are so many useful reports there and it's ever changing. From the more recent reports, the video indexing feature is something I use to quickly troubleshoot performance of no indexed videos and ensure that the companies I'm working with appear as expected in all the different search types that they're targeting. I frequently use the page indexation reports as well as the crawl data to identify any changes to crawling behavior and quick fix errors that might be prohibiting pages to appear as expected. These reports can also help signal content issues as well. The enhancements reports are amazing for websites that have structured data implemented because at a glance, I can identify errors as well as the overall effort and strategy implemented, which in turn enables me to better identify opportunities on what can be implemented to enhance the search appearance of websites via featured snippets. Often, not very much used by SEOs, but still a super useful report for anyone that does not have access to SEO tooling is the links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. I always recommend this to small website owners to take advantage of. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Lazarina. A great point, by the way. She brings up the video reporting in there. That's relatively new. And one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Search Console and using Search Console is that Google's put a lot of emphasis on dev inside of Search Console and they're constantly refining and bringing in new reporting. So keep an eye for new things inside a Search Console, that'll be really helpful. In this case, the video is absolutely super cool if you have a very, very video intensive website. So keep an eye out for what Google's doing. They're doing a great job over there with their development around Search Console. Crystal Carter: And I think particularly, you mentioned the video and she mentions it as well, and I think that one of the other things that's great about Search Console's it tells you what Google cares about. So they add all these features when it's something that they say, if it's not measured, it doesn't matter. That's a thing people say. And if they're measuring it, it means that it matters. So if they've got a whole report all about video, then that tells you that maybe you should have some video on your website. And if you don't have any, then maybe you should consider making some or including some, because with the video report, for instance, it doesn't have to be your YouTube video, it doesn't have to be a YouTube video at all. But if you have a video that's embedded on your page, then Google is able to see it and it can help your content to perform better and it can help you to track better. Google Search Console also lets you filter by the types of media so you can see where images are ranking and things like that, for instance. And Lazarina, one of the reasons why I was really pleased to have her along here is because she does a lot of really interesting things with Google Search Console. Not just the things she talked about, but also some of the reports that she's able to create by combining Google Search Console data with what was Google Data Studio and is now Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Looker, yeah, that's a weird name. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Huh? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We'll link to the Google Looker dashboard thing, I don't know what you call it now, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I'm going to look at the Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Let's not get into the branding names. That was bizarre to me. But anyway, hey, who are we to judge, right? It works for them. I'm sure they've done their research for it. Looker is definitely a better name than Google Beta Studio. Crystal Carter: Are you sure? Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of like names that where in the name, you can sort of understand what you're going to get out of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: With Looker, I kind of feel like, I'm not even going to go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, there are so many, just got to pivot it right out that, there are so many tools that pull in Search Console data. Every SEO tool really does. A few years go ranking tracking tool. Oftentimes, they will let you integrate with Google Search Console through Google Search Console's APIs. You can compare all sorts of ranking data and Search Console data to this data, to that data and to other sorts of the data. As I mentioned before, we integrated with Google's URL inspection tool API to create our site inspection dashboard. So Google's Search Consoles, because it is foundational SEO information, will often be used by various third party SEO tools, which is why we're proud to bring you Tool time by the SERP's UP podcast. This time we're going to Screaming Frog, which itself is a seminal SEO tool and how they pull in Google Search Console's URL inspection API, and what you can do with Screaming Frog. Crystal Carter: Screaming Frog, as you mentioned, is a foundational tool. It's used for technical SEO and it allows you... You can also use it for content as well. But it allows you to do a crawl of your website. It allows you to assess your site map and lots of information like that. I use it with Google Search Console to corroborate data to prioritize what things you need to do, for instance. So within Google Search Console, you can submit your site map and that should form the bulk of what gets crawled and what gets indexed. There are sometimes bits of your website that are not in your site map and they sometimes end up being indexed as well. So one of the things you can do with Screening Frog is you can do a different mode, not the standard crawl, but you can do a list, for instance, and you can submit your site map list and then you can crawl that with the Google Search Console API. And then you can see which things are being indexed from your site map and which things are not being indexed from your site map. And if they're not being indexed, then you can go, "Why isn't this indexed? Should it be in the site map? Should it be indexed? What should we do here?" And so essentially, you can take those little bits of information and you can compare them. Then again, as I say, I very rarely rely on a single thing. But if you're comparing this with the information you get in, say like the Wix URL inspection tool, then you can also see which part of the site it's in, which site map it's in, which folder it's in, and see if there's some commonalities across URLs that are within the same site map or have the same configuration, for instance. But Screaming Frog, like Google Search Console, is something that it can seem both simple and complicated at the same time. Essentially, if you use Screaming Frog, which you can on a free version, you can see 500 URLs. So you can crawl your website, you pump the URL and you press crawl, and then you can get lots of information on your website. And it kind of just looks like a spreadsheet and you really need to click around and dig around. I tweeted ages ago, "Has anyone ever completed Screaming Frog? Because I just keep finding more levels." And it's absolutely true because people do incredible things. And you can also export it to different things. So you can export the data from your from Screening Frog as a CSV, and then you can use it in whatever kind of data, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using Google Sheets, or you can connect it directly to Google Sheets and you can export your data there. And then you can do more SEO analysis or more bulk updates from that. But you can see lots of information about both crawl information and also different parts of your site. So your images, your meta descriptions, whether things are indexable, what status could they have, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking at all the pages that Google has actually crawl but not indexed, and you're able to combine them with all the headers are on those pages, you're like, "Wow, okay, there's a pattern here. There's something going," that's good information. Because you could see there's a content issue with those pages. That's probably the reason why Google's crawled them but hasn't decided to index them. So combining information that these tools allow you to do with Search Console data in all sorts of ways can be super helpful to you. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. And I've had it before where I looked at a site and we had a site map, that was fine, and that had loads of URLs in it. And then I ran it through a Screaming Frog with the Spider tool and it only pulled up two URLs. And I was like, "What? What's going on?" And when I ran it through the site map, it was like, "Yeah, you've got all these URLs and they're all 200s," and all that stuff. And I was like, "How come we can't find? Why isn't this?" And essentially, the Spider one is interesting because essentially, it bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces. If all of your pages are orphans, which is what I found with this one, I did this crawl- Mordy Oberstein: Or maybe there's no link to any other page. Crystal Carter: There's no link to any of the pages. Then basically the crawler won't crawl. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: It goes to that one page and goes, "Cool. Awesome." So you need to make sure, so it's worth comparing. And within Screaming Frog, you can compare the two. You can compare your site map and your crawl and you can see where the things are missing, and that's worth thinking about as well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, all these kind of things, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But again, there's a free version of Screaming Frog. It's really simple to run the site. Just play around. Whatever you get out of it, you get out of it and you go back again. And whatever you get of it next time, you get out of it the next time. Slow and steady runs a race, baby steps. Crystal Carter: One thing I will also say about Screaming Frog is that because it's so foundational, there's lots of documentation and lots of SEOs have gone through Screaming Frog and done this, this, that, that and the other. So if there's ever anything you want to find on Screaming Frog and you are not sure, you can Google how to find this on Screaming Frog. There was a blog that I found recently that was like how to do almost everything on Screaming Frog. Their documentation is also very good. And I would say that yeah, if you're stuck on anything, literally just Google it. Don't flounder around for ages. Just Google it and somebody's almost already figured it out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You know what else you should be diving into other than Screaming Frog and Google's Search Console, it's the latest and greatest news coming out of the SEO world. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, more reasons to keep an eye on what Google is doing in the e-comm space. If you have to pay attention to one area of Google and what it's up to, e-comm would be it in my honest opinion. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google introduces new search labels for coupons and promo. So in a nutshell, Google made a bunch of announcements related to their on the SERP shopping experience. For example, the zoo functionality to copy a coupon code from a shopping listing, as well as Google's price insights coming to the search results, which by the way is a nifty little feature that lets you see how much the product typically costs. And the product that you're buying, how much does it typically cost? So in other words, you're getting a good idea if you're getting a good deal or not. To me, by the way, this is where Google's shopping experience really shines. They have the power to give you so much data. And for whatever reason ,Amazon just doesn't. So Google making price data insights accessible to me is basically their way of moving in on Amazon's eCommerce dominance. Okay, next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Check this out. Links may be less important to the Google search ranking algorithm in the future. I've been saying this for a long time and thank God. Here's what Google said directly. Here's a direct quote from Google's John Mueller, "Well, it's something where I imagine over time the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It's like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it? But my guess is over time, it won't be such a big factor. Sometimes it is today. I think already, that's something that's been changing quite a bit." That again, was Google's direct words, John Mueller's direct words, not mine. Just to give you a kind of conceptual understanding of what he's saying. Links are a secondary signal. Links don't tell you whether the content is actually good or not, or it actually answers a question or it's actually usable, digestible, and awesome for the user. Links are a signal that basically say, "Well, so many people keep linking to this page. It must be awesome. We don't really know, but it must be." The better Google gets actually understanding the content, I put a tweet out about this and it got a lot of comments and controversy because people are still really hung up on links, too hung up on links. We spoke about it on a previous episode of the podcast. I think it was episode 10, so check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes. Links don't tell you how good the actual content is. So if Google's getting better at actually understanding the content, why would they keep so heavily relying on links when they actually understand what the content is saying and therefore, know if it's relevant or awesome, or answers to question is usable and digestible and so forth. So kind of makes sense logically when you think about it. Sorry, link Builders. Anyway, that's been the Snappy News for this week. It's been snappy and it's been news. Anyway, as we wrap this show up, we were wondering who should we have as a follow of the week. Every week we like to bring somebody else for you to follow on social media, typically on Twitter, because the SEO world's core people live on Twitter. And we're wondering who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it be? We really racked our brains on this one and it was hard to find someone who you should follow. We're talking about Search Console and who could it be? Crystal Carter: Oh, man. Mordy Oberstein: It's all about Search Console on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Somebody who talks about- Mordy Oberstein: Somebody who talks about. So maybe somebody who works on the Search Console product over at Google? Crystal Carter: They maybe done some videos on it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe they have done a few videos, maybe even a webinar or an actual live event actually over at Wix, about Search Console. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of anyone like that. Mordy Oberstein: I know, John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I mean, you should follow John. He was our follow of the week, I think two weeks ago, three weeks ago. This week, we're talking about Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: The fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: The fantastic Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate over a Google who works on Google's own Search Console team. Who better to follow than the search advocate who works on the Search Console team over at Google? It's Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: Daniel Waisberg, who has been at Google for ages working first with the Analytics team and now with Google Search Console. I had a good chat with him at Brighton about all of the new reports and things they keep adding to Google Search Console because they've been refining it a lot this year and it's been really, really great to see all of that. We have some show notes from the Google Search Console webinar that he did with us in the summer, and he talked about some great things there. And yeah, he's a great advocate and he also talked about a few things that I hadn't heard of. There was one that was new to me, which was the question hub from Google, which is actually new to me. He's extremely knowledgeable about search and very much into his data and a great person to follow if you want to know things about Google Search Console. Mordy Oberstein: And a great person overall. Crystal Carter: Yes, he's lovely. We love Daniel. Mordy Oberstein: We do love Daniel. He's family. So check out Daniel Waisberg, @DanielWaisberg on Twitter. That's D-A-N-I-E-L W-A-I-S-B-E-R-G. It's the W-A-I that might confuse you. Crystal Carter: And tell him we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: And tell him you followed him because Crystal and Mordy sent you over. Crystal Carter: Sure he'll love that. Mordy Oberstein: I want keep track. We'll ask him. Anyway. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode, as we satisfy our need for speed with a look at site performance and SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lazarina Stoy Daniel Waisberg Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Search Console Optimizing your website performance with Search Console How to Automate The URL Inspection API Get to know the Wix Site Inspection tool Search Console Data Template Are links everything SEOs make them out to be? News: Google Introduces New Search Labels For Coupons & Promos Links may be less important to the Google Search ranking algorithm in the future Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lazarina Stoy Daniel Waisberg Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Search Console Optimizing your website performance with Search Console How to Automate The URL Inspection API Get to know the Wix Site Inspection tool Search Console Data Template Are links everything SEOs make them out to be? News: Google Introduces New Search Labels For Coupons & Promos Links may be less important to the Google Search ranking algorithm in the future Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful Head of SEO Communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: It's me. Hello, internet people. Hi. Hello, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. You just gave me a recommendation for a show. That's first time you've ever recommended anything to me to... Oh, scratch that. You've made many recommendations to me, not a watching recommendation. So I'm excited. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's good. Mordy Oberstein: How about telling what the audience is. I'm not telling you what it is. Crystal Carter: I really enjoyed it. It was a good show. It had a lot of interesting things and the pace was good. I like a show that moves along and has a lot of pace. Mordy Oberstein: There was a show I was watching with my wife and it was a good show, but they could have wrapped it up in one episode and it was nine. Crystal Carter: Honestly, honestly, when they drag it out. Also, I don't like it when people introduce too many characters at once and too much information. I'm like, "Give me one character and fan out from there." If you give me 12 characters and all of their details straight at once, I cannot cope. But I love an ensemble cast. That's all good. But you need somebody who's like- Mordy Oberstein: Slowly, but surely. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they meet this person. Then you find out about them. Then they meet the next person, you find out about them. If they're like, "This person's here and that person." I'm like, "It's too much. I'm both bored and confused." I don't like it. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like marketers, there's a lot you can take away for your content strategy from what these shows do wrong so much. Crystal Carter: Honestly, do you know, I genuinely, when I'm doing deliverables for SEO projects, I structure them like soap operas. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? You have people who are in various scandals? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Marrying other people. Crystal Carter: Basically, in a soap opera, what will happen is during the season, there'll be one long story that runs in the background, like, who did that mysterious thing, or whose glove was it that was found in wherever? And they'll give you a little bit of that story every time for every episode. But then on every episode, there's also little stories that happen as well, and they will conclude a story on every episode. So every month, you should have something that you definitely finish. And over the course of say, six months of your deliverables, you should have something that you're chipping away at as you go. So it's the big thing that you want to build up to, like building up a content portfolio, or maybe you want to be more competitive on a certain thing. So you chip away at that every month, and it might be a long term project, but you move it forward a little bit every month. Mordy Oberstein: And who says soap operas were worthless, other than me? My grandma used to love them. I'm like, "I don't know what this thing is. This is terrible." But anyway, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for core web vitals are a thing of the past. Google Search Console not giving you field data that you so desire? Use Wix's speed dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual core web vitals are with Wix's site speed dashboard. That is absolutely novel, by the way. And I don't think people appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I love it so much because you want to do better. And with Google Search Console, we're going to talk loads about Google Search Console and you get some fantastic information from it. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic and amazing and wonderful. However, if you are a smaller site, you don't get a lot of that core web vitals information until you reach a certain threshold of traffic. In the meantime, you're just sort of wondering. Mordy Oberstein: Guessing. Crystal Carter: Guessing. Mordy Oberstein: Because the lab data and the field data, the data that Google's giving you, that's simulated to what users actually experience, also known as lab data, is not very close to the actual user experience. Crystal Carter: It's very different. It's very different and it might include you as well. And if you're a small site, then you checking your blog 20 times, let's say you're only getting, I don't know, 70 people coming to that blog, then that's going to be a big portion of the traffic, for instance. So anyway, I'm just saying it's really, really useful if you're trying to make these improvements and also, if you're trying to make these improvements for maybe future traffic that you're going to get. Because if you're like, "We're going to be huge, this blog's going to be amazing, this shop's going to be incredible," you want to make sure that you're able to build and to get off on the right footing. And that report is a great place to start. Mordy Oberstein: And you don't need to use total blocking time is a really bad simulation for FID, which is amazing. They're not similar at all. Anyway, on this show, one tool to rule them all, and it's not the speed dashboard we just mentioned, it's a different tool. Or conversely, you could say if you were stuck on a desert island and you can only bring one tool with you to do your SEO with, which would you bring? The answer of course is Search Console. But why? We'll get into the value of Google Search Console today and what it can provide you with, whether you're a business owner or an SEO or a marketer of any kind. Also, Lazarina Stoy will stop by and share how she extracts value out of Google Search Console. Plus, we'll dive into a little tool from Screaming Frog to help you maximize your Google Search Console prowess. Of course, we'll get into some Snappy News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness as episode 12 of the SERP's Up podcast is knocking on your audio doors. So much to get into with Search Console. But I think maybe we should sort of explain Search Console a little bit if you're not so familiar with it. Because when you talk about SEO tools, it can get complicated quickly. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Google Search Console is sometimes abbreviated GSC. If you're on Twitter, if you're online, if you see SEOs chatting with each other, they will talk about Google Search Console like this. Mordy Oberstein: Or just SC. Crystal Carter: SC. Okay, yeah. For the in crowd. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And essentially, what Google Search Console does is it gives you information on how Google is seeing your website. So it's not exactly the same as Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you information about all of the traffic that's coming through to your website that they can track. So you add a tag to your website and then they will tell you about all of the different channels. So from a marketing point of view, it's absolutely crucial for you to have Google Analytics. Sometimes, SEOs will almost exclusively have access to Google Search Console. But what Google Search Console is really, really good for is understanding how Google is seeing your content, both which rich results you might get and which result is some of those cards. For instance, if you ever Google and you see a recipe card, that's a rich result. If you see a job listing for instance, that's a rich result as well. Product listings, those are also rich results and they show at the top of the SERP. And Google Search Console will tell you about how many of them they are showing and will tell you about which pages they are pulling them from. Google Search Console will also tell you about ranking, where you're ranking on Google. They'll also tell you about which pages are actually in their index. And when we talk about indexing and crawling, Google Search Console will also tell you the difference. So they'll tell you, "We've crawled this page, but we have not put it in any index." And if you don't know what the difference between those two things are, it's essentially like if you were trying to be a pop star musician and you wanted to be top of the charts, you would have to get played on the radio at some point probably. So what being index is like being played on the radio. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be top of the charts, that you're going to have a Billboard Award or that sort of thing, but it means you've been played on the radio, so you registered on their index. If you have not been played on the radio, you can't necessarily be top of the charts first. So you need to make sure that you're indexed and that you're crawled. So just because your crawled doesn't mean that you're indexed, just because your indexed doesn't mean that you rank. Mordy Oberstein: Just because your content doesn't mean you deserve to be indexed because some content shouldn't be indexed. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So there's a lot of different nuances within that. Google Search Console breaks down all of the different parts of it. We, at Wix, have recently released our Google Search Console URL inspection tool. And as part of that, we've got a great blog on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which Mordy explains what the tool does. And one of the good things about that is we also put together a list of understanding, within our support tool documents, there's also a list of understanding what those things mean, what the different differentiations mean. So discovered in non-indexed and crawl, but non-indexed, that sort of thing. So dig into those as well. There's also lots of links in that documentation to lots of the Google details as well. So yeah, it can be complicated, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So they try to make sure that the reports are really easy to access for people of all different knowledge abilities. And you can also see lots of things about your links. You can also see lots of things about whether or not you've got security things, whether or not you've had a glitch in your server. You can carry out a very detailed technical SEO audit using Google Search Console almost exclusively if you need to. But one of the limitations of Google Search Consoles, it only tells you what's happening on Google, and it only tells you what's happening on Google organically. So you can't get information on your traffic from Facebook, you can't get information on your traffic from paid. You can't get information on your traffic from other search engines like say Bing or Baidu or whatever it is. So those are the limitations. Bing Webmaster Tools also has something very similar to Google Search Console and it can be interesting to compare the two to see how your site is being crawled. And yeah, it's a great tool. Publication called the State of Technical SEO asked over 800 SEOs, which tools they use for their technical SEO. And 93% of SEOs said they use Google Search Console. So if you want to do better with your SEO, getting into Google Search Console is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we kind of plan on doing today. But what we're kind of going to do is give you sort of an overview of some of the things that it can do and why it's so valuable. But I think the most important thing for you to do is after listening to this, if you are familiar with Search Console, to play around with it more. And if you're not familiar with Search Console, play around with it because it is kind of intuitive once you poke around a little bit and sort of experiment with what's going on in there. Out of all the tools, I would say Google Analytics, like, whoa, okay, you got to take a step back, you got to really get into it, especially GA4. But Search Console's not that way. A lot of the reporting is pretty straightforward. Some of the more technical things around indexing are not, but you can find good documentation around it. But kind of what you said is really the value of Search Console, that it does everything. It's so comprehensive, it talks to you about how many clicks you're getting. It talks how your pages are performing on Google. It also gives you a more technical analysis. You can look at things like which Google bots are crawling your website and how often are they crawling your website? There's a lot of great data in there and there's data around links and it's all free. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all free. I think we talk a lot about SEO generally. But if you are not familiar with Google Search Console and you are a Wix user, you have the ability to, within the SEO set of checklists, connect directly to Google Search Console as you set up your Wix website. And this is fantastic. You also have built into the CMS a URL inspection tool that allows you to see information about Google Search Console, about your index ability for individual pages. And that, I think, is testament to how important a team at Wix thinks Google Search Console is and I think it's a testament to how important we think it is for SEO success. So yeah, it's a great tool. And I think that you mentioned that it's fairly accessible and I've had before where people are like, "Oh, Google Search Console, what's so great about that?" And I think sometimes people look at it and they go, "This is really basic information," and it's actually not. It's almost deceptively simple. The way it's presented is pretty straightforward. But you can also get very clear information about which keywords you're actually ranking for, which is really interesting because you might be trying to rank for one thing, but the keywords that you're actually ranking for might be very, very different. So it's worth looking at the keywords that you're ranking for and the keywords that different pages are ranking for. You can also filter by region. So for instance, if you're seeing that you're getting a lot of traffic, but maybe it's not very relevant, you can filter by region and see maybe you're ranking really, really well in another country. I've seen this happen before. Maybe you're ranking it really, really well in a different country, but actually, you serve customers locally. And so you should be looking at the rankings for your country that you're in. So this can happen sometimes when countries share a similar language. So I've seen it where people based in England were ranking in the US and it wasn't that valuable to them because they could only serve clients in the UK. So we had to adjust our Search Console filters so that we were only looking at where we were ranking in the UK. And then we could make better, more actionable SEO strategies. Mordy Oberstein: You can definitely get super complicated with the filters. I implore you to look at the filters, but don't necessarily think it's super complicated either with the filters, there's just basic comparisons you can do. And again, you're seeing things like, okay, so three months ago, how many clicks did I get versus now, how many clicks am I getting? And that's also one of the things you can do great with Search Console. One of the unique things about Search Console is you can see the impressions that you're getting, meaning your pages are showing up on Google, but you're not getting any clicks. Why is that? Perhaps my title tags are just absolutely horrific and I don't know, they just say home for homepage. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I'm ranking but no one's clicking. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So that's a really, really interesting one. So people sometimes show impressions. Impressions aren't always great. Sometimes if the impressions you have are for keywords that aren't relevant for your website, then you need to retune your content. And when you're looking at the performance report, you can see total clicks. Total clicks, that's pretty straightforward. Those are themes that people actually clicked on. And your impressions is when somebody entered a query and your content was shown. They might not have clicked on it, but your content was shown after somebody entered a query. The click through rate is essentially one divided by the other. So for every 10 times that your content was shown, one person clicked on it. Is that 10% click through rate? I don't know. That would be really, really high. Mordy Oberstein: Math. It's really high by the way, 10% click through rate. Crystal Carter: That's really high. 10% click through rate is very high. You might have that for one particular query, like maybe for your brand or something like that. And then your average position is the average place where you rank. Mordy Oberstein: You should be careful with that one because it's not exactly accurate and it should give you a general sense of things. By the way, data in general gives you a general sense of things. The numbers are never going to be actually exact, even in Search Console, even though it's Google data. But it does kind of bring up why you sometimes, or best practice would be to use a third party tool for various things. If a queue were to super important to you, you see that you're getting a lot of impression and clicks for it in Search Console, then that's something you might want to track in a rank tracking tool. Because the average rank studies have shown is less than accurate all the time. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I almost never rely on a single data source for a particular bit of information because Google Search Console's obviously getting information from Google. Sometimes with Google Search Console, you don't get the information straight away. So sometimes, you might not see the data, like you might not see yesterday's data straight away. You might have to wait a couple of days before the data comes through, which sometimes if you've got a flash sale or if you've got some very important news that's dropping, then you might want to know where you were ranking on that day. So that can be tricky. But yeah, I would very rarely rely on a single source. Also, this is one of the reasons why I bring up Bing. Bing also gives you information on those things. So for instance, if your ranking suddenly drop in Google Search Console, it's worthwhile checking what your rankings are like on Bing to see if they've changed as well or if they're the same. And again, the other thing about Bing and Google Search Console is that if you're like, "I don't spend a lot of time on Bing," that's okay. When you go to Bing to set up your analytics, you go to Bing Webmaster, I think it's Bing Webmaster Tools, and you can connect to Google Search Console with one click and they will pull through all of the information you have from there into their system. So again, if you see your ranking suddenly change in Google Search Console and they don't change in Bing, then it might be that there was an algorithm update that affected you in Google and didn't affect you in Bing. If you see that they both change really quickly, then it might be that there's a technical issue on your website. Mordy Oberstein: Which again, the tools can help you with because you can check out indexing issues which is by the way, I think it's really important these days. Because I think things that are changing around indexing. I think Google is being a little more choosier about what it decides to index. So a little bit of a myth that every page should be in. No, if there's a page that's not really helpful. Imagine had a page and all it was, was like a sign up button for subscribe to an email, a newsletter. That's not a very useful page. Google's probably not going to index that page and nor should it really be indexed. It's really meant for people who are already on your site to follow through and subscribe to your newsletter, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think that you should be very, very much, it's all killer, no filler. You want to make sure that you've got your most important pages indexed. And sometimes, you look in the discover not indexed and you say, "There's a lot of URLs there." Well, look at which ones they are. Sometimes they're UTMs because sometimes those get indexed. Sometimes they're from different campaign ads, sometimes they are category pages that might not necessarily be- Mordy Oberstein: Archive pages. Crystal Carter: Archive pages. Sometimes they're old links from an old URL that Google knows about and they need to know about that so that they can manage the redirect so that they can pay attention to how that traffic flows and the value of those URLs. So for instance, if you had an old domain and you migrated it to, let's say it was HTTP and you migrated it to HTTPS, then those are two different URLs to Google. So they might very well still have in their record the old URL and that will be discovered but not indexed. That's something they know about, but they don't have that in the index because they're indexing the new one. They're doing you a favor. So that's something to think about as well. So look at which ones are discovered and not indexed. If you see something in there that you're like, "Wait a second, that should absolutely be indexed," then there's a couple of things that you can do, and we might talk about that on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and don't afraid because you're going to see all these different, crawl but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, all these different statuses. And they might seem confusing, but there's a lot of documentation Google has around them and there's a lot of great resources around what they mean and how to possibly fix them. So if you see them crawl but not indexed, it could be very much that you have a page that's very, very similar. And Google's like, "Well, we already have this page on the index so we're not going to put it there." But for you it's very different. And then a different intent or might be more of a commerce intent or transactional intent rather. So definitely pay attention to what's happening in there because Google, again is getting a little bit choosier. The way I think about it is if Google's better understanding content, it's going to be choosier about what it decides to index or not to index. And as it gets better at doing that, which it has been in more recent times is getting better that, it's going to get choosier and choosier about what gets indexed, which means there could be real issues for you. So don't be afraid of putting your toe into that index kind of stuff and to the page's reports that you have in there inside of Search Console. Research, ask questions, dig into it because it's super important, even though it might seem a little bit daunting to deal with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, don't be afraid of it and ask for help. The SEO community can be really helpful and there's absolutely opportunities for that. And I think the more signals you can give Google about which pages are most important to you, the better. We've talked about internal linking, for instance. Internal linking is a great signal for telling Google that something is an important page. It's like people sending lots of referrals to someone. If they're getting lots of referrals, then that's going to tell Google that it's an important page. So show them that it's important, don't just assume that they'll figure it out. Show them with links internally, externally, with relevant content, additional schema, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And we'll put some resource into the show notes that'll help you. If you see a certain status in your Search Console reporting, we'll give you some information and resources that you can use to come up some possible solutions to fix those problems. So check out the show notes. With that, we have a fabulous SEO who's going to share with you how she uses Google Search Console to make well informed SEO decisions, keyword well inform SEO decisions. Here's Lazarina Stoy and how she uses Search Console. Lazarina Stoy: I love Google Search Consult and use it daily. There are so many useful reports there and it's ever changing. From the more recent reports, the video indexing feature is something I use to quickly troubleshoot performance of no indexed videos and ensure that the companies I'm working with appear as expected in all the different search types that they're targeting. I frequently use the page indexation reports as well as the crawl data to identify any changes to crawling behavior and quick fix errors that might be prohibiting pages to appear as expected. These reports can also help signal content issues as well. The enhancements reports are amazing for websites that have structured data implemented because at a glance, I can identify errors as well as the overall effort and strategy implemented, which in turn enables me to better identify opportunities on what can be implemented to enhance the search appearance of websites via featured snippets. Often, not very much used by SEOs, but still a super useful report for anyone that does not have access to SEO tooling is the links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. I always recommend this to small website owners to take advantage of. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Lazarina. A great point, by the way. She brings up the video reporting in there. That's relatively new. And one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Search Console and using Search Console is that Google's put a lot of emphasis on dev inside of Search Console and they're constantly refining and bringing in new reporting. So keep an eye for new things inside a Search Console, that'll be really helpful. In this case, the video is absolutely super cool if you have a very, very video intensive website. So keep an eye out for what Google's doing. They're doing a great job over there with their development around Search Console. Crystal Carter: And I think particularly, you mentioned the video and she mentions it as well, and I think that one of the other things that's great about Search Console's it tells you what Google cares about. So they add all these features when it's something that they say, if it's not measured, it doesn't matter. That's a thing people say. And if they're measuring it, it means that it matters. So if they've got a whole report all about video, then that tells you that maybe you should have some video on your website. And if you don't have any, then maybe you should consider making some or including some, because with the video report, for instance, it doesn't have to be your YouTube video, it doesn't have to be a YouTube video at all. But if you have a video that's embedded on your page, then Google is able to see it and it can help your content to perform better and it can help you to track better. Google Search Console also lets you filter by the types of media so you can see where images are ranking and things like that, for instance. And Lazarina, one of the reasons why I was really pleased to have her along here is because she does a lot of really interesting things with Google Search Console. Not just the things she talked about, but also some of the reports that she's able to create by combining Google Search Console data with what was Google Data Studio and is now Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Looker, yeah, that's a weird name. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Huh? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We'll link to the Google Looker dashboard thing, I don't know what you call it now, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I'm going to look at the Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Let's not get into the branding names. That was bizarre to me. But anyway, hey, who are we to judge, right? It works for them. I'm sure they've done their research for it. Looker is definitely a better name than Google Beta Studio. Crystal Carter: Are you sure? Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of like names that where in the name, you can sort of understand what you're going to get out of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: With Looker, I kind of feel like, I'm not even going to go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, there are so many, just got to pivot it right out that, there are so many tools that pull in Search Console data. Every SEO tool really does. A few years go ranking tracking tool. Oftentimes, they will let you integrate with Google Search Console through Google Search Console's APIs. You can compare all sorts of ranking data and Search Console data to this data, to that data and to other sorts of the data. As I mentioned before, we integrated with Google's URL inspection tool API to create our site inspection dashboard. So Google's Search Consoles, because it is foundational SEO information, will often be used by various third party SEO tools, which is why we're proud to bring you Tool time by the SERP's UP podcast. This time we're going to Screaming Frog, which itself is a seminal SEO tool and how they pull in Google Search Console's URL inspection API, and what you can do with Screaming Frog. Crystal Carter: Screaming Frog, as you mentioned, is a foundational tool. It's used for technical SEO and it allows you... You can also use it for content as well. But it allows you to do a crawl of your website. It allows you to assess your site map and lots of information like that. I use it with Google Search Console to corroborate data to prioritize what things you need to do, for instance. So within Google Search Console, you can submit your site map and that should form the bulk of what gets crawled and what gets indexed. There are sometimes bits of your website that are not in your site map and they sometimes end up being indexed as well. So one of the things you can do with Screening Frog is you can do a different mode, not the standard crawl, but you can do a list, for instance, and you can submit your site map list and then you can crawl that with the Google Search Console API. And then you can see which things are being indexed from your site map and which things are not being indexed from your site map. And if they're not being indexed, then you can go, "Why isn't this indexed? Should it be in the site map? Should it be indexed? What should we do here?" And so essentially, you can take those little bits of information and you can compare them. Then again, as I say, I very rarely rely on a single thing. But if you're comparing this with the information you get in, say like the Wix URL inspection tool, then you can also see which part of the site it's in, which site map it's in, which folder it's in, and see if there's some commonalities across URLs that are within the same site map or have the same configuration, for instance. But Screaming Frog, like Google Search Console, is something that it can seem both simple and complicated at the same time. Essentially, if you use Screaming Frog, which you can on a free version, you can see 500 URLs. So you can crawl your website, you pump the URL and you press crawl, and then you can get lots of information on your website. And it kind of just looks like a spreadsheet and you really need to click around and dig around. I tweeted ages ago, "Has anyone ever completed Screaming Frog? Because I just keep finding more levels." And it's absolutely true because people do incredible things. And you can also export it to different things. So you can export the data from your from Screening Frog as a CSV, and then you can use it in whatever kind of data, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using Google Sheets, or you can connect it directly to Google Sheets and you can export your data there. And then you can do more SEO analysis or more bulk updates from that. But you can see lots of information about both crawl information and also different parts of your site. So your images, your meta descriptions, whether things are indexable, what status could they have, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking at all the pages that Google has actually crawl but not indexed, and you're able to combine them with all the headers are on those pages, you're like, "Wow, okay, there's a pattern here. There's something going," that's good information. Because you could see there's a content issue with those pages. That's probably the reason why Google's crawled them but hasn't decided to index them. So combining information that these tools allow you to do with Search Console data in all sorts of ways can be super helpful to you. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. And I've had it before where I looked at a site and we had a site map, that was fine, and that had loads of URLs in it. And then I ran it through a Screaming Frog with the Spider tool and it only pulled up two URLs. And I was like, "What? What's going on?" And when I ran it through the site map, it was like, "Yeah, you've got all these URLs and they're all 200s," and all that stuff. And I was like, "How come we can't find? Why isn't this?" And essentially, the Spider one is interesting because essentially, it bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces. If all of your pages are orphans, which is what I found with this one, I did this crawl- Mordy Oberstein: Or maybe there's no link to any other page. Crystal Carter: There's no link to any of the pages. Then basically the crawler won't crawl. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: It goes to that one page and goes, "Cool. Awesome." So you need to make sure, so it's worth comparing. And within Screaming Frog, you can compare the two. You can compare your site map and your crawl and you can see where the things are missing, and that's worth thinking about as well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, all these kind of things, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But again, there's a free version of Screaming Frog. It's really simple to run the site. Just play around. Whatever you get out of it, you get out of it and you go back again. And whatever you get of it next time, you get out of it the next time. Slow and steady runs a race, baby steps. Crystal Carter: One thing I will also say about Screaming Frog is that because it's so foundational, there's lots of documentation and lots of SEOs have gone through Screaming Frog and done this, this, that, that and the other. So if there's ever anything you want to find on Screaming Frog and you are not sure, you can Google how to find this on Screaming Frog. There was a blog that I found recently that was like how to do almost everything on Screaming Frog. Their documentation is also very good. And I would say that yeah, if you're stuck on anything, literally just Google it. Don't flounder around for ages. Just Google it and somebody's almost already figured it out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You know what else you should be diving into other than Screaming Frog and Google's Search Console, it's the latest and greatest news coming out of the SEO world. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, more reasons to keep an eye on what Google is doing in the e-comm space. If you have to pay attention to one area of Google and what it's up to, e-comm would be it in my honest opinion. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google introduces new search labels for coupons and promo. So in a nutshell, Google made a bunch of announcements related to their on the SERP shopping experience. For example, the zoo functionality to copy a coupon code from a shopping listing, as well as Google's price insights coming to the search results, which by the way is a nifty little feature that lets you see how much the product typically costs. And the product that you're buying, how much does it typically cost? So in other words, you're getting a good idea if you're getting a good deal or not. To me, by the way, this is where Google's shopping experience really shines. They have the power to give you so much data. And for whatever reason ,Amazon just doesn't. So Google making price data insights accessible to me is basically their way of moving in on Amazon's eCommerce dominance. Okay, next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Check this out. Links may be less important to the Google search ranking algorithm in the future. I've been saying this for a long time and thank God. Here's what Google said directly. Here's a direct quote from Google's John Mueller, "Well, it's something where I imagine over time the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It's like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it? But my guess is over time, it won't be such a big factor. Sometimes it is today. I think already, that's something that's been changing quite a bit." That again, was Google's direct words, John Mueller's direct words, not mine. Just to give you a kind of conceptual understanding of what he's saying. Links are a secondary signal. Links don't tell you whether the content is actually good or not, or it actually answers a question or it's actually usable, digestible, and awesome for the user. Links are a signal that basically say, "Well, so many people keep linking to this page. It must be awesome. We don't really know, but it must be." The better Google gets actually understanding the content, I put a tweet out about this and it got a lot of comments and controversy because people are still really hung up on links, too hung up on links. We spoke about it on a previous episode of the podcast. I think it was episode 10, so check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes. Links don't tell you how good the actual content is. So if Google's getting better at actually understanding the content, why would they keep so heavily relying on links when they actually understand what the content is saying and therefore, know if it's relevant or awesome, or answers to question is usable and digestible and so forth. So kind of makes sense logically when you think about it. Sorry, link Builders. Anyway, that's been the Snappy News for this week. It's been snappy and it's been news. Anyway, as we wrap this show up, we were wondering who should we have as a follow of the week. Every week we like to bring somebody else for you to follow on social media, typically on Twitter, because the SEO world's core people live on Twitter. And we're wondering who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it be? We really racked our brains on this one and it was hard to find someone who you should follow. We're talking about Search Console and who could it be? Crystal Carter: Oh, man. Mordy Oberstein: It's all about Search Console on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Somebody who talks about- Mordy Oberstein: Somebody who talks about. So maybe somebody who works on the Search Console product over at Google? Crystal Carter: They maybe done some videos on it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe they have done a few videos, maybe even a webinar or an actual live event actually over at Wix, about Search Console. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of anyone like that. Mordy Oberstein: I know, John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I mean, you should follow John. He was our follow of the week, I think two weeks ago, three weeks ago. This week, we're talking about Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: The fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: The fantastic Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate over a Google who works on Google's own Search Console team. Who better to follow than the search advocate who works on the Search Console team over at Google? It's Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: Daniel Waisberg, who has been at Google for ages working first with the Analytics team and now with Google Search Console. I had a good chat with him at Brighton about all of the new reports and things they keep adding to Google Search Console because they've been refining it a lot this year and it's been really, really great to see all of that. We have some show notes from the Google Search Console webinar that he did with us in the summer, and he talked about some great things there. And yeah, he's a great advocate and he also talked about a few things that I hadn't heard of. There was one that was new to me, which was the question hub from Google, which is actually new to me. He's extremely knowledgeable about search and very much into his data and a great person to follow if you want to know things about Google Search Console. Mordy Oberstein: And a great person overall. Crystal Carter: Yes, he's lovely. We love Daniel. Mordy Oberstein: We do love Daniel. He's family. So check out Daniel Waisberg, @DanielWaisberg on Twitter. That's D-A-N-I-E-L W-A-I-S-B-E-R-G. It's the W-A-I that might confuse you. Crystal Carter: And tell him we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: And tell him you followed him because Crystal and Mordy sent you over. Crystal Carter: Sure he'll love that. Mordy Oberstein: I want keep track. We'll ask him. Anyway. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode, as we satisfy our need for speed with a look at site performance and SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. 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 . 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Back Blog optimization collaborative Google doc Use this collaborative document to streamline your blog publication process and improve on-page optimization. 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 Google Doc to: Structure content in a format that search engines understand Collate vital on-page SEO factors like metatags, links and URLs Coordinate feedback from collaborators seamlessly Hand over content for uploading effectively Cover off content distribution considerations before publishing Manage hashtags, newsletter inclusion and CTAs so team members can access them easily Simon Cox Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co Creative LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram 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 . More about this topic Read this post about the benefits of using a template for content publication 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

In what ways does systematic team collaboration drive success in SEO? Wix’s Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter, travels over to Brighton SEO to lead a deep discussion into ‘SEO as a team’ with a group of esteemed panelists. What does task delegation mean to overall team evolution? Learn the processes industry leaders use to move their team along collectively and progress as a whole. In addition, understand how team collaboration has changed overtime with the evolution of Google, and how you can adapt as an SEO. Plus, hear the varying perspectives of panelists on some of the most commonly contested SEO questions. Brighten your day and tune in to this special feature of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast recorded live from Brighton SEO as we discover the roots of team collaboration in SEO! Back Play ball! Why SEO is a team sport - Live from BrightonSEO In what ways does systematic team collaboration drive success in SEO? Wix’s Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter, travels over to Brighton SEO to lead a deep discussion into ‘SEO as a team’ with a group of esteemed panelists. What does task delegation mean to overall team evolution? Learn the processes industry leaders use to move their team along collectively and progress as a whole. In addition, understand how team collaboration has changed overtime with the evolution of Google, and how you can adapt as an SEO. Plus, hear the varying perspectives of panelists on some of the most commonly contested SEO questions. Brighten your day and tune in to this special feature of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast recorded live from Brighton SEO as we discover the roots of team collaboration in SEO! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 89 | May 29, 2024 | 64 MIN 00:00 / 1:03:55 This week’s guests Grace Frohlich Grace is a SEO consultant at Brainlabs. She has extensive knowledge and experience in SEO fundamentals, and leads strategic direction for her clients in the ecommerce space. Grace has spoken at SEO conferences, most recently BrightonSEO and SearchLove. Sukhjinder Singh Sukhjinder is a freelance SEO consultant with over 13 years of experience mainly on the agency side as a head of SEO. He's got to work with some great brands on national and international SEO campaigns, and is excited to share his mistakes and successes with you in his talk. Barry Adams Barry Adams has been building and ranking websites since 1998. Through his Polemic Digital consultancy business, he focuses on technical SEO and specialised services for news publishers. Barry counts some of the world’s biggest media brands among his clients including News UK, The Guardian, FOX, Future Publishing, Euronews, and Hearst. He is a regular speaker at conferences and events around the world, delivers annual guest lectures for local universities, and writes an irregular newsletter on SEOforGoogleNews.com. Carmen Dominguez A Spanish expat living in Leeds for 10 years, I have been working in the Digital industry for the past 8 years. While I like all Digital aspects: I have done PR, Paid and Social - I am an SEO girl at heart and I can talk about eCommerce SEO & Google’s Natural Language processing for hours. I have worked at an agency and inhouse and I always thought the best SEO work is done with others. I believe in empathy and trust when managing teams and continuous learning for success. Feminist, believer of equality and a foodie, I would kill for a good espresso! 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've put together some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous, amazing, the incredible Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hello on the internet. Hello Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hi. Crystal Carter: It's been a minute. Mordy Oberstein: It has been a minute. A lot has happened since we last recorded. Crystal Carter: Yeah, internet land podcast people, it has not been a minute. It's been the same amount of time- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's been a week. Crystal Carter: ... it normally is because we just plan things and stuff. But in real life, it's been a minute. Mordy Oberstein: So much has happened. Yeah, things have happened. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I went to BrightonSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I went to New York. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: The Knicks won three playoff games, lost two. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, that's all right. That's all right. But yeah, we've been out in the world meeting people, talking to folks. Mordy Oberstein: I went on vacation. Well, not vacation, like stay-cation and a holiday. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's fine. That's when you get gardening done, that's when somebody gives you a list, they're like, "You know that shelf?" Mordy Oberstein: Gardening, that's where you kill plants, right? Crystal Carter: First you have to buy them. You buy them, and then you just- Mordy Oberstein: And then you kill them. Crystal Carter: ... watch them slowly die. Mordy Oberstein: That's how it goes at my house. You buy the plant and then you kill it. Slowly. A slow death. Crystal Carter: I try. I have a cactus that's clearly… Mordy Oberstein: No, cactus does not count. You don't have to do nothing, it just sits there. Crystal Carter: I didn't do anything and it's dead. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Crystal Carter: It died very, very slowly, but it still looks like a cactus, but I know it's not. I know it's dying. Mordy Oberstein: I have a cactus, a giant cactus. Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: Like a desert cactus. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: In the garden, giant cactus. Crystal Carter: That's cool. That's cool. Is it like one of the ones from the cartoons with the arms? Mordy Oberstein: It does. Yeah, it has arms. Crystal Carter: That's nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll send you a picture. Crystal Carter: Cool. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use Wix Studio to work more efficiently with your team, with real time collaboration technology built right into the editor. Because as we all know, SEO is a team sport. And to help us explore how SEO is indeed a team sport, we took the show on the road to BrightonSEO's UK conference where Crystal sat down with Carmen Dominguez, Sukh Singh, Grace Frohlich, and the other Barry. So we won't have your snappiest of SEO news or you should be following this week on social media, because we were in the flesh, well, Crystal was in the flesh, I was on vacation, at one of the industries most prestigious SEO events of the year, BrightonSEO UK. So move over golf, cycling and non doubles tennis, because SEO is a real sport like baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and curling. On this, the 89th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. I left you speechless. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know how to jump in. I feel like you did everything you... I feel like you like mic dropped. I feel like that's great. That's a great intro. I'm going to be talking for most of it anyway with the guys. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm done. This is all you're going to hear from me for the entire episode because I could not make the conference. Crystal Carter: But it's all good because I think that certainly we as a team do a lot of stuff together. Obviously we plan out the podcast, we do all of that sort of stuff, and I think that the way that you work as a team will inform the SEO that you're able to do, and I certainly think that our approach was there in presence, even if you were not there at the moment. And it was a great conversation. And also shout out to the audience because we were flagship for this, I don't think anybody else is doing this, but if you come to a SERP's Up live broadcast, we might have one of these things that we do, which basically we give the audience paddles and the audience will give us their opinions on some of the questions. And we did this at BrightonSEO in San Diego. Mordy Oberstein: That was great. We went real heavy on the audience interaction. It was a lot of fun. Crystal Carter: It was a lot of fun. And then the people on the squads were asking questions to the audience as well, so some of our panelists were asking questions to the audience as well, which I didn't expect, but was a lot of fun. So it's great to get some feedback on how folks in the audience are feeling about some of the questions as well as some of the great insights from our incredible panel. It was a really, really great panel. Mordy Oberstein: So without further ado, I'll see you in the next episode, because here's that panel. Crystal Carter: Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of SERP's Up live. This is the live BrightonSEO Spring 2024 edition of the SERP's Up podcast. I'm going to be joined by some incredible guests who you can see on my left and right for the people who are here. And also, members of the audience, we have some paddles there for you, which are basically for a little bit of interaction. So one side, green is yes, purple is no. So if there's any questions and basically you'd be like, I agree, I do not agree, then please make yourselves heard. We found this to be a little bit of fun, so we hope that you enjoy it as well. I'm going to get started by introducing my fantastic panelists who I have harangued to join me today. First up, all the way over on my left is Mr. Barry Adams, the founder of Award-winning agency, Polemic Digital, and he's a specialist SEO consultant for news publishers focusing on technical SEO, editorial SEO. His clients include many, many publishers including The New York Times, The Independent, lots of other folks as well. Thank you so much for joining us today, Barry. Barry Adams: Thank you very much for having me. Crystal Carter: It's always a pleasure. Barry may or may not swear so if you are sensitive to such things, I'm just going to warn you there now. So yeah, thank you for that. Hello. Hi there, David Bain. David Bain: Hey. Crystal Carter: Welcome, welcome. Welcome lots of other people as well. And so our next person that I'm going to be introducing is the incredible Carmen Dominguez who is joining us from Hallam Digital. She's the head of Organic at Hallam. I first met her at the Hallam Organic event, which was a great event that took place in Nottingham, and it was a warm day. Carmen Dominguez: It was. We had free ice cream though. Crystal Carter: It was, it was delightful and very well received. And it was lovely to have her there, and she spoke about some great stuff. And so I thought if we could get Carmen along, that'd be lovely. She has worked for agencies, she's worked in-house and led a team of many people. You've built a team. Carmen Dominguez: 23 last year and 15 this year. There we go. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So she's got great experience in-house and also working agency side, and she's going to be sharing her insights as well. Thank you, Carmen, for joining us. Carmen Dominguez: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here today. Crystal Carter: And next up is Sukh Singh, who is from I Do SEO, and I've met him at BrightonSEO a few times over the last few years. And I was really excited to get Sukh along for this session, because Sukh has a great perspective from having worked as the head of SEO at an agency for many, many years and now working freelance, working with agency partners and other clients as well. So thank you so much for joining us, Sukh. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you. And finally on my left is the amazing Grace Frohlich, fellow Californian, and she is joining us from Brain Labs where she works as an SEO consultant, and is managing clients and managing lots of different projects and has both project management experience and also SEO experience, and is a fantastic speaker and a big fan of The Parent Trap as well. And we are really pleased to have you here today, Grace. Grace Frohlich: Thank you. I'm excited. Looking forward to this. Crystal Carter: Wonderful. And then finally, it's me. My name is Crystal Carter. I am the Head of SEO Communications at Wix. I am currently working there, but I have a lot of experience working in agencies, working alongside agencies, working across teams, and I hope to be able to share those insights. And finally, there is y'all good selves, the folks here for BrightonSEO, thank you so much for joining us and for making the trek, because I timed it and it's about five minutes walk from the front door. So we appreciate you and we appreciate you getting your steps in today to join us. If you are not familiar with the SERP's Up podcast, then I thank you for taking that leap of faith and joining us here. The SERP's Up podcast comes out every Wednesday. We get some fantastic speakers. Barry's contributed, Grace has contributed, we've had lots of people contribute as well, some of the people in this room. And yeah, check it out every Wednesday. We have over 80 episodes now, so if you are a fan of podcasts, go and check out the archive. So the topic that we are covering today is SEO as a team sport. And when I say that, I do not mean this kind of team, though, bless the team from Screaming Frog for showing up for cardiovascular exercise with the annual charity BrightonSEO football match. They did a great job there. But we're more thinking about the way that marketing has become so spread out and includes so many different disciplines and so many different specialisms even within SEO. So you have a space where somebody says, "Oh, you're the SEO, you must know every single thing about image SEO." Or, "You must know every single thing about international SEO," or Google Merchant Center or Local SEO. And it can be very, very fractional and very specific. And so I think that SEO, certainly from my perspective, has become a little bit more of a team sport. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and how that works and what that means for us. On the podcast, we have different sections. One of the sections that we do is a section called Deep Thoughts. Thank you. So when we talk deep thoughts, one of the things we think about is the way that Google is progressing. And essentially just on this slide, so for instance, if you were to think about the way Google, as Google's progressing, I'm sure you've all seen this, that it's not just that you have plain blue links or one sort of SERP experience, but that you have SERP experience that includes lots of different channels, particularly for your organic stuff. So you have your YouTube, you'll also have the social that will show on the SERP, you might also have products. And even on the products, they'll have lots of different pages that show up within that. And then everyone's favorite SEO feature is Reddit. So Reddit is showing up in lots of different ways as well. And this is an evolution of Google. And I would like to ask my illustrious panelists, because I've spoken enough now, how has the way that you collaborate across channels evolved as Google has become much more diversified in its SERP as we see more and more of these SERP features? How has the way that you collaborate across channels, across teams changed? Grace Frohlich: Well, I actually first want to know from the audience, how many of you already have SEO Plus paid or other channel collaboration currently? Green, if yes- Crystal Carter: So there's paddles on the chairs. Grace Frohlich: ... purple with no. A lot of green. Crystal Carter: That is coming about, for the listening audience, that's coming up about 80% yes, is what I would say. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I mean that's great to see, 'cause we really should be working at least with the paid channel already. Google, it's one SERP. Well, it's two channels, but we should be already collaborating with paid at least if not more channels. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think that for users, certainly, they don't even always know whether or not it's paid and they sometimes can't even tell the difference. So if you're trying to connect with the users, and you're trying to connect with the user journey, that should certainly be a part of it. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, absolutely. Especially with the little sponsored, the little label that's barely noticeable now. I remember when it was very, very obvious in the SERP that, oh, you're clicking an ad, but now it's like... Exactly, a lot of users don't really know what they're clicking on. Barry Adams: I miss the days of a yellow background on the ads. Crystal Carter: And I think certainly with product images, it can be sometimes difficult to tell whether or not it's an ad, or whether or not it's organic. Do you find that across your teams that you're working in paid and organic as well? Carmen Dominguez: Absolutely. And I think one of the impacts of not working together, particularly in brand campaigns is that if PPC is not working, or paid in this case, is not working with organic, they don't understand the impact of putting a little bit more of budget in brand will have in the conversions of organic. So it's not only for the clients and the users, it's also for when you are reporting to your clients the results of your work. If you don't collaborate with paid enough, you can maybe put a lot of effort in organic that in the end doesn't get the results, because paid is doing whatever they want on their own. So it's not only within paid and organic, it's also within all the different sub channels that there is in organic images or SERPs, sorry, the snippets. And it's also within the different type of paid and the different types of organic, which I'll want to talk a little bit more about it before. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I was thinking about in terms of the algorithm changes in the last few years, I think that's forced people to be a bit more multichannel, at least in their thought. And I was thinking of actually promoting Grace's blog posts from a few years ago, the T-shaped marketer being the T being having depth or knowledge in, say SEO for example, being SEO, but also touching on paid search, paid social, PR, et cetera, and recognizing the opportunities to pull in additional traffic where you see, oh, there's more opportunity for paid rather than organic for these keywords might take a bit longer to rank, et cetera. So that together with the algorithm thing and an agency environment, I guess, it just comes, that collaboration comes naturally, I think. Crystal Carter: And do you find that it also has to do with skills like different skillset? Because I certainly know that we are now, within the organic side, really having to think much more about LLMs and AI and how that all works. But paid have been working with AI and, oh, this ad has to learn, although it's machine learning and you just wait for days while it spends money and you have no idea how. And people have been working on that for years. And so I feel like a lot of the skills that people have acquired during that paid space can translate more into how we think about organic as well. Carmen Dominguez: I think it's also the other way around. It plays for both. So I wanted to talk a little bit about skills as well within organic. You cannot have the same person, for example, doing tech then is doing content, even though both need to know a little bit about each other. It's a little bit the same with paid, right? If paid doesn't understand EEAT, for example, and EEAT is purely organic, but EEAT is based on how the user engage with your content. So EEAT should also be applicable for paid in the same way that, for example, paid talk about CTR should also be applicable for organic. So in the end, we are talking about getting so many skills with one person in order to be successful, and it's impossible, which actually goes very well into the conversation that we're talking, that specializing and specializing within a specialization, if that makes sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think that when you're thinking about channels and we think about where to specialize in things, which channels do you find are most helpful for growing clients? We've talked a little bit about paid, but are we finding that digital PR, for instance, is as helping with a lot of things? Or are we finding that other elements are helping clients to grow at the moment? Grace Frohlich: I think it's going to be social- Crystal Carter: Social? Grace Frohlich: ... with SEO. Crystal Carter: Interesting. Why do you think that? Grace Frohlich: Well, yeah, I don't have the definitive proof, but from talking with clients and talking cross channely, and strategists within my agency, it's just one of those trends that keeps popping up over and over, basically getting more organic traffic through social. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also there's a question of, with it, you're trying to connect with users and users are on social, and also that with the social thing you get both visibility and you also get clicks, links, et cetera. So there's a potential there. Barry Adams: I think it's not even one specific channel, when I look at how my clients grow their audiences, I work primarily with news publishers, it's all about original reporting and quality of reporting. The news websites that report the news that other websites have first reported are the ones that tend to lose out. Whereas if you're a news publisher that invested in quality investigative journalism and original reporting, you tend to win in the long run. And I think that translates to a lot of other companies as well. If you have a dropshipping e-commerce website, you should have low expectations of long-term success because you're just another middleman. Whereas if you have an original product, you're an original manufacturer or original brand, I think you're probably looking at a healthier future. And I think that's fairly channel independent, be that paid or social or search or email. I think you can always find channels to min/max your growth within the confines of your business. But if your business isn't inherently sound and you don't have a strong brand, I think you should probably change your business. Crystal Carter: So you think that originality is still cutting through in terms of growth? Barry Adams: I see that more and more. I think that's also something that search engines like Google and also organic platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they want to reward originality, they want to reward authenticity. It's hard to do that algorithmically, because it's very much engagement based and you can sort of manipulate engagement figures. But I think they are trying to find ways to measure that and improve that algorithmically so that original brands and quality brands surface more and more, because they realize that's also what our audience wants. The audience wants quality brands and original content and not just rehashed stuff that other websites have done before and maybe worse or better. Crystal Carter: And I think in the space of LLMs, I think it's even more important to be unique in that space in order to see growth. And I don't know if you all wanted to add anything more. Sukhjinder Singh: I was thinking about EEAT bolstering social as well, or social bolstering EEAT. So the experience and authority of the authors and the website as well, and seeing that engagement on social. And also with social being a good research tool, I just saw... Oh God, his name's blanking me now. I'm going to have to comment on it later. Crystal Carter: Steven Bartlett? He's on all the socials. Sukhjinder Singh: No, actually I was at an SEO talk about an hour ago on using TikTok for keyword research in terms of topical research. And then even if the resulting keywords have zero search volume, he did a case study where he still used those keywords and saw an uptick in search console data in impressions and click-throughs, et cetera, even with such volume zero keywords. So I think it's a good tool there. Carmen Dominguez: I'm sorry, go. No, no. I was going to say that I think in the end, everything is related. Right? If you have a good brand, probably you're going to be all over social, and if you are all over social, your users are going to be engaging with you and they're going to end up going back to your website. So I think the whole point of change is not specific areas, it's actually looking at the overall. So we have a good brand, we have to showcase EEAT in every single possible channel, and that is what is going to make you successful. And on that, what you were saying, I also recently did a test on particularly TikTok and Instagram with one of my e-commerce clients, and actually getting lots of links coming from TikTok made all the people clicking on my products. And my products now rank, even though I don't have no longer people coming from TikTok just because the clicks made Google to recognize my products. So it does have an impact being in social, but also my brand now is much better recognized in TikTok as well because of that. So people come from brand much, much often. So I think it's all related into making sure that we do all an organic strategy where we look at all the different channels all at once rather than just single pointing different areas, if that makes sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So I think that flows in next to our next session where we're talking about team evolution. So if you're in a space where you are finding, for instance, that TikTok is a really good channel for your brand or that you're getting good traffic from Instagram, for instance, how are you thinking about which skills... How are you thinking about how you're connecting with your team and how you need to evolve your team in order to sit alongside those channels? Are you thinking that you need to maybe get another social media person or maybe work alongside a social media person? Or are you thinking that one person needs to suddenly become an SEO and a social media? Carmen Dominguez: And it's super difficult actually. And one of the things I have done with my team recently is changed the whole structure of it. So in agency, normally we're used to having one SEO person, one technical SEO person, content, digital PR, and they all work in silos even though they work toward the same objective. For me, what I have done is try to make sure that everyone has the basic SEO knowledge of everything, but then they specialize farther away. But they work together in squads, which actually every week they're like, "Okay, I found this issue in the technical SEO that might have an impact in content. I'm not an expert in content. Content person, tell me what you think." And then the content person also knows about EEAT, who collaborates with the social media person to try to elevate EEAT. And then social media also communicates. It's way harder, because it means that you need to be upskilling constantly, right? You cannot just know one thing and that's it. And it means that collaboration needs to be tighter, which is very difficult, particularly if you work remote. So because Google is changing so fast and the SERPs are changing so fast, you need to change as fast. But humans, we are slower, right? So it is difficult. I think we need to change a lot how we collaborate as teams and we need to forget about silos. How do we do that, become a reality, is another thing. And I'm not sure how you feel. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, exactly the same. Yeah. So I was working in an agency up until a year and a half ago, and at that time we did try to bring in processes and loads of opportunities to have these collaborative conversations. And as a freelancer now I can attest to how easy it was to upskill and how that comes in an agency versus now, like I spend way more time reading and stuff, which is great because there's lots more podcasts like this now. But also, you have to work harder as a freelancer to collaborate. But if you're in an agency where you have a team, you've got that immediacy there, which is great. But then what I struggled with was the same thing with you, with communication. So creating enough opportunities like team huddles and all this stuff, but also incentivizing it and saying, "Okay, what are our shared KPIs? And how can we help you guys?" And vice versa. And just getting them bought into the other channels outside of SEO and get them bought into the multichannel collaboration or how it contributes to the global KPIs and the SEO and vice versa. So yeah, I can't quite explain it. I used slides at the time on all this stuff, but basically just getting them bought in and having way more meetings. And then finding out what's the important KPIs to them and what motivates them and getting collaboration that way. Grace Frohlich: Yes, I agree with both of you actually. I actually spoke about this in the Women in Tech SEO conference in March about cross channel with paid, how to get paid and SEO to work together. So if you want to check that out, I think that can be a transferable kind of a process that I talked about. But yeah, everything you just said, getting to know their challenges for the other channel, getting to know what their goals are and KPIs, and aligning with regular meetings. Of course, easier said than done, I can attest to that. But a lot of it... And also don't underestimate building a relationship with the other channel, the people. There's people behind these channels, so that's also really important. Crystal Carter: And I think, can I just, questions from the audience? So if you've seen the little paddles, so green is yes, and it's like purply blue is no. Do you find that you're collaborating with more people who are working outside of your core channel? Yes for green, or purple for no. Wow. I have 100% green y'all, that's 100% yes. I think that's really fascinating and I think that's really, really good to see, especially in the dynamic SERP space that we're working in. Barry, you're working with a lot of clients who are working, like we were talking earlier about the Mail for instance, and they are huge on social, they're huge on lots of different channels. How are you finding, because we're talking about ways that people communicate, how do you find that you keep in the loop or you connected between what's happening in the different spaces? Barry Adams: I’ll tell you almost most of my clients engage me for a very small specific role. And I personally haven't worked in a team for over 10 years, just me and the voices in my head as a freelancer. But I do find it very interesting how it's evolved in who hires me and in the context that they hire me. Where previously when I came in in the early stages of my freelance career, I was sort of like the SEO guy, and everything SEO related I had to take that by the scruff of the neck for that client and do it. Whereas now, a lot of them have very detailed in-house capabilities. They have good editorial SEOs, for example, and they have good technical people who have some SEO knowledge. So when they engage with a freelancer like myself, it's a much more specific skillset and specific project that they need that they don't have or don't want to develop in-house. And for me, that shows how far the industry has already come and how far the specialties with the industry have already come. Especially in news where I work, you have people who are very, very good at, for example, the editorial side of SEO, optimizing articles and site structures. But the technical side is something that they probably don't need hardcore internal capabilities for when you can just once every year or two years get an outsider in to do a sanity check on your website. And that shows to me that they already have the defined roles. It's not enough to be an SEO anymore, you need to be a specific type of SEO. I think as your career progresses in SEO, again the concept of the T-shaped marketer, you even have a T-shape within the T-shape where it becomes a much more narrow T. When I started doing this, I'm old enough to remember when the job title was webmaster. I had that job title for a while and you did everything. You did email, you did social, you did SERPs, you did the whole thing. And then I picked one specialty, SEO, and now within SEO it became technical. And within there it's now news SEO. So I think that's where if you want your career to develop, you sort of have to hang your coat on a specific skillset and discipline. That doesn't mean that's always going to be your career because there's overlaps with other channels and other capabilities that you can develop. I mean, fortunately, search is not going to die anytime soon, no matter how often SEO has been proclaimed deceased. We're still alive and kicking and growing. But I think you sort have to find out what you like doing, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and say, "Right, let's go and try and make this work." Let's become a great analytical SEO or a great tech SEO or a great editorial SEO, and there will always be roles within those specialties that really work for you. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that within that space, there's always devs. No matter what kind of thing there's always devs. And when we're thinking about this, because I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is just me in my little silo, but I feel like devs are devs and they do deving. And so do you have to explain to them when you're having conversations with devs that are taking into account multichannel traffic, multichannel dependencies, for instance, are you finding that those conversations are changing that you need to give them more context about this is a landing page, not just for SEO, this is a landing page for somebody coming from TikTok or that sort of thing? Are you finding that you're having those conversations? Grace Frohlich: I'm finding that we have to explain to devs less of the importance of SEO, because I think more and more, at least clients, they have a foundational understanding of what it is. So because those clients are like the C-suite and the upper management, they give the devs, okay, these are your goals, your KPIs, and a lot of times they align with SEO KPIs. Carmen Dominguez: Yeah, I was going to say too. Yeah, actually when you asked that question, I was thinking when I said I haven't been in SEO as long as Barry has been, but I remember when I started and I started writing content for websites, it was an eternal fight, constantly, constantly fighting. And now most of the time when you talk to devs, they know that there are certain things that they cannot do. They know that there are SEO areas that they shouldn't take so personally when they get feedback on. And I actually, I'm enjoying very much working with devs recently. Once you are able to understand the basics, I think the key is being able to communicate what you're doing, the changes or what you need to do, and what's the point of a website. It's not just to be there. Once you explain that and you create relationship, because that's very important, I think it's particularly easy. Or I think I found, in recent times, it's easier to work with them. Crystal Carter: Okay. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I was going to second that because I started in 2009 with SEO and working with devs at that point. And I guess fair play on their side, they didn't really know the impact or the value, it wasn't part of their roadmap or KPIs or anything. So I learned from that point how to get to know them, I guess. It comes back to relationship building. And I guess, sounds a bit wishy-washy, but emotional intelligence, trying to figure out, okay, what really motivates you? Trying to figure out the body language. Oh, they didn't like that request. Or at the start of my career, I'd have to create a standards document literally on paper and grade their websites, brand new websites, so there's a website division of my first agency. And then I put it on their desk, and then so immediately they're being like, "Oh, yeah, cool." And then they're just like, whatever. And so you're immediately not their favorite person, and I have to find myself to ingratiate myself to them, go to the pub, whatever, I think, but also figure out, okay, how can I get my stuff signed off and kind of relate it all to them? And I think it's become way easier now with SEO integrations in CMSs, whatever. And also it's a bit more word from Google on what impacts what on the website. So it's way easier, but for me it's always been relationship building and figuring out what motivates them. Crystal Carter: Barry? Barry Adams: Yeah, I have a notorious example where I was presenting my findings in a Zoom call to a client and the lead dev was in the call as well, and he counted me on a specific point, and I was maybe lacking emotional intelligence in my response, and frankly, I was a bit of a dick. Anyway, the call went on and we went through the audit and then the CEO wanted to show me something, so he started sharing his screen. He didn't realize he had a Slack channel open where that lead dev had just messaged him saying, this guy is a dick. I actually still want that on a T-shirt. But he was fair, I was being a dick, but I was also right. But it also taught me something that if you want to get stuff done, don't be a dick. And I think in the past, and sometimes even now, I come across as maybe too forceful and too sure of myself, and sometimes we need to look at the context in which we make these recommendations. 'Cause I am an SEO guy with a big SEO hammer, so for me, everything looks like an SEO nail. But I've learned that there's a lot of other moving pieces in an organization that have very different goals, very different objectives, and you have to weigh these things up. And I think I've gotten better at providing the context of a recommendation where I say, "Well, this would be an ideal scenario for SEO, but it might hurt your commercials," or it might hurt usability, or it might have another impact on another aspect of the website. And I think if you frame recommendations or best practices in that context, you actually end up getting done more often than not, because they realize that you realize there's other stuff happening, but you still make that recommendation knowing that the other stuff is happening. So it's probably worthwhile doing the recommendation, whereas if you just say, "Oh, you need to get this shit done right now," that's just not going to fly. Crystal Carter: And question to the audience, are you finding that working with devs is... So green is easier and blue for not easier? Okay, that's probably like 90% easier. I'm finding that really interesting. There's someone in the audience who's like, "Mm-hmm." So yeah, I think that's really interesting. So yeah, I think that's really interesting. Let's go on to squad goals. So here's the scenario. You need to assemble a squad for a new project. You need to get your crew together. It might be people within your team, it might be freelancers, it might be a co-agency, it might be whoever that you're thinking of. What are the things that you're looking for in a new collaborator, and how do you know that this is the match for you? Is it swipe right or swipe left know? No, it's swipe left? Is that right? Sukhjinder Singh: Right? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't do them. Okay. So yeah, Sukh, can we start with you? How do you know that this is a good match, we can collaborate, this is going to be a good setup? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I'm actually doing this at the moment. So as a freelancer, I'm trying to build a network of people in other channels like I had with the agency setup, and I guess I'm doing my own EEAT evaluation of them. So I'm looking at all of their engagements, so not just on their website to say what they've done, but their recommendations on LinkedIn, see if they're legitimate, and then talking to them and looking at case studies, anything like that, and the work history. It's really revealing, so if they're listening to it... So trying to figure out, because as you know, even when hiring people on the agency side, it's really hard to drill down the people that have got real experience. So trying to do that evaluation and then chatting to them and then just starting with a small project. So something that I can get them to chip in on with a small amount of budget and see how they do. And for me, it's important to see the results, but also their personality and if I can work well with them, and if they're reasonable and flexible to a point. So that's how I do it. Carmen Dominguez: And the personality part for me is very important. Beyond the skills, there are lots of people who are very good skills, and that doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be working well with them. So for me, being aware of my own personality, I might be a little bit intense just to say, it's my Spanish blood. So when I have an idea, I want to go after the idea, but I know that I need to have someone who calms me down. So having someone that is the contrary of me in my team is going to be better for the project. So I look for that, I look for someone who's a doer because I'm a dreamer. So I want to do this, I want to do it now, everyone focused. I need someone who actually will do it, because then if I don't put the time in to do the thing, then it won't happen. So I need someone who is a realistic, someone who is a doer and someone who also has visibility of everything. So independently of the skill sets that everyone has, which is important, I also need to have all of this. But there are also core attitudes that are very important for me, which is honesty. I prefer someone to tell me, "You are a dickhead, Carmen." Ooh, sorry, I said that word, I realize. But I prefer someone who is honest to me than actually says, "Yes, yes, yes," and nothing comes across. And I judge people on actions and not words, so if someone delivers what they say they do and they tell me this is feasible or not, I'm definitely going to be working with them. So core attitudes and people who have different personalities is, for me, what makes a team work well. Crystal Carter: Amazing. Yeah, I think hiring for complimentary skills for the gaps that you have and also being aware of those gaps that you have gets really important. Carmen Dominguez: Which is actually not that common, doing this self-analysis of, okay, who am I? Because maybe I think I'm perfect, but not really. So being aware of the things that you are good at and you are not as good at, it's very important for you to build a good team. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I agree. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I agree with those points. I will also say if you're trying to build a team, going back to the football, well, soccer, soccer analogy, you don't want a team full of strikers. And also you don't want a team full of keepers like goalkeepers, so you want to diversify. So I would say choose people with different backgrounds. Don't underestimate the value of diversity when you're choosing a team, because they'll have different perspectives, they'll have different backgrounds, different ways of thinking. So that can only make your team stronger. Crystal Carter: And Barry? Barry Adams: I haven't worked in a team for a very long time, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think I enjoy that part of it. I've never been a real people person, to be highly honest. I do find the clients that I enjoy working with the most are the ones who, I don't know how to describe that common denominator, but they're all in one way or another, extremely good at their jobs and know exactly what they want from external parties. And I'm grateful that I get to be that external partner. I find it very educational, projects where I learn as much from the client as the client hopefully learns from me. And I think that's hard to select for, either somebody has that passion and is that good at their job or they're not. But there's clients who bring me along whenever they move jobs, they work with one publisher and then a few years later they move to a different publisher and they get to work with them again in a different context. But it's still just a really pleasant collaboration, because you get to know each other's ins and outs and know exactly what they're good at and how you can compliment their skillset. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah. That's awesome. And I have a question to the squad as well, or to the squad here. Also, if you're in the back, you can come in. There's spaces. There are spaces, it's totally fine. Please do come in. Yeah. So one of the things that we've been finding across our teams is that when we're thinking about these things, one of the things you mentioned, Sukh, was that sometimes when you're trying to hire, it's hard to tell which skills people have. Question to the audience. When you're thinking about either hiring or collaborating or whichever with folks, are you finding that AI, people using AI, is a help or a hindrance? Are you finding that people with AI profiles or you finding that people are having AI in their CVs? Are you finding that help is a help or hindrance? So green for help and blue for hindrance on that. Okay, we got a lot of blue. We're about 50/50 there, so that's very interesting. I think that that goes back to one of the points from Carmen that you'd rather know where somebody's limits are in terms of their skills for sure, rather than somebody faking it until they make it necessarily. We are tight on time, so I'm going to move to the next section, which kind of covers that, which is awkward conversations. So when you're working with partners, also the partners are also teams, Barry. So when you're working with partners, when you're working with clients, when you're working across your team, when you're working as part of a collaborative SEO venture, sometimes there's awkward conversations. Sometimes somebody takes credit for something that you're pretty sure was you, and I get a bit upset about that because I'm like, that's my gold star, thank you very much. Or sometimes you're working with a client and they say, "Hey, we want to bring in this other agency." And you're like, "Who are they?" I can see somebody shaking their head. So actually I saw a little bit of reaction to that, so another question to the audience. Okay, and so the client is on the phone with you and they say, "Hey, I like to get this other agency involved." And green for this is good, or blue for I don't know on that. Okay, that's mostly blue. Okay. One more second. This is George. So that's mostly blue. That's my gut instinct. My gut instinct is why, why do you need somebody else? But yeah, other people in the panel, how do you feel about these conversations when this happens? Sukhjinder Singh: I was trying to think of a good example because yeah, it's difficult. I guess early on in the career, I struggled to figure out how to... I used data basically to say, "Oh, but you can see by the last report like, oh, we're hitting your KPIs," or this, that and the other. And if we're not, I'm like, "Boss, what could we do about this kind of thing?" And then obviously I've learned to look at, so basically always using the KPIs as the goal in the reports and trying to develop that customer relationship where I can tell ahead of time, hopefully, if they're thinking of doing that. And I've been in that situation early in my career a few times where it came down to them deciding between us and the other agency based on maybe trivial things as well. Like, price, obviously not trivial, but other things like, oh, the last two reports had an error on it or something like that. And so I'd always try to plan from that point in advance to say, okay, I'm not going to make any mistakes. And I make sure all the communications are on point and even look out for cues like, oh, you're not happy with this and that, or something bad happened a few times in a row, maybe they're going to look at another agency. And obviously if an email pops up on Google Analytics or something, as a user I always think, oh crap, someone's doing an audit or something. So I try and future-proof that, but if I was confronted with that combo, I'd kind of fall back on the data, but also hopefully use the relationship that we'd built up by that point to say, "Look, what's going on?" I'll be completely honest with you, if you could be honest with me. This didn't go too well. This went okay. Here's our actual strengths and weaknesses. And I learned that from my old boss as well, Ann Stanley, where she was really honest with people to say, oh, this is what we're good at and bad at. And they appreciated that and say, oh, actually we'll stick with you, going back to your point, Carmen, on honesty, like, oh, we actually trust these guys. So maybe they can help us find a good PR person or whatever, 'cause they've got that gap in the team at the moment. So a bit of a long answer on that one. Crystal Carter: No, no. Carmen Dominguez: No, actually, I was going to just... I agree with you 100%. And having been in the client side, so having been a client myself and now working in agency, one of the things that I see as a negative when I see in an agency is when someone try to bullshit me. If you are trying to bullshit me with whatever, I'm going to say another bad word, crap, then the trust is broken. So I think for me, the most important part when building relationship is being able to have the hard conversations at the very beginning. If you don't have the hard conversations, trust breaks. And if trust breaks, you're going to have a competitor coming in. And that is actually your own fault. Sorry for being scared. And I know that it takes guts to be able to have the hard conversations because it's scary, if you are a freelancer particularly, you might even lose the food on your plate. But it's building that relationship, in my opinion, will actually will make your clients defend you, even if you are not meeting the KPI. So always building relationships with trust, even if things go wrong, I think is a way. Because in the end, we're all humans, and if we get attached to people that are honest to us and we are honest to them, then they're going to defend us more. So in the end, it's having a good relationship with people and being human I think is... I don't get scared when they bring other people, even being honest, of course. But yeah, I think that's my recommendation. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Interesting. Grace Frohlich: I think my knee-jerk reaction is why would they bring in someone? Crystal Carter: Right. Grace Frohlich: But at the same time, if you think about it, it's really the client's right to have a second opinion. We do it all the time with doctors, for example, if you want a second opinion from another doctor because your health is on the line. This client's website health is on the line, so yeah, it's their right to bring in a second opinion. So in that sense, I think I'm more okay with it, especially if that other agency proves my point. So it's more of an opportunity to do that. Sukhjinder Singh: That's a good feeling as well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Barry Adams: I had this exact thing actually happen to me where I was brought in to do a specific piece of work for a client and they told me, "Oh, there's another agency who's also doing the exact same piece of work, so no pressure, Barry." And I was a little bit, like this was a fairly big, well-known agency, and I'm just a freelancer sitting in a dinky office in Belfast. So I was feeling the pressure and I felt a bit like, oh crap, I really need to be on my A-game here. But that actually motivated me to do a really, really good job, which I hope I would've done anyway, to be entirely honest. And it turned out that what that other agency presented and what I presented had slightly different angles and complimented each other really, really well, and gave the client the whole holistic view that they were looking for. So that turned out to be a fantastic project for the client as well as for both the other agency and for me. So yeah, I mean, I suck at awkward conversations in general. I think most of us don't like those. I fully agree with what's said before, honesty is always the best approach there as well. And just try not to shy away from saying the hard things that sometimes need to be said. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's easier said than done, but definitely something to think about. Okay, so we're going to move on to another section. In the podcast we sometimes have a fun game I like to play, Fun with People Also Ask. So we can do this with everyone on the audience and also everyone on the panel as well. So this is the first question from People Also Ask, so green for yes and blue for no. Do social links help SEO? We have mostly green. I have some blue. And Google keeps going back and forth being like, oh, it's not a big deal. Yes, it is a big deal. Oh, you're flipping around. Any opinions on this? Barry Adams: Yeah, correlation, not causation. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Anyone else, any two cents on that particular one? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I'm going to go with the indirectly for the safe bet. I think, okay, long spiel, the visibility of the content and all that. Yeah, the more people see your content, they give you legit links and all that. So, yeah. Crystal Carter: So kind of sort of. Okay. All right. Okay. Here's another one in the same sort of thing. So green for yes, and blue for no. Is social media marketing off-page SEO? It's in the same sort of area. Would you call it the same? People are like, I don't know about this question at all. I've got a lot of blue, there's absolutely no... Interesting. Very, very interesting. Any opinions on that? It's a similar question to the one before, if I'm completely honest. No? Okay. We'll move on. We'll move on. We'll move on. Okay. Okay. People also ask, which is harder, SEO or PPC? So I'm going to go... Oh, we have intakes of breath from the audience here. Okay, so we have green for SEO and blue for PPC. Oh. Carmen Dominguez: I think we're biased. Crystal Carter: We're biased. Let's look- Grace Frohlich: I mean, this looks like a biased audience, right? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. That's fine. Barry Adams: I actually think advertising is harder than SEO nowadays. Carmen Dominguez: Really? Crystal Carter: What? Barry Adams: I really do think that. Carmen Dominguez: But AI does everything for you in PPC. So... Barry Adams: AI could do everything for you in SEO. Carmen Dominguez: Well, that's true. That's true for an answer. Barry Adams: Yeah. Not in the same end result, everything being quite... Yeah. Carmen Dominguez: Yeah, it's true, it's true. Barry Adams: I think- Crystal Carter: Barry, read the room. Barry Adams: Yeah, I know I'm at BrightonSEO and I'm an SEO guy, but the paid advertising landscape nowadays, I mean, my goodness, the technology stacks and the targeting. I mean, I'm not an ad guy, but I talk to ad people, I'm like, I really don't want that job. I really don't want that job. But they spend more money every year and they get less and less back for it. Whereas with SEO, I think we're still on a growth curve. With advertising, the margins are narrower and narrower and narrower, and it's becoming really, really hard to have success in advertising. Carmen Dominguez: I think there is more pressure as well in PPC. You need to be reporting on a weekly basis. You need to be checking all the data constantly. But I also think that there are lots of people applying the same rules to SEO and PPC these days. So the pressure is coming. It really depends how you look at it. If you do SEO properly, I think it's more difficult, but a little bit chiller, less pressure. Depends. Crystal Carter: Okay. And just to say these are all actual People Also Ask questions, so yeah. Okay. So this is just a little shout-out to the grammatical incorrections, I did it myself, to the grammar that you see in People Also Ask. Is digital PR a SEO? So green for yes, and a blue for no. I got a lot of green. And I would probably say that's like 75-ish with my ballpark sort of thing. I find digital PR really fascinating. There's some really interesting campaigns. I think though it's kind of just campaign marketing, if I'm completely honest. I think it covers the same. Do other people have various- Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, it's definitely, it's its own beast. Because I used to partner with a colleague that did pure content and PR, digital PR, and she was really good at it because there's so many aspects of it. The journalist relationship, knowing what stuff they need in a brief and all that. Finding the story and that loads of data. And just from doing ideation sessions with her and other elements of the team just for ideas out there, she'd be able to structure a story and find it way easier. And so there was a lot of upskilling involved on my part to figure out, okay, how can I build links like this? And it was just a case of, well, to what Barry said before that, know what your strengths are and specialize in that and recognize it in other people. And so that's why I'm trying to partner with digital PRs as well to fill that link building gap. Carmen Dominguez: I mean, I was a digital PR and we did everything with SEO in our heads. So I will say yes, because we were using the SEO strategy to follow and create the links. Obviously, it's beyond just simple SEO, it also depends on how you see SEO. I see digital PR as part of organic and SEO is part of organic, so it depends on your definition of SEO. But I will say it is. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Cool. Okay, so we're moving on to the next one. This is specifically for the live podcast session. This is the one that I like. This is a section. These are again, actual predictive text from Google, and this one is for the predictive text for Can You Learn SEO, which is can you learn SEO by yourself? I know a lot of people... I've got somebody up already. So from the audience, green for yes, blue for no. Very interesting. So that's lots and lots of green. I've got a little bit of no, or a little bit of blue, so I'd probably say that's probably 90-ish percent saying yes. And I think this is interesting. So Barry, you're close to the microphone, so I'm going to come to you. What are the advantages or disadvantages of being a self-taught SEO? Barry Adams: As a self-taught SEO and one who teaches SEO now, I wish there were courses in SEO when I first learned it. The best learning environment that I learned as a self thought SEO was become part of an SEO community where you could ask questions, where there was no stupid questions basically, where you could just ask anything. That for me was a real breakthrough moment when I think I really embraced SEO and really started to learn it. So self-taught, yes, but still self-taught within a community. I think you will need to have people around you to ask these questions. I don't think there's such a thing as a completely self-taught SEO, 'cause you always learn from other people who are willing to share information, answer your questions. And I think if you're an experienced SEO, you should see it as maybe part of your remit to pass that on to others and be generous with your time and your knowledge and allow people to ask those questions, 'cause realistically that's how you learned it as well. Carmen Dominguez: I was going to say I learned by myself, but really it wasn't by myself because I went to the internet, I asked people. I tested things on my own, and I put the results on forums that people replied to me. So really, is it? Yeah, I didn't have a teacher and I didn't learn at university, but I had a whole community, which I think is one of the most beautiful things of the SEO industry is the community that we have. So you can, but it's not on your own. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, the community is great now, because when I started there wasn't really much of that. And also no SEO courses, at university anyway, so I'd have to do a couple of smaller courses. And then mostly learnt in the agency environment. And also, funnily, I was talking to a colleague of mine who didn't go to uni, and we both worked at the first agency I did in 2010. And straight out of college, he just got an internship and doing SEO, and now he's head of a big department and he's doing really well. Didn't have to pay any of his uni fees and all that stuff, and so he saved with all of that, and he just learned on the job. Pretty much what I did, 'cause I did a web design course and I quit web design to do SEO. And I just thought that's a perfect example of being able to learn in that environment as an internship, or if someone just gives you a chance and you just slowly build up your salary according to how much you learn kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I don't know if you wanted to jump in on that one. No? That's fine. That's fine. Okay. Okay. Okay. Next one. Next one. Next one. Okay. So the next one, this I thought was interesting. So if you type in, what is SEO in, you get a lot of different things. So it's like what is SEO in marketing? What is SEO in business? What is SEO in YouTube? What is SEO in web development? What is SEO in social media? What is SEO in journalism? What is SEO in Etsy? Okay. So my question is is that, do you find that SEO is different in these different spaces, or do you think SEO is SEO? So green for SEO is SEO, and blue for SEO is different in these different spaces. Interesting. Okay. So we have probably 70% people saying that SEO is different in all these different spaces. I think that's really interesting. And I think to the panel, my question is, do you think that clients understand that there are differences in these spaces? Carmen Dominguez: Clients don't understand SEO. So let alone in all the different channels. The amount of times I have to five, because I cannot get them to rank number one in one week is just mental. So no, I don't think they understand the difference, but I also think SEO is SEO. So the point is, you get your content to be visible to users and users engaged with it and that applies to Chat, to YouTube, to Google, to TikTok, to whatever you do. So I think SEO is always the same, but it's done in different ways. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I was thinking about it in terms of the definition of SEO versus an SEO job spec and to see if there's any correlation. And nine times out of 10, because I was looking at job specs, I was like, oh, there's way more things people are asking for versus what you would define as SEO typically. Which is weird because I've always had a problem with SEO as a term, because I thought, well, is it more like organic marketing? But then you can't say organic marketing 'cause then clients aren't aware really what that is, and they think, oh, I'm just going to go with the SEO. So yeah, I think it's something that we're stuck with in terms of a term for lead generation, whatever. But really I think it's way more than what you define as SEO. Grace Frohlich: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. If we're talking about semantics, SEO is just search engines for search engines, right? But as you said, are we talking about organic search or just organic anything? Then yeah, I mean, I think it can be diversified into all these different spaces. Carmen Dominguez: Actually, I'm talking to more about that if anyone wants to come to my talk. It's no SEO. Let's talk about organic. So, self-promotion. Crystal Carter: Carmen, when's your talk? Carmen Dominguez: When? At 3:00. Crystal Carter: Three o'clock, go see Carmen. Carmen Dominguez: I think. Auditorium one. Just find me, I'm the only Carmen, I think. Crystal Carter: Barry, Is SEO, SEO or is SEO different? Barry Adams: I think I agree with what Carmen said earlier. It's still SEO, but the tactics are different. When I do SEO for news websites, you cannot apply the same tactics as you do for e-commerce. But in the end, it is about getting your content in front of an audience that uses an organic search engine. So, yeah. Crystal Carter: Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Finally, we have another section. So I looked up digital marketers needs and Google changed it to digital marketing needs. And it said, digital marketing needs coding, digital marketing needs a degree, digital marketing needs math, digital marketing needs a laptop, which I thought was interesting. Does digital marketing need a degree? And I think this is interesting, 'cause I've heard people say that you cannot be a technical SEO or you can't be an SEO if you don't know HTML or you don't know how to code. I've heard people say you can't be a marketer without a degree, I've heard people say that sort of thing. And so I'm interested in this idea of gatekeeping. So here's a question to the audience and the last question of the day before... And thank you so much for joining us for this session. Do you think there is one way to be a digital marketer? Green for yes and blue for no. That is 100% no. People listening on the internet, there are many ways to become a digital marketer. I have an English literature degree and I've worked in marketing my entire life. And I know somebody else who's a fantastic SEO and his degree is in anthropology. He's amazing. So I think that there's many, many ways to be an SEO, a digital marketer. What are your thoughts on that? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, my degree was in multimedia computing, so it didn't really specialize in anything. A bit of coding, a bit of 3D, whatever. And then I did web design for four years and then quit, and then there was a credit crunch, and then I changed careers. I thought, let me try something different, no jobs anymore. So yeah, I think... What was I going to say? Yeah, I lost my train of thought. Yeah, learning from scratch. And yeah, I just found my way to SEO. I completely lost my train of thought. Crystal Carter: It's all good. It's all good. Sukhjinder Singh: It's almost finished as well. Crystal Carter: Took a new journey. Carmen Dominguez: I think that I know where you're trying to go. Myself, I am a translator. I'd never studied marketing. I didn't know what marketing was when I got into it, but I knew that what I needed to do is someone to read my content. So I needed, as a translator, I needed someone to read my content. As a journalist, you need someone to read your content. So in the end, that is what you want to do as a digital marketer. You need to convince your user to read your contents, basically. Yes, there is one way to be a digital marketer, which is making sure that you engage with the user and the user comes to you. How do you do that? There are a thousand of other ways to do it, but the clarity is what the purpose of digital marketing, and I think it's always the same. Get your users to come to you. And I guess it doesn't matter where you come from, you can come from computing, you can come from, I don't know, cleaning windows, so long as you know that you need to get your user, you are a digital marketer. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to add to that. Yeah, I fell into it from designing websites, and I wanted to know what the websites can do after you produce them, and then also from necessity as well. And I thought, okay, there's a whole different new career that's blowing up. And a few of my mates were doing it outside of uni who did do elements of SEO in their courses. And I thought, let me just try that out. But it's definitely led on from web design and necessity just for me. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I used to work in fashion in New York, so completely different industry. I did that for about 10 years, and then I just switched one day. I was like, I want to do something else. And here I am. So I know, exactly, marketers can come from anywhere really. I'm reminded of Ratatouille. Anyway, yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, agreed. Barry Adams: And this is the point where I admit I don't have a degree. I never finished uni. I started working at a call center two years after I started uni and decided that learning that was not for me, was way too hard. Became an IT guy, server management, and somehow found myself managing a server farm that had intranet pages on it. And then because I hacked together my own website, in my spare time, I knew a bit of HTML. My boss asked me, "Can you change what's on the web servers?" And that's how the whole ball just started rolling basically. And I think in the podcast we did a while ago with SERP's Up where we talked about how people get into a career in digital and in SERPs, we discussed this as well. No matter what your skillset is, what your passion is, there is a role for you in digital and in SERPs. If you're analytical, great. If you're not, but you're very creative, great. If you just like writing stuff, great. If you're a total tech nerd, great. There's always a job role that really suits your skillset and that can really give you fulfillment and achievement within your career. So yeah, it doesn't matter where you come from, it's what you do with it really. Crystal Carter: Yes. And on that motivational note, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today for this episode of SERP's Up. Thank you so much for taking part in my little paddle board thing. I really love seeing all the little cards. Have a wonderful, fantastic rest of BrightonSEO. And bonsoir, goodbye. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Grace Frolich Barry Adams Carmen Dominguez Sukhjinder Singh Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center BrightonSEO Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Grace Frolich Barry Adams Carmen Dominguez Sukhjinder Singh Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center BrightonSEO 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've put together some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous, amazing, the incredible Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hello on the internet. Hello Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hi. Crystal Carter: It's been a minute. Mordy Oberstein: It has been a minute. A lot has happened since we last recorded. Crystal Carter: Yeah, internet land podcast people, it has not been a minute. It's been the same amount of time- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's been a week. Crystal Carter: ... it normally is because we just plan things and stuff. But in real life, it's been a minute. Mordy Oberstein: So much has happened. Yeah, things have happened. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I went to BrightonSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I went to New York. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: The Knicks won three playoff games, lost two. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, that's all right. That's all right. But yeah, we've been out in the world meeting people, talking to folks. Mordy Oberstein: I went on vacation. Well, not vacation, like stay-cation and a holiday. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's fine. That's when you get gardening done, that's when somebody gives you a list, they're like, "You know that shelf?" Mordy Oberstein: Gardening, that's where you kill plants, right? Crystal Carter: First you have to buy them. You buy them, and then you just- Mordy Oberstein: And then you kill them. Crystal Carter: ... watch them slowly die. Mordy Oberstein: That's how it goes at my house. You buy the plant and then you kill it. Slowly. A slow death. Crystal Carter: I try. I have a cactus that's clearly… Mordy Oberstein: No, cactus does not count. You don't have to do nothing, it just sits there. Crystal Carter: I didn't do anything and it's dead. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Crystal Carter: It died very, very slowly, but it still looks like a cactus, but I know it's not. I know it's dying. Mordy Oberstein: I have a cactus, a giant cactus. Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: Like a desert cactus. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: In the garden, giant cactus. Crystal Carter: That's cool. That's cool. Is it like one of the ones from the cartoons with the arms? Mordy Oberstein: It does. Yeah, it has arms. Crystal Carter: That's nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll send you a picture. Crystal Carter: Cool. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use Wix Studio to work more efficiently with your team, with real time collaboration technology built right into the editor. Because as we all know, SEO is a team sport. And to help us explore how SEO is indeed a team sport, we took the show on the road to BrightonSEO's UK conference where Crystal sat down with Carmen Dominguez, Sukh Singh, Grace Frohlich, and the other Barry. So we won't have your snappiest of SEO news or you should be following this week on social media, because we were in the flesh, well, Crystal was in the flesh, I was on vacation, at one of the industries most prestigious SEO events of the year, BrightonSEO UK. So move over golf, cycling and non doubles tennis, because SEO is a real sport like baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and curling. On this, the 89th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. I left you speechless. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know how to jump in. I feel like you did everything you... I feel like you like mic dropped. I feel like that's great. That's a great intro. I'm going to be talking for most of it anyway with the guys. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm done. This is all you're going to hear from me for the entire episode because I could not make the conference. Crystal Carter: But it's all good because I think that certainly we as a team do a lot of stuff together. Obviously we plan out the podcast, we do all of that sort of stuff, and I think that the way that you work as a team will inform the SEO that you're able to do, and I certainly think that our approach was there in presence, even if you were not there at the moment. And it was a great conversation. And also shout out to the audience because we were flagship for this, I don't think anybody else is doing this, but if you come to a SERP's Up live broadcast, we might have one of these things that we do, which basically we give the audience paddles and the audience will give us their opinions on some of the questions. And we did this at BrightonSEO in San Diego. Mordy Oberstein: That was great. We went real heavy on the audience interaction. It was a lot of fun. Crystal Carter: It was a lot of fun. And then the people on the squads were asking questions to the audience as well, so some of our panelists were asking questions to the audience as well, which I didn't expect, but was a lot of fun. So it's great to get some feedback on how folks in the audience are feeling about some of the questions as well as some of the great insights from our incredible panel. It was a really, really great panel. Mordy Oberstein: So without further ado, I'll see you in the next episode, because here's that panel. Crystal Carter: Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of SERP's Up live. This is the live BrightonSEO Spring 2024 edition of the SERP's Up podcast. I'm going to be joined by some incredible guests who you can see on my left and right for the people who are here. And also, members of the audience, we have some paddles there for you, which are basically for a little bit of interaction. So one side, green is yes, purple is no. So if there's any questions and basically you'd be like, I agree, I do not agree, then please make yourselves heard. We found this to be a little bit of fun, so we hope that you enjoy it as well. I'm going to get started by introducing my fantastic panelists who I have harangued to join me today. First up, all the way over on my left is Mr. Barry Adams, the founder of Award-winning agency, Polemic Digital, and he's a specialist SEO consultant for news publishers focusing on technical SEO, editorial SEO. His clients include many, many publishers including The New York Times, The Independent, lots of other folks as well. Thank you so much for joining us today, Barry. Barry Adams: Thank you very much for having me. Crystal Carter: It's always a pleasure. Barry may or may not swear so if you are sensitive to such things, I'm just going to warn you there now. So yeah, thank you for that. Hello. Hi there, David Bain. David Bain: Hey. Crystal Carter: Welcome, welcome. Welcome lots of other people as well. And so our next person that I'm going to be introducing is the incredible Carmen Dominguez who is joining us from Hallam Digital. She's the head of Organic at Hallam. I first met her at the Hallam Organic event, which was a great event that took place in Nottingham, and it was a warm day. Carmen Dominguez: It was. We had free ice cream though. Crystal Carter: It was, it was delightful and very well received. And it was lovely to have her there, and she spoke about some great stuff. And so I thought if we could get Carmen along, that'd be lovely. She has worked for agencies, she's worked in-house and led a team of many people. You've built a team. Carmen Dominguez: 23 last year and 15 this year. There we go. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So she's got great experience in-house and also working agency side, and she's going to be sharing her insights as well. Thank you, Carmen, for joining us. Carmen Dominguez: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here today. Crystal Carter: And next up is Sukh Singh, who is from I Do SEO, and I've met him at BrightonSEO a few times over the last few years. And I was really excited to get Sukh along for this session, because Sukh has a great perspective from having worked as the head of SEO at an agency for many, many years and now working freelance, working with agency partners and other clients as well. So thank you so much for joining us, Sukh. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you. And finally on my left is the amazing Grace Frohlich, fellow Californian, and she is joining us from Brain Labs where she works as an SEO consultant, and is managing clients and managing lots of different projects and has both project management experience and also SEO experience, and is a fantastic speaker and a big fan of The Parent Trap as well. And we are really pleased to have you here today, Grace. Grace Frohlich: Thank you. I'm excited. Looking forward to this. Crystal Carter: Wonderful. And then finally, it's me. My name is Crystal Carter. I am the Head of SEO Communications at Wix. I am currently working there, but I have a lot of experience working in agencies, working alongside agencies, working across teams, and I hope to be able to share those insights. And finally, there is y'all good selves, the folks here for BrightonSEO, thank you so much for joining us and for making the trek, because I timed it and it's about five minutes walk from the front door. So we appreciate you and we appreciate you getting your steps in today to join us. If you are not familiar with the SERP's Up podcast, then I thank you for taking that leap of faith and joining us here. The SERP's Up podcast comes out every Wednesday. We get some fantastic speakers. Barry's contributed, Grace has contributed, we've had lots of people contribute as well, some of the people in this room. And yeah, check it out every Wednesday. We have over 80 episodes now, so if you are a fan of podcasts, go and check out the archive. So the topic that we are covering today is SEO as a team sport. And when I say that, I do not mean this kind of team, though, bless the team from Screaming Frog for showing up for cardiovascular exercise with the annual charity BrightonSEO football match. They did a great job there. But we're more thinking about the way that marketing has become so spread out and includes so many different disciplines and so many different specialisms even within SEO. So you have a space where somebody says, "Oh, you're the SEO, you must know every single thing about image SEO." Or, "You must know every single thing about international SEO," or Google Merchant Center or Local SEO. And it can be very, very fractional and very specific. And so I think that SEO, certainly from my perspective, has become a little bit more of a team sport. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and how that works and what that means for us. On the podcast, we have different sections. One of the sections that we do is a section called Deep Thoughts. Thank you. So when we talk deep thoughts, one of the things we think about is the way that Google is progressing. And essentially just on this slide, so for instance, if you were to think about the way Google, as Google's progressing, I'm sure you've all seen this, that it's not just that you have plain blue links or one sort of SERP experience, but that you have SERP experience that includes lots of different channels, particularly for your organic stuff. So you have your YouTube, you'll also have the social that will show on the SERP, you might also have products. And even on the products, they'll have lots of different pages that show up within that. And then everyone's favorite SEO feature is Reddit. So Reddit is showing up in lots of different ways as well. And this is an evolution of Google. And I would like to ask my illustrious panelists, because I've spoken enough now, how has the way that you collaborate across channels evolved as Google has become much more diversified in its SERP as we see more and more of these SERP features? How has the way that you collaborate across channels, across teams changed? Grace Frohlich: Well, I actually first want to know from the audience, how many of you already have SEO Plus paid or other channel collaboration currently? Green, if yes- Crystal Carter: So there's paddles on the chairs. Grace Frohlich: ... purple with no. A lot of green. Crystal Carter: That is coming about, for the listening audience, that's coming up about 80% yes, is what I would say. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I mean that's great to see, 'cause we really should be working at least with the paid channel already. Google, it's one SERP. Well, it's two channels, but we should be already collaborating with paid at least if not more channels. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think that for users, certainly, they don't even always know whether or not it's paid and they sometimes can't even tell the difference. So if you're trying to connect with the users, and you're trying to connect with the user journey, that should certainly be a part of it. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, absolutely. Especially with the little sponsored, the little label that's barely noticeable now. I remember when it was very, very obvious in the SERP that, oh, you're clicking an ad, but now it's like... Exactly, a lot of users don't really know what they're clicking on. Barry Adams: I miss the days of a yellow background on the ads. Crystal Carter: And I think certainly with product images, it can be sometimes difficult to tell whether or not it's an ad, or whether or not it's organic. Do you find that across your teams that you're working in paid and organic as well? Carmen Dominguez: Absolutely. And I think one of the impacts of not working together, particularly in brand campaigns is that if PPC is not working, or paid in this case, is not working with organic, they don't understand the impact of putting a little bit more of budget in brand will have in the conversions of organic. So it's not only for the clients and the users, it's also for when you are reporting to your clients the results of your work. If you don't collaborate with paid enough, you can maybe put a lot of effort in organic that in the end doesn't get the results, because paid is doing whatever they want on their own. So it's not only within paid and organic, it's also within all the different sub channels that there is in organic images or SERPs, sorry, the snippets. And it's also within the different type of paid and the different types of organic, which I'll want to talk a little bit more about it before. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I was thinking about in terms of the algorithm changes in the last few years, I think that's forced people to be a bit more multichannel, at least in their thought. And I was thinking of actually promoting Grace's blog posts from a few years ago, the T-shaped marketer being the T being having depth or knowledge in, say SEO for example, being SEO, but also touching on paid search, paid social, PR, et cetera, and recognizing the opportunities to pull in additional traffic where you see, oh, there's more opportunity for paid rather than organic for these keywords might take a bit longer to rank, et cetera. So that together with the algorithm thing and an agency environment, I guess, it just comes, that collaboration comes naturally, I think. Crystal Carter: And do you find that it also has to do with skills like different skillset? Because I certainly know that we are now, within the organic side, really having to think much more about LLMs and AI and how that all works. But paid have been working with AI and, oh, this ad has to learn, although it's machine learning and you just wait for days while it spends money and you have no idea how. And people have been working on that for years. And so I feel like a lot of the skills that people have acquired during that paid space can translate more into how we think about organic as well. Carmen Dominguez: I think it's also the other way around. It plays for both. So I wanted to talk a little bit about skills as well within organic. You cannot have the same person, for example, doing tech then is doing content, even though both need to know a little bit about each other. It's a little bit the same with paid, right? If paid doesn't understand EEAT, for example, and EEAT is purely organic, but EEAT is based on how the user engage with your content. So EEAT should also be applicable for paid in the same way that, for example, paid talk about CTR should also be applicable for organic. So in the end, we are talking about getting so many skills with one person in order to be successful, and it's impossible, which actually goes very well into the conversation that we're talking, that specializing and specializing within a specialization, if that makes sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think that when you're thinking about channels and we think about where to specialize in things, which channels do you find are most helpful for growing clients? We've talked a little bit about paid, but are we finding that digital PR, for instance, is as helping with a lot of things? Or are we finding that other elements are helping clients to grow at the moment? Grace Frohlich: I think it's going to be social- Crystal Carter: Social? Grace Frohlich: ... with SEO. Crystal Carter: Interesting. Why do you think that? Grace Frohlich: Well, yeah, I don't have the definitive proof, but from talking with clients and talking cross channely, and strategists within my agency, it's just one of those trends that keeps popping up over and over, basically getting more organic traffic through social. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also there's a question of, with it, you're trying to connect with users and users are on social, and also that with the social thing you get both visibility and you also get clicks, links, et cetera. So there's a potential there. Barry Adams: I think it's not even one specific channel, when I look at how my clients grow their audiences, I work primarily with news publishers, it's all about original reporting and quality of reporting. The news websites that report the news that other websites have first reported are the ones that tend to lose out. Whereas if you're a news publisher that invested in quality investigative journalism and original reporting, you tend to win in the long run. And I think that translates to a lot of other companies as well. If you have a dropshipping e-commerce website, you should have low expectations of long-term success because you're just another middleman. Whereas if you have an original product, you're an original manufacturer or original brand, I think you're probably looking at a healthier future. And I think that's fairly channel independent, be that paid or social or search or email. I think you can always find channels to min/max your growth within the confines of your business. But if your business isn't inherently sound and you don't have a strong brand, I think you should probably change your business. Crystal Carter: So you think that originality is still cutting through in terms of growth? Barry Adams: I see that more and more. I think that's also something that search engines like Google and also organic platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they want to reward originality, they want to reward authenticity. It's hard to do that algorithmically, because it's very much engagement based and you can sort of manipulate engagement figures. But I think they are trying to find ways to measure that and improve that algorithmically so that original brands and quality brands surface more and more, because they realize that's also what our audience wants. The audience wants quality brands and original content and not just rehashed stuff that other websites have done before and maybe worse or better. Crystal Carter: And I think in the space of LLMs, I think it's even more important to be unique in that space in order to see growth. And I don't know if you all wanted to add anything more. Sukhjinder Singh: I was thinking about EEAT bolstering social as well, or social bolstering EEAT. So the experience and authority of the authors and the website as well, and seeing that engagement on social. And also with social being a good research tool, I just saw... Oh God, his name's blanking me now. I'm going to have to comment on it later. Crystal Carter: Steven Bartlett? He's on all the socials. Sukhjinder Singh: No, actually I was at an SEO talk about an hour ago on using TikTok for keyword research in terms of topical research. And then even if the resulting keywords have zero search volume, he did a case study where he still used those keywords and saw an uptick in search console data in impressions and click-throughs, et cetera, even with such volume zero keywords. So I think it's a good tool there. Carmen Dominguez: I'm sorry, go. No, no. I was going to say that I think in the end, everything is related. Right? If you have a good brand, probably you're going to be all over social, and if you are all over social, your users are going to be engaging with you and they're going to end up going back to your website. So I think the whole point of change is not specific areas, it's actually looking at the overall. So we have a good brand, we have to showcase EEAT in every single possible channel, and that is what is going to make you successful. And on that, what you were saying, I also recently did a test on particularly TikTok and Instagram with one of my e-commerce clients, and actually getting lots of links coming from TikTok made all the people clicking on my products. And my products now rank, even though I don't have no longer people coming from TikTok just because the clicks made Google to recognize my products. So it does have an impact being in social, but also my brand now is much better recognized in TikTok as well because of that. So people come from brand much, much often. So I think it's all related into making sure that we do all an organic strategy where we look at all the different channels all at once rather than just single pointing different areas, if that makes sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So I think that flows in next to our next session where we're talking about team evolution. So if you're in a space where you are finding, for instance, that TikTok is a really good channel for your brand or that you're getting good traffic from Instagram, for instance, how are you thinking about which skills... How are you thinking about how you're connecting with your team and how you need to evolve your team in order to sit alongside those channels? Are you thinking that you need to maybe get another social media person or maybe work alongside a social media person? Or are you thinking that one person needs to suddenly become an SEO and a social media? Carmen Dominguez: And it's super difficult actually. And one of the things I have done with my team recently is changed the whole structure of it. So in agency, normally we're used to having one SEO person, one technical SEO person, content, digital PR, and they all work in silos even though they work toward the same objective. For me, what I have done is try to make sure that everyone has the basic SEO knowledge of everything, but then they specialize farther away. But they work together in squads, which actually every week they're like, "Okay, I found this issue in the technical SEO that might have an impact in content. I'm not an expert in content. Content person, tell me what you think." And then the content person also knows about EEAT, who collaborates with the social media person to try to elevate EEAT. And then social media also communicates. It's way harder, because it means that you need to be upskilling constantly, right? You cannot just know one thing and that's it. And it means that collaboration needs to be tighter, which is very difficult, particularly if you work remote. So because Google is changing so fast and the SERPs are changing so fast, you need to change as fast. But humans, we are slower, right? So it is difficult. I think we need to change a lot how we collaborate as teams and we need to forget about silos. How do we do that, become a reality, is another thing. And I'm not sure how you feel. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, exactly the same. Yeah. So I was working in an agency up until a year and a half ago, and at that time we did try to bring in processes and loads of opportunities to have these collaborative conversations. And as a freelancer now I can attest to how easy it was to upskill and how that comes in an agency versus now, like I spend way more time reading and stuff, which is great because there's lots more podcasts like this now. But also, you have to work harder as a freelancer to collaborate. But if you're in an agency where you have a team, you've got that immediacy there, which is great. But then what I struggled with was the same thing with you, with communication. So creating enough opportunities like team huddles and all this stuff, but also incentivizing it and saying, "Okay, what are our shared KPIs? And how can we help you guys?" And vice versa. And just getting them bought into the other channels outside of SEO and get them bought into the multichannel collaboration or how it contributes to the global KPIs and the SEO and vice versa. So yeah, I can't quite explain it. I used slides at the time on all this stuff, but basically just getting them bought in and having way more meetings. And then finding out what's the important KPIs to them and what motivates them and getting collaboration that way. Grace Frohlich: Yes, I agree with both of you actually. I actually spoke about this in the Women in Tech SEO conference in March about cross channel with paid, how to get paid and SEO to work together. So if you want to check that out, I think that can be a transferable kind of a process that I talked about. But yeah, everything you just said, getting to know their challenges for the other channel, getting to know what their goals are and KPIs, and aligning with regular meetings. Of course, easier said than done, I can attest to that. But a lot of it... And also don't underestimate building a relationship with the other channel, the people. There's people behind these channels, so that's also really important. Crystal Carter: And I think, can I just, questions from the audience? So if you've seen the little paddles, so green is yes, and it's like purply blue is no. Do you find that you're collaborating with more people who are working outside of your core channel? Yes for green, or purple for no. Wow. I have 100% green y'all, that's 100% yes. I think that's really fascinating and I think that's really, really good to see, especially in the dynamic SERP space that we're working in. Barry, you're working with a lot of clients who are working, like we were talking earlier about the Mail for instance, and they are huge on social, they're huge on lots of different channels. How are you finding, because we're talking about ways that people communicate, how do you find that you keep in the loop or you connected between what's happening in the different spaces? Barry Adams: I’ll tell you almost most of my clients engage me for a very small specific role. And I personally haven't worked in a team for over 10 years, just me and the voices in my head as a freelancer. But I do find it very interesting how it's evolved in who hires me and in the context that they hire me. Where previously when I came in in the early stages of my freelance career, I was sort of like the SEO guy, and everything SEO related I had to take that by the scruff of the neck for that client and do it. Whereas now, a lot of them have very detailed in-house capabilities. They have good editorial SEOs, for example, and they have good technical people who have some SEO knowledge. So when they engage with a freelancer like myself, it's a much more specific skillset and specific project that they need that they don't have or don't want to develop in-house. And for me, that shows how far the industry has already come and how far the specialties with the industry have already come. Especially in news where I work, you have people who are very, very good at, for example, the editorial side of SEO, optimizing articles and site structures. But the technical side is something that they probably don't need hardcore internal capabilities for when you can just once every year or two years get an outsider in to do a sanity check on your website. And that shows to me that they already have the defined roles. It's not enough to be an SEO anymore, you need to be a specific type of SEO. I think as your career progresses in SEO, again the concept of the T-shaped marketer, you even have a T-shape within the T-shape where it becomes a much more narrow T. When I started doing this, I'm old enough to remember when the job title was webmaster. I had that job title for a while and you did everything. You did email, you did social, you did SERPs, you did the whole thing. And then I picked one specialty, SEO, and now within SEO it became technical. And within there it's now news SEO. So I think that's where if you want your career to develop, you sort of have to hang your coat on a specific skillset and discipline. That doesn't mean that's always going to be your career because there's overlaps with other channels and other capabilities that you can develop. I mean, fortunately, search is not going to die anytime soon, no matter how often SEO has been proclaimed deceased. We're still alive and kicking and growing. But I think you sort have to find out what you like doing, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and say, "Right, let's go and try and make this work." Let's become a great analytical SEO or a great tech SEO or a great editorial SEO, and there will always be roles within those specialties that really work for you. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that within that space, there's always devs. No matter what kind of thing there's always devs. And when we're thinking about this, because I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is just me in my little silo, but I feel like devs are devs and they do deving. And so do you have to explain to them when you're having conversations with devs that are taking into account multichannel traffic, multichannel dependencies, for instance, are you finding that those conversations are changing that you need to give them more context about this is a landing page, not just for SEO, this is a landing page for somebody coming from TikTok or that sort of thing? Are you finding that you're having those conversations? Grace Frohlich: I'm finding that we have to explain to devs less of the importance of SEO, because I think more and more, at least clients, they have a foundational understanding of what it is. So because those clients are like the C-suite and the upper management, they give the devs, okay, these are your goals, your KPIs, and a lot of times they align with SEO KPIs. Carmen Dominguez: Yeah, I was going to say too. Yeah, actually when you asked that question, I was thinking when I said I haven't been in SEO as long as Barry has been, but I remember when I started and I started writing content for websites, it was an eternal fight, constantly, constantly fighting. And now most of the time when you talk to devs, they know that there are certain things that they cannot do. They know that there are SEO areas that they shouldn't take so personally when they get feedback on. And I actually, I'm enjoying very much working with devs recently. Once you are able to understand the basics, I think the key is being able to communicate what you're doing, the changes or what you need to do, and what's the point of a website. It's not just to be there. Once you explain that and you create relationship, because that's very important, I think it's particularly easy. Or I think I found, in recent times, it's easier to work with them. Crystal Carter: Okay. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I was going to second that because I started in 2009 with SEO and working with devs at that point. And I guess fair play on their side, they didn't really know the impact or the value, it wasn't part of their roadmap or KPIs or anything. So I learned from that point how to get to know them, I guess. It comes back to relationship building. And I guess, sounds a bit wishy-washy, but emotional intelligence, trying to figure out, okay, what really motivates you? Trying to figure out the body language. Oh, they didn't like that request. Or at the start of my career, I'd have to create a standards document literally on paper and grade their websites, brand new websites, so there's a website division of my first agency. And then I put it on their desk, and then so immediately they're being like, "Oh, yeah, cool." And then they're just like, whatever. And so you're immediately not their favorite person, and I have to find myself to ingratiate myself to them, go to the pub, whatever, I think, but also figure out, okay, how can I get my stuff signed off and kind of relate it all to them? And I think it's become way easier now with SEO integrations in CMSs, whatever. And also it's a bit more word from Google on what impacts what on the website. So it's way easier, but for me it's always been relationship building and figuring out what motivates them. Crystal Carter: Barry? Barry Adams: Yeah, I have a notorious example where I was presenting my findings in a Zoom call to a client and the lead dev was in the call as well, and he counted me on a specific point, and I was maybe lacking emotional intelligence in my response, and frankly, I was a bit of a dick. Anyway, the call went on and we went through the audit and then the CEO wanted to show me something, so he started sharing his screen. He didn't realize he had a Slack channel open where that lead dev had just messaged him saying, this guy is a dick. I actually still want that on a T-shirt. But he was fair, I was being a dick, but I was also right. But it also taught me something that if you want to get stuff done, don't be a dick. And I think in the past, and sometimes even now, I come across as maybe too forceful and too sure of myself, and sometimes we need to look at the context in which we make these recommendations. 'Cause I am an SEO guy with a big SEO hammer, so for me, everything looks like an SEO nail. But I've learned that there's a lot of other moving pieces in an organization that have very different goals, very different objectives, and you have to weigh these things up. And I think I've gotten better at providing the context of a recommendation where I say, "Well, this would be an ideal scenario for SEO, but it might hurt your commercials," or it might hurt usability, or it might have another impact on another aspect of the website. And I think if you frame recommendations or best practices in that context, you actually end up getting done more often than not, because they realize that you realize there's other stuff happening, but you still make that recommendation knowing that the other stuff is happening. So it's probably worthwhile doing the recommendation, whereas if you just say, "Oh, you need to get this shit done right now," that's just not going to fly. Crystal Carter: And question to the audience, are you finding that working with devs is... So green is easier and blue for not easier? Okay, that's probably like 90% easier. I'm finding that really interesting. There's someone in the audience who's like, "Mm-hmm." So yeah, I think that's really interesting. So yeah, I think that's really interesting. Let's go on to squad goals. So here's the scenario. You need to assemble a squad for a new project. You need to get your crew together. It might be people within your team, it might be freelancers, it might be a co-agency, it might be whoever that you're thinking of. What are the things that you're looking for in a new collaborator, and how do you know that this is the match for you? Is it swipe right or swipe left know? No, it's swipe left? Is that right? Sukhjinder Singh: Right? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't do them. Okay. So yeah, Sukh, can we start with you? How do you know that this is a good match, we can collaborate, this is going to be a good setup? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I'm actually doing this at the moment. So as a freelancer, I'm trying to build a network of people in other channels like I had with the agency setup, and I guess I'm doing my own EEAT evaluation of them. So I'm looking at all of their engagements, so not just on their website to say what they've done, but their recommendations on LinkedIn, see if they're legitimate, and then talking to them and looking at case studies, anything like that, and the work history. It's really revealing, so if they're listening to it... So trying to figure out, because as you know, even when hiring people on the agency side, it's really hard to drill down the people that have got real experience. So trying to do that evaluation and then chatting to them and then just starting with a small project. So something that I can get them to chip in on with a small amount of budget and see how they do. And for me, it's important to see the results, but also their personality and if I can work well with them, and if they're reasonable and flexible to a point. So that's how I do it. Carmen Dominguez: And the personality part for me is very important. Beyond the skills, there are lots of people who are very good skills, and that doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be working well with them. So for me, being aware of my own personality, I might be a little bit intense just to say, it's my Spanish blood. So when I have an idea, I want to go after the idea, but I know that I need to have someone who calms me down. So having someone that is the contrary of me in my team is going to be better for the project. So I look for that, I look for someone who's a doer because I'm a dreamer. So I want to do this, I want to do it now, everyone focused. I need someone who actually will do it, because then if I don't put the time in to do the thing, then it won't happen. So I need someone who is a realistic, someone who is a doer and someone who also has visibility of everything. So independently of the skill sets that everyone has, which is important, I also need to have all of this. But there are also core attitudes that are very important for me, which is honesty. I prefer someone to tell me, "You are a dickhead, Carmen." Ooh, sorry, I said that word, I realize. But I prefer someone who is honest to me than actually says, "Yes, yes, yes," and nothing comes across. And I judge people on actions and not words, so if someone delivers what they say they do and they tell me this is feasible or not, I'm definitely going to be working with them. So core attitudes and people who have different personalities is, for me, what makes a team work well. Crystal Carter: Amazing. Yeah, I think hiring for complimentary skills for the gaps that you have and also being aware of those gaps that you have gets really important. Carmen Dominguez: Which is actually not that common, doing this self-analysis of, okay, who am I? Because maybe I think I'm perfect, but not really. So being aware of the things that you are good at and you are not as good at, it's very important for you to build a good team. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I agree. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I agree with those points. I will also say if you're trying to build a team, going back to the football, well, soccer, soccer analogy, you don't want a team full of strikers. And also you don't want a team full of keepers like goalkeepers, so you want to diversify. So I would say choose people with different backgrounds. Don't underestimate the value of diversity when you're choosing a team, because they'll have different perspectives, they'll have different backgrounds, different ways of thinking. So that can only make your team stronger. Crystal Carter: And Barry? Barry Adams: I haven't worked in a team for a very long time, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think I enjoy that part of it. I've never been a real people person, to be highly honest. I do find the clients that I enjoy working with the most are the ones who, I don't know how to describe that common denominator, but they're all in one way or another, extremely good at their jobs and know exactly what they want from external parties. And I'm grateful that I get to be that external partner. I find it very educational, projects where I learn as much from the client as the client hopefully learns from me. And I think that's hard to select for, either somebody has that passion and is that good at their job or they're not. But there's clients who bring me along whenever they move jobs, they work with one publisher and then a few years later they move to a different publisher and they get to work with them again in a different context. But it's still just a really pleasant collaboration, because you get to know each other's ins and outs and know exactly what they're good at and how you can compliment their skillset. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah. That's awesome. And I have a question to the squad as well, or to the squad here. Also, if you're in the back, you can come in. There's spaces. There are spaces, it's totally fine. Please do come in. Yeah. So one of the things that we've been finding across our teams is that when we're thinking about these things, one of the things you mentioned, Sukh, was that sometimes when you're trying to hire, it's hard to tell which skills people have. Question to the audience. When you're thinking about either hiring or collaborating or whichever with folks, are you finding that AI, people using AI, is a help or a hindrance? Are you finding that people with AI profiles or you finding that people are having AI in their CVs? Are you finding that help is a help or hindrance? So green for help and blue for hindrance on that. Okay, we got a lot of blue. We're about 50/50 there, so that's very interesting. I think that that goes back to one of the points from Carmen that you'd rather know where somebody's limits are in terms of their skills for sure, rather than somebody faking it until they make it necessarily. We are tight on time, so I'm going to move to the next section, which kind of covers that, which is awkward conversations. So when you're working with partners, also the partners are also teams, Barry. So when you're working with partners, when you're working with clients, when you're working across your team, when you're working as part of a collaborative SEO venture, sometimes there's awkward conversations. Sometimes somebody takes credit for something that you're pretty sure was you, and I get a bit upset about that because I'm like, that's my gold star, thank you very much. Or sometimes you're working with a client and they say, "Hey, we want to bring in this other agency." And you're like, "Who are they?" I can see somebody shaking their head. So actually I saw a little bit of reaction to that, so another question to the audience. Okay, and so the client is on the phone with you and they say, "Hey, I like to get this other agency involved." And green for this is good, or blue for I don't know on that. Okay, that's mostly blue. Okay. One more second. This is George. So that's mostly blue. That's my gut instinct. My gut instinct is why, why do you need somebody else? But yeah, other people in the panel, how do you feel about these conversations when this happens? Sukhjinder Singh: I was trying to think of a good example because yeah, it's difficult. I guess early on in the career, I struggled to figure out how to... I used data basically to say, "Oh, but you can see by the last report like, oh, we're hitting your KPIs," or this, that and the other. And if we're not, I'm like, "Boss, what could we do about this kind of thing?" And then obviously I've learned to look at, so basically always using the KPIs as the goal in the reports and trying to develop that customer relationship where I can tell ahead of time, hopefully, if they're thinking of doing that. And I've been in that situation early in my career a few times where it came down to them deciding between us and the other agency based on maybe trivial things as well. Like, price, obviously not trivial, but other things like, oh, the last two reports had an error on it or something like that. And so I'd always try to plan from that point in advance to say, okay, I'm not going to make any mistakes. And I make sure all the communications are on point and even look out for cues like, oh, you're not happy with this and that, or something bad happened a few times in a row, maybe they're going to look at another agency. And obviously if an email pops up on Google Analytics or something, as a user I always think, oh crap, someone's doing an audit or something. So I try and future-proof that, but if I was confronted with that combo, I'd kind of fall back on the data, but also hopefully use the relationship that we'd built up by that point to say, "Look, what's going on?" I'll be completely honest with you, if you could be honest with me. This didn't go too well. This went okay. Here's our actual strengths and weaknesses. And I learned that from my old boss as well, Ann Stanley, where she was really honest with people to say, oh, this is what we're good at and bad at. And they appreciated that and say, oh, actually we'll stick with you, going back to your point, Carmen, on honesty, like, oh, we actually trust these guys. So maybe they can help us find a good PR person or whatever, 'cause they've got that gap in the team at the moment. So a bit of a long answer on that one. Crystal Carter: No, no. Carmen Dominguez: No, actually, I was going to just... I agree with you 100%. And having been in the client side, so having been a client myself and now working in agency, one of the things that I see as a negative when I see in an agency is when someone try to bullshit me. If you are trying to bullshit me with whatever, I'm going to say another bad word, crap, then the trust is broken. So I think for me, the most important part when building relationship is being able to have the hard conversations at the very beginning. If you don't have the hard conversations, trust breaks. And if trust breaks, you're going to have a competitor coming in. And that is actually your own fault. Sorry for being scared. And I know that it takes guts to be able to have the hard conversations because it's scary, if you are a freelancer particularly, you might even lose the food on your plate. But it's building that relationship, in my opinion, will actually will make your clients defend you, even if you are not meeting the KPI. So always building relationships with trust, even if things go wrong, I think is a way. Because in the end, we're all humans, and if we get attached to people that are honest to us and we are honest to them, then they're going to defend us more. So in the end, it's having a good relationship with people and being human I think is... I don't get scared when they bring other people, even being honest, of course. But yeah, I think that's my recommendation. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Interesting. Grace Frohlich: I think my knee-jerk reaction is why would they bring in someone? Crystal Carter: Right. Grace Frohlich: But at the same time, if you think about it, it's really the client's right to have a second opinion. We do it all the time with doctors, for example, if you want a second opinion from another doctor because your health is on the line. This client's website health is on the line, so yeah, it's their right to bring in a second opinion. So in that sense, I think I'm more okay with it, especially if that other agency proves my point. So it's more of an opportunity to do that. Sukhjinder Singh: That's a good feeling as well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Barry Adams: I had this exact thing actually happen to me where I was brought in to do a specific piece of work for a client and they told me, "Oh, there's another agency who's also doing the exact same piece of work, so no pressure, Barry." And I was a little bit, like this was a fairly big, well-known agency, and I'm just a freelancer sitting in a dinky office in Belfast. So I was feeling the pressure and I felt a bit like, oh crap, I really need to be on my A-game here. But that actually motivated me to do a really, really good job, which I hope I would've done anyway, to be entirely honest. And it turned out that what that other agency presented and what I presented had slightly different angles and complimented each other really, really well, and gave the client the whole holistic view that they were looking for. So that turned out to be a fantastic project for the client as well as for both the other agency and for me. So yeah, I mean, I suck at awkward conversations in general. I think most of us don't like those. I fully agree with what's said before, honesty is always the best approach there as well. And just try not to shy away from saying the hard things that sometimes need to be said. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's easier said than done, but definitely something to think about. Okay, so we're going to move on to another section. In the podcast we sometimes have a fun game I like to play, Fun with People Also Ask. So we can do this with everyone on the audience and also everyone on the panel as well. So this is the first question from People Also Ask, so green for yes and blue for no. Do social links help SEO? We have mostly green. I have some blue. And Google keeps going back and forth being like, oh, it's not a big deal. Yes, it is a big deal. Oh, you're flipping around. Any opinions on this? Barry Adams: Yeah, correlation, not causation. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Anyone else, any two cents on that particular one? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I'm going to go with the indirectly for the safe bet. I think, okay, long spiel, the visibility of the content and all that. Yeah, the more people see your content, they give you legit links and all that. So, yeah. Crystal Carter: So kind of sort of. Okay. All right. Okay. Here's another one in the same sort of thing. So green for yes, and blue for no. Is social media marketing off-page SEO? It's in the same sort of area. Would you call it the same? People are like, I don't know about this question at all. I've got a lot of blue, there's absolutely no... Interesting. Very, very interesting. Any opinions on that? It's a similar question to the one before, if I'm completely honest. No? Okay. We'll move on. We'll move on. We'll move on. Okay. Okay. People also ask, which is harder, SEO or PPC? So I'm going to go... Oh, we have intakes of breath from the audience here. Okay, so we have green for SEO and blue for PPC. Oh. Carmen Dominguez: I think we're biased. Crystal Carter: We're biased. Let's look- Grace Frohlich: I mean, this looks like a biased audience, right? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. That's fine. Barry Adams: I actually think advertising is harder than SEO nowadays. Carmen Dominguez: Really? Crystal Carter: What? Barry Adams: I really do think that. Carmen Dominguez: But AI does everything for you in PPC. So... Barry Adams: AI could do everything for you in SEO. Carmen Dominguez: Well, that's true. That's true for an answer. Barry Adams: Yeah. Not in the same end result, everything being quite... Yeah. Carmen Dominguez: Yeah, it's true, it's true. Barry Adams: I think- Crystal Carter: Barry, read the room. Barry Adams: Yeah, I know I'm at BrightonSEO and I'm an SEO guy, but the paid advertising landscape nowadays, I mean, my goodness, the technology stacks and the targeting. I mean, I'm not an ad guy, but I talk to ad people, I'm like, I really don't want that job. I really don't want that job. But they spend more money every year and they get less and less back for it. Whereas with SEO, I think we're still on a growth curve. With advertising, the margins are narrower and narrower and narrower, and it's becoming really, really hard to have success in advertising. Carmen Dominguez: I think there is more pressure as well in PPC. You need to be reporting on a weekly basis. You need to be checking all the data constantly. But I also think that there are lots of people applying the same rules to SEO and PPC these days. So the pressure is coming. It really depends how you look at it. If you do SEO properly, I think it's more difficult, but a little bit chiller, less pressure. Depends. Crystal Carter: Okay. And just to say these are all actual People Also Ask questions, so yeah. Okay. So this is just a little shout-out to the grammatical incorrections, I did it myself, to the grammar that you see in People Also Ask. Is digital PR a SEO? So green for yes, and a blue for no. I got a lot of green. And I would probably say that's like 75-ish with my ballpark sort of thing. I find digital PR really fascinating. There's some really interesting campaigns. I think though it's kind of just campaign marketing, if I'm completely honest. I think it covers the same. Do other people have various- Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, it's definitely, it's its own beast. Because I used to partner with a colleague that did pure content and PR, digital PR, and she was really good at it because there's so many aspects of it. The journalist relationship, knowing what stuff they need in a brief and all that. Finding the story and that loads of data. And just from doing ideation sessions with her and other elements of the team just for ideas out there, she'd be able to structure a story and find it way easier. And so there was a lot of upskilling involved on my part to figure out, okay, how can I build links like this? And it was just a case of, well, to what Barry said before that, know what your strengths are and specialize in that and recognize it in other people. And so that's why I'm trying to partner with digital PRs as well to fill that link building gap. Carmen Dominguez: I mean, I was a digital PR and we did everything with SEO in our heads. So I will say yes, because we were using the SEO strategy to follow and create the links. Obviously, it's beyond just simple SEO, it also depends on how you see SEO. I see digital PR as part of organic and SEO is part of organic, so it depends on your definition of SEO. But I will say it is. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Cool. Okay, so we're moving on to the next one. This is specifically for the live podcast session. This is the one that I like. This is a section. These are again, actual predictive text from Google, and this one is for the predictive text for Can You Learn SEO, which is can you learn SEO by yourself? I know a lot of people... I've got somebody up already. So from the audience, green for yes, blue for no. Very interesting. So that's lots and lots of green. I've got a little bit of no, or a little bit of blue, so I'd probably say that's probably 90-ish percent saying yes. And I think this is interesting. So Barry, you're close to the microphone, so I'm going to come to you. What are the advantages or disadvantages of being a self-taught SEO? Barry Adams: As a self-taught SEO and one who teaches SEO now, I wish there were courses in SEO when I first learned it. The best learning environment that I learned as a self thought SEO was become part of an SEO community where you could ask questions, where there was no stupid questions basically, where you could just ask anything. That for me was a real breakthrough moment when I think I really embraced SEO and really started to learn it. So self-taught, yes, but still self-taught within a community. I think you will need to have people around you to ask these questions. I don't think there's such a thing as a completely self-taught SEO, 'cause you always learn from other people who are willing to share information, answer your questions. And I think if you're an experienced SEO, you should see it as maybe part of your remit to pass that on to others and be generous with your time and your knowledge and allow people to ask those questions, 'cause realistically that's how you learned it as well. Carmen Dominguez: I was going to say I learned by myself, but really it wasn't by myself because I went to the internet, I asked people. I tested things on my own, and I put the results on forums that people replied to me. So really, is it? Yeah, I didn't have a teacher and I didn't learn at university, but I had a whole community, which I think is one of the most beautiful things of the SEO industry is the community that we have. So you can, but it's not on your own. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, the community is great now, because when I started there wasn't really much of that. And also no SEO courses, at university anyway, so I'd have to do a couple of smaller courses. And then mostly learnt in the agency environment. And also, funnily, I was talking to a colleague of mine who didn't go to uni, and we both worked at the first agency I did in 2010. And straight out of college, he just got an internship and doing SEO, and now he's head of a big department and he's doing really well. Didn't have to pay any of his uni fees and all that stuff, and so he saved with all of that, and he just learned on the job. Pretty much what I did, 'cause I did a web design course and I quit web design to do SEO. And I just thought that's a perfect example of being able to learn in that environment as an internship, or if someone just gives you a chance and you just slowly build up your salary according to how much you learn kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I don't know if you wanted to jump in on that one. No? That's fine. That's fine. Okay. Okay. Okay. Next one. Next one. Next one. Okay. So the next one, this I thought was interesting. So if you type in, what is SEO in, you get a lot of different things. So it's like what is SEO in marketing? What is SEO in business? What is SEO in YouTube? What is SEO in web development? What is SEO in social media? What is SEO in journalism? What is SEO in Etsy? Okay. So my question is is that, do you find that SEO is different in these different spaces, or do you think SEO is SEO? So green for SEO is SEO, and blue for SEO is different in these different spaces. Interesting. Okay. So we have probably 70% people saying that SEO is different in all these different spaces. I think that's really interesting. And I think to the panel, my question is, do you think that clients understand that there are differences in these spaces? Carmen Dominguez: Clients don't understand SEO. So let alone in all the different channels. The amount of times I have to five, because I cannot get them to rank number one in one week is just mental. So no, I don't think they understand the difference, but I also think SEO is SEO. So the point is, you get your content to be visible to users and users engaged with it and that applies to Chat, to YouTube, to Google, to TikTok, to whatever you do. So I think SEO is always the same, but it's done in different ways. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, I was thinking about it in terms of the definition of SEO versus an SEO job spec and to see if there's any correlation. And nine times out of 10, because I was looking at job specs, I was like, oh, there's way more things people are asking for versus what you would define as SEO typically. Which is weird because I've always had a problem with SEO as a term, because I thought, well, is it more like organic marketing? But then you can't say organic marketing 'cause then clients aren't aware really what that is, and they think, oh, I'm just going to go with the SEO. So yeah, I think it's something that we're stuck with in terms of a term for lead generation, whatever. But really I think it's way more than what you define as SEO. Grace Frohlich: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. If we're talking about semantics, SEO is just search engines for search engines, right? But as you said, are we talking about organic search or just organic anything? Then yeah, I mean, I think it can be diversified into all these different spaces. Carmen Dominguez: Actually, I'm talking to more about that if anyone wants to come to my talk. It's no SEO. Let's talk about organic. So, self-promotion. Crystal Carter: Carmen, when's your talk? Carmen Dominguez: When? At 3:00. Crystal Carter: Three o'clock, go see Carmen. Carmen Dominguez: I think. Auditorium one. Just find me, I'm the only Carmen, I think. Crystal Carter: Barry, Is SEO, SEO or is SEO different? Barry Adams: I think I agree with what Carmen said earlier. It's still SEO, but the tactics are different. When I do SEO for news websites, you cannot apply the same tactics as you do for e-commerce. But in the end, it is about getting your content in front of an audience that uses an organic search engine. So, yeah. Crystal Carter: Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Finally, we have another section. So I looked up digital marketers needs and Google changed it to digital marketing needs. And it said, digital marketing needs coding, digital marketing needs a degree, digital marketing needs math, digital marketing needs a laptop, which I thought was interesting. Does digital marketing need a degree? And I think this is interesting, 'cause I've heard people say that you cannot be a technical SEO or you can't be an SEO if you don't know HTML or you don't know how to code. I've heard people say you can't be a marketer without a degree, I've heard people say that sort of thing. And so I'm interested in this idea of gatekeeping. So here's a question to the audience and the last question of the day before... And thank you so much for joining us for this session. Do you think there is one way to be a digital marketer? Green for yes and blue for no. That is 100% no. People listening on the internet, there are many ways to become a digital marketer. I have an English literature degree and I've worked in marketing my entire life. And I know somebody else who's a fantastic SEO and his degree is in anthropology. He's amazing. So I think that there's many, many ways to be an SEO, a digital marketer. What are your thoughts on that? Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah, my degree was in multimedia computing, so it didn't really specialize in anything. A bit of coding, a bit of 3D, whatever. And then I did web design for four years and then quit, and then there was a credit crunch, and then I changed careers. I thought, let me try something different, no jobs anymore. So yeah, I think... What was I going to say? Yeah, I lost my train of thought. Yeah, learning from scratch. And yeah, I just found my way to SEO. I completely lost my train of thought. Crystal Carter: It's all good. It's all good. Sukhjinder Singh: It's almost finished as well. Crystal Carter: Took a new journey. Carmen Dominguez: I think that I know where you're trying to go. Myself, I am a translator. I'd never studied marketing. I didn't know what marketing was when I got into it, but I knew that what I needed to do is someone to read my content. So I needed, as a translator, I needed someone to read my content. As a journalist, you need someone to read your content. So in the end, that is what you want to do as a digital marketer. You need to convince your user to read your contents, basically. Yes, there is one way to be a digital marketer, which is making sure that you engage with the user and the user comes to you. How do you do that? There are a thousand of other ways to do it, but the clarity is what the purpose of digital marketing, and I think it's always the same. Get your users to come to you. And I guess it doesn't matter where you come from, you can come from computing, you can come from, I don't know, cleaning windows, so long as you know that you need to get your user, you are a digital marketer. Sukhjinder Singh: Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to add to that. Yeah, I fell into it from designing websites, and I wanted to know what the websites can do after you produce them, and then also from necessity as well. And I thought, okay, there's a whole different new career that's blowing up. And a few of my mates were doing it outside of uni who did do elements of SEO in their courses. And I thought, let me just try that out. But it's definitely led on from web design and necessity just for me. Grace Frohlich: Yeah, I used to work in fashion in New York, so completely different industry. I did that for about 10 years, and then I just switched one day. I was like, I want to do something else. And here I am. So I know, exactly, marketers can come from anywhere really. I'm reminded of Ratatouille. Anyway, yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, agreed. Barry Adams: And this is the point where I admit I don't have a degree. I never finished uni. I started working at a call center two years after I started uni and decided that learning that was not for me, was way too hard. Became an IT guy, server management, and somehow found myself managing a server farm that had intranet pages on it. And then because I hacked together my own website, in my spare time, I knew a bit of HTML. My boss asked me, "Can you change what's on the web servers?" And that's how the whole ball just started rolling basically. And I think in the podcast we did a while ago with SERP's Up where we talked about how people get into a career in digital and in SERPs, we discussed this as well. No matter what your skillset is, what your passion is, there is a role for you in digital and in SERPs. If you're analytical, great. If you're not, but you're very creative, great. If you just like writing stuff, great. If you're a total tech nerd, great. There's always a job role that really suits your skillset and that can really give you fulfillment and achievement within your career. So yeah, it doesn't matter where you come from, it's what you do with it really. Crystal Carter: Yes. And on that motivational note, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today for this episode of SERP's Up. Thank you so much for taking part in my little paddle board thing. I really love seeing all the little cards. Have a wonderful, fantastic rest of BrightonSEO. And bonsoir, goodbye. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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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