Back Developers SEO checklist Follow this checklist of development best practices to help websites perform in organic search. 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 asset to: Identify and fix SEO errors Kickstart SEO research for improvements Improve user experience Optimize site performance Evolved Search Search and social agency LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Evolved is an audience-first, search and social agency founded in 2014 with the mission to create and drive an agency that is genuinely different and acts as a positive force for their people, clients, and industry. More about this topic Read this post on how to get technical SEO recommendations implemented 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

Back Podcast planning template From guest scheduling to SEO, keep everything that goes into publishing a podcast on track with this template. 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 template to: Organize everything that goes into publishing a podcast episode Keep track of guest scheduling Keep track of creative asset creation Organize your episode distribution process Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Brand, Wix LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram In addition to leading SEO branding at Wix, Mordy Oberstein serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy authored the Wix SEO Guide , and is a well-known industry speaker and webinar host . Catch him chatting all things SEO on Wix’s podcast SERP’s Up , as well as Edge of the Web. More about this topic Read this post on podcast optimization from 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

SEO agency uses Wix to boost client sales by 88% “For an SEO team, the best part about working on Wix is that you don’t have to waste time fixing technical SEO issues. It means you’ve got more freedom to focus on the work you actually love to do.” 100% Increase in organic traffic 1,800 Keywords ranked 88% Uplift in revenue from organic traffic ReGo isn’t the kind of agency to turn down an SEO challenge. So when a client came to them with a big ask, they jumped at the opportunity to flex their search marketing skills. They learned something priceless in the process: when your web creation platform is designed with SEO in mind, you can focus your time and talents where it promises the most ROI for clients—and your agency. The business Based in Israel, ReGo is a digital marketing agency that focuses predominantly on SEO. Headed up by CEO Idan Ben Or, their team is made up of 25 marketing professionals, including SEO team leads, project managers, and content writers. In 2021, ReGo took on a new client called Sipil —a boutique alcohol business in Tel Aviv with both a brick-and-mortar business and an eCommerce website. They had their mind set on moving their site to Wix for two reasons: 1) They wanted a more intuitive website building platform and 2) They wanted to save on high developer costs. The SEO challenge When Sipil came to ReGo, they were distraught over a massive loss in website traffic. The boutique liquor store previously boasted an enormous inventory of alcohol products (you name it, they had it), but recently the business had made the strategic decision to scale back their offering and focus solely on selling luxury liquors. This led them to delete 90% of their website’s product pages, which in turn caused an alarming decline in website traffic—a key source of revenue the business relied on. While the liquor store realized the magnitude of their mistake SEO wise, they stood by the business decision to specialize exclusively in high-end products. What they wanted was ReGo’s help to revive their website traffic. Specifically, the client’s goal was to start ranking for keywords that would actually convert into sales. The solution It was ReGo’s first time using Wix as a web creation platform and it proved to be the ideal solution for the agency’s needs—intuitive, flexible, and built with SEO in mind. “We found it very comfortable and intuitive to work within the Wix platform,” confirms project manager Jenya Sinay. “As opposed to open CMSs, we didn't need to work with a developer, which also meant we didn't have to worry about maintenance or things breaking after the developer finished their work.” He goes on to explain that the first step his SEO team took was to perform thorough keyword research for the alcohol boutique. “ Our client already knew the keywords they wanted to rank for; they had basically told us ‘I know that these keywords will make me money.’ But that’s where we came in and said ‘Okay that’s great, but we can offer some other very similar keywords that can help bring you in more traffic with the same intent.” With the new keyword strategy approved by their client, ReGo’s team began the process of performing a technical SEO audit of the newly built website. With a checklist hundreds of items long, Jenya decided to reach out to the Wix customer support team for guidance. “We had a super beneficial meeting with the Wix team who showed us how to do everything on our checklist step-by-step. So before we even started we understood all the Wix SEO tools. We got such detailed guidance, it was incredibly helpful.” When it came to performing the audit, ReGo were delighted to find they wouldn’t have to spend any time optimizing the site’s performance. “We actually didn’t need to do anything at all related to site speed,” Jenya reveals. “We run sites on other platforms, and in comparison, Wix is among the best 10% of sites we’ve ever worked with. We had less CLS and LCP speed issues. For example, on other platforms we would find that things were broken or images weren’t being compressed properly. We didn’t have to touch any of that with Wix.” Based on the findings of their technical SEO audit, ReGo created the following action plan to optimize Sipil’s online store: Map the product pages that were deleted Create relevant pages based on new keyword research Optimize existing content and header hierarchy Divide up existing content into separate pages and include more keywords Build internal links between the site pages Fix all orphan pages Improve the 404 pages Update all meta titles and descriptions Create SEO-based content for the category pages and blog The agency completed their plan of action in record time. They found the Wix SEO Setup Checklist particularly helpful for updating the site’s meta titles and descriptions, while the Wix URL Redirect Manager made it super efficient for them to make bulk 301 redirects. The stability of the platform is one of the things that Jenya’s team loved most about working on Wix. It meant they could allocate their time towards growth-oriented SEO tasks, rather than time consuming site fixes. “There were no canonical issues, no broken parts on the website that we needed to fix. When we work with open CMSs, a large share of our time is spent working with developers to fix things that shouldn’t have broken in the first place, like plugin updates that mess up everything. With Wix, once we finished what we needed to do technically, we didn’t need to touch this area again and that meant we had more time to spend on the tasks that we enjoy—the tasks that have the most impact for clients.” The results Thanks to the stellar SEO work that ReGo performed on Wix, Sipil succeeded in increasing its organic traffic by 100% in three months. In spite of the fact that Sipil removed 90% of their product pages, their website now ranks for 1,800 keywords, and for the first time ever, the alcohol boutique boasts several featured snippets. As a result, they've grown their revenue from organic traffic by a whopping 88%. As for client satisfaction? ReGo has gained a customer for life. “From now on, we’ll be working on Wix as much as we can, that’s for sure,” says Jenya. “We’ve already started some new client projects we’re very excited about.” Discover how advanced SEO features on Wix give you the ability to work smarter and faster for your clients and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts. 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

Can your PPC campaigns actually help drive your SEO efforts? Can SEO and PPC share intelligence and data? How does quality content for SEO factor into PPC and how do you manage conflicts between the two disciplines? Join guest host, Greg Finn, Co-founder of Cypress North along Wix’s own, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, as they share insights into how your PPC efforts can help drive SEO success on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO podcast. Back SEO & PPC: With our powers combined... Can your PPC campaigns actually help drive your SEO efforts? Can SEO and PPC share intelligence and data? How does quality content for SEO factor into PPC and how do you manage conflicts between the two disciplines? Join guest host, Greg Finn, Co-founder of Cypress North along Wix’s own, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, as they share insights into how your PPC efforts can help drive SEO success on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 34 | April 19, 2023 | 38 MIN 00:00 / 37:46 This week’s guests Greg Finn Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides digital marketing and web development. He is a co-host of Marketing O'Clock and has been in the digital marketing industry for nearly 20 years. 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 branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastically, hey, it's SEO, it's PPC, it's all good, head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hi. Thank you for joining us today on the SERP's Up Podcast. It is a perfect day for a podcast. The weather is fine, the water is nice. Welcome. Join us. Mordy Oberstein: Did ChatGPT write that for you? It's a little poem. Like write up poem for the podcast? Crystal Carter: No, not precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, did I insult you then? Crystal Carter: Not quite. ChatGPT definitely has better spelling than I do. Mordy Oberstein: Lily Ray went on on Twitter talking about how she is going to, fashion recommendations from ChatGPT and how it was all messed up. So I replied back, "Which should be more reliable for fashion recommendations, ChatGPT or me?" To which John Mueller replied back, "This is the case for AI." Okay. Well the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Surprised you there, right? Where you can use Wix's AI to help you get the max out of Facebook and Instagram ads. Drive your business forward with Facebook ads. With Wix, boost sales, generate leads and drive traffic to your site with paid Facebook at Instagram campaigns powered by Wix's smart algorithm. By the way, I literally read that from a landing page. I had literally no idea that existed until I was planning this episode out. I am ashamed. There is so much about Wix I don't know about, but I have a problem with PPC that the second you mention it I black out. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of things to think about and it's also changing a lot. So I did a lot of PPC about a year ago. It is almost completely changed in that time. But there's still a lot of things that overlap and they're used, to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we're going to be talking about today. What a coincidence. We're talking about Facebook ads because, well, not because I don't have any clue about PPC anymore. I used to actually manage PPC campaigns, but believe it or not, back in the day. But as you mentioned, everything's changed and I am out. We're talking about it because we're talking about SEO and PPC campaigns. They can coexist, I think. Can SEO PPC share intelligence and data? How does quality content for SEO factor into PPC? And how do you manage conflicts between the two disciplines? You ignore the PPC, you go with the SEO. Problem solved. Done. Just kidding. And to help us navigate this wild and weird world of PPC, we have a very, very special guest for you. He's the CMO and partner over at Cypress North, the host of one of the best, if not the best digital marketing podcasts out there, an all around sweet fellow, a wearer of flannel, the one the only the only Greg Finn, is going to join us in just a bit. We'll also dive into how different search engines handle ads on their search in different ways. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Ready, set, click. Click again and again. Oh my God, we're a click bot. Episode number 34 of the SERP's UP Podcast is bidding for your attention. Crystal Carter: Yes, it is. Yes it is. So yeah, today we're going to be talking about SEO for PPC campaigns. This is something that I've spoken a little bit about at an event called PPC Live, which is a great event if you're looking to learn more about PPC in London. And essentially, one of the reasons why I think it's really interesting is they really often go together for a lot of different websites. It tends to be a sort of go-to add-on if you're doing activity. And one of the reasons why it's useful, from my perspective, is because it can provide you a little bit of control with regards to visibility. So your PPC can sometimes give... The rules of engagement are very, very clear. You put in the money, you get some visibility. With regards to it, with regards to SEO, we can be a little bit more complex. It can be a few more wheels within wheels to move. So it's something that can be useful while you're building up your brand, it can be something to help you shape it. But I'm sure we'll get into it a bit more with Greg, who will talk to us more about how you can add in PPC campaigns and how you can include PPC more and what you do. Mordy Oberstein: So because I again, check out on everything PPC and because he is an all around great guy, Anna, aware of Flannel and C M O and co-founder, you got the co-founder part right, of Cyprus North. Please welcome, put your hands together for the host of the Marketing O'Clock Podcast, one of the best digital your marketing podcasts out there that you should be listening to after you finish this one. Welcome, Greg Finn. Greg Finn : Wow. Thanks for the margarita here. I'm going to be catching a wave here on SERP's Up. Really happy to be here, y'all. Love the podcast. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. The feeling is absolutely mutual. It's fantastic. Thank you for joining us. Greg Finn : And I'll make sure I don't black out on these margaritas. But I can make Mordy black out. PPC, PPC, PPC. Mordy Oberstein: What would happen? It's like Old School. You ever see that movie with Will Ferrell, the Bass, James Carville, and he said the most intelligent things and then he wakes up, he was like, "What happened?" He has no idea he said anything intelligent. That's how I feel. But it's true. I used to manage PBC campaigns. It was kind of like, I'll throw a word at you, a broad match modifier, huh? Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: See? I know the PPC. Greg Finn : If you have Microsoft advertising campaigns, they just turned it a broad match last week, so be careful. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. This is it. And I'm interested to hear you talking about Bing, jumping straight in with the Bing Microsoft advertising suite because I'm guessing a lot of people are going to be more interested in that, now that we have new Bing, Bing 2.17. Greg Finn : Yeah. And actually, Microsoft advertising is a really great tool obviously for people that do PPC. But it's also got kind of a really unique currently, I guess, elements that you can leverage that Google doesn't at the moment, where you can see all of your search query data. And when you're doing SEO and when you're putting things together, it's great to see those trends and the volume that's out there. But obviously, that is all kind of well and good and Google Trends, Keyword Planner, whatever tool of your choice is great, but Google sort of limits what actually comes through in those keywords. But Microsoft advertising doesn't. So you can see your full suite of keywords that you're showing for what works, not only hypothetically what that volume looks like, but what's actually converting. And then pick and choose some of those good ones for your SEO campaigns. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's one of the greatest things about doing a PPC SEO combo is that you can use lots of different data sets. So if you know more about, if you have good SEO keyword research, good PPC research, you can sort of pick and choose which one would be best for a PPC campaign, which would be best for a more different funnel approach, for instance, that you might take for an SEO. And yeah, you can compare different tools because again, you say you get different data from Microsoft and you get different data from Google. You also get different data from the teams behind the paid campaigns and the teams behind the search campaigns. So the team behind the page campaigns will call you all the time, asking you to get involved, whereas it can be the other way when you're on search for instance. Greg Finn : Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I'm assuming from the search you're talking about like SEO specifically. Absolutely. And there's also quite a bit of insight that you can get from, whether it be Google Ads or Microsoft advertising. And so what even some of the search engines think about your content, whether you have something like a dynamic search ad where you just put out a certain section of your website, an entire website, and you kind of see what Google, in this case, would say, or Microsoft, always got to include them, especially now, what kind of terms they're matching for and what they think your page is about. Sometimes that's just a good temperature check to be like, yep, a search engine really does think that this page is what I thought it was about, or maybe you start pulling on some different model numbers or things like that, that you know might want to work in the copy more and things of that nature. And then even on the shopping side, the feed, that's sort of a gray area sometimes. So where the feed, if you're retail, if that sits under the ads team or an organic team let's say. And there's no better way to see what a search engine thinks about your products than by looking at those search query reports for your product data. You don't have terms that you put in, you just put the feed up and see what happens. And that's again, a great way to see what a search engine thinks about it and how you can modify that to try to drive more of the free listings and the paid. So there's a ton of data in each one of these platforms that can help you in obviously, the platforms themselves and in your SEO. Mordy Oberstein: And you're going to have to work together at some point inevitably because if, for example, I've seen a bunch of cases like this... By the way, parenthetically, I want to just point out historically speaking, the keyword research data we as SEOs have had comes from the ads side of Google. Keyword Planner is a Google Ads tool, it's not a SEO tool. I mean we use it as a SEO tool. Essentially, it's a paid search tool. But anyway, you're going to definitely have to work together. I've seen cases where sites are bidding on their own branded terms and they're killing their organic rankings by pushing the organic URL down the page below the fold in some cases because they're bidding on themselves. You mentioned Google Merchant. You're going to have to figure out where to work together, where either the PPC side is impacting organic or organic isn't going the way you thought it would go and maybe now you need to pay to play. Greg Finn : Yeah, especially now as well with some of the new products that are rolling out. The biggest one is Performance Max, where it's devoid of data. The data exists, you just can't get it and you don't get to tell it where to bid. So there's a new feature where you can stop bidding on your own brand, but at the same time, if you are just putting your website out there and Google thinks that it can make a sale on a competitor's term or a competitor now is showing up for you where they didn't mean to before, you might see a drop in organic traffic because they didn't mean to. They just said, Performance Max, I'm going to fire this up. And then all of a sudden SERP's Up is outranking Marketing O'Clock because you are running ads you didn't even know on that. So I think that's one of the things that really could hinder some organic performance is the fact that you may not have had people showing up for your brand. People might not be meaning to advertise for your brand, but now there they are above their organic results. And as we've seen with Favicons coming through and site names and all that, ads typically don't look less organic results with each one of these changes that Google puts out. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're going to talk more about that later by the way, because on the Bing side, it's bonkers. But anyway, I think that's where sometimes you run into a problem though. People look at it like, I'm on the SEO team, you're on the PPC team, but I will tell you, your CMO or your growth manager does not look at it like that. They see the website and they see the sales and they see the revenue. And I think sometimes we think there's a conflicting mindset between SEO and PPC. But I think there's a lot of overlap that we don't focus on enough. Wondering what your experience is with that as somebody who's sort of straddling both of these worlds at the same time? Greg Finn : Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the goal is to get business from a search engine and to get it as profitably as you can. That's everybody's goal. And in many cases where you have those good organic rankings, you can use that, have teams work together and bid more conservatively for some of those paid plans that you've got going on. And then the nice thing is that SEOs should love is that if there's a problem or you're struggling with ranking on specific terms, that's where paid can come in and really help each other out. I don't see it as a competitive aspect whatsoever. More so. How can we together get to the goal that we're looking to get to. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've absolutely seen this before, particularly if there was an algorithm adjustment that maybe caught you by surprise. Sometimes paid can swoop in and help out with that. I've seen that happen before. But also it can be useful to give you intelligence on maybe why a page isn't performing the way you might expect it to. Because sometimes you put it through Google Ads and Google Ads gives you some feedback. They're like, actually this page has a low relevance score, or actually, this page is showing up for searches that aren't relevant. So maybe you should have another look at some of those keywords that it's showing up for when we read it with our machine learning tools. Also, sometimes it's a case where it might pull up certain parts of the page as being more important than other parts of the page, like when it's doing creating ads. So that can be useful as well. I'd be interested to talk to you about machine learning and PPC. One of the things I find interesting is that SEOs seem a little bit surprised sometimes when Google gets more involved with the sort of machine learning and more maybe is changing around title tags and changing around different things like that. And I know that that's something that they've been doing in PPC a lot. I don't know how you feel about the machine learning that's come into PPC. Mordy Oberstein: Get off my lawn. Greg Finn : The machine learning from something like ChatGPT and what we see with some of these auto applied recommendations and recommendation scores are light year's difference. A lot of what is kind of now really baked into the platforms really benefits the ad platforms. If you were just to say like, "We've got these recommendations, we're going to auto apply them," for the most part, those will really tank your performance. I think the big thing is now with APIs for something like ChatGPT, how can that be used to be able to say, let's help build these responsive search ads or let's go out there, can we make some sort of image. If we upload a basic picture, can we turn it into something majestic and turn it into a DSA or something like that? So I think that's really the exciting part. Now that there are more APIs coming out, you're never going to have something do it for you, but just to be able to refresh, hit things and be able to get you 70% of the way there or at least get started is really an exciting thought. Mordy Oberstein: While we still have you, I want to make sure we touch on one more topic a little bit more in depth. We just talked about content algorithms and one of the things that I love focusing on is the quality of a page. Literally, I'm looking at my screen, I'm diving into the product review update and what pages are doing way back, I'm going to the way back machine and saying what were they doing before the update and now during the update and what happened historically with the page and what does it mean for content quality? Does what content quality means for me as an SEO mean the same thing for you as someone on the PPC side? Greg Finn : No, it doesn't. So I would say that on the PPC side- Mordy Oberstein: You're saying you don't need quality content? Greg Finn : No, you do, but it's more important to really be relevant. You need to hit the right person with the right message, sending them to the right place at the right time. So for a lot of times, that might be something where on the SEO side you might build something like a skyscraper type style hub that's got everything going on. Mordy Oberstein: Whoa, whoa. What kind of person do you think I am? Greg Finn : And on the PPC side, you might match those terms up a little bit more because people might not know you. They're looking, you don't want to keep that scent trail high there. So you match whatever query is in the ad and an ad group and you send them to a landing page that talks about that specifically and then you spin up a secondary landing page for a variation of those terms so that you have a good quality score. So I think you still want to have quality, but it's less EEAT, or however many Es y'all have right now, and it's a little bit more about really hitting relevancy on the nose on it. Crystal Carter: And I think a lot of your targeting will affect whether or not you have something that's of quality to the person that clicks on it, so that you said the right person at the right time. The targeting that you set up to make sure that you are sending them to the right information at the right time is going to help you a lot there. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, we talked about this in the previous episode of the podcast, would you recommend having separate pages for your SEO and PPC campaigns? So no indexing for example, the page you're using for your PPC and doing your own, one thing on the SEO side and one thing on the PPC side? Greg Finn : Let me throw my SEO hat on quick. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. Greg Finn : It depends. If you've got a great page, I would just say that the majority of sites out there don't have phenomenal pages for both, right? You really needed to capture that demand on PPC as you're paying for it. And with SEO, you probably want to again, bake in some of those EEAT metrics and really be helpful. And on the PPC side, you can almost push harder to get that conversion, especially if you're in something like a B2B SaaS or something of that nature. So I would say that there are probably 30% of people that have good enough landing pages, but I'd say 70% of people should be testing landing pages, testing calls to action. It's one of those things where, unlike SEO, you can really dictate the spend, the clicks, you can run reports, you could run experiments, you could run tests. And you should be trying that, not just going to your homepage or something of that nature. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. And that's kind of what we said. So let's end this on a high note where you agree with what we said in the previous episode, didn't contradict it because I was a little worried there for a moment. Greg Finn : No, I completely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: Greg, where can people find you? Greg Finn : People can find me, @GregFinn on Twitter and like you said, we've got a show, Marketing O'Clock, it comes out every Friday. It's just a new show and you can keep up with us there. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely check out the show. It features great people such as yourself and some great knowledge from people like Barry Schwartz and Glen Gabe over on the podcast. I just want to point out that I think I'm pretty sure I beat out Barry for an award. Greg Finn : Yes, we haven't made the awards yet, but there's a physical award that will be coming out. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's actual physical? I cannot wait. I'm stoked. I'm going to put it right here next to my little desk here, which you can't see because I have a virtual background right now. But this desk right here. I'm going to put it there. Thank you so much, Greg. Again, don't forget to check out the Marketing O'Clock Podcast. It's a great podcast if you want to keep up with everything that's going on in the digital marketing space, from SEO to PPC, to all the other digital marketing stuff that we don't actually talk about here on this podcast. Greg Finn : Thanks for having me. I had a blast. Hang 10. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thank you, Greg. Now, as I mentioned earlier, or hinted at earlier in the show, different search engines handle different ads in different ways. Some, you might argue are better, some you might argue are worse. But they are most certainly different, and ads by the way, are a huge part of the ecosystem we know as the SERP, or SERPs, because we're talking about multiple search engines, not just- Crystal Carter: Search engine results pages. Mordy Oberstein: Pages. And by the way, I'm just like, for example, in 2021, which is the first set I saw, I should have probably found 2022, but I was being lazy, Microsoft raked in like eight and a half billion dollars. That's Microsoft, not Google. Microsoft. Eight and a half billion dollars from search advertising. So ads are a big deal to the search engine. It's literally why they have a search engine so they can have ads. I'm not saying that's what they're doing on every SERP to get you to an ad, but it is a source of revenue. It's how they exist, how they function. Anyway, right now we're going to go do a little fun segment that we call So Many Search Engines. So here is the PPC version of So Many Search Engines. I was talking to Owain Lloyd-Williams, who does a lot of work with Baidu in China. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, I saw that interview. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. And he was showing me the Baidu SERP. And one of the things that struck me was, you know you go to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo and the ads are generally on top or on the bottom or on the top and the bottom. But with Baidu, they're everywhere. You get an organic result or get a result, ad, organic result, ad. And it's very, very difficult to realize when it's not separated that way, what's actually an add or not. So my point by the way to that was when I spoke to him, sometimes we as SEOs complain about how the way Google goes about ads, so aggressive with ads, the grass is always greener on the other side because it could be worse. It could be Baidu. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's useful to have an ad. Sometimes I've definitely been on something and I was like, "I saw that ad for that thing," and I can't remember where it was. I can't remember what it was I was looking for that triggered that ad, but I would like to find that thing again. And I don't know what it's called because it was just this random kitchen gadget or something that I saw. So sometimes it's useful to have ads, if they're appropriate, if they're ads that make sense. But I think that it can be tricky if it's in a situation where people are expecting to see organic results and they're not sure if they're organic results. I think sometimes this happens in Maps. So for instance, you get the sponsored listings in Google Maps and they're not necessarily, it's just whoever was able to spend money that month rather than whoever is the best recommended and things like that. So I think that it kind of brings in the importance of adding in additional rich elements to your website, things like reviews and things like images and good title tags and stuff like that. So that even if there are ads mixed in whatever ecosystem you might be in, that your content still looks good and is able to be considered appropriately, especially when it's a very, yeah, there's some ads. Yeah, there's some mechanic stuff. Yeah, it's all kind of mixed up. Because a lot of times people can't tell. Mordy Oberstein: It's really hard. Back in the day, Google had an ad label, was highlighted in yellow, then went highlighted to green, then it had no highlight. Now it doesn't say ad anymore, it says sponsors. I think it actually makes it stick out a little bit more, between you and me. But I was actually looking at Bing, right? I'm like, let's go to Bing and see how they handle ads. I'm like, where are all the ads? Where are all the ads? I don't see any ads. That is so weird. How are they making money? Till I realized they have a very, very, very, very faint ad label in very light gray that kind of matches, into the meta description. And I didn't even notice that there were ads there. Crystal Carter: And you're somebody who watches the SERP all the time. Mordy Oberstein: I'm good at looking at these things and finding these things and it took a real minute to realize what it was. And I think, by the way, that's problematic because I do want to know when it's an ad as a consumer so I can make a choice. And I always feel like good marketing is bring up the user to the point where you're letting them be autonomous to make a choice. And I feel in this particular case that it goes a little bit too far. But again, you understand why they're doing it because they have to earn the revenue. It's just you want to know when the content is there because it deserves to rank there or when the content is there because somebody paid for it to be there. Crystal Carter: Right. And sometimes that is a signal like that we believe so much in this brand that we put some money behind it. We believe so much in what we're doing that we put some money behind it and we really want to be here for your consideration. And so sometimes that might play into your deciding process. So I think that, yeah, it's absolutely important to think about. I'm looking on Amazon right now and the reason why I bring up Amazon is because e-commerce searches in the US anyway are predominantly starting on Amazon. And I looked up leopard print dress because I'm a big fan of leopard print and I've gone full Carole Baskin in the last few months. I think she was right. Let's just be honest, wearing leopard print all the time, it just makes me happy. So there we go. Anyways, so I was looking up leopard print dress on Amazon and they have a similar sort of thing. So they've got their sponsored ads mixed in with their other ones and it's very subtle. So they have a little thing that says sponsored and a little eye next to it, but they look very much the same as the other content. And they have it mixed in for both the top section. It's like results. And then they have four star styles and it starts with a sponsored ad. And they've got other styles and they've got sponsored ads in with that. So more results and it goes with an organic, an organic and then three sponsored ads for instance. So they're all mixed in with them. And then when you go into it, there's sidebar advertising and there's going to be more advertising underneath as well for you to consider it as part of your process. And I think that for this one, mostly the sponsored ads are relevant, which is good. Although, one of them's a skirt. And I don't want to skirt, I want a dress. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I'm someone who loves Amazon. I like shopping on Amazon. I don't have to leave my house because I don't like shopping, and I don't leaving my house either. So it's two birds in one stone, I guess. One of the things I do notice about Amazon's ads is that yes, they kind of do blend in, but they are generally super relevant and I do generally like them because they're usually a cheaper version of the same product that I'm looking for. It's like, oh, that's awesome. It's like a T-shirt, instead of $18 I'm looking at, it's $7. You know what? I don't care that's not a brand name. That t-shirt's for my six-year-old kid. You know what he's going to do with that shirt? He's going to rip it, destroy it. I am going to buy the cheaper version. So I do appreciate Amazon's ads in there. I'm not against ads at all. I will tell you a hack that I do on Facebook. I don't like Facebook, but if I'm looking for a product, I will start Googling that product. Inevitably, one of those will show up in my Facebook feed. I will purposely click on it so that my Facebook feed becomes inundated with ads about that product. I don't have to go looking around, the ads are coming right to me. My shopper stuff, I kid you not. Crystal Carter: I find it the other way around. So I treat my Instagram feed a little bit like Vogue magazine. I'm not buying anything in Vogue Magazine, I just like the pretty pictures. I just like the outfits, I think they're cute. I like seeing the outfits and the looks and all of that. But I'm not buying anything. I'm not buying Gucci, I'm not buying Ferragamo, I have no Louis Vuitton. This is not happening for me. But I like looking at the picture. So I go on Instagram and they're like, oh look, Ferragamo has a new collection. And I'm like, "Oh, they do?" And they're advertising at me and I click on it and I look through all of their collection and I buy nothing. And then I go back to my Instagram feed and then they show me some others. So I'm like Louis Vuitton, and I'm not buying any of it, I'm just looking. Mordy Oberstein: Window shopping? What is that called when it's on the internet? Crystal Carter: When I was doing PPC, I called those folks looky-loos. So we had a campaign that we were running, it was around apparel, it was around clothing and we were running around 24 hours a day. But we looked at it and we saw that we had a lot of clicks between midnight and 3:00 AM, and none of them bought anything. This is just the equivalent of digital drunk dialing. And so those people are looky-loos. And I'm like, "We are cutting off those ads. Y'all can look on your own dime." You're not looking on mine. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Love that. Crystal Carter: And we increased. Our cost per acquisition or whatever improved dramatically because we weren't appealing to those people who aren't actually buying. Mordy Oberstein: They're like me, they're just looking for something. I do eventually buy something, but I buy in a store, but that's a whole different thing. Don't go by me, I'm a weird shopper. Crystal Carter: And here's another example. So I looked up leopard print dress on YouTube and if you're not aware, YouTube is one of the second... It's like generally most ads, put it is the second biggest search engine on earth, in the world. And I looked up leopard print dress and the organic results are how to style a leopard print dress, how to layer a leopard print dress, how to wear leopard print dresses. The ad that I'm getting is from Cisco, which is best class hardware and software to protect your business network. Mordy Oberstein: YouTube is a mess. I will tell you when my kids are watching YouTube on the TV, it's less of a problem on the device, but on the TV, they get most ridiculous ads that are completely inappropriate for them. It's like a problem. It's problematic, which is weird by the way, because I'm about to say coming back to the traditional search engine, Google, one of the ways that I see them differentiating themselves and how they handle ads is one, is they are generally very, very relevant, very, very accurate, which is weird about the whole YouTube thing. But they also do a lot of cross advertising. So you have PLAs and image search, for example. You have map ads, you have local pack ads, you have product listing ads on the SERP for products. There's all different types of dynamic ads in all sorts of places, one of which is YouTube. It's just sometimes the YouTube ones are less accurate I find than other platforms. But Bing doesn't do this the same way. Other search engines don't. Google is very deliberate and very unique in how they place their ads in all parts or all subsections of search. Crystal Carter: Right. And they will create dedicated channels for it. So for instance, on the leopard print dress, the SERPs and around apparel, they've invested a lot around clothing and around shopping. So they've got sponsored ads that show up on the main SERP. Then they have their dedicated channel, their Google shopping channel, which gives you another row of ads, another bit of organic, another opportunity to engage with that content if you have a high intent for purchasing that. Similarly, I mentioned the ones for Google Maps, they also have a dedicated ad feed for that. They also have one for hotels, for instance, and travel and that sort of thing as well. So Google Travel has that as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's really good. Crystal Carter: And they're filtering it by intent. It also allows advertisers to focus by intent. The thing for SEOs to think about is how they interact with those ecosystems. And sometimes, you can work together. So for instance, Google Merchant can give you a lot of good information about how your products are being read online, generally. I was looking at an account the other day and Google Merchant was flagging it for excessive capitalization is what they were being flagged for. Mordy Oberstein: That is problematic right there, all that- Crystal Carter: Right. So that's an accessibility issue that also looks a little bit spammy. And so Google Merchant is flagging them for that. That's going to be something that they should pay attention to, just generally for search and also for their ads as well. So think about how your content fits into those ecosystems and if there's other opportunities for that. Similarly, for Google Merchant, there's also like the Google Merchant API, I think it's content indexing API, that allows you to show up in Google Merchant. And that's something that also helps your content generally perform better. Mordy Oberstein: And look, where Google is placing ads and how they're placing ads, if you're in SEO, for example, the classic example I think of is image search. There's so many PLAs in image search, which goes to tell you that Google knows that when people go to images in image search, they're sometimes have a commercial and transactional intent. That's why they're throwing those images in there. So if you have images for your products or whatever it is that you're doing, you don't have your blog post in image search, have the actual product page image. People are actually looking for actual purchase intent in image search. That's why Google's showing ads there. Now, onto other things, new things, other things I guess, maybe ad related things. Who knows? Because the world of SEO news is just always so changing and there is always so much about ads. Now I feel pigeonholed. We're going to have to discuss an ad related topic in the SEO news. Crystal Carter: Or you could do an advertisement. This is an advertisement for the SEO news, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You're advertising SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: You’re advertising. When we do the SEO news, it's basically advertising, free advertising for Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: We love you Barry. Thank you for all you do. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Barry. So without further ado, here's this week's version of the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two in the bag for you today, both from he who was known as Sir Barry, Knight of the SEO Round table. I can't remember if I made that joke before because both these articles are from Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table. Anyway, number one, Google, April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Products, Services, and Things. This is super interesting to me because I've long suspected the product review update was never meant to be just for product reviews, but was meant to learn how to profile that genre of content. I have tweeted this out, I don't know, a year and a half ago. So I have the tweet to prove it. Well just call me Elijah because I'm an SEO prophet. The product review update is now the reviews update, which means the acronym has gone from PRU to RU. Fascinating. And as such, it applies to all review content. So blogs that review the best places to travel or the best lawyers a throw your life savings away at, sorry, I can never help making a good lawyer joke, are all included in this update. My prediction in the future, it will expand or elements of this algorithm will be included in the core algorithm. Also, super cool to note how confident Google is in understanding content. Because identifying a website like the Wirecutter, which is all about product reviews, is relatively easy. With the topical expansion, Google has to dig more through the weeds to find applicable pages, which it feels it can. So that's super cool. Also, from Knight of the SEO Roundtable, that is just how I'm going to refer to you from now on, Barry, Google Removes Video Thumbnails In Search Results When Video Is Not Main Content. So Google had two formats for video thumbnails, one with a thumbnail to the left of the title description and so forth, and one to the right. The one the right is no more. And it's because the format where the video thumbnail is, was, to the right is for cases where the video is not the main content of the page. So now, only URLs where the video is the main content will show with a thumbnail, to the left, reiterating what Beyonce has always known to be true, to the left, to the left, everything you own in the box to the left. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. With the news out of the way, and so much of the news coming from the PPC side, if you go to seroundtable.com or Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal, so much of the news for search marketers is actually about PPC, for me to the point of annoyance. But for many people, to the point of it being helpful. So we've thought what a great person for the follow of the week than none other than Google's own Ads liaison, one of my favorite people in the wider digital marketing industry, Ginny Marvin. Crystal Carter: Ginny Marvin. Absolutely. She is the Google Ad Liaison. And she is somebody who speaks really, really openly to folks on online, which is really, really useful to help people learn more about what's going on in the ad space. Mordy Oberstein: She's just a sweet person. She used to be the editor over Search Engine Land and the SMX events and all my interactions were incredibly pleasant. So she's a great person to follow, @AdsLiaison on Twitter and her personal account is @GinnyMarvin. Ginny with a G, G-I-N-N-Y-M-A-R-V-I-N. We'll link to both profiles in the show notes. She's an amazing resource, she's incredibly helpful. If you have questions and problems or whatever is related to your PPC, as it pertains to Google, like I wouldn't ask her about Bing. We owe you much thanks Ginny. First off, thanks for managing Barry all those years over at Search Engine Land and now, thank you for helping with the PPC side of the Google Search experience, and that brings us to the end of this show. Crystal Carter: That brings us to the end of the show. Mordy Oberstein: I hope it really paid off for you. Crystal Carter: That was good. I hope had a high return on investment. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, nice. I'm not going to say it wasn't as good as my pun because I don't want to say that. Crystal Carter: You didn't say it. Mordy Oberstein: But almost there, I think. I'm going to get into some much trouble. Crystal Carter: More optimization. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's all good. Thank you for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into where SEO meets content marketing. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all of 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 or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Greg Finn Ginny Marvin Google Ad Liaison Resources : Wix SEO Learning Hub Cypress North Agency Marketing O'Clock Podcast Interview on Baidu SEO The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Products, Services, and Things Google Removes Video Thumbnails In Search Results When Video Is Not Main Content Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Greg Finn Ginny Marvin Google Ad Liaison Resources : Wix SEO Learning Hub Cypress North Agency Marketing O'Clock Podcast Interview on Baidu SEO The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Products, Services, and Things Google Removes Video Thumbnails In Search Results When Video Is Not Main Content 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 branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastically, hey, it's SEO, it's PPC, it's all good, head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hi. Thank you for joining us today on the SERP's Up Podcast. It is a perfect day for a podcast. The weather is fine, the water is nice. Welcome. Join us. Mordy Oberstein: Did ChatGPT write that for you? It's a little poem. Like write up poem for the podcast? Crystal Carter: No, not precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, did I insult you then? Crystal Carter: Not quite. ChatGPT definitely has better spelling than I do. Mordy Oberstein: Lily Ray went on on Twitter talking about how she is going to, fashion recommendations from ChatGPT and how it was all messed up. So I replied back, "Which should be more reliable for fashion recommendations, ChatGPT or me?" To which John Mueller replied back, "This is the case for AI." Okay. Well the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Surprised you there, right? Where you can use Wix's AI to help you get the max out of Facebook and Instagram ads. Drive your business forward with Facebook ads. With Wix, boost sales, generate leads and drive traffic to your site with paid Facebook at Instagram campaigns powered by Wix's smart algorithm. By the way, I literally read that from a landing page. I had literally no idea that existed until I was planning this episode out. I am ashamed. There is so much about Wix I don't know about, but I have a problem with PPC that the second you mention it I black out. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of things to think about and it's also changing a lot. So I did a lot of PPC about a year ago. It is almost completely changed in that time. But there's still a lot of things that overlap and they're used, to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we're going to be talking about today. What a coincidence. We're talking about Facebook ads because, well, not because I don't have any clue about PPC anymore. I used to actually manage PPC campaigns, but believe it or not, back in the day. But as you mentioned, everything's changed and I am out. We're talking about it because we're talking about SEO and PPC campaigns. They can coexist, I think. Can SEO PPC share intelligence and data? How does quality content for SEO factor into PPC? And how do you manage conflicts between the two disciplines? You ignore the PPC, you go with the SEO. Problem solved. Done. Just kidding. And to help us navigate this wild and weird world of PPC, we have a very, very special guest for you. He's the CMO and partner over at Cypress North, the host of one of the best, if not the best digital marketing podcasts out there, an all around sweet fellow, a wearer of flannel, the one the only the only Greg Finn, is going to join us in just a bit. We'll also dive into how different search engines handle ads on their search in different ways. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Ready, set, click. Click again and again. Oh my God, we're a click bot. Episode number 34 of the SERP's UP Podcast is bidding for your attention. Crystal Carter: Yes, it is. Yes it is. So yeah, today we're going to be talking about SEO for PPC campaigns. This is something that I've spoken a little bit about at an event called PPC Live, which is a great event if you're looking to learn more about PPC in London. And essentially, one of the reasons why I think it's really interesting is they really often go together for a lot of different websites. It tends to be a sort of go-to add-on if you're doing activity. And one of the reasons why it's useful, from my perspective, is because it can provide you a little bit of control with regards to visibility. So your PPC can sometimes give... The rules of engagement are very, very clear. You put in the money, you get some visibility. With regards to it, with regards to SEO, we can be a little bit more complex. It can be a few more wheels within wheels to move. So it's something that can be useful while you're building up your brand, it can be something to help you shape it. But I'm sure we'll get into it a bit more with Greg, who will talk to us more about how you can add in PPC campaigns and how you can include PPC more and what you do. Mordy Oberstein: So because I again, check out on everything PPC and because he is an all around great guy, Anna, aware of Flannel and C M O and co-founder, you got the co-founder part right, of Cyprus North. Please welcome, put your hands together for the host of the Marketing O'Clock Podcast, one of the best digital your marketing podcasts out there that you should be listening to after you finish this one. Welcome, Greg Finn. Greg Finn : Wow. Thanks for the margarita here. I'm going to be catching a wave here on SERP's Up. Really happy to be here, y'all. Love the podcast. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. The feeling is absolutely mutual. It's fantastic. Thank you for joining us. Greg Finn : And I'll make sure I don't black out on these margaritas. But I can make Mordy black out. PPC, PPC, PPC. Mordy Oberstein: What would happen? It's like Old School. You ever see that movie with Will Ferrell, the Bass, James Carville, and he said the most intelligent things and then he wakes up, he was like, "What happened?" He has no idea he said anything intelligent. That's how I feel. But it's true. I used to manage PBC campaigns. It was kind of like, I'll throw a word at you, a broad match modifier, huh? Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: See? I know the PPC. Greg Finn : If you have Microsoft advertising campaigns, they just turned it a broad match last week, so be careful. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. This is it. And I'm interested to hear you talking about Bing, jumping straight in with the Bing Microsoft advertising suite because I'm guessing a lot of people are going to be more interested in that, now that we have new Bing, Bing 2.17. Greg Finn : Yeah. And actually, Microsoft advertising is a really great tool obviously for people that do PPC. But it's also got kind of a really unique currently, I guess, elements that you can leverage that Google doesn't at the moment, where you can see all of your search query data. And when you're doing SEO and when you're putting things together, it's great to see those trends and the volume that's out there. But obviously, that is all kind of well and good and Google Trends, Keyword Planner, whatever tool of your choice is great, but Google sort of limits what actually comes through in those keywords. But Microsoft advertising doesn't. So you can see your full suite of keywords that you're showing for what works, not only hypothetically what that volume looks like, but what's actually converting. And then pick and choose some of those good ones for your SEO campaigns. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's one of the greatest things about doing a PPC SEO combo is that you can use lots of different data sets. So if you know more about, if you have good SEO keyword research, good PPC research, you can sort of pick and choose which one would be best for a PPC campaign, which would be best for a more different funnel approach, for instance, that you might take for an SEO. And yeah, you can compare different tools because again, you say you get different data from Microsoft and you get different data from Google. You also get different data from the teams behind the paid campaigns and the teams behind the search campaigns. So the team behind the page campaigns will call you all the time, asking you to get involved, whereas it can be the other way when you're on search for instance. Greg Finn : Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I'm assuming from the search you're talking about like SEO specifically. Absolutely. And there's also quite a bit of insight that you can get from, whether it be Google Ads or Microsoft advertising. And so what even some of the search engines think about your content, whether you have something like a dynamic search ad where you just put out a certain section of your website, an entire website, and you kind of see what Google, in this case, would say, or Microsoft, always got to include them, especially now, what kind of terms they're matching for and what they think your page is about. Sometimes that's just a good temperature check to be like, yep, a search engine really does think that this page is what I thought it was about, or maybe you start pulling on some different model numbers or things like that, that you know might want to work in the copy more and things of that nature. And then even on the shopping side, the feed, that's sort of a gray area sometimes. So where the feed, if you're retail, if that sits under the ads team or an organic team let's say. And there's no better way to see what a search engine thinks about your products than by looking at those search query reports for your product data. You don't have terms that you put in, you just put the feed up and see what happens. And that's again, a great way to see what a search engine thinks about it and how you can modify that to try to drive more of the free listings and the paid. So there's a ton of data in each one of these platforms that can help you in obviously, the platforms themselves and in your SEO. Mordy Oberstein: And you're going to have to work together at some point inevitably because if, for example, I've seen a bunch of cases like this... By the way, parenthetically, I want to just point out historically speaking, the keyword research data we as SEOs have had comes from the ads side of Google. Keyword Planner is a Google Ads tool, it's not a SEO tool. I mean we use it as a SEO tool. Essentially, it's a paid search tool. But anyway, you're going to definitely have to work together. I've seen cases where sites are bidding on their own branded terms and they're killing their organic rankings by pushing the organic URL down the page below the fold in some cases because they're bidding on themselves. You mentioned Google Merchant. You're going to have to figure out where to work together, where either the PPC side is impacting organic or organic isn't going the way you thought it would go and maybe now you need to pay to play. Greg Finn : Yeah, especially now as well with some of the new products that are rolling out. The biggest one is Performance Max, where it's devoid of data. The data exists, you just can't get it and you don't get to tell it where to bid. So there's a new feature where you can stop bidding on your own brand, but at the same time, if you are just putting your website out there and Google thinks that it can make a sale on a competitor's term or a competitor now is showing up for you where they didn't mean to before, you might see a drop in organic traffic because they didn't mean to. They just said, Performance Max, I'm going to fire this up. And then all of a sudden SERP's Up is outranking Marketing O'Clock because you are running ads you didn't even know on that. So I think that's one of the things that really could hinder some organic performance is the fact that you may not have had people showing up for your brand. People might not be meaning to advertise for your brand, but now there they are above their organic results. And as we've seen with Favicons coming through and site names and all that, ads typically don't look less organic results with each one of these changes that Google puts out. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're going to talk more about that later by the way, because on the Bing side, it's bonkers. But anyway, I think that's where sometimes you run into a problem though. People look at it like, I'm on the SEO team, you're on the PPC team, but I will tell you, your CMO or your growth manager does not look at it like that. They see the website and they see the sales and they see the revenue. And I think sometimes we think there's a conflicting mindset between SEO and PPC. But I think there's a lot of overlap that we don't focus on enough. Wondering what your experience is with that as somebody who's sort of straddling both of these worlds at the same time? Greg Finn : Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the goal is to get business from a search engine and to get it as profitably as you can. That's everybody's goal. And in many cases where you have those good organic rankings, you can use that, have teams work together and bid more conservatively for some of those paid plans that you've got going on. And then the nice thing is that SEOs should love is that if there's a problem or you're struggling with ranking on specific terms, that's where paid can come in and really help each other out. I don't see it as a competitive aspect whatsoever. More so. How can we together get to the goal that we're looking to get to. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've absolutely seen this before, particularly if there was an algorithm adjustment that maybe caught you by surprise. Sometimes paid can swoop in and help out with that. I've seen that happen before. But also it can be useful to give you intelligence on maybe why a page isn't performing the way you might expect it to. Because sometimes you put it through Google Ads and Google Ads gives you some feedback. They're like, actually this page has a low relevance score, or actually, this page is showing up for searches that aren't relevant. So maybe you should have another look at some of those keywords that it's showing up for when we read it with our machine learning tools. Also, sometimes it's a case where it might pull up certain parts of the page as being more important than other parts of the page, like when it's doing creating ads. So that can be useful as well. I'd be interested to talk to you about machine learning and PPC. One of the things I find interesting is that SEOs seem a little bit surprised sometimes when Google gets more involved with the sort of machine learning and more maybe is changing around title tags and changing around different things like that. And I know that that's something that they've been doing in PPC a lot. I don't know how you feel about the machine learning that's come into PPC. Mordy Oberstein: Get off my lawn. Greg Finn : The machine learning from something like ChatGPT and what we see with some of these auto applied recommendations and recommendation scores are light year's difference. A lot of what is kind of now really baked into the platforms really benefits the ad platforms. If you were just to say like, "We've got these recommendations, we're going to auto apply them," for the most part, those will really tank your performance. I think the big thing is now with APIs for something like ChatGPT, how can that be used to be able to say, let's help build these responsive search ads or let's go out there, can we make some sort of image. If we upload a basic picture, can we turn it into something majestic and turn it into a DSA or something like that? So I think that's really the exciting part. Now that there are more APIs coming out, you're never going to have something do it for you, but just to be able to refresh, hit things and be able to get you 70% of the way there or at least get started is really an exciting thought. Mordy Oberstein: While we still have you, I want to make sure we touch on one more topic a little bit more in depth. We just talked about content algorithms and one of the things that I love focusing on is the quality of a page. Literally, I'm looking at my screen, I'm diving into the product review update and what pages are doing way back, I'm going to the way back machine and saying what were they doing before the update and now during the update and what happened historically with the page and what does it mean for content quality? Does what content quality means for me as an SEO mean the same thing for you as someone on the PPC side? Greg Finn : No, it doesn't. So I would say that on the PPC side- Mordy Oberstein: You're saying you don't need quality content? Greg Finn : No, you do, but it's more important to really be relevant. You need to hit the right person with the right message, sending them to the right place at the right time. So for a lot of times, that might be something where on the SEO side you might build something like a skyscraper type style hub that's got everything going on. Mordy Oberstein: Whoa, whoa. What kind of person do you think I am? Greg Finn : And on the PPC side, you might match those terms up a little bit more because people might not know you. They're looking, you don't want to keep that scent trail high there. So you match whatever query is in the ad and an ad group and you send them to a landing page that talks about that specifically and then you spin up a secondary landing page for a variation of those terms so that you have a good quality score. So I think you still want to have quality, but it's less EEAT, or however many Es y'all have right now, and it's a little bit more about really hitting relevancy on the nose on it. Crystal Carter: And I think a lot of your targeting will affect whether or not you have something that's of quality to the person that clicks on it, so that you said the right person at the right time. The targeting that you set up to make sure that you are sending them to the right information at the right time is going to help you a lot there. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, we talked about this in the previous episode of the podcast, would you recommend having separate pages for your SEO and PPC campaigns? So no indexing for example, the page you're using for your PPC and doing your own, one thing on the SEO side and one thing on the PPC side? Greg Finn : Let me throw my SEO hat on quick. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. Greg Finn : It depends. If you've got a great page, I would just say that the majority of sites out there don't have phenomenal pages for both, right? You really needed to capture that demand on PPC as you're paying for it. And with SEO, you probably want to again, bake in some of those EEAT metrics and really be helpful. And on the PPC side, you can almost push harder to get that conversion, especially if you're in something like a B2B SaaS or something of that nature. So I would say that there are probably 30% of people that have good enough landing pages, but I'd say 70% of people should be testing landing pages, testing calls to action. It's one of those things where, unlike SEO, you can really dictate the spend, the clicks, you can run reports, you could run experiments, you could run tests. And you should be trying that, not just going to your homepage or something of that nature. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. And that's kind of what we said. So let's end this on a high note where you agree with what we said in the previous episode, didn't contradict it because I was a little worried there for a moment. Greg Finn : No, I completely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: Greg, where can people find you? Greg Finn : People can find me, @GregFinn on Twitter and like you said, we've got a show, Marketing O'Clock, it comes out every Friday. It's just a new show and you can keep up with us there. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely check out the show. It features great people such as yourself and some great knowledge from people like Barry Schwartz and Glen Gabe over on the podcast. I just want to point out that I think I'm pretty sure I beat out Barry for an award. Greg Finn : Yes, we haven't made the awards yet, but there's a physical award that will be coming out. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's actual physical? I cannot wait. I'm stoked. I'm going to put it right here next to my little desk here, which you can't see because I have a virtual background right now. But this desk right here. I'm going to put it there. Thank you so much, Greg. Again, don't forget to check out the Marketing O'Clock Podcast. It's a great podcast if you want to keep up with everything that's going on in the digital marketing space, from SEO to PPC, to all the other digital marketing stuff that we don't actually talk about here on this podcast. Greg Finn : Thanks for having me. I had a blast. Hang 10. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thank you, Greg. Now, as I mentioned earlier, or hinted at earlier in the show, different search engines handle different ads in different ways. Some, you might argue are better, some you might argue are worse. But they are most certainly different, and ads by the way, are a huge part of the ecosystem we know as the SERP, or SERPs, because we're talking about multiple search engines, not just- Crystal Carter: Search engine results pages. Mordy Oberstein: Pages. And by the way, I'm just like, for example, in 2021, which is the first set I saw, I should have probably found 2022, but I was being lazy, Microsoft raked in like eight and a half billion dollars. That's Microsoft, not Google. Microsoft. Eight and a half billion dollars from search advertising. So ads are a big deal to the search engine. It's literally why they have a search engine so they can have ads. I'm not saying that's what they're doing on every SERP to get you to an ad, but it is a source of revenue. It's how they exist, how they function. Anyway, right now we're going to go do a little fun segment that we call So Many Search Engines. So here is the PPC version of So Many Search Engines. I was talking to Owain Lloyd-Williams, who does a lot of work with Baidu in China. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, I saw that interview. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. And he was showing me the Baidu SERP. And one of the things that struck me was, you know you go to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo and the ads are generally on top or on the bottom or on the top and the bottom. But with Baidu, they're everywhere. You get an organic result or get a result, ad, organic result, ad. And it's very, very difficult to realize when it's not separated that way, what's actually an add or not. So my point by the way to that was when I spoke to him, sometimes we as SEOs complain about how the way Google goes about ads, so aggressive with ads, the grass is always greener on the other side because it could be worse. It could be Baidu. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's useful to have an ad. Sometimes I've definitely been on something and I was like, "I saw that ad for that thing," and I can't remember where it was. I can't remember what it was I was looking for that triggered that ad, but I would like to find that thing again. And I don't know what it's called because it was just this random kitchen gadget or something that I saw. So sometimes it's useful to have ads, if they're appropriate, if they're ads that make sense. But I think that it can be tricky if it's in a situation where people are expecting to see organic results and they're not sure if they're organic results. I think sometimes this happens in Maps. So for instance, you get the sponsored listings in Google Maps and they're not necessarily, it's just whoever was able to spend money that month rather than whoever is the best recommended and things like that. So I think that it kind of brings in the importance of adding in additional rich elements to your website, things like reviews and things like images and good title tags and stuff like that. So that even if there are ads mixed in whatever ecosystem you might be in, that your content still looks good and is able to be considered appropriately, especially when it's a very, yeah, there's some ads. Yeah, there's some mechanic stuff. Yeah, it's all kind of mixed up. Because a lot of times people can't tell. Mordy Oberstein: It's really hard. Back in the day, Google had an ad label, was highlighted in yellow, then went highlighted to green, then it had no highlight. Now it doesn't say ad anymore, it says sponsors. I think it actually makes it stick out a little bit more, between you and me. But I was actually looking at Bing, right? I'm like, let's go to Bing and see how they handle ads. I'm like, where are all the ads? Where are all the ads? I don't see any ads. That is so weird. How are they making money? Till I realized they have a very, very, very, very faint ad label in very light gray that kind of matches, into the meta description. And I didn't even notice that there were ads there. Crystal Carter: And you're somebody who watches the SERP all the time. Mordy Oberstein: I'm good at looking at these things and finding these things and it took a real minute to realize what it was. And I think, by the way, that's problematic because I do want to know when it's an ad as a consumer so I can make a choice. And I always feel like good marketing is bring up the user to the point where you're letting them be autonomous to make a choice. And I feel in this particular case that it goes a little bit too far. But again, you understand why they're doing it because they have to earn the revenue. It's just you want to know when the content is there because it deserves to rank there or when the content is there because somebody paid for it to be there. Crystal Carter: Right. And sometimes that is a signal like that we believe so much in this brand that we put some money behind it. We believe so much in what we're doing that we put some money behind it and we really want to be here for your consideration. And so sometimes that might play into your deciding process. So I think that, yeah, it's absolutely important to think about. I'm looking on Amazon right now and the reason why I bring up Amazon is because e-commerce searches in the US anyway are predominantly starting on Amazon. And I looked up leopard print dress because I'm a big fan of leopard print and I've gone full Carole Baskin in the last few months. I think she was right. Let's just be honest, wearing leopard print all the time, it just makes me happy. So there we go. Anyways, so I was looking up leopard print dress on Amazon and they have a similar sort of thing. So they've got their sponsored ads mixed in with their other ones and it's very subtle. So they have a little thing that says sponsored and a little eye next to it, but they look very much the same as the other content. And they have it mixed in for both the top section. It's like results. And then they have four star styles and it starts with a sponsored ad. And they've got other styles and they've got sponsored ads in with that. So more results and it goes with an organic, an organic and then three sponsored ads for instance. So they're all mixed in with them. And then when you go into it, there's sidebar advertising and there's going to be more advertising underneath as well for you to consider it as part of your process. And I think that for this one, mostly the sponsored ads are relevant, which is good. Although, one of them's a skirt. And I don't want to skirt, I want a dress. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I'm someone who loves Amazon. I like shopping on Amazon. I don't have to leave my house because I don't like shopping, and I don't leaving my house either. So it's two birds in one stone, I guess. One of the things I do notice about Amazon's ads is that yes, they kind of do blend in, but they are generally super relevant and I do generally like them because they're usually a cheaper version of the same product that I'm looking for. It's like, oh, that's awesome. It's like a T-shirt, instead of $18 I'm looking at, it's $7. You know what? I don't care that's not a brand name. That t-shirt's for my six-year-old kid. You know what he's going to do with that shirt? He's going to rip it, destroy it. I am going to buy the cheaper version. So I do appreciate Amazon's ads in there. I'm not against ads at all. I will tell you a hack that I do on Facebook. I don't like Facebook, but if I'm looking for a product, I will start Googling that product. Inevitably, one of those will show up in my Facebook feed. I will purposely click on it so that my Facebook feed becomes inundated with ads about that product. I don't have to go looking around, the ads are coming right to me. My shopper stuff, I kid you not. Crystal Carter: I find it the other way around. So I treat my Instagram feed a little bit like Vogue magazine. I'm not buying anything in Vogue Magazine, I just like the pretty pictures. I just like the outfits, I think they're cute. I like seeing the outfits and the looks and all of that. But I'm not buying anything. I'm not buying Gucci, I'm not buying Ferragamo, I have no Louis Vuitton. This is not happening for me. But I like looking at the picture. So I go on Instagram and they're like, oh look, Ferragamo has a new collection. And I'm like, "Oh, they do?" And they're advertising at me and I click on it and I look through all of their collection and I buy nothing. And then I go back to my Instagram feed and then they show me some others. So I'm like Louis Vuitton, and I'm not buying any of it, I'm just looking. Mordy Oberstein: Window shopping? What is that called when it's on the internet? Crystal Carter: When I was doing PPC, I called those folks looky-loos. So we had a campaign that we were running, it was around apparel, it was around clothing and we were running around 24 hours a day. But we looked at it and we saw that we had a lot of clicks between midnight and 3:00 AM, and none of them bought anything. This is just the equivalent of digital drunk dialing. And so those people are looky-loos. And I'm like, "We are cutting off those ads. Y'all can look on your own dime." You're not looking on mine. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Love that. Crystal Carter: And we increased. Our cost per acquisition or whatever improved dramatically because we weren't appealing to those people who aren't actually buying. Mordy Oberstein: They're like me, they're just looking for something. I do eventually buy something, but I buy in a store, but that's a whole different thing. Don't go by me, I'm a weird shopper. Crystal Carter: And here's another example. So I looked up leopard print dress on YouTube and if you're not aware, YouTube is one of the second... It's like generally most ads, put it is the second biggest search engine on earth, in the world. And I looked up leopard print dress and the organic results are how to style a leopard print dress, how to layer a leopard print dress, how to wear leopard print dresses. The ad that I'm getting is from Cisco, which is best class hardware and software to protect your business network. Mordy Oberstein: YouTube is a mess. I will tell you when my kids are watching YouTube on the TV, it's less of a problem on the device, but on the TV, they get most ridiculous ads that are completely inappropriate for them. It's like a problem. It's problematic, which is weird by the way, because I'm about to say coming back to the traditional search engine, Google, one of the ways that I see them differentiating themselves and how they handle ads is one, is they are generally very, very relevant, very, very accurate, which is weird about the whole YouTube thing. But they also do a lot of cross advertising. So you have PLAs and image search, for example. You have map ads, you have local pack ads, you have product listing ads on the SERP for products. There's all different types of dynamic ads in all sorts of places, one of which is YouTube. It's just sometimes the YouTube ones are less accurate I find than other platforms. But Bing doesn't do this the same way. Other search engines don't. Google is very deliberate and very unique in how they place their ads in all parts or all subsections of search. Crystal Carter: Right. And they will create dedicated channels for it. So for instance, on the leopard print dress, the SERPs and around apparel, they've invested a lot around clothing and around shopping. So they've got sponsored ads that show up on the main SERP. Then they have their dedicated channel, their Google shopping channel, which gives you another row of ads, another bit of organic, another opportunity to engage with that content if you have a high intent for purchasing that. Similarly, I mentioned the ones for Google Maps, they also have a dedicated ad feed for that. They also have one for hotels, for instance, and travel and that sort of thing as well. So Google Travel has that as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's really good. Crystal Carter: And they're filtering it by intent. It also allows advertisers to focus by intent. The thing for SEOs to think about is how they interact with those ecosystems. And sometimes, you can work together. So for instance, Google Merchant can give you a lot of good information about how your products are being read online, generally. I was looking at an account the other day and Google Merchant was flagging it for excessive capitalization is what they were being flagged for. Mordy Oberstein: That is problematic right there, all that- Crystal Carter: Right. So that's an accessibility issue that also looks a little bit spammy. And so Google Merchant is flagging them for that. That's going to be something that they should pay attention to, just generally for search and also for their ads as well. So think about how your content fits into those ecosystems and if there's other opportunities for that. Similarly, for Google Merchant, there's also like the Google Merchant API, I think it's content indexing API, that allows you to show up in Google Merchant. And that's something that also helps your content generally perform better. Mordy Oberstein: And look, where Google is placing ads and how they're placing ads, if you're in SEO, for example, the classic example I think of is image search. There's so many PLAs in image search, which goes to tell you that Google knows that when people go to images in image search, they're sometimes have a commercial and transactional intent. That's why they're throwing those images in there. So if you have images for your products or whatever it is that you're doing, you don't have your blog post in image search, have the actual product page image. People are actually looking for actual purchase intent in image search. That's why Google's showing ads there. Now, onto other things, new things, other things I guess, maybe ad related things. Who knows? Because the world of SEO news is just always so changing and there is always so much about ads. Now I feel pigeonholed. We're going to have to discuss an ad related topic in the SEO news. Crystal Carter: Or you could do an advertisement. This is an advertisement for the SEO news, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You're advertising SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: You’re advertising. When we do the SEO news, it's basically advertising, free advertising for Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: We love you Barry. Thank you for all you do. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Barry. So without further ado, here's this week's version of the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two in the bag for you today, both from he who was known as Sir Barry, Knight of the SEO Round table. I can't remember if I made that joke before because both these articles are from Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table. Anyway, number one, Google, April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Products, Services, and Things. This is super interesting to me because I've long suspected the product review update was never meant to be just for product reviews, but was meant to learn how to profile that genre of content. I have tweeted this out, I don't know, a year and a half ago. So I have the tweet to prove it. Well just call me Elijah because I'm an SEO prophet. The product review update is now the reviews update, which means the acronym has gone from PRU to RU. Fascinating. And as such, it applies to all review content. So blogs that review the best places to travel or the best lawyers a throw your life savings away at, sorry, I can never help making a good lawyer joke, are all included in this update. My prediction in the future, it will expand or elements of this algorithm will be included in the core algorithm. Also, super cool to note how confident Google is in understanding content. Because identifying a website like the Wirecutter, which is all about product reviews, is relatively easy. With the topical expansion, Google has to dig more through the weeds to find applicable pages, which it feels it can. So that's super cool. Also, from Knight of the SEO Roundtable, that is just how I'm going to refer to you from now on, Barry, Google Removes Video Thumbnails In Search Results When Video Is Not Main Content. So Google had two formats for video thumbnails, one with a thumbnail to the left of the title description and so forth, and one to the right. The one the right is no more. And it's because the format where the video thumbnail is, was, to the right is for cases where the video is not the main content of the page. So now, only URLs where the video is the main content will show with a thumbnail, to the left, reiterating what Beyonce has always known to be true, to the left, to the left, everything you own in the box to the left. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. With the news out of the way, and so much of the news coming from the PPC side, if you go to seroundtable.com or Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal, so much of the news for search marketers is actually about PPC, for me to the point of annoyance. But for many people, to the point of it being helpful. So we've thought what a great person for the follow of the week than none other than Google's own Ads liaison, one of my favorite people in the wider digital marketing industry, Ginny Marvin. Crystal Carter: Ginny Marvin. Absolutely. She is the Google Ad Liaison. And she is somebody who speaks really, really openly to folks on online, which is really, really useful to help people learn more about what's going on in the ad space. Mordy Oberstein: She's just a sweet person. She used to be the editor over Search Engine Land and the SMX events and all my interactions were incredibly pleasant. So she's a great person to follow, @AdsLiaison on Twitter and her personal account is @GinnyMarvin. Ginny with a G, G-I-N-N-Y-M-A-R-V-I-N. We'll link to both profiles in the show notes. She's an amazing resource, she's incredibly helpful. If you have questions and problems or whatever is related to your PPC, as it pertains to Google, like I wouldn't ask her about Bing. We owe you much thanks Ginny. First off, thanks for managing Barry all those years over at Search Engine Land and now, thank you for helping with the PPC side of the Google Search experience, and that brings us to the end of this show. Crystal Carter: That brings us to the end of the show. Mordy Oberstein: I hope it really paid off for you. Crystal Carter: That was good. I hope had a high return on investment. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, nice. I'm not going to say it wasn't as good as my pun because I don't want to say that. Crystal Carter: You didn't say it. Mordy Oberstein: But almost there, I think. I'm going to get into some much trouble. Crystal Carter: More optimization. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's all good. Thank you for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into where SEO meets content marketing. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all of 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 or both. 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

How should Google address the growing presence of Reddit on the SERP? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss why Reddit is ranking at the top of so many SERPs and the problems it presents. They also survey the wider SEO community for solutions Google should implement to bring balance back to the SERP. Founder of Foundation Marketing, Ross Simmonds, joins the show to discuss the future of Reddit and how marketers can use it to their benefit. Join us as this week as the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast becomes your go-to “forum” to understand the Google SERP! Back What to do about Google's reddit habit? How should Google address the growing presence of Reddit on the SERP? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss why Reddit is ranking at the top of so many SERPs and the problems it presents. They also survey the wider SEO community for solutions Google should implement to bring balance back to the SERP. Founder of Foundation Marketing, Ross Simmonds, joins the show to discuss the future of Reddit and how marketers can use it to their benefit. Join us as this week as the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast becomes your go-to “forum” to understand the Google SERP! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 85 | May 1, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 53:00 This week’s guests Ross Simmonds Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that works with some of the worlds most successful brands. He's also the author of Create Once. Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too. 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 on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the uncompromising, but in a good way, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Mordy Oberstein: Uncompromising on your SEO values and your humanity is what I meant. Crystal Carter: That's right. Upvote for that. Mordy Oberstein: Beat me to this. Beat me to this. I guess that's karma for you. Crystal Carter: Oh, oh, oh. Well, I'm sure if we can make a thread about it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Somebody, by the way, commented on social media, I love how you all hint at the topic before you actually get to it, which we're doing right now. Crystal Carter: As if the person who's listening to the podcast hasn't actually read the title of the podcast- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's possible. Crystal Carter: Is it possible? Mordy Oberstein: No, that's totally possible. Crystal Carter: It's cool. Mordy Oberstein: If you're the regular listener... I listen to this sports podcasts every day, I don't look at the title, I'm, like, oh, I just keep going. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all good. Do you know what, somebody was like, oh, I summarized your podcast with ChatGPT? I'm like, you're missing the entire point. Mordy Oberstein: I know. I saw that. Crystal Carter: I'm like, what? Mordy Oberstein: You lose all the flavor. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right, right. It's like saying- Mordy Oberstein: You come for the insights, but you stay for the entertainment. Crystal Carter: It's nice. You're missing the vibes, guys. People who are listening to the podcast, you're vibing with us. We're all vibing together. It's like a whole SEO vibe. It's important. Mordy Oberstein: That AI cannot replicate at all. Crystal Carter: No, no. We're definitely real people. This is- Mordy Oberstein: We're beyond AI. It's more like Reddit for your ears. Okay. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search site each and every month at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our Zapier integration to do things like post a new event from your Wix studio website to a subreddit automatically. This as this week, in case you haven't gotten the hints, we're talking about the problem on the SERP with Reddit. Well, I don't know if it's a problem. Who knows? Because I read it somewhere that perhaps there's too much Reddit on the SERP. I can't recall where I read it, but I did read it or read it somewhere. You know I'm going to keep making that joke the entire time now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the stars, I read it. Sorry. Okay. That's right. We're taking up the abundance of Reddit on the SERP and what Google should perhaps do about it from the reason why Google has gone Reddit to how it all to LLMs and how to address the reason why Reddit is on the SERP with complaints about Reddit on the SERP. And to help us solve this complex problem, joining the podcast this week is you all. We're going through the comments y'all have left on this issue across the wider social media universe, and we'll also chat with none other than Ross Simmonds about the future of Reddit and how marketers can really leverage it. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media like Reddit, I guess for more SEO awesomeness. So forgo any preconceived notions about forums being at the forefront of the SERP as we attempt to foresee the future of forum formulations on the results page and how it might foreshadow wider marketing trends on this the 85th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Please forgive me. Crystal Carter: That was formidable. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. It's also like how many dad jokes can I possibly make in one intro? Crystal Carter: I think that's kind of fine. We're talking about Reddit, there's a lot of dads on Reddit. There's also a lot of other folks on Reddit. There must be a dad joke Reddit, right? Mordy Oberstein: I'm sure. Yeah. No, there's definitely got to be a dad joke Reddit, right? Crystal Carter: Yeah. There's got to be, I'm sure. Mordy Oberstein: There's definitely inappropriate joke Reddit, so there has to be a counterbalance to that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I mean, basically all the folks that I know that spend a lot of time on Reddit basically go and look for the worst things on the internet on Reddit. Mordy Oberstein: We'll get into this because we already recorded the section with Ross before recording this section to drop the fourth wall, and I am telling you, I made some heavy comments about my opinions about Reddit. Crystal Carter: Ross is a great person to speak to because Ross has come at this from a very strategic point of view. Because I think some people go to Reddit with a lot of feels like you're talking about, but he's only forever approached it from a strategic point of view, from a, how can we leverage this traffic? How can we engage these audiences? And I think that that's a really, really intelligent way to think about it. So grateful to Ross for joining us for that session, and y'all are for a real treat because he's got nothing but gems. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Okay, so let's get started because there's a lot to cover and why we're talking about this is basically because there's an abundance of Reddit results on Google, at least at the time of this recording. I would imagine it'll still be that way by the time this episode actually is released. But I want to start at the beginning because in the beginning there was content and it was good. Humans consumed printed content on pages made of paper of all kinds, cardstock, A4, glossy, and it was good. But then came the machines and humankind deteriorated into a black hole of five ways to and 10 best things to, and it was not good. Then in 2020, a new day dawned on the horizons of the web when Google announced passage ranking said to impact 7% of search queries, and it was meh. Not really that impactful, not really that big of a deal, but all kidding aside, the story does, I think begin with passage ranking where Google said, "Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right"... Or maybe I'm quoting Barry, Wait, am I quoting Barry? I think I'm quoting Barry quoting Google. No, no, I'm not quoting Barry, I'm quoting Google. So Google said, "Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right since sometimes a single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page." And this is already years ago, "we've recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the web." They don't actually mean index, they mean rank actual passages from the web. "By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle in a haystack information you're looking for." And this is the first time where Google basically said outright, we want to get past the crap that's out there on the web and reward creators with real expertise who are talking about very specific things that answer very specific questions. And Google's been on this quest for... what, we're in 2024. 4 years. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Google's been on this quest for four years and we haven't exactly gotten there. But then in November 2023, Google came and started to talk about hidden gems, which is to be determined. We're not there yet in terms of seeing the impact of the hidden gems, but Google wrote in November of 2023... Google or no, now I'm quoting Barry. Now I'm quoting Barry, quoting Google. Barry wrote, "Google has rolled out ranking improvements aimed at showcasing more content from social media, blog posts, forums, and more that share personal insights and experience." This is the hidden gems announcement Google made back in May 2023, but this update is not part of the helpful content updates system, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Google's has announced that they're trying to find ways to reward personal experience, real expertise. Kind of what they were talking about with the passage ranking thing, but much more formalized. And they've added this to the core algorithm, and this is where I think Reddit on the SERP was born. Google wants to reward specific answers that have actual expertise based on actual firsthand knowledge and firsthand experiences, but they don't have the content to do it. Most web content, most blog posts are not taken from a first-person experience point of view. If I'm writing about how to create a SEO report for your clients. My default is not going to be, let me tell you my personal experience with my personal clients. I'm going to write a very stoic, generic, almost like cold post about the best ways to create a SEO report for your clients. So there's not a lot of content out there that's taken from that first-person, first-experience point of view. So Google went a little bit too far down the social media rabbit hole, particularly with the Reddit rabbit hole because they don't have anything else. And I think that's how we got here. And that's why there's so much Reddit showing up for so many queries. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember that Google has bought into Reddit. They've invested in the company and having access to their database and things like that. And I think the other thing that's important to think about is when you're talking about the passage ranking, one of the things that's really important to that, and I think that was at Search On that they announced that they were doing passage ranking. And the thing that's really important about that is that it also has to do with NLP. So natural language processing and Reddit forums and all forums really are written in natural language because it's someone going, why is my plant dying? I've tried feeding it with this fertilizer, I've tried moving it to this window, and I don't understand why my Monstera plant is struggling. I don't understand. And then someone goes, oh, I had a Monstera that was like that, and it was like dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and this didn't happen, and all that sort of stuff. Or like mom blogs, we were talking about dad jokes, mom forums, places like Mumsnet in the UK for instance, are full of people being like, oh, I've been trying to get my kid to sleep for weeks and he's teething now. And somebody's like, oh yeah, well, my son did this and my daughter did that, and dah, dah, dah, dah. And all of those things are written in natural language, and I think that that's really important to think about because of the bots, right? Because of all the AI content, this is essentially, forum content is kind of a foil to that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's why Google has to do it. They know they have to swing the other way a little bit. They can't be seen as a place where you're getting content that might be too generic because in an AI world, too generic is a real branding problem. And it makes sense, I agree with the notion that you should be going first-person experience on the SERP with content in general. I just think you're saying... and you're hitting on such a great point, but I don't want to spoil it yet because I want to get to it later about the forums and mom forums and SEO forums and all the other forums that are out there. But you're right, they're trying to train the LLMs on this stuff. I think that, by the way, as a separate point, training large language models on places like Reddit I think is problematic at best because I'm not sure you're always getting an unbiased view of whatever it is that you're looking to understand from a place like Reddit. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that's interesting about Reddit is the demographics of Reddit. The demographics of Reddit are very much swinging in the sort of realms of, it's very male, it tends to be fairly young, and that's something that it's real challenge. For instance, if you're talking about mom blogs, if you're talking about the experiences of moms and stuff, what a 20-year-old boy... not a boy, I'm sorry, my apologies, what a 20-year-old young man has... I'm showing my age- Mordy Oberstein: I'm a man. Crystal Carter: I'm showing my age. I'm an old lady, I'm sorry. What a 20-year-old has to say about kids teething or something is going to be different from what somebody who's had three children and is maybe in their 30s, 40s, et cetera is going to say about that. And I think that it's a real challenge with some of those topics because there are biases within certain platforms and also certain platforms are going to lead themselves to certain personality types. I've heard issues that people have had with Reddit where people are kind of mean, which will mean that some people won't go to those kinds of spaces. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, totally. Crystal Carter: Similarly, a place like Pinterest is going to have a different kind of vibe. And so if there were leaning into Pinterest, that would have a different kind of effect on the kinds of information that we're showing on the SERP. Whereas if you're talking about gaming, Reddit's a great place. Mordy Oberstein: That might be a great place, I agree. Crystal Carter: That's a great place to get information about gaming, but for some topics, it's not great. And so I think Google's trying to patch this gap, but I think that one of the tricky things with Reddit is that demographically speaking, they're going to miss a lot of topics that Reddit just hasn't covered because it just hasn't really necessarily connected with those topics. It's also very American, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. And that I think is sort of the problem. Look, Google has this fire hose from Reddit, they have direct access to it, so they're going to use the Reddit. I think it ends up, you need to create a new incentive cycle in order to create the incentive for people to say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start a forum, or I'm going to create a microblog, or I'm going to start writing in first-person based on first-person experiences and pivot the entire tone and the entire style and the entire way of writing my content on my actual blog. And then incentive really isn't there yet. Google did announce the structured data markup for forums, and smart people, like Aleyda Solis took advantage of as a signal, like Google does want more forum first-handed content, and if they only had good forums, they would pull that content into the server. Which what I'm saying, they don't really want to pull Reddit all the time. They do want to pull other forums, they're just not there yet. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that this is interesting because Mark Williams-Cook, who's a great person to follow online if you're interested in SEO so do you follow Mark, one of the things he was like, he was saying he's like, is this 2008? Again, because Google was way big into forums since day dot. Mordy Oberstein: Right, it almost is in a way. Crystal Carter: And it always has been. And there's a lot of forums. For instance, like Mumsnet, there's a World of Warcraft forum, there are forums for gardening, there are forums for... I follow Money Saving Expert in the UK. They've got a great forum on things like credit cards and loans and mortgages and all that kind of stuff. And people going, oh, is that worth getting that mortgage? Should I get this account? Is it worth paying the extra for that account? And people just discussing all of that stuff. And that content is round. So I think it's also a question of what tools Google has to access them. And I think that's why you mentioned passage ranking. If they have better tooling for understanding that content, that's really important. I think also, there's a lot of websites that don't even index their UGC stuff. So comments underneath blogs for instance, a lot of people don't index those, but whereas if you look at the reviews on Amazon for instance, not only do they index those, they've got separate pages dedicated specifically for those, which is going to give you that UGC, which is going to give you that sort of forum experience, because they're very forum-esque, like, is this vacuum cleaner good? And people are like, nah. Mordy Oberstein: You're right. It is a re-circling of that kind of content. I think it's a different take on that content and in a new way. I'll go back to Aleyda Solis, she created a forum called chat.seofomo.co, which by the way is on Wix. There's a little plug there. She created a forum where people can ask and answer SEO questions, and there's really good information there. And by the way, I actually asked this question on that forum just to prove the point of what should Google do about the Reddit issue. And I got a bunch of answers back really good answers back. And this is the kind of content that I think Google should be showing on the SERP forums, and not just Reddit. And Aleyda Solis herself wrote back, "Sadly, Google is never able to evolve their own social platform to have firsthand access to that sort of UGC, user-generated content, and now needs to rely on third-party whose quality they don't control. It's tricky. Bigger UGC-focused platforms like Reddit or Quora might facilitate access or scale to obtain that sort of information. However, the level of spam/low-quality information in there can be non-trivial for certain topics." She goes on to say, "This is something they need to identify how to filter or weight to avoid giving so much visibility due to their overall authority to overall UGC generalists with higher levels of spam and give more to niche-specialized one," meaning your point. That's I want to come back to your point, there needs to be more specialized forums like Aleyda's forum, like the mom forum, whatever forum, so they don't have to rely on Reddit all the time, but are much more like... Aleyda's moderating her forum. It's a higher level of control and quality, and it's a great point. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that Aleyda's is a classic example and very similar to the money-saving expert one in that it's attached to a website that has high authority. So Aleyda's, it's a sub-domain of SEO fomo, and she runs a newsletter. People know that brand. People know what's going on there, and people know that Aleyda knows her stuff, right? And so then she's got this forum that's attached to that. Similarly, money-saving expert, he's a great advocate for lots of things, has a great website, and has a forum attached to that. And so you're able to port those two things and say these two things are related, and Google can use the data that they have on the existing website to support how they place that forum in the SERP. And I think that that would create a better, more rich SERP experience because also in terms of people figuring out who's in charge of this and who's looking after this, and in the EAT, people can track that back to something that is more researched, more backed by general sources like you get from the web. Because I'm also here for that content. Can we just say that? People are saying like, oh, we shouldn't have something that's just written by somebody. People say, oh, it is just written by some content writer. Well, a content writer is a skilled writer who can write something coherent and based on research from the web and from whatever, and that's important. That is valuable content, and there's a reason why it ranks. And sometimes I've been on forums before and they're just rambling stuff and it's a bunch of things where somebody says this is the answer, and it's clearly not, and somebody says it's not- Mordy Oberstein: No. That's why the moderation is such an important part of it, but I think there's no immediate answer to this question. It's a slow burn because there has to be an increase in the creation of these kind of forums and this kind of content. And in order for that to happen, you need to change an entire incentive cycle. Gary Kirwan from Traffic Think Tank wrote, "Unless they change their obvious KPI metric to surface X percent more diverse content from forums, this is here to stay and keep growing." And what he's basically, I think saying is Google says, okay, we need to have X percentage... they don't actually say this, but imagine they say, X percentage of results need to be from forums. If Google's going to be very linear about that, then we're stuck with the Reddit for a long time, and I think in long term are dis-incentivizing forums from mom and pop forums from ranking. Because I'm not going to compete with Reddit. So I think they do need to just scale it back and find another solution and address the short-term dissatisfaction of not having that firsthand content with a longer actual substantial, long-term solution that can actually be sustainable. Crystal Carter: I think it's tricky because if you look at the demographic, the demographic is 74% men and 25% women. And 48% of users are from the United States, for instance. If you wanted to get more balanced information about whatever topic, that's not a balanced demographic of humanity. It's just not. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, by the way, Gianluca Fiorelli on Aleyda's forum said literally the same thing, he wrote, Reddit is very popular, but its popularity is not equally distributed worldwide. So what I fear and start seeing is Reddit shadowing the visibility of local forums that are more relevant for local audiences than Reddit. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a problem that you can't just patch with Reddit. So hopefully Reddit is a first step, and hopefully they'll be able to revive some of the forums and things that they've been looking at and that have been thriving for years. If you think about, is it WebmasterWorld or whatever, that's a forum that's been around for a long time, and that's a forum that's got a lot of... Google will have lots of information about the SERP on that, something that Barry references really regularly, Barry Schwartz. And I hope that this is first start of them engaging in more direct user-generated content. That's evidenced by the quality rater guidelines, which have a whole new section all about forums. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Google is all in from the algorithm updates to those things, to the hidden gems, to we're assuming with Reddit, we know what they want. I do think, though, to that point, I know it's not Google's style and I understand why it's not their style, it's a separate conversation, I think they need to just come out and say it. We want to rank more forums. We don't want to rank just Reddit. Go out there folks and create really high-quality forums because we want to rank them. And that's the only way you're going to speed up this process, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've got some more schema stuff that they've been incentivizing in that way. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but those are very backhanded signals. Unless you're again, super smart, like Aleyda's going to capitalize on that... by the way, another plug, Wix, Wix Studio, we automatically add a markup to your forum for you so you don't have to edit, it's there. Just saying, but unless you're really on the ball, really keeping on top of these things, you're not going to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think if people start seeing the traffic, then people will start responding and hopefully it won't just be traffic to Reddit. And Quora's also getting a lot as well. I think people haven't been talking about Quora so much, but Quora's been getting a lot of traffic as well. So I think it's important that when people start seeing the signals, they'll start investing the time. I think the tricky thing is they're just relying on the goodwill of people to make content, and maybe they will, maybe they won't. And I think that that's one of the things that's tricky. Mordy Oberstein: We shall see. Now, again, I don't want to, I have issues. You have issues, we all have issues, and as we discussed, Reddit has many issues, many, many issues, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. In fact, don't throw out the bath water, just let it drain down because a baby can't fit down a drain anyway. You follow what I'm saying? Crystal Carter: I think it's a reference to before there were baths, like indoor plumbing- Mordy Oberstein: Like, why would you throw out the bath water? Crystal Carter: It's like a bath- Mordy Oberstein: Babies can't fit down drains. Crystal Carter: Baby baths are in a bucket. They're like a bucket. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay. Crystal Carter: That's what we're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, yeah. Okay. Okay. Now it makes more sense. I was like, why throw out the bath water? You just drain it. It never made sense to me. Crystal Carter: It's harder to throw. You can't throw your whole sink out the window. Mordy Oberstein: No. And why would you do it? Take buckets and throw out the bath water. Okay, you've gone way... Anyways, what I'm trying to say is, don't cast Reddit aside. Use it. Use it. And to help us learn how to best leverage and use Reddit, the social media platform we all know and love, now and in the future, special guests to one and only. Ross Simmonds, the founder of Foundation, a content marketing agency is here to join us as we take a look into the future of Reddit with a little segment we call Crystal's Ball. Welcome to SERP's Up, Ross. How are you? Ross Simmonds: Going on. I'm doing well, doing well. No complaints. Things are great in my world. Crystal Carter: Absolutely love it. I've been seeing you doing lots of video stuff online and lots of obviously content distribution and just always speaking absolute sense. Ross Simmonds: Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, I'm pushing hard on the distribution thing right now. I've got a book coming out, so I'm definitely ramping up on the stories around distribution and how powerful it is. And yeah, I'm doubling down for the next little bit. Mordy Oberstein: You're one of the few consistent people that my social algorithm likes across all social media platforms, so that's a big kudos. Ross Simmonds: That is. I appreciate that. I'm glad. That means that I'm doing something right, hopefully. And as long as you don't click those little three dots and then unfollow or mute, I'm doing my job. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, no don't, follow Ross. The videos are great, by the way. You've been doing them for such a long time. Ross Simmonds: Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, video's a lot of fun. It's one of those things that my nickname in high school was Shy Ross, so old me would've never pictured myself being okay with video content. So it's been an internal journey, let's say, to get comfortable with it, but it's been fun. The response has been great. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. So today, we're talking about the world's largest cesspool and how to succeed in it- Crystal Carter: Just jumping right in there. Mordy Oberstein: I don't really get into the world of this podcast and just- Ross Simmonds: There's no bias. You don't hate- Mordy Oberstein: No, I love- Mordy Oberstein: But, those who are still confused, I'm talking about Reddit, obviously. All kidding aside. So this is a good conversation for me because I'm somebody who has a hard time with Reddit. I have a hard time existing on Reddit, navigating Reddit, but you're saying it's a viable channel for people. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm a big believer. I've been a Redditor for a long time. Mordy Oberstein: Convince me. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, and I'm going to try. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Ross Simmonds: So here's the thing with Reddit, it's essentially a replication in my opinion of culture. And oftentimes people go down a path where they look at the holistic demographics and psychographics of Redditors and they put them all in one bucket. But what is oftentimes underestimated is the number of subcultures that exist within this massive platform that might skew towards one demographic, but there are subcultures within it that actually might look and seem a little bit more niche than the traditional internet. So there are subreddits, for example, that are dedicated to small little communities and towns all over the world. For example, Halifax, which is where I'm from, small place in Nova Scotia, has a very popular subreddit dedicated to Halifax where there's thousands of people who talk about things happening here. It's not reflective of the entire internet, but it is a very small group. Similar, there's a subreddit that is dedicated to futurology. And again, this might be a little bit more along the lines of what people would expect Redditors to look like, where it's a lot of kind of geeks talking about things in the future. But then you'll also find that there's subreddits about very niche tasks. There could be one about dads learning to braid. And for me as a dad with two girls, and I would love to be able to do cornrows, I can go into a subreddit and learn from people who actually know how to do that, and they will show me tips and tricks on how to do cornrows. So within this major massive community, there are pockets where I think brands can show up, businesses can show up and extract value, but also humans. And for me, I'm a big fantasy football guy. I love the NFL, I love the Philadelphia Eagles. So I go- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the second-best team in Pennsylvania. Ross Simmonds: Oh no, you're a Steelers fan. I have no comments on that one. Mordy Oberstein: Good luck with Kenny. Good luck. Ross Simmonds: That's fair. Good luck with two quarterbacks. Mordy Oberstein: That's also fair. Ross Simmonds: So you can go into these communities and you can learn a ton. And that's my typical advice for anyone is to first find your people because your people are probably on Reddit, they just might not be in a very popular subreddit that is followed by millions and millions of people. There are subreddits that are dedicated to regions, dedicated to things like barbecue, dedicated to plant-based food, dedicated to vegan food, you name it, there's subreddits associated with everything. All that said, is Reddit filled with chaos and things that you don't want to read and consume? No doubt about it, there are subreddits that are super toxic, super ridiculous, say offside things, are offside, and probably shouldn't be on the internet. That exists, too. But also, let's be real, so does culture. Culture has people who are that. So I think it's a blend. It's a reflection of society more than anything. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that comes out of that discussion there and some great fantastic points... just before we were talking about you've been in this space since 2016, you've written a book on it and that sort of thing. And I think that one of the things that comes out from that is sometimes it's a question of quality rather than quantity. So that it might be a question of finding something that is very, very, very relevant rather than something that is very, very, very popular. Is that an approach? Ross Simmonds: That's exactly it. Let's pretend for example that we are a coffee shop or a founder of a coffee shop and we're trying to launch our own coffee store. What I would advise that individual to do is not just become overwhelmed when they log into Reddit and see all of this noise of a viral post in the news and all of the chaos and all of these things, the going into a NSFW subreddit, just let's put on our blinders for a second and go in with an intention to say, okay, I'm starting a coffee shop, what are things that are relevant to me? Entrepreneurship, coffee, beans, best roast, maybe decor, location, things like that. You can go into now, subreddits like r/Entrepreneur, which is a subreddit that is dedicated to entrepreneurs, and you can go into the search bar and you can type in coffee shops. And it's very likely that you are going to find a bunch of threads from entrepreneurs who have written about their experiences running or launching coffee shops. So you can now learn very specific information and insight from someone... and this is where it gets very interesting, from someone who is not creating this content with the intention of capturing organic traffic and then selling you a course, but instead, their own sole intention was to get karma amongst a community where they would get thumbs up in votes. So they're giving as much value as possible. And I think that mechanism is what has made Reddit valuable. People aren't yet... traditionally things have changed now that Google's announced that Reddit's a place for getting traffic and SEO and all that stuff. But traditionally, Reddit was built on in many ways, the buddy system where it's like, I'm going to give as much value to this community as possible, and I might get thumbs up, votes up, and that's going to be good. Or if I give something that's really valuable and now we're getting a little bit into the weeds, I might get Reddit Gold. And Reddit Gold is something that people can pay with their actual credit cards to give someone extra brownie points on the platform that gives them additional perks and benefits when they're using the tool. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of those interactive points are really, really important for a viable forum. If you look in the quality reader's guidelines, they've added additional information about forums specifically, and they talk about upvotes, they talk about interaction, they talk about things like that. And certainly when you look at other forum spaces, like even Google has product expert spaces. So people like Joy Hawkins is a platinum Google business profile expert. And I think that being able to engage with a community that has people that are that active from a business point of view, how important is that to businesses? Ross Simmonds: It's huge. I think right now almost in every industry, there's someone on Reddit who's asking a question or having a dialogue where you could show up and add value and it'd benefit your business. So that is on a local level. If you sell to a specific region, join your community subreddit because there's probably tourists that are commenting and asking questions like, Hey, when I have a trip to Pennsylvania, where should I eat? What should I do? And you as a business owner have a chance and an opportunity to respond there, add a bunch of value by referencing things that aren't you, but then also say, and also check out my restaurant. Check out my coffee shop, check out my gaming group. Whatever it might be that you offer, plug yourself in the mix. Then in addition to that, there's two benefits that are going to happen. One, you've added value in that specific thread, but two, if the value was significant enough, it might start to show up in the SERP and Google might actually start driving traffic to that page when someone asks the question, things to do with kids in Pennsylvania or things to do with kids in New York, whatever it might be that you've answered. So that is what I always advise folks to do is, keep your eyes open for opportunities where questions exist that you can show up and answer those questions and add as much value as possible because you want those upvotes. And then once you get those upvotes, move on to the next one and continue to rinse and repeat. Mordy Oberstein: So three things. One, I retract my earlier statement a little bit. I do find that when I go to Google and Reddit shows up there, if it's something that I really want, that really first person valuable experience, I do get it. I also, by the way, find that sometimes I don't actually click. I just see the little snippet there. I got enough and I move on. That's a different point. Two, pro-tip on Reddit, do not go into a New York Mets subreddit on Bobby Bonilla Day and wish them a happy Bobby Bonilla Day. You'll lose all your karma, I know this from experience. The third thing though is, how do you go about actually doing this? Reddit to me seems like very, very organic. They're going to find you out really quickly if you're just in there plugging away, commenting away just about your business. I want to make sure our audience understands what it actually means to engage and do this. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. I really appreciate that question because a lot of marketers go into Reddit and they think that they should just submit a bunch of links, plug their business, and then leave and call it a day, rinse, and repeat that strategy. I tried it and you get banned and blocked very quickly. I think I've been blocked already about 13 times in my life. Crystal Carter: You're on a list, man. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Did you also wish the Mets fans Happy Bobby Bonilla Day? Ross Simmonds: No, I just plugged in a bunch of my links and hoped that they would get upvoted and it doesn't work that way. But I got banned from technology, from SEO, all the communities, ghost bans, all the bans, bye Felicia, I was kicked out. It was not fun. Crystal Carter: Did you come back with a hat, look, hey guys, it's me. Ross Simmonds: Exactly. Had the giant glasses. Yeah, I came back and I figured out the code to making this stuff work. And to your question, here's what it is, you don't want to go into these communities and spam. You want to go into these communities and add value, but two, you also have to show that you are a little bit of a human and not a robot. And what I mean by that is, go into other communities that might not be exactly your space and your niche and add some comments there, too. So for every one post that I believe is business-oriented and going to potentially benefit me, I'll add two more posts that hopefully are community-oriented and will help people on Reddit in some different way, fashion, or form. It could be as simple as going into a sports subreddit and saying, my pick for next year's MVP is, Jalen Hurts. Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Not Kenny Pickett. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, it's not happening. I hope he doesn't start. That would be very stressful. But dropping a few of those little tidbits of just human combos tends to go afar in these communities because you have to build up a bit of karma to be able to actually publish frequently in some different spaces. So every subreddit has its own rules you have to follow and oblige by those rules. One other pro tip, every subreddit has an ego. So Redditors tend to have ego around their community, and if you're an outsider coming in, there can be a lot of issues. So one of my best things to always recommend people do is when you are going into these communities, always, I don't want to say pretend but act like you are so grateful for all the contributions that everyone in the community has given in the past. So whenever I go into these communities, I start a post by saying, Hey folks, I've been a long-time lurker of this subreddit, and I have gotten so much value out of this community, I want to give value back. And I say that because I don't want to get a bunch of downvotes, people saying, oh, look at you, you're trying to spam us and all that good stuff. I'll come in with that type of a message, then I'll deliver as much value as possible, and then I'll get upvotes all the way to the moon and make it to the front page, and then you win from Reddit. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of politics for a social media platform. Ross Simmonds: It is, but that's social media these days. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's a community, isn't it? It's kind of like, you wouldn't show up at somebody's house and just start throwing stuff everywhere and just like, well, I've got a space for me, I've got a seat for me. I've got some food on my plate. You guys don't get food on your plate. You wouldn't, like somebody invites you around for dinner and you don't say thank you, you wouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: My kids do it all the time. Ross Simmonds: And I think one other piece that I would advise people to do is, before you go into any subreddit, a great hack is to sort the content by top post. So in a subreddit, you can go into a subreddit like r/Entrepreneur or let's say barbecue, and you can click on a button that says sort by. And instead of setting your default to sort by new post, you're going to set your settings to sort by top post. And then there's a section where you have the opportunity to select the amount of time that you want this sort to be applied to, and you're going to select all time. Now, what you're going to do is analyze the types of posts that have generated the most engagement, most comments, most shares, most combos in your subreddit. So if you see that in the barbecue subreddit, the most popular piece is always when people are comparing two different types of smokers, then you can say to yourself, okay, when did that go viral? It went viral three years ago. I'm going to come back to this subreddit with a very similar style post about the best smokers that you should have in 2024, and I'm going to add additional value to my post, and I'm going to share that because I know that this post has content market fit with this subreddit. You rinse and repeat that across every subreddit that is relevant to your niche and your audience, and you will win. We've done this with clients, and the clients have actually had their websites crash because of the amount of traffic that they can get from one subreddit. That's another- Crystal Carter: Was any of your client's game? Ross Simmonds: Right. That's another piece of it. It's like you have to recognize, they call Reddit the front page of the internet. So be ready if you do make the front page to have a ridiculous amount of traffic to your site. Crystal Carter: Okay, so the front page of the internet, it now is kind of going to be kind of the front page of the internet. What's your opinion on the Google Reddit acquisition partnership... not a straight acquisition- Mordy Oberstein: Fire hose of Reddit. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. Crystal Carter: What's your opinion? Ross Simmonds: It's interesting. I think it's interesting. And I know what Google's trying to do, and I can appreciate what they're attempting to do, and I wished that there were more Reddits out there so we could have a more diversified SERP of different forms and communities. But unfortunately, Reddit is one of the last standing forums in a traditional sense that is fully scrapable and digestible, et cetera. So to me, I get what Google is trying to do because oftentimes if I'm asking a question, like what are the must-read books on a certain topic, I will sometimes include in my query Reddit because I want to hear from Redditors or real people what they think. And the reason why we do that is because we don't want to read content that was written by SEOs. We don't want to read a piece that an SEO wrote with the full intention of just ranking. We want to hear from other people who are like us. Now, that's where it gets difficult because everybody on Reddit isn't like us. So while the SERP is so influential, I think the other part of this becomes like, is there a world where content from Facebook groups eventually starts to show up in the SERP or from Pinterest starts to show up in the SERP or where else can it come from? It's going to be a fascinating time. I get what they're trying to do, but I don't know if it's going to fully achieve what they are sending out for it to accomplish. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I feel like they don't have the actual forms that they want. They want the Aleyda Solis' of the world to create a forum at SEO and have all that content there so they can rank that. But there's very few, in case you ever realize, Aleyda Solis' on this planet, so there just isn't enough content, and I feel like they're stuck, so now we're stuck. Ross Simmonds: Right. Crystal Carter: So I've had a situation where I've tried to solve a problem. For instance, there's a lot of IT help desks that have essentially gone to forums, right? They're just like, y'all figure it out. I had problems with my broadband. Mordy knows all about this because it was a whole big drama. I had problems with my broadband, and I was trying to figure out my broadband, and they're like, just go to our help forum. It was literally the blind leading the blind. People were like, oh, I stood on one foot and it worked. Oh, I changed my TV channel and it worked, all this sort of thing. So I think the upvotes are great, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. If it's a question of lots of people who don't know what they're talking about and one person says, oh, you can remove your manual actions by just getting rid of Google search console, and everybody goes, that's great. That's one of the things I worry about. I worry about these things. Mordy Oberstein: You worry. It keeps you up at night worrying about the internet. Crystal Carter: I like smart people. And I'm not saying that there aren't smart people on Reddit, but people don't always qualify what they're saying. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you just lost all your karma. Ross Simmonds: It just evaporated. It's gone. Yeah, it's so true. No, I completely hear you. I agree. I think there is elements of that that is at risk, and I think that's also true though on the internet at scale. I think when you think of the amount of blogs that are being published, yes, Google is trying their hardest to create and rank content that is created by authoritative sources, but we all have recently seen people doing Parasite SEO and showing up on Harvard's domain somehow with content. And when you see that type of thing, it's like, okay, who do we trust? We need to fix some of the fundamental plumbing around the internet first. Mordy Oberstein: That's the real problem. The whole thing is fundamentally flawed. And on that happy note, we're out of time. Ross, where can people find you? Ross Simmonds: Yeah, you can find me at rosssimmonds.com. I'm also on all of your favorite social media channels. You can do a quick search for Ross Simmonds. I'm typically @TheCoolestCool. That was my Twitter handle, also my handle on Instagram, and things like that. But both of you, thank you so much for having me on to chat about Reddit. It's one of my favorite platforms, and I hope folks can learn from it, absorb it, and hopefully not get banned. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure to give Ross a big old following, throw some karma his way in upvotes, and all that good stuff on the Reddit. Ross Simmonds: I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Thanks, Ross. Once again, thank you, Ross. Now, it's quite possible, and I don't know, I can't see the future, I don't have a crystal ball because I'm not Crystal and Mordy's Ball is more like a bowling ball than a crystal ball- Crystal Carter: It's a baseball, let's be honest. Mordy Oberstein: It's a baseball. Thank you. I'm literally wearing a baseball jersey and a baseball hat because it's opening day when we're recording this. It's like a holiday for me today. Crystal Carter: Okay. Yeah/ Mordy Oberstein: But it's quite possible that we could be covering something to do with Reddit on the SERP in the news today. Who knows? You'll have to wait and see as we see what the Mysterious Barry has in store for us today on our Snappy SEO News. So here's the Snappy SEO News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Well, turns out that the March 2024 core update finished on April 19th. That's like two weeks ago from when you'll hear this recording. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google March 2024 core update finish, April 19th, a week ago from when Barry wrote this article on April 26th, so almost two weeks ago, the time of this recording. Google has said that they upped the number. They went from saying that the update removed 40% of unhelpful results from the SERP to saying 45 removed, helped reduce rather low quality and unoriginal content in search results by 45% to quote Barry. So they upped it from 40 to 45%. I'm not sure what that means yet. A lot of the big data is still coming out. I'm waiting for a SEMrush poll to come through and see what actually happened, how this update compares to other updates because it's just so different in terms of the rollout and in terms of what Google is saying. I know Glenn Gabe is preparing to write up an article as well. It'll be interesting to see how this all settles and how it all kind of plays out what the analysis sort of is. Very, very curious to see. But in terms of you analyzing your own rankings, the cutoff date is April 19th. That's not to say there can't be tremors and reversals that follow it. I typically find that about a week or so after an update, you could still see reversals coming through a bit. So take the date of April 19th with a little bit of a grain of salt, but that is the official date. It's March 5th through April 19th. Okay, shoot. This from Danny Goodwin, actually two from Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. They kind of go together in my opinion. One is Google's CEO says, "AI overviews are increasing search usage." This is from Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO... I believe this is from Sundar's statements during or after, rather, their earnings call, basically saying that they're seeing an increase in AI overviews and Google's going to be evolving this experience as Danny says in the article, and yada, yada, yada, and they're going to make sure that there's traffic to actual websites and that this is going to expand and we're exploring more and we're doing more. And they particularly mentioned that there's pathways for monetization for them because again, this is an earnings call, so they want their investors to understand that with the AI advancements coming to the SERP, there is a plan for monetization. The next article is Head of Google Search demands urgency as growth slows. Google's Senior VP blames increasing competition costs and regulation on a new operating reality. This kind of works hand in hand with the other article. You kind of see how Google's saying publicly. I think this came out from an all-hands that kind of leaked out. So in this case, you have Google's Senior VP, Prabhakar Raghavan saying things like, I think we can agree that things are not like they were 15, 20 years ago, things have changed. He's calling for more agileness in how they develop. He's saying there's more competition, which Danny points out is probably talking about OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft, probably Amazon also, and yada, yada yada. They also increased costs. All the AI stuff that Google's doing is very costly. They're spending a lot to generate the SGE. He talks about that and talks about how they need to be different and it's not going to be easy going forward and yada, yada, yada. If you kind of put all the things Google is saying, whether it's from their CEO's public statements around their earnings calls, around SGE, and so forth, and you see what they're saying behind the scenes, it just kind of feels that something is happening at Google. I won't weigh in here what my personal thoughts are. I just want to point out these articles to you. We'll link to them in the show notes so you can read it, form your own opinion. We'll love to chat with you about this on social media because I do have a lot of thoughts about this and what's happening at Google because it is, I think one of the more interesting times, and you should definitely read the statements from both these senior level folks over at Google in the articles that Danny wrote for you. And that's going to do it for this week's Snappy News. Actually, I think by the way, that the news segment that we do is undervalued. Crystal Carter: No, it's not. Whenever I go out, people say, I really love the Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Because there's so much news out there around SEO. Barry produces 30 articles a day in an hour. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know how he does it. Barry, tell us how you do it. I don't know how you type that quickly or maybe voice type. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but there's a lot of news that we don't cover, that we filter out because some of the things that Barry has to cover are absurd. Like, you should still have an about page, even though it might not be a ranking factor. We don't cover that on this podcast because that's just bonkers. But God bless Barry for covering it so that people know the truth about SEO. And the truth is, by the way, that you should not only read the SEO news, but the truth is you should also be following some great SEOs out there on forums. I guess Reddit, I guess there's some good SEOs on Reddit, but also X or LinkedIn. And that brings us to this week's follow of the week, which is Ori Zilbershtein, who is at O-R-I-Z-I-L-B-E-R-S-H-T-E-I-N. That's a mouthful. So we'll link to his profile in the show notes. Ori's talked a lot about what goes on Reddit. I like Ori as a follow, as a person, as a friend. I've actually interviewed him a few times in my other podcasts. He's brilliant. He takes a very conceptual approach to things. He's got a very cut through the nonsense kind of approach to SEO marketing overall, and he's gone through a ton about the value of Reddit on the SERP and the not value of Reddit on the SERP and where things should be going and how Google should deal with this kind of stuff. So definitely give Ori a big follow and tell him what we sent you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's a great follow. Super active on Twitter, so yeah, check in. Tell 'em we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, tell 'em we sent you. Hey, Ori, we're telling people, tell 'em we sent you. We should be a weird post, like, Hey Ori, I heard you on the SERP's Up podcast, they told me to tell you that they sent me. Crystal Carter: I'm here because of Crystal and Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I'm here. I'm not sure what to do now, but they told me to tell you. Crystal Carter: Sometimes I think about what following in real life would be like. People are like, oh yeah, you should follow that person. There's just people literally just following you around. Mordy Oberstein: And they're like saying, I like that. You pull a thing off the shelf of the grocery store, like, oh, I like that, good purchase. Crystal Carter: Right? I do like pop-tarts, and you're like, what? Mordy Oberstein: I'll retweet. I'll grab a box myself. Crystal Carter: Right? Or they go, he just bought pop-tarts. He just bought pop-tarts, everyone. You should also get some. Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete from Moz has a thing. If you went into a store and actually asked for things, what you ask on Google, like buy laptop now. You walk in the Best Buy and you just screamed, buy laptop now. Crystal Carter: I literally just enter lowest common denominator terms in sequence. I'm just like laptop, hi-res screen with- Mordy Oberstein: Cheap. Crystal Carter: Not even with, just like, yeah, cheap 35, megabyte. I don't know, that's not that many megabytes, but you know what I mean. I just, literally like, 10 terabytes. Mordy Oberstein: That'd be great. Walk in like, cheap laptop. Crystal Carter: Now. Near me. Mordy Oberstein: Now. Near me. On that happy note, thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with new episodes. We dive into how to reignite and revitalize your SEO. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and downloadable resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ross Simmonds Ori Zilbershtein Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google Ends Video Carousel Structured Data Test Google Search Tests Thumbs Up/Down Buttons In Product Grid Results Google Will Fight Site Reputation Abuse Spam Both With Manual Actions & Algorithms Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ross Simmonds Ori Zilbershtein Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google Ends Video Carousel Structured Data Test Google Search Tests Thumbs Up/Down Buttons In Product Grid Results Google Will Fight Site Reputation Abuse Spam Both With Manual Actions & Algorithms 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 on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the uncompromising, but in a good way, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Mordy Oberstein: Uncompromising on your SEO values and your humanity is what I meant. Crystal Carter: That's right. Upvote for that. Mordy Oberstein: Beat me to this. Beat me to this. I guess that's karma for you. Crystal Carter: Oh, oh, oh. Well, I'm sure if we can make a thread about it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Somebody, by the way, commented on social media, I love how you all hint at the topic before you actually get to it, which we're doing right now. Crystal Carter: As if the person who's listening to the podcast hasn't actually read the title of the podcast- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's possible. Crystal Carter: Is it possible? Mordy Oberstein: No, that's totally possible. Crystal Carter: It's cool. Mordy Oberstein: If you're the regular listener... I listen to this sports podcasts every day, I don't look at the title, I'm, like, oh, I just keep going. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all good. Do you know what, somebody was like, oh, I summarized your podcast with ChatGPT? I'm like, you're missing the entire point. Mordy Oberstein: I know. I saw that. Crystal Carter: I'm like, what? Mordy Oberstein: You lose all the flavor. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right, right. It's like saying- Mordy Oberstein: You come for the insights, but you stay for the entertainment. Crystal Carter: It's nice. You're missing the vibes, guys. People who are listening to the podcast, you're vibing with us. We're all vibing together. It's like a whole SEO vibe. It's important. Mordy Oberstein: That AI cannot replicate at all. Crystal Carter: No, no. We're definitely real people. This is- Mordy Oberstein: We're beyond AI. It's more like Reddit for your ears. Okay. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search site each and every month at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our Zapier integration to do things like post a new event from your Wix studio website to a subreddit automatically. This as this week, in case you haven't gotten the hints, we're talking about the problem on the SERP with Reddit. Well, I don't know if it's a problem. Who knows? Because I read it somewhere that perhaps there's too much Reddit on the SERP. I can't recall where I read it, but I did read it or read it somewhere. You know I'm going to keep making that joke the entire time now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the stars, I read it. Sorry. Okay. That's right. We're taking up the abundance of Reddit on the SERP and what Google should perhaps do about it from the reason why Google has gone Reddit to how it all to LLMs and how to address the reason why Reddit is on the SERP with complaints about Reddit on the SERP. And to help us solve this complex problem, joining the podcast this week is you all. We're going through the comments y'all have left on this issue across the wider social media universe, and we'll also chat with none other than Ross Simmonds about the future of Reddit and how marketers can really leverage it. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media like Reddit, I guess for more SEO awesomeness. So forgo any preconceived notions about forums being at the forefront of the SERP as we attempt to foresee the future of forum formulations on the results page and how it might foreshadow wider marketing trends on this the 85th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Please forgive me. Crystal Carter: That was formidable. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. It's also like how many dad jokes can I possibly make in one intro? Crystal Carter: I think that's kind of fine. We're talking about Reddit, there's a lot of dads on Reddit. There's also a lot of other folks on Reddit. There must be a dad joke Reddit, right? Mordy Oberstein: I'm sure. Yeah. No, there's definitely got to be a dad joke Reddit, right? Crystal Carter: Yeah. There's got to be, I'm sure. Mordy Oberstein: There's definitely inappropriate joke Reddit, so there has to be a counterbalance to that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I mean, basically all the folks that I know that spend a lot of time on Reddit basically go and look for the worst things on the internet on Reddit. Mordy Oberstein: We'll get into this because we already recorded the section with Ross before recording this section to drop the fourth wall, and I am telling you, I made some heavy comments about my opinions about Reddit. Crystal Carter: Ross is a great person to speak to because Ross has come at this from a very strategic point of view. Because I think some people go to Reddit with a lot of feels like you're talking about, but he's only forever approached it from a strategic point of view, from a, how can we leverage this traffic? How can we engage these audiences? And I think that that's a really, really intelligent way to think about it. So grateful to Ross for joining us for that session, and y'all are for a real treat because he's got nothing but gems. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Okay, so let's get started because there's a lot to cover and why we're talking about this is basically because there's an abundance of Reddit results on Google, at least at the time of this recording. I would imagine it'll still be that way by the time this episode actually is released. But I want to start at the beginning because in the beginning there was content and it was good. Humans consumed printed content on pages made of paper of all kinds, cardstock, A4, glossy, and it was good. But then came the machines and humankind deteriorated into a black hole of five ways to and 10 best things to, and it was not good. Then in 2020, a new day dawned on the horizons of the web when Google announced passage ranking said to impact 7% of search queries, and it was meh. Not really that impactful, not really that big of a deal, but all kidding aside, the story does, I think begin with passage ranking where Google said, "Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right"... Or maybe I'm quoting Barry, Wait, am I quoting Barry? I think I'm quoting Barry quoting Google. No, no, I'm not quoting Barry, I'm quoting Google. So Google said, "Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right since sometimes a single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page." And this is already years ago, "we've recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the web." They don't actually mean index, they mean rank actual passages from the web. "By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle in a haystack information you're looking for." And this is the first time where Google basically said outright, we want to get past the crap that's out there on the web and reward creators with real expertise who are talking about very specific things that answer very specific questions. And Google's been on this quest for... what, we're in 2024. 4 years. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Google's been on this quest for four years and we haven't exactly gotten there. But then in November 2023, Google came and started to talk about hidden gems, which is to be determined. We're not there yet in terms of seeing the impact of the hidden gems, but Google wrote in November of 2023... Google or no, now I'm quoting Barry. Now I'm quoting Barry, quoting Google. Barry wrote, "Google has rolled out ranking improvements aimed at showcasing more content from social media, blog posts, forums, and more that share personal insights and experience." This is the hidden gems announcement Google made back in May 2023, but this update is not part of the helpful content updates system, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Google's has announced that they're trying to find ways to reward personal experience, real expertise. Kind of what they were talking about with the passage ranking thing, but much more formalized. And they've added this to the core algorithm, and this is where I think Reddit on the SERP was born. Google wants to reward specific answers that have actual expertise based on actual firsthand knowledge and firsthand experiences, but they don't have the content to do it. Most web content, most blog posts are not taken from a first-person experience point of view. If I'm writing about how to create a SEO report for your clients. My default is not going to be, let me tell you my personal experience with my personal clients. I'm going to write a very stoic, generic, almost like cold post about the best ways to create a SEO report for your clients. So there's not a lot of content out there that's taken from that first-person, first-experience point of view. So Google went a little bit too far down the social media rabbit hole, particularly with the Reddit rabbit hole because they don't have anything else. And I think that's how we got here. And that's why there's so much Reddit showing up for so many queries. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember that Google has bought into Reddit. They've invested in the company and having access to their database and things like that. And I think the other thing that's important to think about is when you're talking about the passage ranking, one of the things that's really important to that, and I think that was at Search On that they announced that they were doing passage ranking. And the thing that's really important about that is that it also has to do with NLP. So natural language processing and Reddit forums and all forums really are written in natural language because it's someone going, why is my plant dying? I've tried feeding it with this fertilizer, I've tried moving it to this window, and I don't understand why my Monstera plant is struggling. I don't understand. And then someone goes, oh, I had a Monstera that was like that, and it was like dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and this didn't happen, and all that sort of stuff. Or like mom blogs, we were talking about dad jokes, mom forums, places like Mumsnet in the UK for instance, are full of people being like, oh, I've been trying to get my kid to sleep for weeks and he's teething now. And somebody's like, oh yeah, well, my son did this and my daughter did that, and dah, dah, dah, dah. And all of those things are written in natural language, and I think that that's really important to think about because of the bots, right? Because of all the AI content, this is essentially, forum content is kind of a foil to that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's why Google has to do it. They know they have to swing the other way a little bit. They can't be seen as a place where you're getting content that might be too generic because in an AI world, too generic is a real branding problem. And it makes sense, I agree with the notion that you should be going first-person experience on the SERP with content in general. I just think you're saying... and you're hitting on such a great point, but I don't want to spoil it yet because I want to get to it later about the forums and mom forums and SEO forums and all the other forums that are out there. But you're right, they're trying to train the LLMs on this stuff. I think that, by the way, as a separate point, training large language models on places like Reddit I think is problematic at best because I'm not sure you're always getting an unbiased view of whatever it is that you're looking to understand from a place like Reddit. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that's interesting about Reddit is the demographics of Reddit. The demographics of Reddit are very much swinging in the sort of realms of, it's very male, it tends to be fairly young, and that's something that it's real challenge. For instance, if you're talking about mom blogs, if you're talking about the experiences of moms and stuff, what a 20-year-old boy... not a boy, I'm sorry, my apologies, what a 20-year-old young man has... I'm showing my age- Mordy Oberstein: I'm a man. Crystal Carter: I'm showing my age. I'm an old lady, I'm sorry. What a 20-year-old has to say about kids teething or something is going to be different from what somebody who's had three children and is maybe in their 30s, 40s, et cetera is going to say about that. And I think that it's a real challenge with some of those topics because there are biases within certain platforms and also certain platforms are going to lead themselves to certain personality types. I've heard issues that people have had with Reddit where people are kind of mean, which will mean that some people won't go to those kinds of spaces. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, totally. Crystal Carter: Similarly, a place like Pinterest is going to have a different kind of vibe. And so if there were leaning into Pinterest, that would have a different kind of effect on the kinds of information that we're showing on the SERP. Whereas if you're talking about gaming, Reddit's a great place. Mordy Oberstein: That might be a great place, I agree. Crystal Carter: That's a great place to get information about gaming, but for some topics, it's not great. And so I think Google's trying to patch this gap, but I think that one of the tricky things with Reddit is that demographically speaking, they're going to miss a lot of topics that Reddit just hasn't covered because it just hasn't really necessarily connected with those topics. It's also very American, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. And that I think is sort of the problem. Look, Google has this fire hose from Reddit, they have direct access to it, so they're going to use the Reddit. I think it ends up, you need to create a new incentive cycle in order to create the incentive for people to say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start a forum, or I'm going to create a microblog, or I'm going to start writing in first-person based on first-person experiences and pivot the entire tone and the entire style and the entire way of writing my content on my actual blog. And then incentive really isn't there yet. Google did announce the structured data markup for forums, and smart people, like Aleyda Solis took advantage of as a signal, like Google does want more forum first-handed content, and if they only had good forums, they would pull that content into the server. Which what I'm saying, they don't really want to pull Reddit all the time. They do want to pull other forums, they're just not there yet. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that this is interesting because Mark Williams-Cook, who's a great person to follow online if you're interested in SEO so do you follow Mark, one of the things he was like, he was saying he's like, is this 2008? Again, because Google was way big into forums since day dot. Mordy Oberstein: Right, it almost is in a way. Crystal Carter: And it always has been. And there's a lot of forums. For instance, like Mumsnet, there's a World of Warcraft forum, there are forums for gardening, there are forums for... I follow Money Saving Expert in the UK. They've got a great forum on things like credit cards and loans and mortgages and all that kind of stuff. And people going, oh, is that worth getting that mortgage? Should I get this account? Is it worth paying the extra for that account? And people just discussing all of that stuff. And that content is round. So I think it's also a question of what tools Google has to access them. And I think that's why you mentioned passage ranking. If they have better tooling for understanding that content, that's really important. I think also, there's a lot of websites that don't even index their UGC stuff. So comments underneath blogs for instance, a lot of people don't index those, but whereas if you look at the reviews on Amazon for instance, not only do they index those, they've got separate pages dedicated specifically for those, which is going to give you that UGC, which is going to give you that sort of forum experience, because they're very forum-esque, like, is this vacuum cleaner good? And people are like, nah. Mordy Oberstein: You're right. It is a re-circling of that kind of content. I think it's a different take on that content and in a new way. I'll go back to Aleyda Solis, she created a forum called chat.seofomo.co, which by the way is on Wix. There's a little plug there. She created a forum where people can ask and answer SEO questions, and there's really good information there. And by the way, I actually asked this question on that forum just to prove the point of what should Google do about the Reddit issue. And I got a bunch of answers back really good answers back. And this is the kind of content that I think Google should be showing on the SERP forums, and not just Reddit. And Aleyda Solis herself wrote back, "Sadly, Google is never able to evolve their own social platform to have firsthand access to that sort of UGC, user-generated content, and now needs to rely on third-party whose quality they don't control. It's tricky. Bigger UGC-focused platforms like Reddit or Quora might facilitate access or scale to obtain that sort of information. However, the level of spam/low-quality information in there can be non-trivial for certain topics." She goes on to say, "This is something they need to identify how to filter or weight to avoid giving so much visibility due to their overall authority to overall UGC generalists with higher levels of spam and give more to niche-specialized one," meaning your point. That's I want to come back to your point, there needs to be more specialized forums like Aleyda's forum, like the mom forum, whatever forum, so they don't have to rely on Reddit all the time, but are much more like... Aleyda's moderating her forum. It's a higher level of control and quality, and it's a great point. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that Aleyda's is a classic example and very similar to the money-saving expert one in that it's attached to a website that has high authority. So Aleyda's, it's a sub-domain of SEO fomo, and she runs a newsletter. People know that brand. People know what's going on there, and people know that Aleyda knows her stuff, right? And so then she's got this forum that's attached to that. Similarly, money-saving expert, he's a great advocate for lots of things, has a great website, and has a forum attached to that. And so you're able to port those two things and say these two things are related, and Google can use the data that they have on the existing website to support how they place that forum in the SERP. And I think that that would create a better, more rich SERP experience because also in terms of people figuring out who's in charge of this and who's looking after this, and in the EAT, people can track that back to something that is more researched, more backed by general sources like you get from the web. Because I'm also here for that content. Can we just say that? People are saying like, oh, we shouldn't have something that's just written by somebody. People say, oh, it is just written by some content writer. Well, a content writer is a skilled writer who can write something coherent and based on research from the web and from whatever, and that's important. That is valuable content, and there's a reason why it ranks. And sometimes I've been on forums before and they're just rambling stuff and it's a bunch of things where somebody says this is the answer, and it's clearly not, and somebody says it's not- Mordy Oberstein: No. That's why the moderation is such an important part of it, but I think there's no immediate answer to this question. It's a slow burn because there has to be an increase in the creation of these kind of forums and this kind of content. And in order for that to happen, you need to change an entire incentive cycle. Gary Kirwan from Traffic Think Tank wrote, "Unless they change their obvious KPI metric to surface X percent more diverse content from forums, this is here to stay and keep growing." And what he's basically, I think saying is Google says, okay, we need to have X percentage... they don't actually say this, but imagine they say, X percentage of results need to be from forums. If Google's going to be very linear about that, then we're stuck with the Reddit for a long time, and I think in long term are dis-incentivizing forums from mom and pop forums from ranking. Because I'm not going to compete with Reddit. So I think they do need to just scale it back and find another solution and address the short-term dissatisfaction of not having that firsthand content with a longer actual substantial, long-term solution that can actually be sustainable. Crystal Carter: I think it's tricky because if you look at the demographic, the demographic is 74% men and 25% women. And 48% of users are from the United States, for instance. If you wanted to get more balanced information about whatever topic, that's not a balanced demographic of humanity. It's just not. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, by the way, Gianluca Fiorelli on Aleyda's forum said literally the same thing, he wrote, Reddit is very popular, but its popularity is not equally distributed worldwide. So what I fear and start seeing is Reddit shadowing the visibility of local forums that are more relevant for local audiences than Reddit. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a problem that you can't just patch with Reddit. So hopefully Reddit is a first step, and hopefully they'll be able to revive some of the forums and things that they've been looking at and that have been thriving for years. If you think about, is it WebmasterWorld or whatever, that's a forum that's been around for a long time, and that's a forum that's got a lot of... Google will have lots of information about the SERP on that, something that Barry references really regularly, Barry Schwartz. And I hope that this is first start of them engaging in more direct user-generated content. That's evidenced by the quality rater guidelines, which have a whole new section all about forums. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Google is all in from the algorithm updates to those things, to the hidden gems, to we're assuming with Reddit, we know what they want. I do think, though, to that point, I know it's not Google's style and I understand why it's not their style, it's a separate conversation, I think they need to just come out and say it. We want to rank more forums. We don't want to rank just Reddit. Go out there folks and create really high-quality forums because we want to rank them. And that's the only way you're going to speed up this process, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've got some more schema stuff that they've been incentivizing in that way. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but those are very backhanded signals. Unless you're again, super smart, like Aleyda's going to capitalize on that... by the way, another plug, Wix, Wix Studio, we automatically add a markup to your forum for you so you don't have to edit, it's there. Just saying, but unless you're really on the ball, really keeping on top of these things, you're not going to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think if people start seeing the traffic, then people will start responding and hopefully it won't just be traffic to Reddit. And Quora's also getting a lot as well. I think people haven't been talking about Quora so much, but Quora's been getting a lot of traffic as well. So I think it's important that when people start seeing the signals, they'll start investing the time. I think the tricky thing is they're just relying on the goodwill of people to make content, and maybe they will, maybe they won't. And I think that that's one of the things that's tricky. Mordy Oberstein: We shall see. Now, again, I don't want to, I have issues. You have issues, we all have issues, and as we discussed, Reddit has many issues, many, many issues, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. In fact, don't throw out the bath water, just let it drain down because a baby can't fit down a drain anyway. You follow what I'm saying? Crystal Carter: I think it's a reference to before there were baths, like indoor plumbing- Mordy Oberstein: Like, why would you throw out the bath water? Crystal Carter: It's like a bath- Mordy Oberstein: Babies can't fit down drains. Crystal Carter: Baby baths are in a bucket. They're like a bucket. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay. Crystal Carter: That's what we're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, yeah. Okay. Okay. Now it makes more sense. I was like, why throw out the bath water? You just drain it. It never made sense to me. Crystal Carter: It's harder to throw. You can't throw your whole sink out the window. Mordy Oberstein: No. And why would you do it? Take buckets and throw out the bath water. Okay, you've gone way... Anyways, what I'm trying to say is, don't cast Reddit aside. Use it. Use it. And to help us learn how to best leverage and use Reddit, the social media platform we all know and love, now and in the future, special guests to one and only. Ross Simmonds, the founder of Foundation, a content marketing agency is here to join us as we take a look into the future of Reddit with a little segment we call Crystal's Ball. Welcome to SERP's Up, Ross. How are you? Ross Simmonds: Going on. I'm doing well, doing well. No complaints. Things are great in my world. Crystal Carter: Absolutely love it. I've been seeing you doing lots of video stuff online and lots of obviously content distribution and just always speaking absolute sense. Ross Simmonds: Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, I'm pushing hard on the distribution thing right now. I've got a book coming out, so I'm definitely ramping up on the stories around distribution and how powerful it is. And yeah, I'm doubling down for the next little bit. Mordy Oberstein: You're one of the few consistent people that my social algorithm likes across all social media platforms, so that's a big kudos. Ross Simmonds: That is. I appreciate that. I'm glad. That means that I'm doing something right, hopefully. And as long as you don't click those little three dots and then unfollow or mute, I'm doing my job. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no, no don't, follow Ross. The videos are great, by the way. You've been doing them for such a long time. Ross Simmonds: Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, video's a lot of fun. It's one of those things that my nickname in high school was Shy Ross, so old me would've never pictured myself being okay with video content. So it's been an internal journey, let's say, to get comfortable with it, but it's been fun. The response has been great. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. So today, we're talking about the world's largest cesspool and how to succeed in it- Crystal Carter: Just jumping right in there. Mordy Oberstein: I don't really get into the world of this podcast and just- Ross Simmonds: There's no bias. You don't hate- Mordy Oberstein: No, I love- Mordy Oberstein: But, those who are still confused, I'm talking about Reddit, obviously. All kidding aside. So this is a good conversation for me because I'm somebody who has a hard time with Reddit. I have a hard time existing on Reddit, navigating Reddit, but you're saying it's a viable channel for people. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm a big believer. I've been a Redditor for a long time. Mordy Oberstein: Convince me. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, and I'm going to try. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Ross Simmonds: So here's the thing with Reddit, it's essentially a replication in my opinion of culture. And oftentimes people go down a path where they look at the holistic demographics and psychographics of Redditors and they put them all in one bucket. But what is oftentimes underestimated is the number of subcultures that exist within this massive platform that might skew towards one demographic, but there are subcultures within it that actually might look and seem a little bit more niche than the traditional internet. So there are subreddits, for example, that are dedicated to small little communities and towns all over the world. For example, Halifax, which is where I'm from, small place in Nova Scotia, has a very popular subreddit dedicated to Halifax where there's thousands of people who talk about things happening here. It's not reflective of the entire internet, but it is a very small group. Similar, there's a subreddit that is dedicated to futurology. And again, this might be a little bit more along the lines of what people would expect Redditors to look like, where it's a lot of kind of geeks talking about things in the future. But then you'll also find that there's subreddits about very niche tasks. There could be one about dads learning to braid. And for me as a dad with two girls, and I would love to be able to do cornrows, I can go into a subreddit and learn from people who actually know how to do that, and they will show me tips and tricks on how to do cornrows. So within this major massive community, there are pockets where I think brands can show up, businesses can show up and extract value, but also humans. And for me, I'm a big fantasy football guy. I love the NFL, I love the Philadelphia Eagles. So I go- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the second-best team in Pennsylvania. Ross Simmonds: Oh no, you're a Steelers fan. I have no comments on that one. Mordy Oberstein: Good luck with Kenny. Good luck. Ross Simmonds: That's fair. Good luck with two quarterbacks. Mordy Oberstein: That's also fair. Ross Simmonds: So you can go into these communities and you can learn a ton. And that's my typical advice for anyone is to first find your people because your people are probably on Reddit, they just might not be in a very popular subreddit that is followed by millions and millions of people. There are subreddits that are dedicated to regions, dedicated to things like barbecue, dedicated to plant-based food, dedicated to vegan food, you name it, there's subreddits associated with everything. All that said, is Reddit filled with chaos and things that you don't want to read and consume? No doubt about it, there are subreddits that are super toxic, super ridiculous, say offside things, are offside, and probably shouldn't be on the internet. That exists, too. But also, let's be real, so does culture. Culture has people who are that. So I think it's a blend. It's a reflection of society more than anything. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that comes out of that discussion there and some great fantastic points... just before we were talking about you've been in this space since 2016, you've written a book on it and that sort of thing. And I think that one of the things that comes out from that is sometimes it's a question of quality rather than quantity. So that it might be a question of finding something that is very, very, very relevant rather than something that is very, very, very popular. Is that an approach? Ross Simmonds: That's exactly it. Let's pretend for example that we are a coffee shop or a founder of a coffee shop and we're trying to launch our own coffee store. What I would advise that individual to do is not just become overwhelmed when they log into Reddit and see all of this noise of a viral post in the news and all of the chaos and all of these things, the going into a NSFW subreddit, just let's put on our blinders for a second and go in with an intention to say, okay, I'm starting a coffee shop, what are things that are relevant to me? Entrepreneurship, coffee, beans, best roast, maybe decor, location, things like that. You can go into now, subreddits like r/Entrepreneur, which is a subreddit that is dedicated to entrepreneurs, and you can go into the search bar and you can type in coffee shops. And it's very likely that you are going to find a bunch of threads from entrepreneurs who have written about their experiences running or launching coffee shops. So you can now learn very specific information and insight from someone... and this is where it gets very interesting, from someone who is not creating this content with the intention of capturing organic traffic and then selling you a course, but instead, their own sole intention was to get karma amongst a community where they would get thumbs up in votes. So they're giving as much value as possible. And I think that mechanism is what has made Reddit valuable. People aren't yet... traditionally things have changed now that Google's announced that Reddit's a place for getting traffic and SEO and all that stuff. But traditionally, Reddit was built on in many ways, the buddy system where it's like, I'm going to give as much value to this community as possible, and I might get thumbs up, votes up, and that's going to be good. Or if I give something that's really valuable and now we're getting a little bit into the weeds, I might get Reddit Gold. And Reddit Gold is something that people can pay with their actual credit cards to give someone extra brownie points on the platform that gives them additional perks and benefits when they're using the tool. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of those interactive points are really, really important for a viable forum. If you look in the quality reader's guidelines, they've added additional information about forums specifically, and they talk about upvotes, they talk about interaction, they talk about things like that. And certainly when you look at other forum spaces, like even Google has product expert spaces. So people like Joy Hawkins is a platinum Google business profile expert. And I think that being able to engage with a community that has people that are that active from a business point of view, how important is that to businesses? Ross Simmonds: It's huge. I think right now almost in every industry, there's someone on Reddit who's asking a question or having a dialogue where you could show up and add value and it'd benefit your business. So that is on a local level. If you sell to a specific region, join your community subreddit because there's probably tourists that are commenting and asking questions like, Hey, when I have a trip to Pennsylvania, where should I eat? What should I do? And you as a business owner have a chance and an opportunity to respond there, add a bunch of value by referencing things that aren't you, but then also say, and also check out my restaurant. Check out my coffee shop, check out my gaming group. Whatever it might be that you offer, plug yourself in the mix. Then in addition to that, there's two benefits that are going to happen. One, you've added value in that specific thread, but two, if the value was significant enough, it might start to show up in the SERP and Google might actually start driving traffic to that page when someone asks the question, things to do with kids in Pennsylvania or things to do with kids in New York, whatever it might be that you've answered. So that is what I always advise folks to do is, keep your eyes open for opportunities where questions exist that you can show up and answer those questions and add as much value as possible because you want those upvotes. And then once you get those upvotes, move on to the next one and continue to rinse and repeat. Mordy Oberstein: So three things. One, I retract my earlier statement a little bit. I do find that when I go to Google and Reddit shows up there, if it's something that I really want, that really first person valuable experience, I do get it. I also, by the way, find that sometimes I don't actually click. I just see the little snippet there. I got enough and I move on. That's a different point. Two, pro-tip on Reddit, do not go into a New York Mets subreddit on Bobby Bonilla Day and wish them a happy Bobby Bonilla Day. You'll lose all your karma, I know this from experience. The third thing though is, how do you go about actually doing this? Reddit to me seems like very, very organic. They're going to find you out really quickly if you're just in there plugging away, commenting away just about your business. I want to make sure our audience understands what it actually means to engage and do this. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. I really appreciate that question because a lot of marketers go into Reddit and they think that they should just submit a bunch of links, plug their business, and then leave and call it a day, rinse, and repeat that strategy. I tried it and you get banned and blocked very quickly. I think I've been blocked already about 13 times in my life. Crystal Carter: You're on a list, man. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Did you also wish the Mets fans Happy Bobby Bonilla Day? Ross Simmonds: No, I just plugged in a bunch of my links and hoped that they would get upvoted and it doesn't work that way. But I got banned from technology, from SEO, all the communities, ghost bans, all the bans, bye Felicia, I was kicked out. It was not fun. Crystal Carter: Did you come back with a hat, look, hey guys, it's me. Ross Simmonds: Exactly. Had the giant glasses. Yeah, I came back and I figured out the code to making this stuff work. And to your question, here's what it is, you don't want to go into these communities and spam. You want to go into these communities and add value, but two, you also have to show that you are a little bit of a human and not a robot. And what I mean by that is, go into other communities that might not be exactly your space and your niche and add some comments there, too. So for every one post that I believe is business-oriented and going to potentially benefit me, I'll add two more posts that hopefully are community-oriented and will help people on Reddit in some different way, fashion, or form. It could be as simple as going into a sports subreddit and saying, my pick for next year's MVP is, Jalen Hurts. Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Not Kenny Pickett. Ross Simmonds: Yeah, it's not happening. I hope he doesn't start. That would be very stressful. But dropping a few of those little tidbits of just human combos tends to go afar in these communities because you have to build up a bit of karma to be able to actually publish frequently in some different spaces. So every subreddit has its own rules you have to follow and oblige by those rules. One other pro tip, every subreddit has an ego. So Redditors tend to have ego around their community, and if you're an outsider coming in, there can be a lot of issues. So one of my best things to always recommend people do is when you are going into these communities, always, I don't want to say pretend but act like you are so grateful for all the contributions that everyone in the community has given in the past. So whenever I go into these communities, I start a post by saying, Hey folks, I've been a long-time lurker of this subreddit, and I have gotten so much value out of this community, I want to give value back. And I say that because I don't want to get a bunch of downvotes, people saying, oh, look at you, you're trying to spam us and all that good stuff. I'll come in with that type of a message, then I'll deliver as much value as possible, and then I'll get upvotes all the way to the moon and make it to the front page, and then you win from Reddit. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of politics for a social media platform. Ross Simmonds: It is, but that's social media these days. Crystal Carter: I mean, it's a community, isn't it? It's kind of like, you wouldn't show up at somebody's house and just start throwing stuff everywhere and just like, well, I've got a space for me, I've got a seat for me. I've got some food on my plate. You guys don't get food on your plate. You wouldn't, like somebody invites you around for dinner and you don't say thank you, you wouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: My kids do it all the time. Ross Simmonds: And I think one other piece that I would advise people to do is, before you go into any subreddit, a great hack is to sort the content by top post. So in a subreddit, you can go into a subreddit like r/Entrepreneur or let's say barbecue, and you can click on a button that says sort by. And instead of setting your default to sort by new post, you're going to set your settings to sort by top post. And then there's a section where you have the opportunity to select the amount of time that you want this sort to be applied to, and you're going to select all time. Now, what you're going to do is analyze the types of posts that have generated the most engagement, most comments, most shares, most combos in your subreddit. So if you see that in the barbecue subreddit, the most popular piece is always when people are comparing two different types of smokers, then you can say to yourself, okay, when did that go viral? It went viral three years ago. I'm going to come back to this subreddit with a very similar style post about the best smokers that you should have in 2024, and I'm going to add additional value to my post, and I'm going to share that because I know that this post has content market fit with this subreddit. You rinse and repeat that across every subreddit that is relevant to your niche and your audience, and you will win. We've done this with clients, and the clients have actually had their websites crash because of the amount of traffic that they can get from one subreddit. That's another- Crystal Carter: Was any of your client's game? Ross Simmonds: Right. That's another piece of it. It's like you have to recognize, they call Reddit the front page of the internet. So be ready if you do make the front page to have a ridiculous amount of traffic to your site. Crystal Carter: Okay, so the front page of the internet, it now is kind of going to be kind of the front page of the internet. What's your opinion on the Google Reddit acquisition partnership... not a straight acquisition- Mordy Oberstein: Fire hose of Reddit. Ross Simmonds: Yeah. Crystal Carter: What's your opinion? Ross Simmonds: It's interesting. I think it's interesting. And I know what Google's trying to do, and I can appreciate what they're attempting to do, and I wished that there were more Reddits out there so we could have a more diversified SERP of different forms and communities. But unfortunately, Reddit is one of the last standing forums in a traditional sense that is fully scrapable and digestible, et cetera. So to me, I get what Google is trying to do because oftentimes if I'm asking a question, like what are the must-read books on a certain topic, I will sometimes include in my query Reddit because I want to hear from Redditors or real people what they think. And the reason why we do that is because we don't want to read content that was written by SEOs. We don't want to read a piece that an SEO wrote with the full intention of just ranking. We want to hear from other people who are like us. Now, that's where it gets difficult because everybody on Reddit isn't like us. So while the SERP is so influential, I think the other part of this becomes like, is there a world where content from Facebook groups eventually starts to show up in the SERP or from Pinterest starts to show up in the SERP or where else can it come from? It's going to be a fascinating time. I get what they're trying to do, but I don't know if it's going to fully achieve what they are sending out for it to accomplish. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I feel like they don't have the actual forms that they want. They want the Aleyda Solis' of the world to create a forum at SEO and have all that content there so they can rank that. But there's very few, in case you ever realize, Aleyda Solis' on this planet, so there just isn't enough content, and I feel like they're stuck, so now we're stuck. Ross Simmonds: Right. Crystal Carter: So I've had a situation where I've tried to solve a problem. For instance, there's a lot of IT help desks that have essentially gone to forums, right? They're just like, y'all figure it out. I had problems with my broadband. Mordy knows all about this because it was a whole big drama. I had problems with my broadband, and I was trying to figure out my broadband, and they're like, just go to our help forum. It was literally the blind leading the blind. People were like, oh, I stood on one foot and it worked. Oh, I changed my TV channel and it worked, all this sort of thing. So I think the upvotes are great, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. If it's a question of lots of people who don't know what they're talking about and one person says, oh, you can remove your manual actions by just getting rid of Google search console, and everybody goes, that's great. That's one of the things I worry about. I worry about these things. Mordy Oberstein: You worry. It keeps you up at night worrying about the internet. Crystal Carter: I like smart people. And I'm not saying that there aren't smart people on Reddit, but people don't always qualify what they're saying. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you just lost all your karma. Ross Simmonds: It just evaporated. It's gone. Yeah, it's so true. No, I completely hear you. I agree. I think there is elements of that that is at risk, and I think that's also true though on the internet at scale. I think when you think of the amount of blogs that are being published, yes, Google is trying their hardest to create and rank content that is created by authoritative sources, but we all have recently seen people doing Parasite SEO and showing up on Harvard's domain somehow with content. And when you see that type of thing, it's like, okay, who do we trust? We need to fix some of the fundamental plumbing around the internet first. Mordy Oberstein: That's the real problem. The whole thing is fundamentally flawed. And on that happy note, we're out of time. Ross, where can people find you? Ross Simmonds: Yeah, you can find me at rosssimmonds.com. I'm also on all of your favorite social media channels. You can do a quick search for Ross Simmonds. I'm typically @TheCoolestCool. That was my Twitter handle, also my handle on Instagram, and things like that. But both of you, thank you so much for having me on to chat about Reddit. It's one of my favorite platforms, and I hope folks can learn from it, absorb it, and hopefully not get banned. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure to give Ross a big old following, throw some karma his way in upvotes, and all that good stuff on the Reddit. Ross Simmonds: I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Thanks, Ross. Once again, thank you, Ross. Now, it's quite possible, and I don't know, I can't see the future, I don't have a crystal ball because I'm not Crystal and Mordy's Ball is more like a bowling ball than a crystal ball- Crystal Carter: It's a baseball, let's be honest. Mordy Oberstein: It's a baseball. Thank you. I'm literally wearing a baseball jersey and a baseball hat because it's opening day when we're recording this. It's like a holiday for me today. Crystal Carter: Okay. Yeah/ Mordy Oberstein: But it's quite possible that we could be covering something to do with Reddit on the SERP in the news today. Who knows? You'll have to wait and see as we see what the Mysterious Barry has in store for us today on our Snappy SEO News. So here's the Snappy SEO News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Well, turns out that the March 2024 core update finished on April 19th. That's like two weeks ago from when you'll hear this recording. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google March 2024 core update finish, April 19th, a week ago from when Barry wrote this article on April 26th, so almost two weeks ago, the time of this recording. Google has said that they upped the number. They went from saying that the update removed 40% of unhelpful results from the SERP to saying 45 removed, helped reduce rather low quality and unoriginal content in search results by 45% to quote Barry. So they upped it from 40 to 45%. I'm not sure what that means yet. A lot of the big data is still coming out. I'm waiting for a SEMrush poll to come through and see what actually happened, how this update compares to other updates because it's just so different in terms of the rollout and in terms of what Google is saying. I know Glenn Gabe is preparing to write up an article as well. It'll be interesting to see how this all settles and how it all kind of plays out what the analysis sort of is. Very, very curious to see. But in terms of you analyzing your own rankings, the cutoff date is April 19th. That's not to say there can't be tremors and reversals that follow it. I typically find that about a week or so after an update, you could still see reversals coming through a bit. So take the date of April 19th with a little bit of a grain of salt, but that is the official date. It's March 5th through April 19th. Okay, shoot. This from Danny Goodwin, actually two from Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. They kind of go together in my opinion. One is Google's CEO says, "AI overviews are increasing search usage." This is from Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO... I believe this is from Sundar's statements during or after, rather, their earnings call, basically saying that they're seeing an increase in AI overviews and Google's going to be evolving this experience as Danny says in the article, and yada, yada, yada, and they're going to make sure that there's traffic to actual websites and that this is going to expand and we're exploring more and we're doing more. And they particularly mentioned that there's pathways for monetization for them because again, this is an earnings call, so they want their investors to understand that with the AI advancements coming to the SERP, there is a plan for monetization. The next article is Head of Google Search demands urgency as growth slows. Google's Senior VP blames increasing competition costs and regulation on a new operating reality. This kind of works hand in hand with the other article. You kind of see how Google's saying publicly. I think this came out from an all-hands that kind of leaked out. So in this case, you have Google's Senior VP, Prabhakar Raghavan saying things like, I think we can agree that things are not like they were 15, 20 years ago, things have changed. He's calling for more agileness in how they develop. He's saying there's more competition, which Danny points out is probably talking about OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft, probably Amazon also, and yada, yada yada. They also increased costs. All the AI stuff that Google's doing is very costly. They're spending a lot to generate the SGE. He talks about that and talks about how they need to be different and it's not going to be easy going forward and yada, yada, yada. If you kind of put all the things Google is saying, whether it's from their CEO's public statements around their earnings calls, around SGE, and so forth, and you see what they're saying behind the scenes, it just kind of feels that something is happening at Google. I won't weigh in here what my personal thoughts are. I just want to point out these articles to you. We'll link to them in the show notes so you can read it, form your own opinion. We'll love to chat with you about this on social media because I do have a lot of thoughts about this and what's happening at Google because it is, I think one of the more interesting times, and you should definitely read the statements from both these senior level folks over at Google in the articles that Danny wrote for you. And that's going to do it for this week's Snappy News. Actually, I think by the way, that the news segment that we do is undervalued. Crystal Carter: No, it's not. Whenever I go out, people say, I really love the Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Because there's so much news out there around SEO. Barry produces 30 articles a day in an hour. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know how he does it. Barry, tell us how you do it. I don't know how you type that quickly or maybe voice type. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but there's a lot of news that we don't cover, that we filter out because some of the things that Barry has to cover are absurd. Like, you should still have an about page, even though it might not be a ranking factor. We don't cover that on this podcast because that's just bonkers. But God bless Barry for covering it so that people know the truth about SEO. And the truth is, by the way, that you should not only read the SEO news, but the truth is you should also be following some great SEOs out there on forums. I guess Reddit, I guess there's some good SEOs on Reddit, but also X or LinkedIn. And that brings us to this week's follow of the week, which is Ori Zilbershtein, who is at O-R-I-Z-I-L-B-E-R-S-H-T-E-I-N. That's a mouthful. So we'll link to his profile in the show notes. Ori's talked a lot about what goes on Reddit. I like Ori as a follow, as a person, as a friend. I've actually interviewed him a few times in my other podcasts. He's brilliant. He takes a very conceptual approach to things. He's got a very cut through the nonsense kind of approach to SEO marketing overall, and he's gone through a ton about the value of Reddit on the SERP and the not value of Reddit on the SERP and where things should be going and how Google should deal with this kind of stuff. So definitely give Ori a big follow and tell him what we sent you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's a great follow. Super active on Twitter, so yeah, check in. Tell 'em we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, tell 'em we sent you. Hey, Ori, we're telling people, tell 'em we sent you. We should be a weird post, like, Hey Ori, I heard you on the SERP's Up podcast, they told me to tell you that they sent me. Crystal Carter: I'm here because of Crystal and Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I'm here. I'm not sure what to do now, but they told me to tell you. Crystal Carter: Sometimes I think about what following in real life would be like. People are like, oh yeah, you should follow that person. There's just people literally just following you around. Mordy Oberstein: And they're like saying, I like that. You pull a thing off the shelf of the grocery store, like, oh, I like that, good purchase. Crystal Carter: Right? I do like pop-tarts, and you're like, what? Mordy Oberstein: I'll retweet. I'll grab a box myself. Crystal Carter: Right? Or they go, he just bought pop-tarts. He just bought pop-tarts, everyone. You should also get some. Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete from Moz has a thing. If you went into a store and actually asked for things, what you ask on Google, like buy laptop now. You walk in the Best Buy and you just screamed, buy laptop now. Crystal Carter: I literally just enter lowest common denominator terms in sequence. I'm just like laptop, hi-res screen with- Mordy Oberstein: Cheap. Crystal Carter: Not even with, just like, yeah, cheap 35, megabyte. I don't know, that's not that many megabytes, but you know what I mean. I just, literally like, 10 terabytes. Mordy Oberstein: That'd be great. Walk in like, cheap laptop. Crystal Carter: Now. Near me. Mordy Oberstein: Now. Near me. On that happy note, thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with new episodes. We dive into how to reignite and revitalize your SEO. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and downloadable resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

Crystal Carter is the Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix and an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with almost 20 years of experience.  Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An active AI & SEO communicator, she hosts SEO webinars, presents keynotes and her expertise has been featured at Google Search Central, Microsoft, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush, and more. Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix Crystal Carter is the Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix and an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with almost 20 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An active AI & SEO communicator, she hosts SEO webinars , presents keynotes and her expertise has been featured at Google Search Central, Microsoft, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush, and more. Articles & Resources 30 Mar 2026 Introduction to structured data for SEO 18 Mar 2026 How to optimize images for search on Wix 16 Mar 2026 How to add and customize structured data on Wix 4 Jun 2025 AI Tools for SEO: From LLM Workflows to MCP 28 May 2024 How to use long-tail keywords and why you should 30 Apr 2024 What is bounce rate and how has it changed? 28 Dec 2023 Automate your digital marketing funnel with Wix Studio & Zapier 5 Sept 2023 How to design a Wix Studio website with SEO in mind 3 Aug 2023 What is structured data validation? 15 Dec 2022 Homepage SEO strategies to achieve business goals 16 Nov 2022 Edit by Page: Manage SEO on your Wix site pages at scale 15 Nov 2022 How to Use Wix SEO Settings Resources Crystal Carter LLM brand visibility tracker Interpret your brand's LLM presence in AI-powered search results and provide actionable strategies to optimize for the future of generative search. Crystal Carter Yearly client goal planner Monitor the progress you make with clients and highlight achievements that can help you further your own career. Crystal Carter Content distribution toolkit Learn how to drive traffic to your posts with Wix Blog’s content distribution tools. Crystal Carter User-first keyword ideation Google Sheet Uncover razor sharp insights by collating search data from existing user touchpoints with this SEO worksheet. Crystal Carter SEO toolkit for Wix web design Make SEO an integral part of your web design process effectively and efficiently with this toolkit. 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

Consulting business sees 800% uplift in organic traffic on Wix “I used to be afraid to touch my old site because it was so complex. Now I can change up my website content and optimize my own blog posts in minutes—and nothing’s going to break.” 800% Increase in organic traffic $300 Amount saved by SYSTM every month 138% Increase in website conversion rates Matt Lerner, former marketing director at PayPal, was exasperated. His plugin-reliant website was giving him endless hassle in the form of laggy load times, security scares, and costly maintenance. What he needed? A fast, resilient platform that let him take care of SEO and focus on growing his business. The business After helping PayPal’s marketing team achieve phenomenal success, Matt moved from Silicon Valley to the UK to head up their SMB arm. In the process, something became very clear to him: It wasn’t enough for a startup to simply have a good product—plenty of those companies fail everyday. The lucky few that make it have one thing in common: they invest in strategies that pay off in the long-run. This is exactly why Matt founded SYSTM (formerly Start Up Core Strengths). With 15 coaches on staff, SYSTM’s mission is to help early-stage businesses find their big growth levers—and pull them. This is how SYSTM helps about 60 startups a year to double down on their most impactful work and drive growth that’s both profitable and scalable. For all these reasons and more, Matt’s weekly newsletter is widely regarded as an industry must-read, and is consumed religiously by leaders at the likes of Harvard, Google, and Amazon. Matt Lerner, Founder of SYSTM The SEO challenge According to Matt, there’s free like a beer—and there’s free like a puppy. Unfortunately, SYSTM’s first business website was built on a platform that was free like a puppy. Needless to say, this resulted in a lot of unpleasant surprises for Matt and his team. “So you don't actually pay money for WordPress, but I ended up paying thousands of dollars to a developer in India to build the thing. And then of course, it was all plugins jacked together in weird ways so that I had to pay her to maintain it. And then I had to pay for GoDaddy hosting which already, by itself, costs more than Wix,” Matt shares. As a professional marketer, Matt also found it extremely frustrating that he couldn’t so much as change a header on his site without something going wrong. Overall, he found the platform costly, hard to use, and worst of all for his SEO—it was slow. This was particularly painful for potential customers in other countries who didn’t necessarily have great caching and page load acceleration. As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Matt’s attention was also being diverted from his business because of late night security calls—despite the fact he was paying for plugins that were supposed to protect his site. “WordPress sites are constantly attacked, so you have to make sure all your plugins are always up-to-date. Even then, my site still got taken over and I ended up having to pay an offshore security firm hundreds of bucks a month to be there on retainer in case my site got hacked again. I’m not technical, so this is not stuff I want to be dealing with. I want to focus on running my business.” The solution Matt decided to re-build his business website on a platform that was known for enterprise-grade security, lightning-fast load times, and intuitive SEO features. He enlisted the help of a Wix Partner, Julia Dudnitska to help him make the move and re-design his site. Wix now offers a far more user-friendly and cost-effective solution for Matt’s value-driven business. “ If Wix did nothing else other than really fast, bulletproof hosting that would already be worth it, but it goes far beyond that. It's been great to set up and work with,” he enthuses. One of the biggest advantages that Wix offers Matt is the flexibility to optimize his weekly blog post from inside the Wix Editor—no plugins or tech support needed. He finds the AI-powered recommendations from the SEO Assistant particularly helpful. “There's a bunch of SEO fill-in-the-blank tools right there in the panel,” he describes. “They’re super intuitive for a non-expert to use. Whenever I create a post, I just go in and it helps me identify the right keywords, come up with the right URL slug and preview text, and everything else I need to optimize my post.” Results As well as saving Matt a hefty $300 a month and hours of needless stress, his Wix website is now faster and more secure by design. A content refresh also helped it rank for a slew of new terms. The result? Matt’s business has succeeded in increasing its organic traffic by 800% and upping online conversions by 138%. “Overall, it's just been fabulous. I've got customers all around the world and never had a single complaint about page speed. It's unbelievably fast and I've never had any security issues—they haven’t even crossed my mind. The fact that I get all of that for tens of dollars a month is an unbeatable bargain. It’s one of those checks that I'm just perfectly happy to pay every month and know I'm getting a lot of value for it.” Matt is so happy with his decision to move to Wix, he now enthusiastically recommends the platform to startups he advises. He uses it as a real-life example of how to make value-driven business decisions. “I say forget Webflow, forget WordPress. Get on Wix and just cross all these things off your list of stuff to worry about.” Learn more about the Wix SEO features that help Matt scale his business and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How do you build an SEO strategy from scratch? How should SEO differ for specific business models? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by SEO growth specialist Gaetano DiNardi to teach you how to build an SEO strategy from the ground up… using an actual case as a reference. Get hands-on as we explore how Gaetano built his client an SEO strategy from scratch. Also stopping by is messaging strategist Diane Wiredu to discuss ways to articulate brand messaging that actually resonates with your audience effectively. Gather your finest ingredients, as this week we’re giving you the recipe to make SEO from scratch right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back The ins & outs of starting SEO from scratch How do you build an SEO strategy from scratch? How should SEO differ for specific business models? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by SEO growth specialist Gaetano DiNardi to teach you how to build an SEO strategy from the ground up… using an actual case as a reference. Get hands-on as we explore how Gaetano built his client an SEO strategy from scratch. Also stopping by is messaging strategist Diane Wiredu to discuss ways to articulate brand messaging that actually resonates with your audience effectively. Gather your finest ingredients, as this week we’re giving you the recipe to make SEO from scratch right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 77 | March 6, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 52:57 This week’s guests Diane Wiredu Diane Wiredu is a messaging expert and the founder of Lion Words. She helps scaling SaaS and B2B companies achieve message-market fit. So they can stand out from the crowd, market more effectively, and sell more. Simply put: she helps make the value of your products easier to understand. Gaetano DiNardi Gaetano DiNardi is a music producer and songwriter turned growth marketer. Over the past 10 years, Gaetano has become one of the most prominent voices in B2B marketing. Currently, he's advising companies like Gong, Kustomer, Cognism, Workvivo, DataGrail, Aura and more on SEO, PPC, content strategy, website optimization, and copywriting. 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. I'm brewing 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 cooks up a storm from the scratch. She has the flour, she has the water, she mixes it in, adds the sugar, puts in the oven, out comes great SEO pie, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Okay. I do not make cakes from scratch. Let's just make that clear. I use the box. The box is the best way. Mordy Oberstein: That counts, by the way. That's scratch. Crystal Carter: I use the box. I always use the box. The boxes are good. Highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: If you didn't buy it and you put it into the oven and you had to mix something, that's from scratch in my book. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I do make cornbread from scratch because I moved to England from America, and in America they have Jiffy Cornbread, comes in a box, get it from the box. Perfect. Gets every single time, right? Every time. In England, Jiffy doesn't exist. So I had to learn how to make it from scratch so that I do make from scratch. But cakes, generally speaking, Betty Crocker, she does a great job. So let's just give Betty her flowers and everybody can have a nice birthday. Throw some sprinkles on it. Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: I make toast from scratch. Crystal Carter: Are you out there? Are you like the little red hen? Did you grow the wheat and- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I just put it into the thing and out comes toast. Crystal Carter: Ta-daa. Mordy Oberstein: Ta-daa. I did it myself. Crystal Carter: Right. You tell your children, you're like, "You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: My kids are actually way better cooks than I am. It's a whole- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they're good. They're good. Crystal Carter: All right. This is good. Mordy Oberstein: That's so great on the cleanup, but on the cooking part. Crystal Carter: You win some, you lose some. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by a Wix. You can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over Wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Got little slashes, but where you can also get started with your SEO by using the Wix SEO setup checklist, where you can connect to Google Search Console to single click with the add a bonus of having your homepage indexed by Google instantly. And who knows what else they'll find when they do. As this week we're talking about starting SEO from scratch, which now you know why there was a scratch joke about cooking in the beginning. It all makes sense, how your product and services and business models factor into SEO. How to craft a strategy and SEO plan from scratch. How to get your SEO to gain some momentum when you are starting from scratch. And to help us stir the pot and add in some spice, musician songwriter and SEO extraordinary Gaetano DiNardi will join us just a few minutes. Or before you could say, "It's shake a bake and I helped." Plus, we'll explore what it means to cook up some brand messaging from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you this weekend. Who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So add three cups of flour, one cup of water, a teaspoon of yeast, let it sit, and then add 10 sticks of butter, some large, as much as you want, Crisco the entire can, teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt. And you mix it all up till your arms fall off. As episode number 77 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you start baking some SEO goodness from scratch. You smell that? Smells like SEO. Crystal Carter: I don't know what this recipe was for, but it was very greasy. Its like- Mordy Oberstein: Well, some say that SEO is snake oil. It's not really snake oil, it's just Crisco. Crystal Carter: It's Crisco. Crisco is magical. Shout out to Crisco my- Mordy Oberstein: My grandma used scoop Crisco. It was a disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was just nasty. Crystal Carter: No. You want to make cookies? Crisco. Mordy Oberstein: Crisco. Crystal Carter: Those are the best cookies, honestly, dry never. Forever moisturized. Mordy Oberstein: It looks disgusting. I feel like it's the... It's like you eat it and it immediately clogs your entire body. Crystal Carter: I don't care. The cookies are off the chain. The cookies are delicious. Mordy Oberstein: But it's delicious. Probably worth it. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: SEO from scratch. Starting from nothing is never easy. A lot of times when you come into SEO, it's in the middle of the process, but sometimes it's not in the middle of the process. Sometimes you're actually starting from literally nothing. And those are probably great moments because you're actually starting from when the business is getting going. You're there from day one. So that is very opportunistic for you as an SEO. But it's also hard, which gives me the pleasure of introducing today's guest. He's here in the flesh or the digital flesh, Gaetano DiNardi, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction. And I got to say, I love the banter. I love the chemistry, I love the back and forth. This is the way. It almost feels like a talk radio show here. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. This is what I'm going for. I said this before, if I had to do my life over and I couldn't be what I am now, I had to do something different, I would like to be a talk radio show talking about sports in New York. That would be my dream. Gaetano DiNardi: That's what this feels like. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. It's the greatest comment anyone has ever given me. Gaetano DiNardi: It's so good, man. I love it. I love it. Being from... Well, I'll tell you, when I was growing up, I couldn't really sleep well as a kid. And I used to put on the AM New York Sports Talk radio it's all right through the night. Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. I would put the thing on sleep for 90 minutes. And you have... Steve was choosing from the fan talking about the rangers. Gaetano DiNardi: Exactly. How boring can that be. There's nothing better to put you to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Right to sleep, right to sleep. Oh wait, who's that on line one? Is it Sal from Staten Island? I'm sorry. Gaetano DiNardi: Sal from Staten Island. Dude, it was some funny stuff though. I used to listen to Joe Benigno. Mordy Oberstein: Joe Benigno. You know he's still around? Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He's still around. Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Joe Benigno at like 2:00 AM, Mordy Oberstein: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Yeah. Frank coming out as … Mordy Oberstein: Crazier than ever- Gaetano DiNardi: ...because he's pissed. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I feel like though, y'all could do an app for that. There's people who are using... I don't know. There's different apps for meditation. You could just have a like, "Hey, do you need to go to sleep? Here's some vintage." Mordy Oberstein: Vintage 1990s New York Sports Radio. Crystal Carter: Right. You could just pick one and choose yours today. You want Staten Island? You want Long Island? What do you want? Mordy Oberstein: Oh man. I'll give you some good old Mike Francesa. I'll be out in three seconds. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh man, that guy. Mordy Oberstein: That guy is so boring. Gaetano DiNardi: That guy's so... Oh man. Mordy Oberstein: Well, he's also... Look at these guys are all still around with the geezers. Anyway. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Let's talk SEO from scratch. Since we're starting from scratch. Where do you want to start? Gaetano DiNardi: All right, well look, since we're starting from scratch, I'll tell you guys why this topic is being talked about. Now, I had a very tough assignment three years ago. I went into a company as a full-time head of marketing. And the primary way we're going to grow this business was through search. And so the SEO assignment was, well, there's nothing. There's zero. And the primary category was identity theft. The company saw is identity theft protection. Side note, my identity got stolen. It's a horrible situation. And so I was motivated to really thrive and crush this role because I know the kinds of people out there who do that, they are scum. So we need to fight back against this horrible thing that is plaguing so many people. And it's not just affecting young people, people who are digitally savvy. It's mostly hitting people who have no idea. And it's mostly hitting people who are in not great financial situations. So when it cracks them, it cracks hard because they're stuck with bills that they didn't accumulate, that they got to now pay for. Credit card accounts open in your name, the use of your social security number to steal your tax returns, all sorts of wacky stuff. So anyway, the company has a lot of products and they had a huge investment. So the one caveat to this is there was a lot of dough and I could spend. In fact, they kept saying to me, "Why don't you spend more? Can't you spend more? How much more can you spend?" Mordy Oberstein: That's a good problem to have. Gaetano DiNardi: Good problem to have. And of course, all my agency and consultants and link building friends are like, "He has a lot of resources, so let's get in there." So yeah, I did recruit in a lot of players to help me scale this, but this was the ultimate setup that we landed on. Me driving everything. Two content marketers with very strong SEO backgrounds and great editorial chops. 10 freelance writers, one in-house link building manager, plus like two, three external link builders. The result of that is approximately 20 articles a month and approximately a hundred links per month. And that was the pace we ran at from when I started building that program, which really kicked off in late 2021. The first article was published in November 2021. I personally wrote it actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: It was how to check if your identity has been stolen. It's still a top killer. It's still ranks- Mordy Oberstein: EEAT. E For experience. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. E for experience, baby. Yeah. I wrote it personally, built links to it personally through my own network. And it ranked pretty fast actually for a site with nothing. And so I guess I'll pause there before I keep ranting and riffing, but that's the initial setup. I know it's a lot to take in because most people do an SEO, it's way smaller scale than that. Nobody's doing 20 articles a month. Nobody's treating a SaaS SEO as a publisher almost would. And so anyway, I guess I'll pause there so we can just get your reactions. But that's how we launched it and that's the setup. Crystal Carter: I think one of the first things that stood out for me from that conversation, and you brought it back at the end, was when you were talking about the building it from scratch, you'd had the customer base in mind and you actually discussed that throughout your description of what you were going to do. You were saying, "I had my identity stolen. This is the experience that people were having. And I wrote the first article myself." And Mordy mentioned the experience in the EEAT. And I think that when people are thinking about getting going with SEO, having the customer experience and the customer focus, and like, "I get you, I get this, I get why this is an issue for you, and that's at the core of what we're doing." I feel like that is always a good recipe for success. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly what stood out to me initially also is that when you're first starting out, you're really trying to think, "Okay, who is the audience? What are the needs? How do I align the needs? And how do I align SEO with what the business itself is actually trying to do?" So it's completely harmonious from the start. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So here's the next thing I realized. The company has a lot of products and services. Like identity theft protection is the flagship product, but it's sold as a bundle with a lot of other stuff. So there's financial fraud protection, there's password manager, there's VPN, there's antivirus and there's family safety, parental controls and stuff like that. Have you guys ever looked at how difficult VPN the category is? Have you ever seen how insane- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, actually. Gaetano DiNardi: ...antiviruses? You know the kind of brands and players that are in those categories. It's pretty wild. So you can get overwhelmed really fast as an SEO with the company saying, "Hey, we got to get more subscribers into this. We got to grow our presence for that. We got to do this and that and this and that." And so you got to actually deflect a lot of that noise and say, "All right, the reality is we have no topical focus and no strength and no brand association with anything right now." So we've got to hammer one thing and go all in and say, "All right, that other stuff is going to have to come later." And so I made the decision to say, "All right, we're just going to build our identity theft and own that to start because we need to get something going somehow, somewhere." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's a real strength because I think that a lot of people think that when my brand, I have to get my logo out there and this and that. And it's like when you're very much starting from a completely new business or a completely new website or a completely new product, for instance, the solution is the lead there. So when you're saying identity theft first, that's how people are going to find you. And I think that building that out and building the depth of information there is going to help you build trust with people so that when you introduce them to a new product, they're more likely to actually get involved with you because they trust you on that one thing that you show yourself to be very good at. Mordy Oberstein: I want to read you an email that I sent to somebody who was asking about an SEO product that I'm working on with them. And I'm not going to go into the whole details around the whole thing, but I wrote, I generally recommend in these cases, putting your full energy behind one thing, seeing how it goes- Gaetano DiNardi: Thank You. Mordy Oberstein: ...and then taking it from there. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Crystal Carter: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed and all over the place. And what I feel like when you're starting from scratch, what you're trying to do is really getting... We spoke about this on the podcast, is getting momentum. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And that's both momentum internally in terms of your own process, getting things going, getting things moving. And also externally, getting some momentum in terms of creating a digital presence for yourself, building up those associations and getting Google to really see your light in that dark sky so that it's gravitated to it, like a moth kind of thing. And you can't do that if you're all over the place. You have to just pick one thing and just go all in. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you so much for saying that. You just made me so happy because this is what I say too, the momentum piece in SEO is huge. It's such an underrated factor. But when you have momentum, think about it. You're publishing 10, 15, 20 articles a month, a hundred plus links a month. Now, I'll tell you guys how we sprinkled some more sauce on top of that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is like a deep dish pizza, you're putting the sauce on top. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh, this is crazy. So now when the company you're driving results for is backed by the former chairman of Walt Disney Corporation, you know there's some heavy hitters behind this project. So they went and sponsored the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA basketball team. So then the next part of this was, all right, this can't just be SEO, it's got to be fully surround sound. Let's hit all the review sites as hard as we can. So we started doing surround sound search, hitting up every big site that reviews identity theft products and getting them to review us. We started getting included on all those X best top software lists for identity theft protection, working out affiliate deals with every single affiliate player out there. We started working with YouTube creators and influencers to mention our product in their scam stories. We did YouTube SEO, we mirrored our editorial strategy with a YouTube SEO playbook. It was literally just a dude who's well-spoken and credible, like a Mordy, I got to say. He's like your son. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I don't have a credible part, but well-spoken I'll take. Gaetano DiNardi: To deliver on camera, very confident with good, clear delivery of speech and stuff. We basically took all the content briefs for our SEO pages and transformed them into scripts, and we started embedding all the YouTube videos into our SEO pages. But I guess where I was going with all this was it helped a lot to start seeing in branded search aura plus identity protection, aura identity theft. Now we're getting somewhere. Now it's like okay, we're getting a lot of links with those anchor texts. We're starting to rank for some really competitive terms, and we're branding ourselves real hard against LifeLock. So that was pick out the big nasty enemy in the room and just go attack. So ranking for stuff like that was key. Crystal Carter: And I think something that's interesting with that playbook that you just laid out, there is a lot of people... Some people will be listening to this and they'll go, "I'm a small business, how could I possibly do this?" But like, "Yo, you could sponsor the local 5K. You could sponsor your local little league team. You could sponsor the local football team at your high school, the high school near you. You can do that sort of thing. And then you can build on that. You can get links in local publications. You can talk to local influencers. You can literally talk to them because they're probably in your town. You can invite them to your restaurant. You could give them a free consultation at your law firm, whatever it may be." So there are definitely plays that you can make. And YouTube videos, you could make a YouTube video. We have the tools, we have the technology. It doesn't have to cost you a million dollars. And certainly when you're getting started, it doesn't have to be a massive production in order to get going. So I think that there's lots of things that you can take from that, even if you have a small budget. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, nothing's actually different. Just the scale of it is different. What you actually want to do is the same thing. It's actually probably easier at a smaller scale than doing it at a massive scale. I am thinking of two particular projects in my mind. One was a very big massive project with a big massive budget, and one is not. And the strategy I did for... They're pretty much the same. Just the scale is different. So in one of them, they have a hundred thousand dollars budget for SEO. I'm like, okay, 20 grand for the first three months should be on social media, getting influencers to share your content, put it out there, get your brand known, get your content known, get people to link to it, put money there. On the smaller scale product, it was the same thing, but it wasn't $20,000, it was $200. Crystal Carter: And you could figure that out. You can beg, borrow, et cetera, for instance- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's much easier. If you're a smaller grassroots, then you could beg, borrow and steal people. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. You work at a big product and no one doing any favors. Crystal Carter: No. But if you have people that you know that you're like, "Hey." These people, you can get involved with them. And I think you mentioned, you said, "Oh, this person's related to Disney," et cetera, et cetera. That's a sign. Be aware of your networks, that's the other thing. Use your networks to grow as well. I think that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: Think like a marketer. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So to the point of not needing a huge budget, I'll tell you, most of our ads were shot with iPhones. Most of our videos that we used for ads were shorts. We just got customers to put your iPhone in front of your face and just talk. And we would clip that up, shape that up. We would even take little clips of the news saying, "Austin, tonight, 10:00 PM news, this crazy identity theft story is out of control." And then we would have somebody talking about that same topic. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: And we would collage stuff together. So we got creative and nifty with some of our advertising as well. And then remember what we said at the beginning, how I actually wrote the first post, and like it's really about understanding that customer deeply. I forgot to mention one of the most important things I did in this whole process, and it was just listening to calls, listening to sales calls. That's all I did for the first week actually. As I was doing keyword research, I was listening to calls. We used a call transcription software, and I would type in things like dark web and I would see that 35% of our calls mentioned dark web or I would type in little focus terms like that just to see what pops up. And I would look at the surrounding texts near it and I would see, oh, dark web monitoring, dark web alerts. And I would form content strategy based on that. And then I would actually use mostly autosuggest to be honest with you, to find the super long tail stuff. Because what I realized was there's two things in somebody's mind who's worried about identity theft. It definitely has happened. I got hacked, I got scammed. Somebody took advantage of me somehow, some way, and I'm freaking out versus I think something weird is happening. Am I in that danger zone? I'm still very, very concerned, but I don't know if I should be out in full out panic mode yet. What should I do? And then there's actually another category of people that are just like, "Whatever, I don't care. I know that I use the same passwords across 80 different online accounts and I don't care. I'll be fine. This is all just marketing hype to try and get me to buy stuff." And we countered a lot of those thoughts and feelings with our content. We actually realized that is X worth it? Should I get X is a great topic for this category. Is identity theft insurance worth it? Is identity theft protection worth it? And we took the narrative of we're going to be the only company out there that says something different than everyone else. If you go look at Norton, LifeLock and all those big brands, they all say, "Yes, you need it, you need it, you need it, you need it. If you don't, you're screwed." We were the only ones that said, "You actually don't really need this if you're comfortable with doing all this manual work." And the reality is, no one's comfortable doing all this manual work. Who do you know that goes to the credit score website and checks all their credit reports and credit scores manually? Who goes through the three- Crystal Carter: I do all the time. No, I'm kidding. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who do you know that... I mean, I do this because I'm a freak, but who logs in to all their credit card accounts and checks all the charges all the time, the debit card? Who's on top of that stuff like 24/7? You know what I mean? It's tough. So anyway, that's just some thoughts around the content strategy and how I came up with ideas and stuff. Crystal Carter: I think though, there's so many points to take from that. Again, this is something you do not need a gigantic budget for. You can look at your customer service information. You can see the reviews on your product. You can see the reviews on your business. You can talk to the people who are your customer service team. You can look in your Slack channels for the questions that are coming from that. I have an article that talks about user first content information. That is gold dust. That is gold dust. Going through those user calls is super, super useful. Does not cost the earth and like you said, gives you some keywords that you would not find in other places. The trending topics thing is really important, I think is particularly when you're working in SaaS or something that's where the technology is evolving and stuff because auto suggest updates quicker than you're going to see in historic keyword search volumes. So that's super useful. And also differentiation, like you said, we don't want to sound like everybody else. That's huge as well. With all the AI stuff, for instance, a lot of people are going to be making a lot of content that sounds very similar to a lot of content that's also being published at the same time. And that's been the case for a while. But if you can cut through that noise, that is absolutely crucial. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So I feel like we've got a really good solid foundation about how to get started, how to think strategically, how to think about... How to get going from the very beginning, how to structure, know what you're going to need long term. We going to make a point that maybe we can consciousize a little bit, that's not a real word. Make conscious a little bit, you need to think about what the plan is not now, but also long-term, the resource that you're going to need and build yourself up in order to handle that. But if there's one last thing you wanted to focus on before time quickly runs out on us, what would it be? Gaetano DiNardi: I think I would in terms of just how to decide topics, because there's so many different kinds of topics you could create content about. It's like an endless sea of ideas. I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this framework. I'll just show it to you. It's this framework that prioritizes the business potential of a topic based on how commercially relevant it is. So there's a lot of rabbit holes with content. A lot of times even somebody at your company will bring up a really wacky idea like, "Hey, PPP loan fraud is exploding right now. Let's go cover this topic." That could potentially work. But the problem is there's very, very little connection with that trending topic to your solution. The other problem with it is that it's not really going to be much of an SEO play because think about who's covering the topic PPP loan fraud. Every big news site out there is already covering it. So it doesn't really make sense for you as a smaller brand to try and out-cover what these big publishers are already going nuts over. So I like to go as close to the product as possible, and it doesn't have to be the classic X best software list. There's other ways to find that pain point. So for example, how to protect your child from identity theft. That would be the highest possible business potential because you pretty much need a solution to do that. There are other things you can do manually, but a solution is going to do that really, really well. The next level down is if your product is helpful, but it's not absolutely essential to solving the problem. So something like I got scammed on Facebook marketplace. That was a very, very common thing that we would see. The solution can help you solve parts of that problem, but it can't guarantee 100% scam prevention. And we would say that pretty openly in all of our marketing material. Because a lot of people would get the impression that if you are a customer and you do get scammed on Facebook, we'll be able to help you recover a hundred percent of your lost assets or things like that. It's not always the case. The next level down is if the product can be mentioned sparingly or as part of the recovery process in the event of fraud or some kind of identity theft. So an example is like how do scammers steal credit card numbers? This is a very popular long-tail search, and we felt that explaining all the ways that scammers can steal your credit card number and then how to prevent that from happening is a great way to get in front of the audiences that matter. The audiences who are thinking about this, they may be worried that their credit card number already has been stolen, but this may be what they're searching. So that's the framework for thinking about how close is this topic to how our product can solve that potential problem. And if too many ideas are coming to the table that are far away from the product, we probably need to reevaluate what we're doing because the reality is we're not getting judged based on how much traffic we generate to the site. We're getting judged on SERPs. And so the traffic is nice, it's a leading indicator. We can show that to leadership and say, "Hey, we have this much organic visibility," and they're going to be like, "That's great. That's a great positive sign." But if none of that traffic is really doing anything in terms of business results, they're going to start questioning the program. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. And we spoke about this on a recent podcast about emerging content versus evergreen content and bailing those two things out and going after, even for emerging content, if the big players are there, maybe not the best place for you to go. Being really strategic, especially at the very beginning about what topics you go after will be the difference maker between burning through resources that you don't really have or being effective with the limited resource that you have and making sure that you're actually building that momentum we spoke about before. With that, where can people find you? Gaetano DiNardi: You just go to my website, officialgaetano.com. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Social? Gaetano DiNardi: Social. Yeah, I'm all over that stuff. If you guys go to LinkedIn, that's where you'll primarily find me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Cool. Okay. So not TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: You just search Gaetano DiNardi. I'm not a tiktoker man. It's just not- Mordy Oberstein: It's not our thing. Again, I've never said, "Yeah, SEO marketing. But yeah, TikTok is my thing." And then we talk about TikTok, it's marketing TikTok, of course, but then actually on TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: I know. The thing is I'm a good writer and it's easier for me to just rant on X or put together a nice little LinkedIn post or something. It takes too much work to get on camera and start talking and doing video content. I don't know. I got to be in the mood for it. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you very much for being in the mood for this today. We really appreciate all your insights and it's very clear that you've got very clear focus of where you want to take something from zero to hero, and that's amazing. So thank you very much for sharing today. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what to say. I feel pretty blessed and humbled to be a part of the Wix podcast. This is going to be a stamp on the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Gaetano DiNardi: Stamp on the old resume here. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Gaetano DiNardi: Checkbox, accomplishment done. Mordy Oberstein: We're happy we can make this happen for you. Thanks so much for coming by. Gaetano DiNardi: All right, sounds good. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So building SEO from scratch is one thing, but to build brand messaging from scratch is a totally different thing, but not really because it overlap in a lot of ways. But let's pretend that they don't. Okay, let's not pretend that they don't, they do. What I'm saying is let's just focus on the brand messaging part and move beyond SEO, just so we bit as we get into brand messaging and building it from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu in a little segment we call The Great Beyond. So I, in case you don't know, I love brand building, I love brand messaging, I love brand positioning, I love brand marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Let's bring a little bit of that into this. As we look at building messaging from scratch, which is really, really, really hard to do. Building brand from scratch, I take building a brand from scratch is harder than building SEO from scratch. And building SEO from scratch is incredibly difficult,. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think sometimes you have to decide which things to lean on. So I've seen people... I saw somebody on Dragon Stand, which is something like Shark Tank in America. It's like that sort of thing where you're presenting a business and they had this matcha tea brand and the guy asked him, "Why don't you have the name of your brand bigger on the can of tea?" It was like an iced tea kind of thing. And he was like, "Because matcha as a concept is bigger at the moment than our brand name. So if somebody is looking for this particular product, they will recognize the word matcha sooner than they will recognize our brand name." And sometimes you have to think about that. Sometimes you have to think about that and that balance of which thing is actually going to lead the conversation and which thing is going to be more recognizable. And sometimes that's a little bit of a tough pill to swallow because people are like, "But I want to have this thing." It's like, but people don't know you yet. Mordy Oberstein: That's always a tough pill to swallow in my opinion. And brand messaging is swallowing that pill. People don't care about the product the way that you think that they actually do, the way that you do, and just swallowing that pill. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have to recognize where the value is and people will come with you because let's say on this matcha tea thing, I love matcha tea, by the way, but if I were to try- Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if you've had a bit before. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I drink matcha tea, I switched from coffee to matcha tea. I highly recommend it to anyone. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. No, no, no. Slow down. Do not get off coffee people. Crystal Carter: Do it. Do it. It's the best thing that ever happened to you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to have a sip of coffee. Crystal Carter: And I think that the thing that you can do with that is that it allows you to... Let's say if I'm the matcha tea person, I'm in this audience and I go, "Oh, matcha tea." Then I can experience the brand and I can go, "Oh, I like this. I want to find out more about this." And then I will check out the brand and if I've had a good brand experience, and then I'll say, "Hey, have you heard about that?" I'll tell other people about it. I'll let people know, say, "Hey, I found this great thing. It's really, really great." I'll be out and about. And I'll say, "Oh, I'll see that. That's what I want." And I think that sometimes you can lead with that, lead with the product and the actual USP of the product, the solution that you have until you get that brand equity as you're building from scratch. Mordy Oberstein: It's a slow burn. I have so much to say about this, but let's actually get to what Diane Wiredu from Lion's Words, the founder of Lion Words has to say about building brand messaging from scratch. Here's Diane. Diane Wiredu: So the question is, how do you create brand messaging from scratch? Well, usually you're not really starting from scratch. You've probably been explaining what you do successfully somehow or somewhere to get your business to the state that it's at right now. So whether that's on your current website, on sales calls, chats, or prospect conversations, it could be in decks or proposals or even just on social media. So I'll start by saying that you've probably got a foundation. What you need to do is figure out if what you're saying about your product or service actually resonates with your market and buyers and how to better articulate the value that you deliver in a really clear, relevant and differentiated way. So for that, there are a few crucial steps. Step one is to document and evaluate your existing messaging. So I always do this with my clients. I take a look at their current messaging and bring it into one place. So what's working, what's not? Where are the gaps or inconsistencies in the story that you're telling? You want to identify some points of friction, but also opportunities. What do you want to be saying? So starting with this step, this gives you a really good point of reference and a benchmark to evaluate against. Then step two, we want to find out what your customers are saying. So go out and perform voice of customer research to discover how your customers speak about your product or service and their experience with it. So I love to set up customer interviews where I can ask open-ended questions around the before, during, and after stage. So I'll ask questions that dig into customer struggles, the decision and buying process, what their needs and jobs to be done were, and of course the results and outcomes afterwards. Step three is to go out and look at what competitors are saying. So our messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum. And aside from being clear, we also want to avoid drowning in the sea of sameness. So look at competitive alternatives and evaluate what they are and aren't saying as well. And then lastly, step four, you want to filter those findings and really narrow your messaging focus. So I like to create a messaging map, which is essentially a prioritized list of key themes, words, messages that came up in the research, and then map this against your initial evaluation and start drafting new messaging that better reflects your value as well as the customer's needs and point of view. A really important little copywriting tip is to really bring in and use those customer words as well. So this step is a bit tricky, but it's all about simplifying. Remember that you can't be known for a hundred things as a company, so find your north star and really narrow down your focus. And lastly, I guess a bonus step, step five is to test because creating messaging might be done by you and/or your team, but it's really your prospects and customers who will tell you if it works and resonates or not. So validate your messaging through message testing or user testing and then iterate on it and optimize so that you can get the biggest ROI from it. So hopefully that will help you get started with your messaging. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Diane. Make sure you follow Diane on LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Just look for Diane Wiredu on LinkedIn, give Lion's Word a look, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. She's also an event and host organizer for the Marketing Meetup. So shout out to the Marketing Meetup. We love them. A lot of shout-outs. There's a lot of points to get to in this, and I'll say first off, one of the points people don't realize about messaging and something that she hit on is that I find that good messaging is the vertex of what your users need and who you are. And it's a convergence of those two things together. And I think what brands often don't get right is often they lean too into who they are or too far into who their audience is and what their audience needs, but don't connect that to who they are either. And that's finding that sweet spot is what you really ultimately want because what you're trying to do when you're building a brand is really trying to create a connection. So it has to be part of you and part of your audience together in that, in order for there to be a conversation or there be a connection, it can just be one or the other one. And the last thing I wanted to say, or one of the last things, I have a million things to say, but the last thing I want to say before I hand it over to Crystal is messaging frameworks when you're getting started are great. And to what she's talking about there about refining that and doing focus groups and really understanding what people want and who you are. All that stuff is great. I do find though, as you start getting things rolling, and as your brand starts evolving, as you mature, as you get past the starting up phase from scratch, messaging framework can also become a crutch and it's something to watch out for. Messaging frameworks are great for working at scale, especially in larger companies because you cannot talk to everybody all the time and all the different people all the time about what the USPS are, how you want to... You need to have some framework. What nearly happens though is as you use those frameworks to scale things, you lose touch with the actual user, the actual needs and the actual pain points and things can become a little bit templatized. So you need to find a good balance between scaling and actually being in tune and having your finger on the pulse, which you can't scale. There's no way to scale that in my personal opinion. So yes, frameworks are great, but as things start to evolve, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with the frameworks and relying on them as a crutch. Crystal Carter: She talked about refining testing and things, and I think that really ties in with what you're saying as well. These shouldn't be static. They should evolve with your brand because your brand will evolve. Your brand is a living, breathing thing and will evolve. And certainly with digital marketing, with SEO, you will be able to get actual feedback on that in real time, essentially. So if a new story breaks and people want to talk about your brand in a different way, then your brand positioning will evolve. So for instance, I mean with Wix, we had this last year, people started talking about AI and Wix was like, "No, actually we are big in the game on AI, and we have been for a long time and started putting that information more to the fore. Another prime example is there's a drink called Lucozade, which exists in England, and it's a little bit like Gatorade. And back in the day it was marketed as the brand was medicinal. So it came in glass bottles and it had very medicinal packaging and stuff because it had electrolytes, it was the kind of thing that you would have after you'd been- Mordy Oberstein: Like coke, literally like Coke. Both the drink and the drug were medicinal. Crystal Carter: So yeah, so people thought of it as a medicinal thing. And then later on people started realizing that athletes were having it because it replaced electrolytes, and so they started marketing it as a sports drink, and that is people listening to how the audience is responding to their brand. And as she said, this is something you should see how users are responding to it, how your audience is responding to your brand. I also liked what she was saying about you're not really starting from scratch. You have input. You have data on how people respond to your brand from sales calls and from going to conferences and talking to people at expos and from talking about your brand, explaining what you do to your mom. Does your mom actually understand what you do? Can you summarize the brand of your company in a couple of words? That's something that you refine and that's something that's really, really important. If you're able to do that really, really quickly, then that means you've really nailed the essence of your brand. And I think also what you were talking about, about the relationship between what can you do for me? That sort of thing. What can you do for me? Who are you? Do you understand who you are? And do I understand who you are and do you understand who I am? I think sometimes there's a thing, it's like it's not necessarily that I don't have confidence in you but sometimes it's like... Not you personally Mordy, but- Mordy Oberstein: You're completely right. Crystal Carter: ...I do. But I think sometimes you have a situation, like I mentioned Dragons Den earlier, but something that happens on that show is they'll say, "Oh, I'm investing in you as a person," or whatever. And I think it's hard to understand what that means, but sometimes with the brand, it's a question of demonstrating that you have confidence in yourself, and if you don't have confidence in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to also have confidence in you? So it might be that you think this brand is great, but it doesn't seem like they think they're great, which makes you worry what they know that you don't know. So I think it's really important that you're confident, but maybe not necessarily overly so, but just confident in your capabilities and aware of your competitors and things like that. And I think that that's something that's really, really useful. Dan had some great points. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. One thing I'll say real quick before we have to move on, and never really when you're going to start thinking about messaging, you're going to bring up tone like what's our tone in our messaging going to be? I will say that the biggest mistake I see people make is the tone is simply a list of adjectives when really tone is actually a way of communicating with your audience in nonverbal ways or less like subtle, more sublime verbal ways. It's basically asking in what way and more importantly, on what emotional level do we want to communicate with our audience? And once you understand that's what tone actually is, you'll immediately realize that it's more than a few adjectives. Anyway, you know who's got a great tone? I always find this tone very fun, really fun, uplifting and exciting. Crystal Carter: I do too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's Barry, Barry Schwartz, it's Barry Schwarz time on the SERP's Up podcast. When we get into the SEO news, I'm going to say, "Take it away, Barry," at this point. Crystal Carter: All right, go RustyBrick, go. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Search Engine Roundtable. One from Search Engine Land. All three from Barry Schwartz, who clearly has a monopoly on the SEO news. First up from SEO Roundtable, Google Popular Opinion search carousel. What about the Google Popular Opinions search carousel? Let me help you, Barry. Google tests popular Opinion search carousel. As spotted by Brodie Clark was a great follow, follow him over an X. Brodie was searching for Sony XM4, which is a pair of headphones and underneath an Amazon listing, got a carousel that was called Popular Opinions, which presented a series of cards that were review articles of the headphones. Barry pointed out that he saw a similar test a year ago with a section on the cervical perspectives and opinions. What's interesting though is that back then the results Barry got back were from CNET and Gadget, CNN, big, big name sites. In Brodie's case, the results seem a little bit more niche, which I think is interesting. What I think is happening here is Google looking for a way to put results up on the top of the SERP from more specifically topically specific websites that are not just the usual big names. There's been a lot of controversy around Google just defaulting to the big name websites and is that really healthy and are those results really good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I don't want to get into the controversy here right now, but what I do see is with a popular opinion is if the results are more niche and more topically specific than they used to be with the tests a year ago, that to me seems like Google is trying to find a way to implement a scenario where there are more topically focused websites that offer perhaps better content up at the top of the SERP. So I like that one. Okay. Also from seoroundtable.com and also from Barry Schwartz because who else would it be? Well, I guess technically Glenn Gabe does write once in a while for SEO Roundtable. By the way, Barry, more Glenn on SEO Roundtable. I like that little diversity of authors there. Anyway, Barry writes Early Signs, Google search ranking update on February 28th and 29th. There's been a... Well, it looks like almost like massive increase in ring fluctuations, not just on the 20th and 29th, but a few days before that. Also, it looks to be like 25th. So a series of ring volatility. Glenn Gabe who will try to link to the show notes on this as well, walk through some cases you've seen of massive reversals and so forth. Sometimes these kind of things could be a precursor to an official algorithm update. So who knows? As of the recording of this new section, it looks like things have calmed down a little bit. By the time when we release this episode, things could be spiking again. Who knows? It's a game of roulette. Onto searchengineland.com. But again, sticking with Barry Schwartz, new Google structured data carousels beta. What about them, Barry? Google announces new structured data carousels beta. Well, they didn't announce it, they added documentation. I digress. Google add in new documentation for a new beta carousel that basically looks when you have, let's say events or products or whatever it might be, but you have multiple iterations of them. So imagine a collection page or an event page with multiple events. If you want to show those multiple items, there's a new carousel that Google might implement, and you can use structurally in a markup to be eligible to appear in this little carousel that is attached to your result. It's not a separate independent cert feature carousel, but imagine you see this often with, let's say, news aggregators where if you search for something related to, say, sports news, ESPN might have a carousel, like multiple stories there. It's like that. Where in your organic result, you'll have multiple swipeable carousel cards. Basically this item list structured data needs to be attached or combined with something that supports the items. So you need to have product markup on there if you have a series of multiple products, right? If you are a local business and your page has multiple, I don't know, vacation rentals listed on the page, so you have to have local business markup or a subtype for a vacation rental listed on there. So it's not like it's independent thing, it's a markup to show the items or the items of what. So there's going to be multiple markups on the page. And with that, I'm done. That is your Snappy news for this week. Thank you, Barry, for your contributions and for your great headlines. Well, that was always fun. Thank you, Barry and the other contributors to the SEO News world out there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, thank you very much for keeping us up to date with everything that's going on. It's like, it's wild though here. There's a lot of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Lot of ins and outs, sort of what have yous. Different people involved. Speaking of people, speaking of people, that brings us to our follow of the week this week, which is the one, the only Lily Ugbaja who's over at Lily U-G-B-A-J-A over on X slash Twitter, whatever you want to call it. She's up first off contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. Crystal Carter: Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. She's fantastic. She also has a great TED Talk online as well. One of the things she talks about on the Wix SEO Hub is how she built up our website from scratch and built up all the traffic from scratch and built that up from zero. That's one of the reasons why she's the follow of the week, and she talks about a lot of different tactics there and competitors and pulling things through. And I think she talks about being a little bit scrappy in the marketing, and I think that that's something that's really important when you're trying to get a brand going. I think Glenn Gabe has said, when trying to recover from an algorithm update, throw the kitchen sink at it, do all of the things- Mordy Oberstein: This is welcome wisdom by the way. Just want to shout out to Glen. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so Glen, Lily, everybody, Lily Ugbaja. And I think that it's important to, when you're thinking about your brand, get in there, get stuck in and move things forward until you get to the place where you want to be. And Lily definitely takes that approach. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do that. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And she takes a content first approach. I think people realize your content is your brand. That's you talking. Some random blog post about whatever, that's actually you communicating with your audience and they're looking how you're doing that. So watch your tone. As we said before, I don't like your tone young man. Listen to my children, never. Crystal Carter: I found a great blog. I don't know if we have time for another tangent. Mordy Oberstein: Always. Crystal Carter: Okay, so I was looking at sheds and I found this great blog. Mordy Oberstein: Like wood sheds, like the store tool? Crystal Carter: Like a shed in your garden. I found this great blog, and my question was, should I build a shed by a wall? And the article that I found was the general thing you would find on a blog, like a marketing blog, but it was so well written, me and my kids, I read it aloud to my family because it was so- Mordy Oberstein: Like a bedtime story? Crystal Carter: It was just so well written. I was like, "Should I build a shed by a wall?" And it was like, "Do you want to build a shed by a wall? That's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that." But then the heading, so they gave all the reasons, and then the last heading was like, "But I still want to build my shed by a wall." And it was so well written. And after that thinking, speaking of tone from that, I get that these people are knowledgeable. They know what they're talking about because there was definitely knowledge in this blog, but they also have a sense of humor. And they also saw me coming. They know. Mordy Oberstein: They know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: 99.9% of all communication is nonverbal. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's definitely something in there, your tone of voice and what you're saying about your brand being... Your blog being your brand, your content being your brand. It's absolutely true. Mordy Oberstein: I only have one question for you. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: You know what's coming, right? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Did you build a shed by the wall? Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I had a shed that was by a wall, and it's causing me problems, and I was trying to figure out a way to get around it, but apparently you can't. So basically note to anybody who's listening, if you have a shed, do not build it by a wall because it will cause damp and the shed will fall down. So don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Next question. Are you rebuilding the shed yourself? Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see this. Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I mean, it would be like the House of Jack- Mordy Oberstein: Please. No, please do it and like live, like video blogging. Crystal Carter: No, no, I'm not doing that. But I have a professional person who is assisting me with this. He's a very nice man named James. Thanks, James. Mordy Oberstein: Is he your husband? Crystal Carter: No. We are artsy. We don't build things with tools. We don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: We build knowledge. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we read books and stuff, but not about sheds. Mordy Oberstein: Well, apparently you do read books about... Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Well, I guess you got to do for us. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what you never knew about Local pacs. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/seo/learn. Looking into more about SEO, check it all the great content, webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guest, at Wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece of love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gaetano DiNardi Diane Wiredu Lily Ugbaja Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Lion Words News: Google Structured Data Carousels Beta Documentation Added Early Signs: Google Search Ranking Update On February 28 & 29th Glenn Gabe showing rank volatility examples New Google structured data carousels (beta) Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gaetano DiNardi Diane Wiredu Lily Ugbaja Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Lion Words News: Google Structured Data Carousels Beta Documentation Added Early Signs: Google Search Ranking Update On February 28 & 29th Glenn Gabe showing rank volatility examples New Google structured data carousels (beta) 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. I'm brewing 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 cooks up a storm from the scratch. She has the flour, she has the water, she mixes it in, adds the sugar, puts in the oven, out comes great SEO pie, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Okay. I do not make cakes from scratch. Let's just make that clear. I use the box. The box is the best way. Mordy Oberstein: That counts, by the way. That's scratch. Crystal Carter: I use the box. I always use the box. The boxes are good. Highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: If you didn't buy it and you put it into the oven and you had to mix something, that's from scratch in my book. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I do make cornbread from scratch because I moved to England from America, and in America they have Jiffy Cornbread, comes in a box, get it from the box. Perfect. Gets every single time, right? Every time. In England, Jiffy doesn't exist. So I had to learn how to make it from scratch so that I do make from scratch. But cakes, generally speaking, Betty Crocker, she does a great job. So let's just give Betty her flowers and everybody can have a nice birthday. Throw some sprinkles on it. Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: I make toast from scratch. Crystal Carter: Are you out there? Are you like the little red hen? Did you grow the wheat and- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I just put it into the thing and out comes toast. Crystal Carter: Ta-daa. Mordy Oberstein: Ta-daa. I did it myself. Crystal Carter: Right. You tell your children, you're like, "You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: My kids are actually way better cooks than I am. It's a whole- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they're good. They're good. Crystal Carter: All right. This is good. Mordy Oberstein: That's so great on the cleanup, but on the cooking part. Crystal Carter: You win some, you lose some. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by a Wix. You can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over Wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Got little slashes, but where you can also get started with your SEO by using the Wix SEO setup checklist, where you can connect to Google Search Console to single click with the add a bonus of having your homepage indexed by Google instantly. And who knows what else they'll find when they do. As this week we're talking about starting SEO from scratch, which now you know why there was a scratch joke about cooking in the beginning. It all makes sense, how your product and services and business models factor into SEO. How to craft a strategy and SEO plan from scratch. How to get your SEO to gain some momentum when you are starting from scratch. And to help us stir the pot and add in some spice, musician songwriter and SEO extraordinary Gaetano DiNardi will join us just a few minutes. Or before you could say, "It's shake a bake and I helped." Plus, we'll explore what it means to cook up some brand messaging from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you this weekend. Who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So add three cups of flour, one cup of water, a teaspoon of yeast, let it sit, and then add 10 sticks of butter, some large, as much as you want, Crisco the entire can, teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt. And you mix it all up till your arms fall off. As episode number 77 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you start baking some SEO goodness from scratch. You smell that? Smells like SEO. Crystal Carter: I don't know what this recipe was for, but it was very greasy. Its like- Mordy Oberstein: Well, some say that SEO is snake oil. It's not really snake oil, it's just Crisco. Crystal Carter: It's Crisco. Crisco is magical. Shout out to Crisco my- Mordy Oberstein: My grandma used scoop Crisco. It was a disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was just nasty. Crystal Carter: No. You want to make cookies? Crisco. Mordy Oberstein: Crisco. Crystal Carter: Those are the best cookies, honestly, dry never. Forever moisturized. Mordy Oberstein: It looks disgusting. I feel like it's the... It's like you eat it and it immediately clogs your entire body. Crystal Carter: I don't care. The cookies are off the chain. The cookies are delicious. Mordy Oberstein: But it's delicious. Probably worth it. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: SEO from scratch. Starting from nothing is never easy. A lot of times when you come into SEO, it's in the middle of the process, but sometimes it's not in the middle of the process. Sometimes you're actually starting from literally nothing. And those are probably great moments because you're actually starting from when the business is getting going. You're there from day one. So that is very opportunistic for you as an SEO. But it's also hard, which gives me the pleasure of introducing today's guest. He's here in the flesh or the digital flesh, Gaetano DiNardi, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction. And I got to say, I love the banter. I love the chemistry, I love the back and forth. This is the way. It almost feels like a talk radio show here. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. This is what I'm going for. I said this before, if I had to do my life over and I couldn't be what I am now, I had to do something different, I would like to be a talk radio show talking about sports in New York. That would be my dream. Gaetano DiNardi: That's what this feels like. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. It's the greatest comment anyone has ever given me. Gaetano DiNardi: It's so good, man. I love it. I love it. Being from... Well, I'll tell you, when I was growing up, I couldn't really sleep well as a kid. And I used to put on the AM New York Sports Talk radio it's all right through the night. Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. I would put the thing on sleep for 90 minutes. And you have... Steve was choosing from the fan talking about the rangers. Gaetano DiNardi: Exactly. How boring can that be. There's nothing better to put you to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Right to sleep, right to sleep. Oh wait, who's that on line one? Is it Sal from Staten Island? I'm sorry. Gaetano DiNardi: Sal from Staten Island. Dude, it was some funny stuff though. I used to listen to Joe Benigno. Mordy Oberstein: Joe Benigno. You know he's still around? Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He's still around. Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Joe Benigno at like 2:00 AM, Mordy Oberstein: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Yeah. Frank coming out as … Mordy Oberstein: Crazier than ever- Gaetano DiNardi: ...because he's pissed. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I feel like though, y'all could do an app for that. There's people who are using... I don't know. There's different apps for meditation. You could just have a like, "Hey, do you need to go to sleep? Here's some vintage." Mordy Oberstein: Vintage 1990s New York Sports Radio. Crystal Carter: Right. You could just pick one and choose yours today. You want Staten Island? You want Long Island? What do you want? Mordy Oberstein: Oh man. I'll give you some good old Mike Francesa. I'll be out in three seconds. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh man, that guy. Mordy Oberstein: That guy is so boring. Gaetano DiNardi: That guy's so... Oh man. Mordy Oberstein: Well, he's also... Look at these guys are all still around with the geezers. Anyway. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Let's talk SEO from scratch. Since we're starting from scratch. Where do you want to start? Gaetano DiNardi: All right, well look, since we're starting from scratch, I'll tell you guys why this topic is being talked about. Now, I had a very tough assignment three years ago. I went into a company as a full-time head of marketing. And the primary way we're going to grow this business was through search. And so the SEO assignment was, well, there's nothing. There's zero. And the primary category was identity theft. The company saw is identity theft protection. Side note, my identity got stolen. It's a horrible situation. And so I was motivated to really thrive and crush this role because I know the kinds of people out there who do that, they are scum. So we need to fight back against this horrible thing that is plaguing so many people. And it's not just affecting young people, people who are digitally savvy. It's mostly hitting people who have no idea. And it's mostly hitting people who are in not great financial situations. So when it cracks them, it cracks hard because they're stuck with bills that they didn't accumulate, that they got to now pay for. Credit card accounts open in your name, the use of your social security number to steal your tax returns, all sorts of wacky stuff. So anyway, the company has a lot of products and they had a huge investment. So the one caveat to this is there was a lot of dough and I could spend. In fact, they kept saying to me, "Why don't you spend more? Can't you spend more? How much more can you spend?" Mordy Oberstein: That's a good problem to have. Gaetano DiNardi: Good problem to have. And of course, all my agency and consultants and link building friends are like, "He has a lot of resources, so let's get in there." So yeah, I did recruit in a lot of players to help me scale this, but this was the ultimate setup that we landed on. Me driving everything. Two content marketers with very strong SEO backgrounds and great editorial chops. 10 freelance writers, one in-house link building manager, plus like two, three external link builders. The result of that is approximately 20 articles a month and approximately a hundred links per month. And that was the pace we ran at from when I started building that program, which really kicked off in late 2021. The first article was published in November 2021. I personally wrote it actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: It was how to check if your identity has been stolen. It's still a top killer. It's still ranks- Mordy Oberstein: EEAT. E For experience. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. E for experience, baby. Yeah. I wrote it personally, built links to it personally through my own network. And it ranked pretty fast actually for a site with nothing. And so I guess I'll pause there before I keep ranting and riffing, but that's the initial setup. I know it's a lot to take in because most people do an SEO, it's way smaller scale than that. Nobody's doing 20 articles a month. Nobody's treating a SaaS SEO as a publisher almost would. And so anyway, I guess I'll pause there so we can just get your reactions. But that's how we launched it and that's the setup. Crystal Carter: I think one of the first things that stood out for me from that conversation, and you brought it back at the end, was when you were talking about the building it from scratch, you'd had the customer base in mind and you actually discussed that throughout your description of what you were going to do. You were saying, "I had my identity stolen. This is the experience that people were having. And I wrote the first article myself." And Mordy mentioned the experience in the EEAT. And I think that when people are thinking about getting going with SEO, having the customer experience and the customer focus, and like, "I get you, I get this, I get why this is an issue for you, and that's at the core of what we're doing." I feel like that is always a good recipe for success. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly what stood out to me initially also is that when you're first starting out, you're really trying to think, "Okay, who is the audience? What are the needs? How do I align the needs? And how do I align SEO with what the business itself is actually trying to do?" So it's completely harmonious from the start. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So here's the next thing I realized. The company has a lot of products and services. Like identity theft protection is the flagship product, but it's sold as a bundle with a lot of other stuff. So there's financial fraud protection, there's password manager, there's VPN, there's antivirus and there's family safety, parental controls and stuff like that. Have you guys ever looked at how difficult VPN the category is? Have you ever seen how insane- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, actually. Gaetano DiNardi: ...antiviruses? You know the kind of brands and players that are in those categories. It's pretty wild. So you can get overwhelmed really fast as an SEO with the company saying, "Hey, we got to get more subscribers into this. We got to grow our presence for that. We got to do this and that and this and that." And so you got to actually deflect a lot of that noise and say, "All right, the reality is we have no topical focus and no strength and no brand association with anything right now." So we've got to hammer one thing and go all in and say, "All right, that other stuff is going to have to come later." And so I made the decision to say, "All right, we're just going to build our identity theft and own that to start because we need to get something going somehow, somewhere." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's a real strength because I think that a lot of people think that when my brand, I have to get my logo out there and this and that. And it's like when you're very much starting from a completely new business or a completely new website or a completely new product, for instance, the solution is the lead there. So when you're saying identity theft first, that's how people are going to find you. And I think that building that out and building the depth of information there is going to help you build trust with people so that when you introduce them to a new product, they're more likely to actually get involved with you because they trust you on that one thing that you show yourself to be very good at. Mordy Oberstein: I want to read you an email that I sent to somebody who was asking about an SEO product that I'm working on with them. And I'm not going to go into the whole details around the whole thing, but I wrote, I generally recommend in these cases, putting your full energy behind one thing, seeing how it goes- Gaetano DiNardi: Thank You. Mordy Oberstein: ...and then taking it from there. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Crystal Carter: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed and all over the place. And what I feel like when you're starting from scratch, what you're trying to do is really getting... We spoke about this on the podcast, is getting momentum. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And that's both momentum internally in terms of your own process, getting things going, getting things moving. And also externally, getting some momentum in terms of creating a digital presence for yourself, building up those associations and getting Google to really see your light in that dark sky so that it's gravitated to it, like a moth kind of thing. And you can't do that if you're all over the place. You have to just pick one thing and just go all in. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you so much for saying that. You just made me so happy because this is what I say too, the momentum piece in SEO is huge. It's such an underrated factor. But when you have momentum, think about it. You're publishing 10, 15, 20 articles a month, a hundred plus links a month. Now, I'll tell you guys how we sprinkled some more sauce on top of that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is like a deep dish pizza, you're putting the sauce on top. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh, this is crazy. So now when the company you're driving results for is backed by the former chairman of Walt Disney Corporation, you know there's some heavy hitters behind this project. So they went and sponsored the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA basketball team. So then the next part of this was, all right, this can't just be SEO, it's got to be fully surround sound. Let's hit all the review sites as hard as we can. So we started doing surround sound search, hitting up every big site that reviews identity theft products and getting them to review us. We started getting included on all those X best top software lists for identity theft protection, working out affiliate deals with every single affiliate player out there. We started working with YouTube creators and influencers to mention our product in their scam stories. We did YouTube SEO, we mirrored our editorial strategy with a YouTube SEO playbook. It was literally just a dude who's well-spoken and credible, like a Mordy, I got to say. He's like your son. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I don't have a credible part, but well-spoken I'll take. Gaetano DiNardi: To deliver on camera, very confident with good, clear delivery of speech and stuff. We basically took all the content briefs for our SEO pages and transformed them into scripts, and we started embedding all the YouTube videos into our SEO pages. But I guess where I was going with all this was it helped a lot to start seeing in branded search aura plus identity protection, aura identity theft. Now we're getting somewhere. Now it's like okay, we're getting a lot of links with those anchor texts. We're starting to rank for some really competitive terms, and we're branding ourselves real hard against LifeLock. So that was pick out the big nasty enemy in the room and just go attack. So ranking for stuff like that was key. Crystal Carter: And I think something that's interesting with that playbook that you just laid out, there is a lot of people... Some people will be listening to this and they'll go, "I'm a small business, how could I possibly do this?" But like, "Yo, you could sponsor the local 5K. You could sponsor your local little league team. You could sponsor the local football team at your high school, the high school near you. You can do that sort of thing. And then you can build on that. You can get links in local publications. You can talk to local influencers. You can literally talk to them because they're probably in your town. You can invite them to your restaurant. You could give them a free consultation at your law firm, whatever it may be." So there are definitely plays that you can make. And YouTube videos, you could make a YouTube video. We have the tools, we have the technology. It doesn't have to cost you a million dollars. And certainly when you're getting started, it doesn't have to be a massive production in order to get going. So I think that there's lots of things that you can take from that, even if you have a small budget. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, nothing's actually different. Just the scale of it is different. What you actually want to do is the same thing. It's actually probably easier at a smaller scale than doing it at a massive scale. I am thinking of two particular projects in my mind. One was a very big massive project with a big massive budget, and one is not. And the strategy I did for... They're pretty much the same. Just the scale is different. So in one of them, they have a hundred thousand dollars budget for SEO. I'm like, okay, 20 grand for the first three months should be on social media, getting influencers to share your content, put it out there, get your brand known, get your content known, get people to link to it, put money there. On the smaller scale product, it was the same thing, but it wasn't $20,000, it was $200. Crystal Carter: And you could figure that out. You can beg, borrow, et cetera, for instance- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's much easier. If you're a smaller grassroots, then you could beg, borrow and steal people. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. You work at a big product and no one doing any favors. Crystal Carter: No. But if you have people that you know that you're like, "Hey." These people, you can get involved with them. And I think you mentioned, you said, "Oh, this person's related to Disney," et cetera, et cetera. That's a sign. Be aware of your networks, that's the other thing. Use your networks to grow as well. I think that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: Think like a marketer. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So to the point of not needing a huge budget, I'll tell you, most of our ads were shot with iPhones. Most of our videos that we used for ads were shorts. We just got customers to put your iPhone in front of your face and just talk. And we would clip that up, shape that up. We would even take little clips of the news saying, "Austin, tonight, 10:00 PM news, this crazy identity theft story is out of control." And then we would have somebody talking about that same topic. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: And we would collage stuff together. So we got creative and nifty with some of our advertising as well. And then remember what we said at the beginning, how I actually wrote the first post, and like it's really about understanding that customer deeply. I forgot to mention one of the most important things I did in this whole process, and it was just listening to calls, listening to sales calls. That's all I did for the first week actually. As I was doing keyword research, I was listening to calls. We used a call transcription software, and I would type in things like dark web and I would see that 35% of our calls mentioned dark web or I would type in little focus terms like that just to see what pops up. And I would look at the surrounding texts near it and I would see, oh, dark web monitoring, dark web alerts. And I would form content strategy based on that. And then I would actually use mostly autosuggest to be honest with you, to find the super long tail stuff. Because what I realized was there's two things in somebody's mind who's worried about identity theft. It definitely has happened. I got hacked, I got scammed. Somebody took advantage of me somehow, some way, and I'm freaking out versus I think something weird is happening. Am I in that danger zone? I'm still very, very concerned, but I don't know if I should be out in full out panic mode yet. What should I do? And then there's actually another category of people that are just like, "Whatever, I don't care. I know that I use the same passwords across 80 different online accounts and I don't care. I'll be fine. This is all just marketing hype to try and get me to buy stuff." And we countered a lot of those thoughts and feelings with our content. We actually realized that is X worth it? Should I get X is a great topic for this category. Is identity theft insurance worth it? Is identity theft protection worth it? And we took the narrative of we're going to be the only company out there that says something different than everyone else. If you go look at Norton, LifeLock and all those big brands, they all say, "Yes, you need it, you need it, you need it, you need it. If you don't, you're screwed." We were the only ones that said, "You actually don't really need this if you're comfortable with doing all this manual work." And the reality is, no one's comfortable doing all this manual work. Who do you know that goes to the credit score website and checks all their credit reports and credit scores manually? Who goes through the three- Crystal Carter: I do all the time. No, I'm kidding. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who do you know that... I mean, I do this because I'm a freak, but who logs in to all their credit card accounts and checks all the charges all the time, the debit card? Who's on top of that stuff like 24/7? You know what I mean? It's tough. So anyway, that's just some thoughts around the content strategy and how I came up with ideas and stuff. Crystal Carter: I think though, there's so many points to take from that. Again, this is something you do not need a gigantic budget for. You can look at your customer service information. You can see the reviews on your product. You can see the reviews on your business. You can talk to the people who are your customer service team. You can look in your Slack channels for the questions that are coming from that. I have an article that talks about user first content information. That is gold dust. That is gold dust. Going through those user calls is super, super useful. Does not cost the earth and like you said, gives you some keywords that you would not find in other places. The trending topics thing is really important, I think is particularly when you're working in SaaS or something that's where the technology is evolving and stuff because auto suggest updates quicker than you're going to see in historic keyword search volumes. So that's super useful. And also differentiation, like you said, we don't want to sound like everybody else. That's huge as well. With all the AI stuff, for instance, a lot of people are going to be making a lot of content that sounds very similar to a lot of content that's also being published at the same time. And that's been the case for a while. But if you can cut through that noise, that is absolutely crucial. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So I feel like we've got a really good solid foundation about how to get started, how to think strategically, how to think about... How to get going from the very beginning, how to structure, know what you're going to need long term. We going to make a point that maybe we can consciousize a little bit, that's not a real word. Make conscious a little bit, you need to think about what the plan is not now, but also long-term, the resource that you're going to need and build yourself up in order to handle that. But if there's one last thing you wanted to focus on before time quickly runs out on us, what would it be? Gaetano DiNardi: I think I would in terms of just how to decide topics, because there's so many different kinds of topics you could create content about. It's like an endless sea of ideas. I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this framework. I'll just show it to you. It's this framework that prioritizes the business potential of a topic based on how commercially relevant it is. So there's a lot of rabbit holes with content. A lot of times even somebody at your company will bring up a really wacky idea like, "Hey, PPP loan fraud is exploding right now. Let's go cover this topic." That could potentially work. But the problem is there's very, very little connection with that trending topic to your solution. The other problem with it is that it's not really going to be much of an SEO play because think about who's covering the topic PPP loan fraud. Every big news site out there is already covering it. So it doesn't really make sense for you as a smaller brand to try and out-cover what these big publishers are already going nuts over. So I like to go as close to the product as possible, and it doesn't have to be the classic X best software list. There's other ways to find that pain point. So for example, how to protect your child from identity theft. That would be the highest possible business potential because you pretty much need a solution to do that. There are other things you can do manually, but a solution is going to do that really, really well. The next level down is if your product is helpful, but it's not absolutely essential to solving the problem. So something like I got scammed on Facebook marketplace. That was a very, very common thing that we would see. The solution can help you solve parts of that problem, but it can't guarantee 100% scam prevention. And we would say that pretty openly in all of our marketing material. Because a lot of people would get the impression that if you are a customer and you do get scammed on Facebook, we'll be able to help you recover a hundred percent of your lost assets or things like that. It's not always the case. The next level down is if the product can be mentioned sparingly or as part of the recovery process in the event of fraud or some kind of identity theft. So an example is like how do scammers steal credit card numbers? This is a very popular long-tail search, and we felt that explaining all the ways that scammers can steal your credit card number and then how to prevent that from happening is a great way to get in front of the audiences that matter. The audiences who are thinking about this, they may be worried that their credit card number already has been stolen, but this may be what they're searching. So that's the framework for thinking about how close is this topic to how our product can solve that potential problem. And if too many ideas are coming to the table that are far away from the product, we probably need to reevaluate what we're doing because the reality is we're not getting judged based on how much traffic we generate to the site. We're getting judged on SERPs. And so the traffic is nice, it's a leading indicator. We can show that to leadership and say, "Hey, we have this much organic visibility," and they're going to be like, "That's great. That's a great positive sign." But if none of that traffic is really doing anything in terms of business results, they're going to start questioning the program. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. And we spoke about this on a recent podcast about emerging content versus evergreen content and bailing those two things out and going after, even for emerging content, if the big players are there, maybe not the best place for you to go. Being really strategic, especially at the very beginning about what topics you go after will be the difference maker between burning through resources that you don't really have or being effective with the limited resource that you have and making sure that you're actually building that momentum we spoke about before. With that, where can people find you? Gaetano DiNardi: You just go to my website, officialgaetano.com. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Social? Gaetano DiNardi: Social. Yeah, I'm all over that stuff. If you guys go to LinkedIn, that's where you'll primarily find me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Cool. Okay. So not TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: You just search Gaetano DiNardi. I'm not a tiktoker man. It's just not- Mordy Oberstein: It's not our thing. Again, I've never said, "Yeah, SEO marketing. But yeah, TikTok is my thing." And then we talk about TikTok, it's marketing TikTok, of course, but then actually on TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: I know. The thing is I'm a good writer and it's easier for me to just rant on X or put together a nice little LinkedIn post or something. It takes too much work to get on camera and start talking and doing video content. I don't know. I got to be in the mood for it. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you very much for being in the mood for this today. We really appreciate all your insights and it's very clear that you've got very clear focus of where you want to take something from zero to hero, and that's amazing. So thank you very much for sharing today. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what to say. I feel pretty blessed and humbled to be a part of the Wix podcast. This is going to be a stamp on the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Gaetano DiNardi: Stamp on the old resume here. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Gaetano DiNardi: Checkbox, accomplishment done. Mordy Oberstein: We're happy we can make this happen for you. Thanks so much for coming by. Gaetano DiNardi: All right, sounds good. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So building SEO from scratch is one thing, but to build brand messaging from scratch is a totally different thing, but not really because it overlap in a lot of ways. But let's pretend that they don't. Okay, let's not pretend that they don't, they do. What I'm saying is let's just focus on the brand messaging part and move beyond SEO, just so we bit as we get into brand messaging and building it from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu in a little segment we call The Great Beyond. So I, in case you don't know, I love brand building, I love brand messaging, I love brand positioning, I love brand marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Let's bring a little bit of that into this. As we look at building messaging from scratch, which is really, really, really hard to do. Building brand from scratch, I take building a brand from scratch is harder than building SEO from scratch. And building SEO from scratch is incredibly difficult,. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think sometimes you have to decide which things to lean on. So I've seen people... I saw somebody on Dragon Stand, which is something like Shark Tank in America. It's like that sort of thing where you're presenting a business and they had this matcha tea brand and the guy asked him, "Why don't you have the name of your brand bigger on the can of tea?" It was like an iced tea kind of thing. And he was like, "Because matcha as a concept is bigger at the moment than our brand name. So if somebody is looking for this particular product, they will recognize the word matcha sooner than they will recognize our brand name." And sometimes you have to think about that. Sometimes you have to think about that and that balance of which thing is actually going to lead the conversation and which thing is going to be more recognizable. And sometimes that's a little bit of a tough pill to swallow because people are like, "But I want to have this thing." It's like, but people don't know you yet. Mordy Oberstein: That's always a tough pill to swallow in my opinion. And brand messaging is swallowing that pill. People don't care about the product the way that you think that they actually do, the way that you do, and just swallowing that pill. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have to recognize where the value is and people will come with you because let's say on this matcha tea thing, I love matcha tea, by the way, but if I were to try- Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if you've had a bit before. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I drink matcha tea, I switched from coffee to matcha tea. I highly recommend it to anyone. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. No, no, no. Slow down. Do not get off coffee people. Crystal Carter: Do it. Do it. It's the best thing that ever happened to you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to have a sip of coffee. Crystal Carter: And I think that the thing that you can do with that is that it allows you to... Let's say if I'm the matcha tea person, I'm in this audience and I go, "Oh, matcha tea." Then I can experience the brand and I can go, "Oh, I like this. I want to find out more about this." And then I will check out the brand and if I've had a good brand experience, and then I'll say, "Hey, have you heard about that?" I'll tell other people about it. I'll let people know, say, "Hey, I found this great thing. It's really, really great." I'll be out and about. And I'll say, "Oh, I'll see that. That's what I want." And I think that sometimes you can lead with that, lead with the product and the actual USP of the product, the solution that you have until you get that brand equity as you're building from scratch. Mordy Oberstein: It's a slow burn. I have so much to say about this, but let's actually get to what Diane Wiredu from Lion's Words, the founder of Lion Words has to say about building brand messaging from scratch. Here's Diane. Diane Wiredu: So the question is, how do you create brand messaging from scratch? Well, usually you're not really starting from scratch. You've probably been explaining what you do successfully somehow or somewhere to get your business to the state that it's at right now. So whether that's on your current website, on sales calls, chats, or prospect conversations, it could be in decks or proposals or even just on social media. So I'll start by saying that you've probably got a foundation. What you need to do is figure out if what you're saying about your product or service actually resonates with your market and buyers and how to better articulate the value that you deliver in a really clear, relevant and differentiated way. So for that, there are a few crucial steps. Step one is to document and evaluate your existing messaging. So I always do this with my clients. I take a look at their current messaging and bring it into one place. So what's working, what's not? Where are the gaps or inconsistencies in the story that you're telling? You want to identify some points of friction, but also opportunities. What do you want to be saying? So starting with this step, this gives you a really good point of reference and a benchmark to evaluate against. Then step two, we want to find out what your customers are saying. So go out and perform voice of customer research to discover how your customers speak about your product or service and their experience with it. So I love to set up customer interviews where I can ask open-ended questions around the before, during, and after stage. So I'll ask questions that dig into customer struggles, the decision and buying process, what their needs and jobs to be done were, and of course the results and outcomes afterwards. Step three is to go out and look at what competitors are saying. So our messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum. And aside from being clear, we also want to avoid drowning in the sea of sameness. So look at competitive alternatives and evaluate what they are and aren't saying as well. And then lastly, step four, you want to filter those findings and really narrow your messaging focus. So I like to create a messaging map, which is essentially a prioritized list of key themes, words, messages that came up in the research, and then map this against your initial evaluation and start drafting new messaging that better reflects your value as well as the customer's needs and point of view. A really important little copywriting tip is to really bring in and use those customer words as well. So this step is a bit tricky, but it's all about simplifying. Remember that you can't be known for a hundred things as a company, so find your north star and really narrow down your focus. And lastly, I guess a bonus step, step five is to test because creating messaging might be done by you and/or your team, but it's really your prospects and customers who will tell you if it works and resonates or not. So validate your messaging through message testing or user testing and then iterate on it and optimize so that you can get the biggest ROI from it. So hopefully that will help you get started with your messaging. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Diane. Make sure you follow Diane on LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Just look for Diane Wiredu on LinkedIn, give Lion's Word a look, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. She's also an event and host organizer for the Marketing Meetup. So shout out to the Marketing Meetup. We love them. A lot of shout-outs. There's a lot of points to get to in this, and I'll say first off, one of the points people don't realize about messaging and something that she hit on is that I find that good messaging is the vertex of what your users need and who you are. And it's a convergence of those two things together. And I think what brands often don't get right is often they lean too into who they are or too far into who their audience is and what their audience needs, but don't connect that to who they are either. And that's finding that sweet spot is what you really ultimately want because what you're trying to do when you're building a brand is really trying to create a connection. So it has to be part of you and part of your audience together in that, in order for there to be a conversation or there be a connection, it can just be one or the other one. And the last thing I wanted to say, or one of the last things, I have a million things to say, but the last thing I want to say before I hand it over to Crystal is messaging frameworks when you're getting started are great. And to what she's talking about there about refining that and doing focus groups and really understanding what people want and who you are. All that stuff is great. I do find though, as you start getting things rolling, and as your brand starts evolving, as you mature, as you get past the starting up phase from scratch, messaging framework can also become a crutch and it's something to watch out for. Messaging frameworks are great for working at scale, especially in larger companies because you cannot talk to everybody all the time and all the different people all the time about what the USPS are, how you want to... You need to have some framework. What nearly happens though is as you use those frameworks to scale things, you lose touch with the actual user, the actual needs and the actual pain points and things can become a little bit templatized. So you need to find a good balance between scaling and actually being in tune and having your finger on the pulse, which you can't scale. There's no way to scale that in my personal opinion. So yes, frameworks are great, but as things start to evolve, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with the frameworks and relying on them as a crutch. Crystal Carter: She talked about refining testing and things, and I think that really ties in with what you're saying as well. These shouldn't be static. They should evolve with your brand because your brand will evolve. Your brand is a living, breathing thing and will evolve. And certainly with digital marketing, with SEO, you will be able to get actual feedback on that in real time, essentially. So if a new story breaks and people want to talk about your brand in a different way, then your brand positioning will evolve. So for instance, I mean with Wix, we had this last year, people started talking about AI and Wix was like, "No, actually we are big in the game on AI, and we have been for a long time and started putting that information more to the fore. Another prime example is there's a drink called Lucozade, which exists in England, and it's a little bit like Gatorade. And back in the day it was marketed as the brand was medicinal. So it came in glass bottles and it had very medicinal packaging and stuff because it had electrolytes, it was the kind of thing that you would have after you'd been- Mordy Oberstein: Like coke, literally like Coke. Both the drink and the drug were medicinal. Crystal Carter: So yeah, so people thought of it as a medicinal thing. And then later on people started realizing that athletes were having it because it replaced electrolytes, and so they started marketing it as a sports drink, and that is people listening to how the audience is responding to their brand. And as she said, this is something you should see how users are responding to it, how your audience is responding to your brand. I also liked what she was saying about you're not really starting from scratch. You have input. You have data on how people respond to your brand from sales calls and from going to conferences and talking to people at expos and from talking about your brand, explaining what you do to your mom. Does your mom actually understand what you do? Can you summarize the brand of your company in a couple of words? That's something that you refine and that's something that's really, really important. If you're able to do that really, really quickly, then that means you've really nailed the essence of your brand. And I think also what you were talking about, about the relationship between what can you do for me? That sort of thing. What can you do for me? Who are you? Do you understand who you are? And do I understand who you are and do you understand who I am? I think sometimes there's a thing, it's like it's not necessarily that I don't have confidence in you but sometimes it's like... Not you personally Mordy, but- Mordy Oberstein: You're completely right. Crystal Carter: ...I do. But I think sometimes you have a situation, like I mentioned Dragons Den earlier, but something that happens on that show is they'll say, "Oh, I'm investing in you as a person," or whatever. And I think it's hard to understand what that means, but sometimes with the brand, it's a question of demonstrating that you have confidence in yourself, and if you don't have confidence in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to also have confidence in you? So it might be that you think this brand is great, but it doesn't seem like they think they're great, which makes you worry what they know that you don't know. So I think it's really important that you're confident, but maybe not necessarily overly so, but just confident in your capabilities and aware of your competitors and things like that. And I think that that's something that's really, really useful. Dan had some great points. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. One thing I'll say real quick before we have to move on, and never really when you're going to start thinking about messaging, you're going to bring up tone like what's our tone in our messaging going to be? I will say that the biggest mistake I see people make is the tone is simply a list of adjectives when really tone is actually a way of communicating with your audience in nonverbal ways or less like subtle, more sublime verbal ways. It's basically asking in what way and more importantly, on what emotional level do we want to communicate with our audience? And once you understand that's what tone actually is, you'll immediately realize that it's more than a few adjectives. Anyway, you know who's got a great tone? I always find this tone very fun, really fun, uplifting and exciting. Crystal Carter: I do too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's Barry, Barry Schwartz, it's Barry Schwarz time on the SERP's Up podcast. When we get into the SEO news, I'm going to say, "Take it away, Barry," at this point. Crystal Carter: All right, go RustyBrick, go. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Search Engine Roundtable. One from Search Engine Land. All three from Barry Schwartz, who clearly has a monopoly on the SEO news. First up from SEO Roundtable, Google Popular Opinion search carousel. What about the Google Popular Opinions search carousel? Let me help you, Barry. Google tests popular Opinion search carousel. As spotted by Brodie Clark was a great follow, follow him over an X. Brodie was searching for Sony XM4, which is a pair of headphones and underneath an Amazon listing, got a carousel that was called Popular Opinions, which presented a series of cards that were review articles of the headphones. Barry pointed out that he saw a similar test a year ago with a section on the cervical perspectives and opinions. What's interesting though is that back then the results Barry got back were from CNET and Gadget, CNN, big, big name sites. In Brodie's case, the results seem a little bit more niche, which I think is interesting. What I think is happening here is Google looking for a way to put results up on the top of the SERP from more specifically topically specific websites that are not just the usual big names. There's been a lot of controversy around Google just defaulting to the big name websites and is that really healthy and are those results really good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I don't want to get into the controversy here right now, but what I do see is with a popular opinion is if the results are more niche and more topically specific than they used to be with the tests a year ago, that to me seems like Google is trying to find a way to implement a scenario where there are more topically focused websites that offer perhaps better content up at the top of the SERP. So I like that one. Okay. Also from seoroundtable.com and also from Barry Schwartz because who else would it be? Well, I guess technically Glenn Gabe does write once in a while for SEO Roundtable. By the way, Barry, more Glenn on SEO Roundtable. I like that little diversity of authors there. Anyway, Barry writes Early Signs, Google search ranking update on February 28th and 29th. There's been a... Well, it looks like almost like massive increase in ring fluctuations, not just on the 20th and 29th, but a few days before that. Also, it looks to be like 25th. So a series of ring volatility. Glenn Gabe who will try to link to the show notes on this as well, walk through some cases you've seen of massive reversals and so forth. Sometimes these kind of things could be a precursor to an official algorithm update. So who knows? As of the recording of this new section, it looks like things have calmed down a little bit. By the time when we release this episode, things could be spiking again. Who knows? It's a game of roulette. Onto searchengineland.com. But again, sticking with Barry Schwartz, new Google structured data carousels beta. What about them, Barry? Google announces new structured data carousels beta. Well, they didn't announce it, they added documentation. I digress. Google add in new documentation for a new beta carousel that basically looks when you have, let's say events or products or whatever it might be, but you have multiple iterations of them. So imagine a collection page or an event page with multiple events. If you want to show those multiple items, there's a new carousel that Google might implement, and you can use structurally in a markup to be eligible to appear in this little carousel that is attached to your result. It's not a separate independent cert feature carousel, but imagine you see this often with, let's say, news aggregators where if you search for something related to, say, sports news, ESPN might have a carousel, like multiple stories there. It's like that. Where in your organic result, you'll have multiple swipeable carousel cards. Basically this item list structured data needs to be attached or combined with something that supports the items. So you need to have product markup on there if you have a series of multiple products, right? If you are a local business and your page has multiple, I don't know, vacation rentals listed on the page, so you have to have local business markup or a subtype for a vacation rental listed on there. So it's not like it's independent thing, it's a markup to show the items or the items of what. So there's going to be multiple markups on the page. And with that, I'm done. That is your Snappy news for this week. Thank you, Barry, for your contributions and for your great headlines. Well, that was always fun. Thank you, Barry and the other contributors to the SEO News world out there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, thank you very much for keeping us up to date with everything that's going on. It's like, it's wild though here. There's a lot of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Lot of ins and outs, sort of what have yous. Different people involved. Speaking of people, speaking of people, that brings us to our follow of the week this week, which is the one, the only Lily Ugbaja who's over at Lily U-G-B-A-J-A over on X slash Twitter, whatever you want to call it. She's up first off contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. Crystal Carter: Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. She's fantastic. She also has a great TED Talk online as well. One of the things she talks about on the Wix SEO Hub is how she built up our website from scratch and built up all the traffic from scratch and built that up from zero. That's one of the reasons why she's the follow of the week, and she talks about a lot of different tactics there and competitors and pulling things through. And I think she talks about being a little bit scrappy in the marketing, and I think that that's something that's really important when you're trying to get a brand going. I think Glenn Gabe has said, when trying to recover from an algorithm update, throw the kitchen sink at it, do all of the things- Mordy Oberstein: This is welcome wisdom by the way. Just want to shout out to Glen. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so Glen, Lily, everybody, Lily Ugbaja. And I think that it's important to, when you're thinking about your brand, get in there, get stuck in and move things forward until you get to the place where you want to be. And Lily definitely takes that approach. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do that. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And she takes a content first approach. I think people realize your content is your brand. That's you talking. Some random blog post about whatever, that's actually you communicating with your audience and they're looking how you're doing that. So watch your tone. As we said before, I don't like your tone young man. Listen to my children, never. Crystal Carter: I found a great blog. I don't know if we have time for another tangent. Mordy Oberstein: Always. Crystal Carter: Okay, so I was looking at sheds and I found this great blog. Mordy Oberstein: Like wood sheds, like the store tool? Crystal Carter: Like a shed in your garden. I found this great blog, and my question was, should I build a shed by a wall? And the article that I found was the general thing you would find on a blog, like a marketing blog, but it was so well written, me and my kids, I read it aloud to my family because it was so- Mordy Oberstein: Like a bedtime story? Crystal Carter: It was just so well written. I was like, "Should I build a shed by a wall?" And it was like, "Do you want to build a shed by a wall? That's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that." But then the heading, so they gave all the reasons, and then the last heading was like, "But I still want to build my shed by a wall." And it was so well written. And after that thinking, speaking of tone from that, I get that these people are knowledgeable. They know what they're talking about because there was definitely knowledge in this blog, but they also have a sense of humor. And they also saw me coming. They know. Mordy Oberstein: They know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: 99.9% of all communication is nonverbal. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's definitely something in there, your tone of voice and what you're saying about your brand being... Your blog being your brand, your content being your brand. It's absolutely true. Mordy Oberstein: I only have one question for you. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: You know what's coming, right? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Did you build a shed by the wall? Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I had a shed that was by a wall, and it's causing me problems, and I was trying to figure out a way to get around it, but apparently you can't. So basically note to anybody who's listening, if you have a shed, do not build it by a wall because it will cause damp and the shed will fall down. So don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Next question. Are you rebuilding the shed yourself? Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see this. Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I mean, it would be like the House of Jack- Mordy Oberstein: Please. No, please do it and like live, like video blogging. Crystal Carter: No, no, I'm not doing that. But I have a professional person who is assisting me with this. He's a very nice man named James. Thanks, James. Mordy Oberstein: Is he your husband? Crystal Carter: No. We are artsy. We don't build things with tools. We don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: We build knowledge. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we read books and stuff, but not about sheds. Mordy Oberstein: Well, apparently you do read books about... Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Well, I guess you got to do for us. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what you never knew about Local pacs. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/seo/learn. Looking into more about SEO, check it all the great content, webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guest, at Wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece of love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Vinnie is a content expert with over 5 years of SEO and content marketing experience. He's worked with Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, and is committed to crafting exceptional content and educating others on the symbiotic relationship between content creation and effective link building. Vinnie Wong Founder and Chief Strategist, Content Cartography Vinnie is a content expert with over 5 years of SEO and content marketing experience. He's worked with Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, and is committed to crafting exceptional content and educating others on the symbiotic relationship between content creation and effective link building. Articles & Resources 8 Aug 2024 The noindex tag: What it is, why you need it, and when to use it for better SEO 21 Feb 2024 Thin content: What it is and how to do better for your users and your website 4 May 2023 Why rank tracking is important 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

Is it time to break free of the SERP silo? What content will work in 2025? And how does AI and the LLM factor into the SEO equation now? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by a panel of guests to give their unique takes on what is coming for SEO in 2025. From the importance of breaking silos and collaborating across departments for better SEO strategies to local SEO tips to insights on structuring AI-generated content to top content strategies for 2025 this is one episode you don’t want to miss! Join episode 117 of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast to gear up and avoid the bunny slopes as we ski down SEO in 2025. Back Looking ahead to SEO in 2025 Is it time to break free of the SERP silo? What content will work in 2025? And how does AI and the LLM factor into the SEO equation now? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by a panel of guests to give their unique takes on what is coming for SEO in 2025. From the importance of breaking silos and collaborating across departments for better SEO strategies to local SEO tips to insights on structuring AI-generated content to top content strategies for 2025 this is one episode you don’t want to miss! Join episode 117 of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast to gear up and avoid the bunny slopes as we ski down SEO in 2025. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 117 | January 14, 2025 | 32 MIN 00:00 / 32:12 This week’s guests Ray Saddiq Ray is the Global Head of Marketing at Rise at Seven. He is an organic growth specialist. With extensive experience across in-house and agency environments, Ray specialises in both Social and SEO strategies to deliver impactful results. His background spans marketing, organic social media, and organic search, making him a go-to thought leader for crafting strategies that connect brands with their audiences from the FYP to the search results. Celeste Gonzalez Celeste Gonzalez leads RooLabs, RicketyRoo's SEO testing division, where she drives innovative strategies and engages with the SEO community. She is passionate about pushing SEO boundaries and sharing insights on both successes and challenges in the industry. Mike King An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Paul Andre De Vera You’ll find Paul Andre de Vera speaking on podcasts/webinars, looking for the next great place to devour a delicious rib-eye steak, and occasionally sipping a glass of whiskey. All while coaching, serving clients, and producing the SEO Video Show. Debbie Chew Debbie Chew is an SEO Manager at Dialpad with over 8 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and is passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting 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 has covered all the facets of 2024 and knows how to look ahead to 2025, our one and only head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I am an expert on 2024. I have been here the whole time. I did every single day of 2024. Can confirm. Mordy Oberstein: I checked out on a few days, I'll be honest with you. There was a few days I missed. Crystal Carter: I was here the whole time. I saw all of it. I saw all of it. First eyewitness account, this is primary source. Mordy Oberstein: It was too much for my eyes. I had to like ... Crystal Carter: It was a lot. There was a lot. Every year I feel like we get to the end of the year and people were like, "Wow." Mordy Oberstein: No, no. This year was real wow. We'll get to it in a second. From an SEO point of view. I'm not talking about anything else. Purely from an SEO point of view. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot to cover. There's been a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of ins and outs. Mordy Oberstein: Ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous. Big Lebowski. Yeah, indeed. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Look for it in your inboxes each and every month, where you can see and plan out your entire site with our new visual site map that not only helps you better see, and dare I say, visualize your client's entire site, but leverages AI to help you build custom wire frames. Links in the show notes. Do check it out, as today's all about having vision, as we look forward to 2025 and what it has in store for SEO. Is it time to break free of the SERP silo? What content will work in 2025? And how does AI in the grand old LLM factor into the SEO equation now? We'll hear from not one, not two, not three, not four, not five ... I could go on, not six, but many SEOs, such as Mike King, the latest soloist, Ray Saddiq, Paul Andre de Vera, Victor Pan, and many more as they weigh in on what's in store for you in 2025. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So while the snow's still soft on 2025, ratchet down those ankle straps and strap your feet in as we ollie and nollie our boards down the mountain that is SEO in 2025. Crystal Carter: You dropping skateboard references on the podcast? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Snowboard. I had to look them up. I have no clue. Crystal Carter: You snowboarding? Okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's snowboarding. Crystal Carter: I'm aware that you can ollie on a skateboard. I guess you can ollie on a snowboard because your feet don't have to come off. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Crystal Carter: An ollie, I can never remember what that is. I know skateboarders, they talk in- Mordy Oberstein: It's the opposite of an ollie, no? Crystal Carter: Possibly. It's like if you're going switch or doing tail taps and half cab disaster, there's lots of skateboard terminology that people say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. We're all about that stuff. I know nothing about it, which is funny- Crystal Carter: Everything's above board. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Crystal Carter: Just play one on TV. Mordy Oberstein: I just play one on our SEO podcast. I literally Googled all that. I don't know what it even means. Crystal Carter: You know what the first time I went snowboarding, we actually Googled top 10 tips for snowboarding, printed it out- Mordy Oberstein: And you broke your leg? Crystal Carter: No, not the first time. No. We printed it out and then printed out the MapQuest and drove up a mountain in a Hyundai, and yeah, it was good times. Good times. That's the- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Probably that first result of the top 10 tips, probably very similar to the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, eighth, ninth 10th offering the top 10 tips. Crystal Carter: Those are the good old days. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was 2024 for you. So as we gently and non-controversially move into recapping 2024 just a bit, because SEO enters in a really weird place. I don't think it's ever been weirder. Isn't that weird? To quote Austin Powers, because it is weird. Crystal Carter: May you live in interesting times. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to recap some of the larger issues, stories, developments in SEO in 2024, such as now that the helpful content update is no more, it's baked into the core algorithm and sites that were hit by it back in September don't seemingly, at this point in time of the recording of this podcast, have been able to actually recover in a significant way. Seeing like 20% recoveries was the max. So that was a big deal. Reddit's here, Reddit's there, Reddit's everywhere, and there's not a drop of organic results to spare. Crystal Carter: I didn't know you had bars, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I could snowboard and rhyme on the same podcast. Podcast is imagination land. So there's that. There were creator summits at Google Health where sites were told, "Nope, not going to happen for you." Crystal Carter: Good luck out there. Mordy Oberstein: Break a leg. I don't know. Yeah? That happened. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I guess they were just kind of told it depends. I don't know. Yeah, there was a lot going on. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting plan for a creator. So let's bring them all in and tell them we don't know. Sucks for you, I guess. Crystal Carter: I think it's just really tricky for people because Google shifts around, but this has been so much shifting. I've been saying to people, Google's in beta mode right now. And we've been in, as SEOs, there are people who've been doing SEO since 1999, and a lot of stuff hadn't changed that much over the course of that time, but in the last three, four years. Mordy Oberstein: In the last three days. Crystal Carter: Right, right, exactly. At time of recording, the head of Google recently said there's going to be monumental change coming in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: That was a great ... We covered that on its new. If you missed that, you should watch that because there are some salty points that I will not say in this podcast about that interview. Just ask Congress. Okay. Stop, cannot go further. I will get too salty too quickly. But yeah, and on the flip side of that, some of these sites have terrible ad experiences and Google traffic isn't guaranteed, which is another issue. Maybe we're too siloed and SEO should kind of get out of the bubble. Brand is now in focus in the SEO space Like never before. Everyone's talking about branding, and branding, and branding, but not exactly about how to do the branding, which is a different problem. But we're talking about branding. AIOs? I don't know how they got so far down on the list. That should have been more on the top of the list. This list. It's not a sequential order of SEO insanity, it's just a random list. So AI overviews kind of been hit or miss. Drink urine, eat glue, that was part of the equation in 2024. Crystal Carter: Right. Seemed to have improved over the course of it, I will say. I will say that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. They have improved. More links, more links, Crystal Carter: More links, more value, less just repeating the exact same featured snippet underneath of it. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: Little bit of that. So we'll see. We'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Right. What's the CTR? All that one actually knows, so that's good. Also, manual actions on some pretty big websites for parasite SEO. Third-party content hosted on the website. It has nothing to do with whatever your website does. Penalized by Google. Moral of the story, write it yourself. Okay, that was again salty, because Google's like ... "Well, if you're writing it yourself, that seems to be fine," which was Greg Finn's point on Its New multiple times. So I'm just dealing Greg Salty Thunder on that one. But Forbes, a lot. Entrepreneur, all these big sites who were hosting third-party content on their website were dinged. Manual action dinged by Google on those folders. So that was a shot across the bow to publishers. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Forbes had quite the year this year. Everybody's been talking about Forbes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Because it seems like they lost a lot of traffic. Oh, you meant it like, "Oh, it was complicated." Got it. Not like, "Wow, that was a great year." Crystal Carter: They've had quite a year. A lot going on. Everybody's talking about Forbes. People have a lot to say about Forbes. People have a lot of opinions about what's going on there, including Google, apparently. Mordy Oberstein: Apparently. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But everybody acts like they're saints also, so whatever. Anywho. Wow, this is starting off great. There's a ton that I probably missed. The net result of all of this is there's mass confusion, uncertainty, and change within the SEO space, and I'm not being hyperbolic. Crystal Carter: Not at all. Not at all. And I think that we're even starting to see this in how people are approaching talking to clients as well. So people are having to diversify their SEO offering, people are having to do things a little bit more different, a little bit more nuanced, a little ... And I haven't seen 360 marketing everywhere. I've seen 360 marketing quoted as a strategy more times than I've ever seen before. Everybody is going to 360, and I think that that's good. I think that's good, and I've spoken on this years ago that it's something that's high value. And Mordy, you've been talking about brand for years. Mordy Oberstein: For years. Years. Crystal Carter: Years. Years. And we don't want to be like the harbingers of, "I told you so," but also- Mordy Oberstein: No. I told you also. Crystal Carter: But we did tell you so. Just saying. Just saying. Just putting it out there. And so hopefully people are able to get involved and see what's going on there. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, we got a bunch of folks together and we asked them, okay, with all this craziness going on in the SEO space, what are your top tips for 2025? And they're like, "Punt." No, I'm just kidding. They had actual ... Punt is a football reference, whatever. It just means kick it down the field and see what happens. They have some actual really good advice for you. So let's get right to it. We're going to start off with Ray Saddiq, who is the global head of marketing at Rice at seven, who talks about working with other teams. Here's what Ray had to say. Ray Saddiq: So I think that search has changed massively, and it's time for you as an SEO to start working with the other teams in your department. So if you are in-house, go ahead and we'll start speaking to your social team, because social search is a thing at the moment, so it's time that you go and start speaking to them. But also speak to your PR team as well, because it's crazy how many links can be built. I've noticed over here on the US side, especially how many people aren't working directly with their PR team to build links into the right places on their website. So have a look at that, check that out. Look into digital PR as well if you haven't already. It's a huge thing. I know there's still a few people I spoke to today who aren't really looking into it at the moment, so now's the time. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Ray. That's a great point. Someone asked me, I don't remember who it was ... Humble brag, I get asked for so many of these round up tips for the end of the year, and one of my ... Somebody- Ray Saddiq: Everybody asks me so many things. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Look at me. Ray Saddiq: Totally asking me questions. Mordy Oberstein: Sound like such a creep. No, but I just have a bad memory. So I don't remember where it was, but I wrote ... I think it was for Aleyda's SEO FOMO thing. Sit with comms. My biggest tip for you is sit with comms, which is kind of what Ray is saying. So great minds think alike. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think that SEOs are growing up. We need to mature into the full marketers that we are, because we always have been a core part of the marketing team and we just need to mature into that. And I think that that's exactly what he's talking about from a PR point of view. One of the other things that's happened this year is that LLMs have also become destinations for search. So I've got an article that goes all into that, but one of the things that I talk about is that links are part of that. All of the things we've done for SEO contribute to that, including getting links in high value publications, which PR is the only way to do that. You're not going to get a link from time. You're not going to get a link in the Atlantic without doing some solid PR. So absolutely great advice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's really solid. Speaking of which, and talking with other teams, Debbie Chew, who's the SEO manager over our Stripe, goes into that with a little bit more detail. So here's Debbie. Debbie Chew: One SEO tip for SEO 2025 would be to break out of your silos. So in SEO, we kind of live in a bubble sometimes. Maybe if we're lucky, we might be working with paid, but there are a bunch of other teams that really understand our customer and that we can tap into. So let's look at our sales team, our customer service team, what data can they share with us about our customers, and what data can the SEO team share back with them and use that within kind your SEO strategy and then have them use that as well. So make sure to break out of your silos and pull all that data together and create a great success for your business. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Debbie. Really appreciate that. That's really the point. I feel like the internet is in the age of resonance. There's so much digital noise, there's so much digital chatter that you really have to resonate with that audience, and the only way to really do that, and that part of your job as an SEO is to resonate, not just to get clicks and not just to get traffic, but to actually resonate, which is ... I don't know why I have to say that. And the only way to do that is to really, I think, is to understand the brand positioning of the company that you're working with or the client that you're working with, which means you need to talk to these other teams that break out of your silo, like Debbie just said. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And she also mentioned at the data point, the only way you're going to effectively connect with these folks is with some authenticity, and you can only get authenticity by knowing what you're talking about, and the only way what you're talking about is with data. So you need to get data from the teams that are working with them. And it might be that the data unlocks always, always data unlocks stuff that you didn't quite see. You're like, "Oh, turns out we're really big in Wisconsin." And you're like, "Oh, okay, maybe we should do some stuff in Wisconsin. I didn't realize that that was a thing. Or maybe you feel like you're big in Wisconsin and you can use the data to back that up so that you can get money to do something in Wisconsin, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Or then they say, "Oh no, we're not really big in Wisconsin. We're actually big in Cleveland, so we have to do stuff in Cleveland." They're like, "Oh, Cleveland." Okay. Speaking of breaking out of silos and working with other teams, maybe it's time to break out of search just a little bit, not put all of your eggs in one basket. So here's Celeste Gonzalez, director of RooLabs, over at Rickety Roo, on that point. Celeste Gonzalez: My one SEO tip for 2025 would be, towards local businesses, don't put all your eggs in one SEO basket. Diversify your channels. Be where your audience is. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Celeste. I could not agree more, not just for local businesses, but in general. I think one of the ideas that's coming out of SEO from 2024 is that search for many websites is a vehicle. And it's not the only vehicle, it's simply one vehicle to build up that brand presence, to build up the visibility that you want to have to build up, the engagement or the performance, whatever it is, it's one vehicle. And especially if you're not one of these giant websites like, I don't know, Wix ... Like Wix, it's going to be much harder for you to get onto that SERP and to use search as a vehicle the way that you might have done in the past. I think it's one of the main themes out of 2024. So definitely diversifying that portfolio a bit makes a lot of sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think it doesn't just apply to local businesses. I think it's absolutely important for local businesses, because you are going to be connecting with your customers in so many different ways. And Facebook is a channel that really, really works for local businesses, for instance. There's always a local schools group, people are using the marketplace to find things on Facebook. So I use Facebook more for local things than almost anything else, and I think that that's for instance, really useful. And making sure that your website connects with that, making sure that you've got listings, making sure you've got your Google business profile, absolutely helps your local business to perform online. So if you are working in the local space, if you are a local business owner or you're supporting a local business owner as a consultant, adding more channels to what you do will absolutely help you in 2024, 2025, 2026, going forward. Mordy Oberstein: That's just channel nine. Nothing ever good was ever on channel nine. Right? Crystal Carter: I don't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: Channel nine. That was UPN when I was a kid. Crystal Carter: Oh, I used to watch tons of UPN. Mordy Oberstein: There was reruns of Family Matters, I'll be honest. Crystal Carter: Tons. Mordy Oberstein: They had the most- Crystal Carter: I watched tons of UPN back in the day. Moesha was on UPN. Mordy Oberstein: The WB also. Also who bought ... Crystal Carter: They also had loads of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: 7th Heaven, Jessica Buell was on that. All right, whatever. Anywho, one of the other big themes out of 2024 is obviously around content generation. We're talking about content generation, one of the things we're talking about is AI. So here's Mike King, founder of iPoll Rank, on how to generate content with AI. Mike King: Use retrieval augmented generation for creating content with generative AI. And when you do it, generate the content in components. Don't just say, "Give me a giant blog post." Give me the intro to the blog post, give me the main body area, give me the TLDR. Break it down into components in alignment with the design of the website and you're going to get much more usable content a lot faster. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Mike. And that's very similar, by the way, to what Mike talked about on our webinar with him and Ross Hudgens. If you give AI a walled garden to operate in, and boundaries to operate in, you usually get way, way better results. Crystal Carter: And in his webinar that we did with him and Ross Hudgens, which we reference a lot because it's got really, really good value in it, they point out that they've both been using AI for years. So they know what they're talking about. They didn't just jump on the bandwagon. They've been driving the bandwagon for years. And I think that it really, really does help if you break it down, if you give it good inputs, if you give it good prompts, if you're breaking it down that way. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Now, to break down content itself a little bit for you in 2025 and what might work that you might not be focused on, here's Paul Andre de Vera, host of the SEO show on some fresh content ideas. Paul Andre De Vera: My one tip for SEO 2025 is live streaming. What's the freshest content out there? What's fresher than fresh? Live streaming? Live video. Last year I was talking about video's great. Get videos ranking on page one of Google button. If you look at right now, every time I schedule a live on my YouTube, they're ranking on page one almost instantly. So check it out. Live streaming is my number one tip for 2025. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Dre. That is really interesting to see that he's doing the live streams on LinkedIn and they're popping up on the SERP right away. That's interesting. Crystal Carter: That is really interesting. The live LinkedIn is a fascinating development. They've really been investing in video in the last little while since everybody's taken to LinkedIn as a refuge after all of the other social media platforms fell apart. So they've been putting a lot of video in there, and the live does seem to get a little bit of traction, so we'll see how that develops in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, absolutely. So we don't only have those tips for you. We collected a whole bunch of tips from a whole bunch of different SEOs that'll be part of a roundup post, but I wanted to pull some of those into the podcast as well. So Victor Pan, who is the SEO over a HubSpot, had a really interesting tip. He wrote, "Don't waste a crisis. When site traffic is down," because we're talking about, "Oh, it's a volatile world out there. Site traffic might be down," it's easy to patch these with the short-term solutions. For example, 2025 coming, or here, depending on how many content plus year keywords your site ranks for, you'll have a predictable traffic decline on pages ranking for 2024 keywords. The short term solution would be to scrape and update page content and titles manually. Gross. Don't waste this crisis, or forget the lesson from yesteryear. Quantify the loss from last year, document an editorial process to proactively avoid future traffic declines while elevating content quality. Record the win and wear it proudly with your colleagues. When you lose traffic, don't lose the lesson. Crystal Carter: Yo teachable moments. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Teachable moments. This is absolutely key. I think also sometimes people are like, "Oh, the traffic is down. Sometimes that means you got their attention." And if you're the person who's like, "I told you so. I told you we shouldn't have done this thing that we did anyway," then that's a great time to also give the teachable moment to the rest of your team and remind them why you are the SEO that you are. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And just like, yeah, remember? Oh, now you're coming to me now. Oh, okay." So just have your answers ready to go. And yeah, as he says, don't let the teachable moment go past. Actually learn from it. Totally, totally great advice. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great quote. So switching over to eCom a little bit, Chris Long VP of marketing at Go Fish Digital wrote, "Retailers, Google is becoming your new category page. In effort to compete with Amazon they're turning the search results into a de facto category page experience. Fast and navigation pricing comparisons and more, all directly available in the search results. This means that you need to spend even more time on your products as opposed to your category pages," which is really interesting. By the way, I think it's really interesting that Google's going so heavy on the homepage or the traditional SERP page with all of the products and not trying to push you into Google shopping more heavily so as to compete brand-wise with Amazon. I think it's a short-term win for Google. I'm not sure it's a long-term win for Google, but that's a different point aside. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they are coming for Amazon hard. And I think also, I think for SEOs, this is going to be changing around the funnel. I think Chris is right. This is your product page, so you need to make sure that anything that's pulling through from your feed, going into Google, is optimized for that experience. And also making sure that your bottom of the funnel is locked tight and frictionless. And I think that people need to think about that going forward and optimize for all search interactions. So yeah, Chris has great, great insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: Chris always has great insights, has a great- Crystal Carter: He's good. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Chris is really good. Okay. Naomi Francis Parker, who's the SEO manager over at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty said, "Pay attention to your brand identity. Make sure it's clear across all places of search. This includes social media, GPTs, and digital search engines like Google and Bing. If 2024 taught us anything it's that the way users are searching is changing at a much faster pace than anyone, platforms included, could have anticipated. Couple that with the constantly changing SERP and it's clear that ranking as a concept is becoming outdated. Entity SEO has always been around because it's how search engines understand brands, people, et cetera. But it's already more important now than ever before. It's no longer just about how you appear in Google. It's about how you appear online at all." Yes, could not agree more. The way you appear, are mentioned, discuss related to as a brand across the entire digital landscape is how GPTs and how AI LLMs of the world are going to pick you up and understand you. Crystal Carter: Right. They need to understand your whole digital presence. And that's always been the case. And I think that as she's saying entities, you need to understand your entity. She's mentioning the LLM. I'm going to shout out my article that talks about that on the SEO hub, and it gets into that. One of the things that's important about LLMs is they're all trained on Wikipedia. 66 million pages of copyright-free, human-vetted information that's all coming from the knowledge graph, and pulling through all of those different entities and all those different elements. If your entity doesn't make sense online, then it's unlikely that your entity is going to make sense on an LLM. So you need to make sure that your entity, which pulls from lots of different data points, including what's on your website, but lots of other places, makes sense. And that's SEO these days. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's plenty of places where you can control if you don't have a Wiki Wikipedia page, you can crunch base if you're a business or a persona online. There's all LinkedIn. There's tons of places where- Crystal Carter: Your local business profile. Mordy Oberstein: Personality and persona are picked up. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Lots of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of places. Crystal Carter: Handle that. Handle it. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Last but not least, Aleyda Solis, SEO consultant, founder of Orainti, and of course, SEO FOMO, and learning SEO.io. Crystal Carter: And contributor/instructor for the WIC Studio SEO learning course, where you can learn SEO from Aleyda Solis. Mordy's waving because I'm waving my finger now. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, everyone. We're both waving fingers. Crystal Carter: Waving fingers because- Mordy Oberstein: Waving our finger at you. How silly it would be if you didn't take up that free SEO course from Aleyda. Crystal Carter: You totally should. Mordy Oberstein: Checkout the SEO Learning Hub, Studio SEO Learning Hub. Crystal Carter: Yes, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Aleyda said, "It's clear that Google wants to feature real authoritative brands at the top of the SERPs, which is also clearly helpful to increase CTR and optimize conversions. Grow your brand authority by understanding your company brand positioning, and take into account in your SEO strategy. Target your brand to key queries, specify your brand details, structure data, optimize your knowledge panel details, etc." So great minds think alike. I literally did a video on why brands, like if your sales team or marketing team, don't focus on the messaging. Focus on the positioning, because that tells you, A, who you are as a brand, and it helps you also understand who the client and the consumer is. It's like the perfect intersection. Focus on understanding positioning, which is I guess my tip of the year if we're talking about all this brand stuff. SEOs are talking and chirping a lot about it, and it's hard. It's long term, it's a different kind of mentality. I will give you my one tip to fall back on it all. It all hinges on creating meaningful brand identity for yourself. And when I say meaningful, I've said this before, it means there are two levels, or multiple levels, of emotions that the human experience revolves around. What are surface level emotions and what are more deep, more integral things that you must have. I always say fun. In the vein of Barry Shores, I don't have to have fun. I don't have to have fun today. I don't have to have fun tomorrow. I can have fun on the weekend, or if I'm Barry, I will never have fun at all. If your brand identity is focused on, "Let's have fun," that's a very fleeting experience. If your brand identities focus on more meaningful experiences that are integral to the human experience, like connection, overcoming struggle, things that are must haves for the human experience, that's much more meaningful, that's much more powerful, and it'll keep you much more centered. Focus on those more existential parts of your brand identity and less on the fleeting parts of your brand identity. And the rest of the brand will follow that. So if you're in SEO, you're looking at where do I start with brand? Start there. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my tip for 2025. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I got it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Hey Crystal, what's your tip for 2025? Smooth transition. Crystal Carter: Sorry. Sorry. You were dropping the knowledge and I was just pondering it. Mordy Oberstein: You were caught in my aura. Crystal Carter: I was just pondering that. I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's really interesting." I forgot I was on a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Thank you? Crystal Carter: So my tip, and I've been saying this all over the place. I've said it in two different Brighton SEOs, have done a couple of podcasts, and I've written this article. Basically, you need to be treating LLMs as a channel, and we need to be treating them as a channel for traffic. We need to be tracking them. I have a deck that shares a regex that Jess Schultz shared where you can track the traffic from LLMs. You can see how many clicks you're getting. And guess what. You're getting clicks from LLMs. And while they are not currently overtaking Google in terms of search, we are looking at billions, billions of traffic that's going to LLMs every day. And people are looking to it for solutions because sometimes it has less friction than standard search, and we need to make sure that we can manage that. And I think that we have been approaching this as if it's completely different, or it's not relevant, or whatever, but it's not completely different. All of these search enabled LLMs, of which there are many, are relying on results from search engines. Legacy results and previous results, previous crawls, things like that. And we can manage that, and I think that that's something that should be a new skill for SEOs. I think it's exciting. Gartner said that search could drop by as much as 25% or something in the next few years. But I think that we are SEOs, we can do anything. We ruin the internet. This ain't nothing. Are you kidding me? So I think that this is a brave new world, and I think that it's super exciting. So I'm excited to see how this goes forward. Mordy Oberstein: Your confidence is inspiring. Crystal Carter: I hope so. I hope so. I love a new thing. It's one of the reasons why I love working in marketing and SEO, because there's always a new thing to learn and try. You know in the Matrix where it says, "Can you fly a helicopter?" and he goes, "Yes, I can." That's how I feel sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: I know kung fu. Crystal Carter: Right? That's how I feel sometimes. And I feel like that's where we are right now. And I think that if you're in a place where you're like, "I want to do things the way I did before, I feel you. I see you, I understand you, but it's new. We got to do new stuff. Mordy Oberstein: That brings to this week's follow of the week. This week's follow of the week are all the people we already mentioned. Is that lazy? I'm sorry. No, but there's so many people. There's Ray Saddiq, Debbie Chew, Celeste Gonzalez, Mike King, Paul Andre De Vera, Victor Pan, Chris Long, Aleyda Solis. My friend is Parker, Crystal, myself, a lot of people to follow. Crystal Carter: I think also you should follow George Wynn, our head of editorial- Mordy Oberstein: Oh yes. Crystal Carter: At the Wix Studio Learning Hub, SEO Learning Hub, because George was the one who brought all these folks together. So George was able to interview some folks at Brighton SEO. He also put together a fantastic article with all of these tips, which you should absolutely check out. And yeah, he's got some great advice and he helps make sure that we sound like we know what we're talking about on the SEO Learning Hub. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, so George is the follow of the week? Crystal Carter: Yeah, follow George. Mordy Oberstein: Is that even lazier than saying, "Follow all the people in the episode"? Crystal Carter: If you follow George, you will also find all of these other folks because he put them in the article. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Follow George, wherever he may go. Crystal Carter: I will follow him. Mordy Oberstein: It's just scary right now. I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. My kid's never seen Sister Act. I feel like I need to sort that out. Mordy Oberstein: My kids never saw that either. That's an old-school movie. Crystal Carter: I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's a great movie. It's just not one I see- Crystal Carter: I like Sister Act 2 better though. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember it as well. Crystal Carter: Sister Act 2 I was obsessed with because I had Lauryn Hill. I watched a movie a million times and had the soundtrack. Obsessed. Mordy Oberstein: I just don't remember it as well. I remember the first one really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no. Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, whatever. Whoopee. And on that high note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into email marketing and how it relates to search marketing in 2025. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars, and our free SEO course over on the Wix Studio Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ray Saddiq Debbie Chew Celeste Gonzalez Paul Andre De Vera Mike King Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ray Saddiq Debbie Chew Celeste Gonzalez Paul Andre De Vera Mike King Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who has covered all the facets of 2024 and knows how to look ahead to 2025, our one and only head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I am an expert on 2024. I have been here the whole time. I did every single day of 2024. Can confirm. Mordy Oberstein: I checked out on a few days, I'll be honest with you. There was a few days I missed. Crystal Carter: I was here the whole time. I saw all of it. I saw all of it. First eyewitness account, this is primary source. Mordy Oberstein: It was too much for my eyes. I had to like ... Crystal Carter: It was a lot. There was a lot. Every year I feel like we get to the end of the year and people were like, "Wow." Mordy Oberstein: No, no. This year was real wow. We'll get to it in a second. From an SEO point of view. I'm not talking about anything else. Purely from an SEO point of view. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot to cover. There's been a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of ins and outs. Mordy Oberstein: Ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous. Big Lebowski. Yeah, indeed. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Look for it in your inboxes each and every month, where you can see and plan out your entire site with our new visual site map that not only helps you better see, and dare I say, visualize your client's entire site, but leverages AI to help you build custom wire frames. Links in the show notes. Do check it out, as today's all about having vision, as we look forward to 2025 and what it has in store for SEO. Is it time to break free of the SERP silo? What content will work in 2025? And how does AI in the grand old LLM factor into the SEO equation now? We'll hear from not one, not two, not three, not four, not five ... I could go on, not six, but many SEOs, such as Mike King, the latest soloist, Ray Saddiq, Paul Andre de Vera, Victor Pan, and many more as they weigh in on what's in store for you in 2025. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So while the snow's still soft on 2025, ratchet down those ankle straps and strap your feet in as we ollie and nollie our boards down the mountain that is SEO in 2025. Crystal Carter: You dropping skateboard references on the podcast? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Snowboard. I had to look them up. I have no clue. Crystal Carter: You snowboarding? Okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's snowboarding. Crystal Carter: I'm aware that you can ollie on a skateboard. I guess you can ollie on a snowboard because your feet don't have to come off. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Crystal Carter: An ollie, I can never remember what that is. I know skateboarders, they talk in- Mordy Oberstein: It's the opposite of an ollie, no? Crystal Carter: Possibly. It's like if you're going switch or doing tail taps and half cab disaster, there's lots of skateboard terminology that people say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. We're all about that stuff. I know nothing about it, which is funny- Crystal Carter: Everything's above board. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Crystal Carter: Just play one on TV. Mordy Oberstein: I just play one on our SEO podcast. I literally Googled all that. I don't know what it even means. Crystal Carter: You know what the first time I went snowboarding, we actually Googled top 10 tips for snowboarding, printed it out- Mordy Oberstein: And you broke your leg? Crystal Carter: No, not the first time. No. We printed it out and then printed out the MapQuest and drove up a mountain in a Hyundai, and yeah, it was good times. Good times. That's the- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Probably that first result of the top 10 tips, probably very similar to the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, eighth, ninth 10th offering the top 10 tips. Crystal Carter: Those are the good old days. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was 2024 for you. So as we gently and non-controversially move into recapping 2024 just a bit, because SEO enters in a really weird place. I don't think it's ever been weirder. Isn't that weird? To quote Austin Powers, because it is weird. Crystal Carter: May you live in interesting times. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to recap some of the larger issues, stories, developments in SEO in 2024, such as now that the helpful content update is no more, it's baked into the core algorithm and sites that were hit by it back in September don't seemingly, at this point in time of the recording of this podcast, have been able to actually recover in a significant way. Seeing like 20% recoveries was the max. So that was a big deal. Reddit's here, Reddit's there, Reddit's everywhere, and there's not a drop of organic results to spare. Crystal Carter: I didn't know you had bars, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I could snowboard and rhyme on the same podcast. Podcast is imagination land. So there's that. There were creator summits at Google Health where sites were told, "Nope, not going to happen for you." Crystal Carter: Good luck out there. Mordy Oberstein: Break a leg. I don't know. Yeah? That happened. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I guess they were just kind of told it depends. I don't know. Yeah, there was a lot going on. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting plan for a creator. So let's bring them all in and tell them we don't know. Sucks for you, I guess. Crystal Carter: I think it's just really tricky for people because Google shifts around, but this has been so much shifting. I've been saying to people, Google's in beta mode right now. And we've been in, as SEOs, there are people who've been doing SEO since 1999, and a lot of stuff hadn't changed that much over the course of that time, but in the last three, four years. Mordy Oberstein: In the last three days. Crystal Carter: Right, right, exactly. At time of recording, the head of Google recently said there's going to be monumental change coming in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: That was a great ... We covered that on its new. If you missed that, you should watch that because there are some salty points that I will not say in this podcast about that interview. Just ask Congress. Okay. Stop, cannot go further. I will get too salty too quickly. But yeah, and on the flip side of that, some of these sites have terrible ad experiences and Google traffic isn't guaranteed, which is another issue. Maybe we're too siloed and SEO should kind of get out of the bubble. Brand is now in focus in the SEO space Like never before. Everyone's talking about branding, and branding, and branding, but not exactly about how to do the branding, which is a different problem. But we're talking about branding. AIOs? I don't know how they got so far down on the list. That should have been more on the top of the list. This list. It's not a sequential order of SEO insanity, it's just a random list. So AI overviews kind of been hit or miss. Drink urine, eat glue, that was part of the equation in 2024. Crystal Carter: Right. Seemed to have improved over the course of it, I will say. I will say that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. They have improved. More links, more links, Crystal Carter: More links, more value, less just repeating the exact same featured snippet underneath of it. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: Little bit of that. So we'll see. We'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Right. What's the CTR? All that one actually knows, so that's good. Also, manual actions on some pretty big websites for parasite SEO. Third-party content hosted on the website. It has nothing to do with whatever your website does. Penalized by Google. Moral of the story, write it yourself. Okay, that was again salty, because Google's like ... "Well, if you're writing it yourself, that seems to be fine," which was Greg Finn's point on Its New multiple times. So I'm just dealing Greg Salty Thunder on that one. But Forbes, a lot. Entrepreneur, all these big sites who were hosting third-party content on their website were dinged. Manual action dinged by Google on those folders. So that was a shot across the bow to publishers. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Forbes had quite the year this year. Everybody's been talking about Forbes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Because it seems like they lost a lot of traffic. Oh, you meant it like, "Oh, it was complicated." Got it. Not like, "Wow, that was a great year." Crystal Carter: They've had quite a year. A lot going on. Everybody's talking about Forbes. People have a lot to say about Forbes. People have a lot of opinions about what's going on there, including Google, apparently. Mordy Oberstein: Apparently. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But everybody acts like they're saints also, so whatever. Anywho. Wow, this is starting off great. There's a ton that I probably missed. The net result of all of this is there's mass confusion, uncertainty, and change within the SEO space, and I'm not being hyperbolic. Crystal Carter: Not at all. Not at all. And I think that we're even starting to see this in how people are approaching talking to clients as well. So people are having to diversify their SEO offering, people are having to do things a little bit more different, a little bit more nuanced, a little ... And I haven't seen 360 marketing everywhere. I've seen 360 marketing quoted as a strategy more times than I've ever seen before. Everybody is going to 360, and I think that that's good. I think that's good, and I've spoken on this years ago that it's something that's high value. And Mordy, you've been talking about brand for years. Mordy Oberstein: For years. Years. Crystal Carter: Years. Years. And we don't want to be like the harbingers of, "I told you so," but also- Mordy Oberstein: No. I told you also. Crystal Carter: But we did tell you so. Just saying. Just saying. Just putting it out there. And so hopefully people are able to get involved and see what's going on there. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, we got a bunch of folks together and we asked them, okay, with all this craziness going on in the SEO space, what are your top tips for 2025? And they're like, "Punt." No, I'm just kidding. They had actual ... Punt is a football reference, whatever. It just means kick it down the field and see what happens. They have some actual really good advice for you. So let's get right to it. We're going to start off with Ray Saddiq, who is the global head of marketing at Rice at seven, who talks about working with other teams. Here's what Ray had to say. Ray Saddiq: So I think that search has changed massively, and it's time for you as an SEO to start working with the other teams in your department. So if you are in-house, go ahead and we'll start speaking to your social team, because social search is a thing at the moment, so it's time that you go and start speaking to them. But also speak to your PR team as well, because it's crazy how many links can be built. I've noticed over here on the US side, especially how many people aren't working directly with their PR team to build links into the right places on their website. So have a look at that, check that out. Look into digital PR as well if you haven't already. It's a huge thing. I know there's still a few people I spoke to today who aren't really looking into it at the moment, so now's the time. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Ray. That's a great point. Someone asked me, I don't remember who it was ... Humble brag, I get asked for so many of these round up tips for the end of the year, and one of my ... Somebody- Ray Saddiq: Everybody asks me so many things. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Look at me. Ray Saddiq: Totally asking me questions. Mordy Oberstein: Sound like such a creep. No, but I just have a bad memory. So I don't remember where it was, but I wrote ... I think it was for Aleyda's SEO FOMO thing. Sit with comms. My biggest tip for you is sit with comms, which is kind of what Ray is saying. So great minds think alike. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think that SEOs are growing up. We need to mature into the full marketers that we are, because we always have been a core part of the marketing team and we just need to mature into that. And I think that that's exactly what he's talking about from a PR point of view. One of the other things that's happened this year is that LLMs have also become destinations for search. So I've got an article that goes all into that, but one of the things that I talk about is that links are part of that. All of the things we've done for SEO contribute to that, including getting links in high value publications, which PR is the only way to do that. You're not going to get a link from time. You're not going to get a link in the Atlantic without doing some solid PR. So absolutely great advice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's really solid. Speaking of which, and talking with other teams, Debbie Chew, who's the SEO manager over our Stripe, goes into that with a little bit more detail. So here's Debbie. Debbie Chew: One SEO tip for SEO 2025 would be to break out of your silos. So in SEO, we kind of live in a bubble sometimes. Maybe if we're lucky, we might be working with paid, but there are a bunch of other teams that really understand our customer and that we can tap into. So let's look at our sales team, our customer service team, what data can they share with us about our customers, and what data can the SEO team share back with them and use that within kind your SEO strategy and then have them use that as well. So make sure to break out of your silos and pull all that data together and create a great success for your business. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Debbie. Really appreciate that. That's really the point. I feel like the internet is in the age of resonance. There's so much digital noise, there's so much digital chatter that you really have to resonate with that audience, and the only way to really do that, and that part of your job as an SEO is to resonate, not just to get clicks and not just to get traffic, but to actually resonate, which is ... I don't know why I have to say that. And the only way to do that is to really, I think, is to understand the brand positioning of the company that you're working with or the client that you're working with, which means you need to talk to these other teams that break out of your silo, like Debbie just said. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And she also mentioned at the data point, the only way you're going to effectively connect with these folks is with some authenticity, and you can only get authenticity by knowing what you're talking about, and the only way what you're talking about is with data. So you need to get data from the teams that are working with them. And it might be that the data unlocks always, always data unlocks stuff that you didn't quite see. You're like, "Oh, turns out we're really big in Wisconsin." And you're like, "Oh, okay, maybe we should do some stuff in Wisconsin. I didn't realize that that was a thing. Or maybe you feel like you're big in Wisconsin and you can use the data to back that up so that you can get money to do something in Wisconsin, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Or then they say, "Oh no, we're not really big in Wisconsin. We're actually big in Cleveland, so we have to do stuff in Cleveland." They're like, "Oh, Cleveland." Okay. Speaking of breaking out of silos and working with other teams, maybe it's time to break out of search just a little bit, not put all of your eggs in one basket. So here's Celeste Gonzalez, director of RooLabs, over at Rickety Roo, on that point. Celeste Gonzalez: My one SEO tip for 2025 would be, towards local businesses, don't put all your eggs in one SEO basket. Diversify your channels. Be where your audience is. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Celeste. I could not agree more, not just for local businesses, but in general. I think one of the ideas that's coming out of SEO from 2024 is that search for many websites is a vehicle. And it's not the only vehicle, it's simply one vehicle to build up that brand presence, to build up the visibility that you want to have to build up, the engagement or the performance, whatever it is, it's one vehicle. And especially if you're not one of these giant websites like, I don't know, Wix ... Like Wix, it's going to be much harder for you to get onto that SERP and to use search as a vehicle the way that you might have done in the past. I think it's one of the main themes out of 2024. So definitely diversifying that portfolio a bit makes a lot of sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, totally. And I think it doesn't just apply to local businesses. I think it's absolutely important for local businesses, because you are going to be connecting with your customers in so many different ways. And Facebook is a channel that really, really works for local businesses, for instance. There's always a local schools group, people are using the marketplace to find things on Facebook. So I use Facebook more for local things than almost anything else, and I think that that's for instance, really useful. And making sure that your website connects with that, making sure that you've got listings, making sure you've got your Google business profile, absolutely helps your local business to perform online. So if you are working in the local space, if you are a local business owner or you're supporting a local business owner as a consultant, adding more channels to what you do will absolutely help you in 2024, 2025, 2026, going forward. Mordy Oberstein: That's just channel nine. Nothing ever good was ever on channel nine. Right? Crystal Carter: I don't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: Channel nine. That was UPN when I was a kid. Crystal Carter: Oh, I used to watch tons of UPN. Mordy Oberstein: There was reruns of Family Matters, I'll be honest. Crystal Carter: Tons. Mordy Oberstein: They had the most- Crystal Carter: I watched tons of UPN back in the day. Moesha was on UPN. Mordy Oberstein: The WB also. Also who bought ... Crystal Carter: They also had loads of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: 7th Heaven, Jessica Buell was on that. All right, whatever. Anywho, one of the other big themes out of 2024 is obviously around content generation. We're talking about content generation, one of the things we're talking about is AI. So here's Mike King, founder of iPoll Rank, on how to generate content with AI. Mike King: Use retrieval augmented generation for creating content with generative AI. And when you do it, generate the content in components. Don't just say, "Give me a giant blog post." Give me the intro to the blog post, give me the main body area, give me the TLDR. Break it down into components in alignment with the design of the website and you're going to get much more usable content a lot faster. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Mike. And that's very similar, by the way, to what Mike talked about on our webinar with him and Ross Hudgens. If you give AI a walled garden to operate in, and boundaries to operate in, you usually get way, way better results. Crystal Carter: And in his webinar that we did with him and Ross Hudgens, which we reference a lot because it's got really, really good value in it, they point out that they've both been using AI for years. So they know what they're talking about. They didn't just jump on the bandwagon. They've been driving the bandwagon for years. And I think that it really, really does help if you break it down, if you give it good inputs, if you give it good prompts, if you're breaking it down that way. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Now, to break down content itself a little bit for you in 2025 and what might work that you might not be focused on, here's Paul Andre de Vera, host of the SEO show on some fresh content ideas. Paul Andre De Vera: My one tip for SEO 2025 is live streaming. What's the freshest content out there? What's fresher than fresh? Live streaming? Live video. Last year I was talking about video's great. Get videos ranking on page one of Google button. If you look at right now, every time I schedule a live on my YouTube, they're ranking on page one almost instantly. So check it out. Live streaming is my number one tip for 2025. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Dre. That is really interesting to see that he's doing the live streams on LinkedIn and they're popping up on the SERP right away. That's interesting. Crystal Carter: That is really interesting. The live LinkedIn is a fascinating development. They've really been investing in video in the last little while since everybody's taken to LinkedIn as a refuge after all of the other social media platforms fell apart. So they've been putting a lot of video in there, and the live does seem to get a little bit of traction, so we'll see how that develops in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, absolutely. So we don't only have those tips for you. We collected a whole bunch of tips from a whole bunch of different SEOs that'll be part of a roundup post, but I wanted to pull some of those into the podcast as well. So Victor Pan, who is the SEO over a HubSpot, had a really interesting tip. He wrote, "Don't waste a crisis. When site traffic is down," because we're talking about, "Oh, it's a volatile world out there. Site traffic might be down," it's easy to patch these with the short-term solutions. For example, 2025 coming, or here, depending on how many content plus year keywords your site ranks for, you'll have a predictable traffic decline on pages ranking for 2024 keywords. The short term solution would be to scrape and update page content and titles manually. Gross. Don't waste this crisis, or forget the lesson from yesteryear. Quantify the loss from last year, document an editorial process to proactively avoid future traffic declines while elevating content quality. Record the win and wear it proudly with your colleagues. When you lose traffic, don't lose the lesson. Crystal Carter: Yo teachable moments. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Teachable moments. This is absolutely key. I think also sometimes people are like, "Oh, the traffic is down. Sometimes that means you got their attention." And if you're the person who's like, "I told you so. I told you we shouldn't have done this thing that we did anyway," then that's a great time to also give the teachable moment to the rest of your team and remind them why you are the SEO that you are. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And just like, yeah, remember? Oh, now you're coming to me now. Oh, okay." So just have your answers ready to go. And yeah, as he says, don't let the teachable moment go past. Actually learn from it. Totally, totally great advice. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great quote. So switching over to eCom a little bit, Chris Long VP of marketing at Go Fish Digital wrote, "Retailers, Google is becoming your new category page. In effort to compete with Amazon they're turning the search results into a de facto category page experience. Fast and navigation pricing comparisons and more, all directly available in the search results. This means that you need to spend even more time on your products as opposed to your category pages," which is really interesting. By the way, I think it's really interesting that Google's going so heavy on the homepage or the traditional SERP page with all of the products and not trying to push you into Google shopping more heavily so as to compete brand-wise with Amazon. I think it's a short-term win for Google. I'm not sure it's a long-term win for Google, but that's a different point aside. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they are coming for Amazon hard. And I think also, I think for SEOs, this is going to be changing around the funnel. I think Chris is right. This is your product page, so you need to make sure that anything that's pulling through from your feed, going into Google, is optimized for that experience. And also making sure that your bottom of the funnel is locked tight and frictionless. And I think that people need to think about that going forward and optimize for all search interactions. So yeah, Chris has great, great insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: Chris always has great insights, has a great- Crystal Carter: He's good. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Chris is really good. Okay. Naomi Francis Parker, who's the SEO manager over at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty said, "Pay attention to your brand identity. Make sure it's clear across all places of search. This includes social media, GPTs, and digital search engines like Google and Bing. If 2024 taught us anything it's that the way users are searching is changing at a much faster pace than anyone, platforms included, could have anticipated. Couple that with the constantly changing SERP and it's clear that ranking as a concept is becoming outdated. Entity SEO has always been around because it's how search engines understand brands, people, et cetera. But it's already more important now than ever before. It's no longer just about how you appear in Google. It's about how you appear online at all." Yes, could not agree more. The way you appear, are mentioned, discuss related to as a brand across the entire digital landscape is how GPTs and how AI LLMs of the world are going to pick you up and understand you. Crystal Carter: Right. They need to understand your whole digital presence. And that's always been the case. And I think that as she's saying entities, you need to understand your entity. She's mentioning the LLM. I'm going to shout out my article that talks about that on the SEO hub, and it gets into that. One of the things that's important about LLMs is they're all trained on Wikipedia. 66 million pages of copyright-free, human-vetted information that's all coming from the knowledge graph, and pulling through all of those different entities and all those different elements. If your entity doesn't make sense online, then it's unlikely that your entity is going to make sense on an LLM. So you need to make sure that your entity, which pulls from lots of different data points, including what's on your website, but lots of other places, makes sense. And that's SEO these days. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's plenty of places where you can control if you don't have a Wiki Wikipedia page, you can crunch base if you're a business or a persona online. There's all LinkedIn. There's tons of places where- Crystal Carter: Your local business profile. Mordy Oberstein: Personality and persona are picked up. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Lots of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of places. Crystal Carter: Handle that. Handle it. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Last but not least, Aleyda Solis, SEO consultant, founder of Orainti, and of course, SEO FOMO, and learning SEO.io. Crystal Carter: And contributor/instructor for the WIC Studio SEO learning course, where you can learn SEO from Aleyda Solis. Mordy's waving because I'm waving my finger now. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, everyone. We're both waving fingers. Crystal Carter: Waving fingers because- Mordy Oberstein: Waving our finger at you. How silly it would be if you didn't take up that free SEO course from Aleyda. Crystal Carter: You totally should. Mordy Oberstein: Checkout the SEO Learning Hub, Studio SEO Learning Hub. Crystal Carter: Yes, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Aleyda said, "It's clear that Google wants to feature real authoritative brands at the top of the SERPs, which is also clearly helpful to increase CTR and optimize conversions. Grow your brand authority by understanding your company brand positioning, and take into account in your SEO strategy. Target your brand to key queries, specify your brand details, structure data, optimize your knowledge panel details, etc." So great minds think alike. I literally did a video on why brands, like if your sales team or marketing team, don't focus on the messaging. Focus on the positioning, because that tells you, A, who you are as a brand, and it helps you also understand who the client and the consumer is. It's like the perfect intersection. Focus on understanding positioning, which is I guess my tip of the year if we're talking about all this brand stuff. SEOs are talking and chirping a lot about it, and it's hard. It's long term, it's a different kind of mentality. I will give you my one tip to fall back on it all. It all hinges on creating meaningful brand identity for yourself. And when I say meaningful, I've said this before, it means there are two levels, or multiple levels, of emotions that the human experience revolves around. What are surface level emotions and what are more deep, more integral things that you must have. I always say fun. In the vein of Barry Shores, I don't have to have fun. I don't have to have fun today. I don't have to have fun tomorrow. I can have fun on the weekend, or if I'm Barry, I will never have fun at all. If your brand identity is focused on, "Let's have fun," that's a very fleeting experience. If your brand identities focus on more meaningful experiences that are integral to the human experience, like connection, overcoming struggle, things that are must haves for the human experience, that's much more meaningful, that's much more powerful, and it'll keep you much more centered. Focus on those more existential parts of your brand identity and less on the fleeting parts of your brand identity. And the rest of the brand will follow that. So if you're in SEO, you're looking at where do I start with brand? Start there. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my tip for 2025. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I got it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Hey Crystal, what's your tip for 2025? Smooth transition. Crystal Carter: Sorry. Sorry. You were dropping the knowledge and I was just pondering it. Mordy Oberstein: You were caught in my aura. Crystal Carter: I was just pondering that. I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's really interesting." I forgot I was on a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Thank you? Crystal Carter: So my tip, and I've been saying this all over the place. I've said it in two different Brighton SEOs, have done a couple of podcasts, and I've written this article. Basically, you need to be treating LLMs as a channel, and we need to be treating them as a channel for traffic. We need to be tracking them. I have a deck that shares a regex that Jess Schultz shared where you can track the traffic from LLMs. You can see how many clicks you're getting. And guess what. You're getting clicks from LLMs. And while they are not currently overtaking Google in terms of search, we are looking at billions, billions of traffic that's going to LLMs every day. And people are looking to it for solutions because sometimes it has less friction than standard search, and we need to make sure that we can manage that. And I think that we have been approaching this as if it's completely different, or it's not relevant, or whatever, but it's not completely different. All of these search enabled LLMs, of which there are many, are relying on results from search engines. Legacy results and previous results, previous crawls, things like that. And we can manage that, and I think that that's something that should be a new skill for SEOs. I think it's exciting. Gartner said that search could drop by as much as 25% or something in the next few years. But I think that we are SEOs, we can do anything. We ruin the internet. This ain't nothing. Are you kidding me? So I think that this is a brave new world, and I think that it's super exciting. So I'm excited to see how this goes forward. Mordy Oberstein: Your confidence is inspiring. Crystal Carter: I hope so. I hope so. I love a new thing. It's one of the reasons why I love working in marketing and SEO, because there's always a new thing to learn and try. You know in the Matrix where it says, "Can you fly a helicopter?" and he goes, "Yes, I can." That's how I feel sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: I know kung fu. Crystal Carter: Right? That's how I feel sometimes. And I feel like that's where we are right now. And I think that if you're in a place where you're like, "I want to do things the way I did before, I feel you. I see you, I understand you, but it's new. We got to do new stuff. Mordy Oberstein: That brings to this week's follow of the week. This week's follow of the week are all the people we already mentioned. Is that lazy? I'm sorry. No, but there's so many people. There's Ray Saddiq, Debbie Chew, Celeste Gonzalez, Mike King, Paul Andre De Vera, Victor Pan, Chris Long, Aleyda Solis. My friend is Parker, Crystal, myself, a lot of people to follow. Crystal Carter: I think also you should follow George Wynn, our head of editorial- Mordy Oberstein: Oh yes. Crystal Carter: At the Wix Studio Learning Hub, SEO Learning Hub, because George was the one who brought all these folks together. So George was able to interview some folks at Brighton SEO. He also put together a fantastic article with all of these tips, which you should absolutely check out. And yeah, he's got some great advice and he helps make sure that we sound like we know what we're talking about on the SEO Learning Hub. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, so George is the follow of the week? Crystal Carter: Yeah, follow George. Mordy Oberstein: Is that even lazier than saying, "Follow all the people in the episode"? Crystal Carter: If you follow George, you will also find all of these other folks because he put them in the article. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Follow George, wherever he may go. Crystal Carter: I will follow him. Mordy Oberstein: It's just scary right now. I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. My kid's never seen Sister Act. I feel like I need to sort that out. Mordy Oberstein: My kids never saw that either. That's an old-school movie. Crystal Carter: I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's a great movie. It's just not one I see- Crystal Carter: I like Sister Act 2 better though. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember it as well. Crystal Carter: Sister Act 2 I was obsessed with because I had Lauryn Hill. I watched a movie a million times and had the soundtrack. Obsessed. Mordy Oberstein: I just don't remember it as well. I remember the first one really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no. Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, whatever. Whoopee. And on that high note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into email marketing and how it relates to search marketing in 2025. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars, and our free SEO course over on the Wix Studio Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or 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

Is programmatic SEO a good option for your site? The benefit can be huge but what about content quality and accuracy? Are you looking to create content at scale dynamically? Should you be? If so, when and how do you provide unique value along the way? Wix’s Crystal Carter and programmatic SEO curmudgeon Mordy Oberstein give their take on the benefits and pitfalls of programmatic SEO. Paul Andre De Vera gives his tips on keeping things personal when working programmatically so that you can still speak to your audience naturally. Don’t change the program… Dive into this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about programmatic SEO! Back Getting with the programmatic SEO program Is programmatic SEO a good option for your site? The benefit can be huge but what about content quality and accuracy? Are you looking to create content at scale dynamically? Should you be? If so, when and how do you provide unique value along the way? Wix’s Crystal Carter and programmatic SEO curmudgeon Mordy Oberstein give their take on the benefits and pitfalls of programmatic SEO. Paul Andre De Vera gives his tips on keeping things personal when working programmatically so that you can still speak to your audience naturally. Don’t change the program… Dive into this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about programmatic SEO! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 39 | May 24, 2023 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 34:13 This week’s guests Paul Andre De Vera You’ll find Paul Andre de Vera speaking on podcasts/webinars, looking for the next great place to devour a delicious rib-eye steak, and occasionally sipping a glass of whiskey. All while coaching, serving clients, and producing the SEO Video Show. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast, we're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of Brand SEO at Wix. Joined by Better Head SEO Communications. The person who knows all about all of the things most of the time. Because if I say all of the time, I'll get a snarky look. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There's no snarky looks. It's only happy looks. Mordy Oberstein: I say, you know all of the things, but everything. Like you're like, oh no, that's a lot of pressure Mordy. I don't like that. So... Crystal Carter: That's true. They say a man who knows something, knows that he knows nothing at all, or at least that's what Erica Badu said that one time. She's very wise. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, she's wise. I think Socrates said like, the only difference between me and you is that I know what I don't know. Crystal Carter: There you go. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: And you're a narcissistic, self-centered... I think that was the implication, what he was saying. Crystal Carter: Erica Badu and Socrates obviously like two grateful... Mordy Oberstein: He's a pod. Crystal Carter: Designs entirely. Mordy Oberstein: This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can combine the power of Python and Wix's full stack dev tool Velo to build out programmatic dynamic content for yourself. Behold the full-on nerdiness and power of Wix. And if you don't believe you can do it, Colt Sliva over on Glassdoor did in his article all about just that because he literally did just that. We'll link to it in the show notes because today, guess what we're talking about? Programmatic SEO. That's right. We're talking about programmatic SEO as in what the heck is programmatic SEO? Is programmatic SEO a zero-sum game? Can everyone get with the program? What works, what doesn't work, and what to be wary of when doing programmatic SEO. And all-time SEO, all star and knowledge bomb dropper, Paul Andre De Vera will join us, share his tips on keeping things personal when working programmatically, and we'll dive into a special tool around programmatic SEO and beyond. As I already mentioned, Wix is Velo, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO News and who should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So program, get your program here as episode number 39 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you get with the program, the programmatic SEO program that is. I went full on, I'm a vendor at a baseball stadium. Crystal Carter: Well, I mean, they're very good at their jobs. I do love that when they, the guy's got the train. They- Mordy Oberstein: Programs! Crystal Carter: Who wants? I'm like, yeah- Mordy Oberstein: Hear hear! At Bryant, that's like, we had our stand-up Brighten SEO. We were giving out beer. I'm like, this is a perfect time to be a baseball stadium and a beer here. They don't do that anymore. You have to go to the stands to get your, that was half the fun. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Guy walking around yelling, hotdog! And then you have to pass it through the row to the person who actually ordered the hotdog. So everyone's hands all over your hotdog. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all very communal. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Very authentic. Sometimes you buy a thing just because of the experience. I used to go to green grocers and he just had platitudes for everything. I'd be like, oh, can I buy some grapes? He's like, all right, sweetheart, can I have some oranges? All right treacle. And what about some satsumas or something's like, oh, all right my pet. And I just kept buying things just to see if he ran out of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Crystal Carter: He never did. I don't know how, but yeah, I found it quite amusing. Mordy Oberstein: That is an amazing set. It's almost like Trader Joe's. When you go to Trader Joe's, they have a whole experience, ringing the bell, or wearing the pirate shirt. You go just for that. Crystal Carter: My Trader Joe's experience has never been like that. I've never worn a pirate shirt. Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't wear the pirate shirt, but they're wearing pirate shirts and stuff and Hawaiian shirts and pirate patches and all... It's all thematic at Trader Joe's. Crystal Carter: Thematic programmatic. What are we talking about today? Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so looking to create hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of pages of content that follow the same template or format? Then programmatic SEO might for you. It also might not be for you, but we'll get to that in due course. So programmatic SEO, if I had to define it while standing on one foot, should I stand on, I will stand on one foot. I'm sitting down. I don't know how to do that. It's when you pull data or content in from a database into a content template, and then by natural result you have a heap of pages for your website. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: While some would argue that e-com, Kevin Indig, isn't a case for programmatic SEO, I would perhaps argue and say that it is a really easy case to point to about using programmatic SEO wisely. You pull things in like the product name, the description, which you can use for your title tag and meta description respectively as well, and all the naming from the inventory database. And you plug that in with your usual shipping and return policies you have on every page. And you basically have spun up programmatic content for who knows how many number of product pages without actually typing a single word. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's programmatic. I feel like some will disagree. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of people who are using this for e-commerce, incredibly, incredibly productively. Wayfair is someone who used programmatic SEO and has used some of Google's own tools for some of them work in there and they're crushing it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Hey, look. It works and it's good. Crystal Carter: I think it's entirely the kind of thing where you have something that has a lot of attributes, that has a lot of structured data, has a lot of things. For instance, if you think about a sofa, you're going to talk about the material. You're going to talk about how many seats it has. You're going to talk about whether it reclines, whether it has Bluetooth. I saw a sofa with Bluetooth- Mordy Oberstein: No. We were just shopping for a new sofa. Our children have destroyed it. And we had it for 16 years. I love it. It's great. I'm going to keep it, but not in the living room because I can't part with it. Crystal Carter: That's such a dad thing to do. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's like all these, I just want a sofa. And it's so much stuff. Sorry, sidetrack. Crystal Carter: Right. But I think when you have a product that has lots of attributes, and particularly if you're thinking about something like Google Merchant Center encourages you, it requires you to add in all of those attributes to your data sets, to the information that you have about your products anyway. So it makes sense to take that data, take those attributes, take that information and use it to generate content in a programmatic way. And so e-commerce is absolutely perfect for this. And it also means that you're much more consistent with your product pages when you're creating your product pages so that everything has the same information- Mordy Oberstein: Which makes making changes and fixing things. And it's also easier. So just one last point before we actually dive into the thick of it. Often is what I think separates our programmatic SEO as a content strategy from regular traditional SEO is that often when you're doing this, your goal is not to rank well for a specific page or specific keyword word, but to spin up so much content that it doesn't really matter. That if you have a hundred thousand pages ranking nine or 10 on the SERP, you'll get all of that same kind of traffic or the amount of traffic that you would've had if you were ranking number one with a far fewer pages kind of thing. So that's of course is kind of tricky from a strategic point of view. And all of the metrics might not be the same or as important when you're working programmatically and dynamically. So that's another thing to kind of keep in mind. But that's sort of the general gist on programmatic SEO. I for one, just going to say this at the onset. I'm a bit of a programmatic SEO, curmudgeon, even though I do think it's a great place to test things, but that's just me. Crystal, what about you? Crystal Carter: I think that it gives you the opportunity to serve content for really long tail keywords. This is something that Miriam Myriam Jessier talks about in one of the articles that we have on the SEO hub. And because you're able to use the information about your products, the entities associated with your products, the keywords associated with your products as fodder for content creation in a programmatic way, it's easy to spin up very long tail, very specific keyword categories or category pages or product pages for specific things. And so I think programmatic SEO is great when it solves a problem. Like any SEO. All of the SEO that you're doing is all about adding value for users. That's at the end of the day, adding value for users. And Google's measuring whether or not you're adding value for users. So when they ranking, that's a reflection of the value that they can ascertain that you add for users. So Etsy does this programmatic SEO, Wayfair I mentioned as well. If you're able to drill down into those Etsy keywords, gold earrings with leopard print trim in a hoop shape, and I'm looking specifically for those things, or shoes in this size and this color of this thing. And I'm able to drill all the way down and not have to filter through all of your pages and not have to navigate to everything, but to get exactly what I want from the SERP, then absolutely that's where programmatic SEO wins. And I think that that's where programmatic SEO really, really succeeds. Mordy Oberstein: So let me ask, when would you specifically recommend or not recommend programmatic SEO? Crystal Carter: If you have a large amount of content and you have a large number of products, and also if you have the tooling to do so, as well and to maintain it, I think also a lot of businesses that are working in a sort of high product turnover, like fast moving consumer goods space, they're going to need to do that because they need to be able to spin up content straight away so that they can sort of say, let's capitalize on say a trend that's happening straight away, or let's take this massive catalog. Because I've worked in, I previously worked for a toy manufacturer and we had all of our products, that we manufactured and we had the one, all these giant spreadsheets and all of that sort of stuff. And if you are trying to manually implement making all these changes to every particular product, then it's impossible. It is an impossible task. So when you have a big product set, then programmatic SEO is a fantastic one. Also, if it's something that you're seeing that your competitors are doing, and you might want to think, I need to keep pace because this is what consumers are going to be expecting to see. So it's always important to think about not just how people are searching on your site or how people are arriving on your site, but how the wider ecosystem is also experiencing a search. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point because it doesn't, first up, doesn't have to be zero-sum. It doesn't mean I only doing programmatic SEO. If you see that competitors doing it for certain types of keywords, certain types of pages or whatever it is, and you can do that for that. And if you want to take a demonstrate for different pages, you can do that for that. You could also programmatically build on certain elements of a page. Why wouldn't you? For example, on the e-comm side. Let's say for whatever reason you want to write custom descriptions. God bless. The shipping and the return policy. If you're not just reusing that on every page programmatically, I don't know why you wouldn't, for example. So that's a very hyperbolic example, but it's not zero-sum. You can use programmatic SEO in certain places on your website. You can programmatically build certain parts of the page. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. But I will say, the way I think about it as well, going back to my point of being an SEO curmudgeon about programmatic SEO is I kind of view it AI. AI generated content. It's very, very similar in my mind because you're talking about the possibility of running into creating a lot of low quality content. Or a lot of un-targeted content. And I feel like sometimes you do need to be careful. Cases where the language structure does matter. So for example, in the product review space. To programmatically build out product review pages, if you're a website that has, that's your whole thing, you're like a CNET and you're programmatically just like you're taking certain inputs, taking output certain inputs and creating pros and cons list out of them whatever you're doing. I think that's going to be a space where you have to be careful. Where you might build it out programmatically, but somehow supplement it at the same time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that goes back to your point of having a mix of programmatic content and I guess more manually created content. But I think that essentially we're working in a space where a lot of times we have massive data sets that we're trying to wrangle both from an SEO point of view, but also from a sort of just general marketing point of view. And I think that the efficiency that the programmatic SEO potentially combined with it, because this is the other thing that a lot of people are combining programmatic SEO and AI content, particularly for content generation. So for instance, you would say, I have a product with this attribute, this attribute, that attribute and that attribute. And then it'll write a product description for that particular, then you can use generative AI to write a product description for that content. And that is something that is going to be saving a lot of time. And also, again, producing a lot of consistency with those things. Though again, as we have with any AI thing, editing is key and QA is crucial. So checking over those things and making sure that you're not publishing things, that AI generated content that isn't accurate and making sure that you've trained your prompts so that they accurately reflect what your products do, how they work. So I think that we did a webinar on chat GPT and AI writers and how to use them. And one of the really good examples that Ross Hudgins showed was giving a generative tool, a dataset, for instance, say a product dataset and asking them to create a piece of copy based on that. And I think that if you're able to figure out the best prompt that works for your type of data set, then that can help you to scale content very quickly. So I think that it can help you to, could connect with niches really quickly. It can help you to spin up a lot of things. But also I think from a programmatic point of view, if you're talking about thin content, or maybe not necessarily low quality content, but maybe sort of fairly repetitive content, and Google talks about this, they show a case study for Wayfair, for instance, about this, for ads. So for instance, if you're a locksmith and you're working generally in New York, you might want a PPC landing page that's locksmith for the Bronx, locksmith for Brooklyn, locksmith for Westchester, locksmith, for Manhattan, for Harlem, for wherever. And spinning those out programmatically? Yeah, brilliant, because you're not indexing them anyway and you just need them to match what the query is that you're serving for your ads. And this is something that Google is advertising on their Think With Google, there's a great Think With Google example- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, on the ads side. It makes absolute total sense to do that. And even on the SEO side, a lot of it's the same thing. If it's a local pages go, most of that page's content is going to be very, very, very similar. And it's a matter of going in and changing a couple things around here and there and make it a little bit better and unique then do that. One of the other things that kind of touch on, something you were talking about that I wanted to quickly bring up is that when you do this, it's a great environment to test things. So if you want to have a certain way of constructing the page or certain type of description, it's a way of figuring out what really works, what doesn't work. Because you're working with A, a huge amount of page, so the data you're going to get back is going to be way more accurate than, oh, I have a couple of pages made a title tag change here. Is that really, so you are in an environment that already lends itself the testing where the results are way more accurate equals make those changes much quicker and it helps you drive. Okay. Here's how I think Google's kind of understanding me, which is kind of what Colt did in the post that we mentioned before. He spun up a website programmatically and he wanted with the idea of seeing, okay, what sticks? How is Google understanding this content and is this the right way to go with it or is it not the right way to go? So he spun up the programmatic content as a way of seeing what direction to take the final draft, which I thought was really interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Testing is absolutely crucial because Google will very often look at pages as a page type. So for instance, if you see a search console error, they will say, here's an example of a page like this. If you have 45,000 product pages, they're not going to show you the error for every single, the in-detail for every single product page. But they'll say, here's an example of one that you have. And then you can look at that. And so if you submit it up programmatically, then the fix, you might make a big mistake at once, but you can also make a big fix at once. That's really useful to being able to test that. And also, if you've ever done CRO testing, one of the things that can sometimes be a challenge, particularly when you're doing one page at a time, is actually getting the traffic volume to get any kind of data that's of any use. So if you're spinning up, many many pages have the same basic format, the same kind of iterations in terms of your CRO, then you're going to be able to get a lot more data more quickly than if you were to do it one page at a time. I think one of the other benefit, I can't remember if Colt touched on this as well, but one of the other benefits of programmatic SEO is that it's really easy to align it with things like schema markup, for instance. So I'm think I've mentioned them before, but I remember I judged as a search award and one of the entries was from Dairy Queen. And one of the things I love, they spun up all of these and they programmatically did this. They spun up all of these pages for their Dairy Queen locations and it has all of the attributes and they're aligned with the things that are on Google business profile. They're aligned with the things that are in their structured data and they're aligned with the things that are on their page. And so you can see that consistency going all the way through, what the hours are, where the location is, what the amenities are, whether they have delivery or pickup, or whether they accept credit cards and all of that sort of stuff. So they're able to spin those all up and they're also able to roll them all out to multiple channels. So you get all your pages that are marked up in the same way, and you have all the schema that works with all of those. And then you have all of those are also attributed to each of those Google business profiles. So what you get with programmatic SEO is the ability to use your content as a data set and to be able to use it consistently across multiple channels, which is epic. Mordy Oberstein: So taking into a completely different direction, going back to what we were talking about before about trying to add a personal touch, all your programmatic content to help us with that is the host of the SEO Video Show great YouTube show. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: At SEO. Knowledge Bombs. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's fantastic. Here's Paul Andre De Vera about when working with content at scale, how do you ensure you keep the right tone and personal touch with your content? Paul Andre De Vera: Maintaining a personal touch in your content is important to building a strong personal brand voice and establishing connection with your audience. One effective way I achieve this is by writing the way I speak. Recording yourself, taking and getting it transcribed can be an awesome exercise to help you capture your personal tone and language. You can then use transcriptions as a basis for your content, editing and refining it as needed to make sure it meets your personal language and fits within the context of your content strategy. However, when working with tools like Grammarly, it's important not to accept every suggestion blindly. These tools can help identify and correct grammar and spelling errors, and they may also try to substitute words and phrases that are part of your natural speaking style. I personally like using words such as, awesome, love it, fabulous. These are examples of words that Grammarly may flag, but is part of my personal language. Incorporating personal touches like these can help your content feel more genuine and relatable to your audience, building a stronger connection and establishing your brand as approachable and authentic. Just be your silly self consistently online just as you are offline. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Paul. Definitely. Again, check out Paul on Twitter at Paul Andre and check out the SEO Video Show Crystal Carter: On YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: On YouTube. Look, by the way, his point about Grammarly. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I feel that in every bone of my body. Crystal Carter: Yo. Mordy Oberstein: Because sometimes it's like, change this change. I'm like, no. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: No. I'm not changing that. Mordy Oberstein: Not changing that. That's a whole linchpin. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Like Grammarly, that's my vibes. That's just my style. That's how I do it. Also with Grammarly, it's obviously they're making it so they and talk about Grammarly all the time. But I remember reading, I'm sure I mentioned this before Toni Morrison had a book and she just, she's, it was one sentence for the whole page and it was beautiful and it was fantastic. But I also say, and and and and and. And sometimes I'm trying to get some rhythm. Mordy Oberstein: Like, like, like, like. Crystal Carter: I do say like. Mordy Oberstein: I'm talking about myself. I say it all the time. Crystal Carter: I'm from California. That's how we do... it is what it is. But I think that, yeah, what he's saying about adding in, making sure that you keep your tone of voice is really important. I think about brands that have a tone and it's really important. So for instance, MailChimp has a tone that they just sort of have a tone, even when it's a small little piece of micro copy, there's definitely a tone of voice to it. There's a couple of other brands that I can think of that are a little bit, there's brands that are a little bit salty sometimes. So the- Mordy Oberstein: Wendy's? Crystal Carter: Duolingo can be a little bit salty sometimes. Duolingo has a very dry sense of humor as a brand, and that's kind of their style. And even sometimes to the point where you can recognize the style, you can recognize someone from their styles. And I think with some of the AI things, like Google I/O thing announced that Google Cloud is making it so that you can use your own data sets to train information. So it might be that you add your language style guide into something to maybe move that into programmatic SEO. There's a lot of moving parts going on at the moment, but I think that making sure that you've got your clear tone of voice when you're spinning things up programmatically is, yeah, really important. Mordy Oberstein: Super important. This again, it tells all the time, and I like my soapbox where brand marketing overlaps with SEO, it's such an under discussed undervalued point. And it's something that I know we talk about, you need to align with your designers and your devs, but a lot of times you need to align more with your brand marketers because they're the ones defining how you're going to have to speak publicly. And if they see the programmatic content and they see that it's not in line with the brand tone of voice, they're not going to be happy. So better get that done beforehand as opposed to after hand, which is, I know not a word, but it definitely- Crystal Carter: After hand? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Why would you say beforehand and then after the fact? Makes no sense. Let's be- Crystal Carter: Should it be before fact and- Mordy Oberstein: It should either be before fact or it should be after hand. Crystal Carter: After... Nobody's saying after hand, it's- Mordy Oberstein: Now we are. Crystal Carter: Stop trying to make fetch happen. Mordy Oberstein: So anyway, after hand that, speaking of programmatic content and SEO, we already mentioned cold sliver and how we use a combination of Python and a little tool we call Velo to dynamically create pages at scale. So we figured we jump into this fellow called Velo with a programmatic edition of Tool Time. Velo is a full stack dev tool inbuilt into Wix. So you can enable dev mode, which by the way, Phil should be getting a Mortal Combat... Enable dev mode. Crystal Carter: We should talk to the team and be like, what we need is an explosion though. It goes... Dev mode. Mordy Oberstein: And just like a firebomb goes off on the page. Crystal Carter: Instead of deploying, you should just go finish him. Mordy Oberstein: Dev mode activated. Finish him. Crystal Carter: And then when you run your code, it should go ….. Mordy Oberstein: I'll see if we can add to the roadmap. Crystal Carter: Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that. Mordy Oberstein: I'll advocate. This is why we advocate very much a lot internally. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I feel we should add this to our list of things to advocate for. Crystal Carter: Dev mode. Mordy Oberstein: Activate it. Okay. So yeah, back on track. Velo. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Velo. So Velo, I love Velo. I love Velo so much. Velo is absolutely brilliant. It is a JavaScript like playground essentially within Wix. And you can build JavaScript things all the way through it. And there's lots of fantastic stuff. So we have something called the content manager, and essentially you can take a spreadsheet, it's a spreadsheet sort of format, and it works really well for programmatic- Mordy Oberstein: Programmatic SEO. Because you're connected to a data set and there's your content. Crystal Carter: You can also connect to external datasets, you can add your own datasets, you can connect to other databases as well. And there's lots of tools for Tree to be able to do that. And basically you can use it for, you can use it with JavaScript to create all sorts of fantastic things. So Mark Preston is somebody who created an SEO jobs board, for instance, using Velo. And so you're able to create tools there. And I've also created a few tools myself. I created a Bingo game on my website. Mordy Oberstein: Did you really? You used it to get a Bingo game. I did not know that. How did I not know that? Crystal Carter: I need a bingo game for, it's like a conference SEO bingo game. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's right, you did. I do remember that. Okay, fine. I'm not a horrible friend. Crystal Carter: So the other thing that's great about Velo is that Velo has, so you might say, well, but I'm not a JavaScript person. I don't know all the things. That's okay. Because first of all, our documentation is extremely extensive. Second of all, within Velo, they have tons of guidance in the actual code. So if you input the code incorrectly, it will tell you. It will give you an error or it'll give you a little thing that says, hey, you should have this, or there should be a variable, or you should update that part. So that's really useful. The other thing that's great is that you can use it with an LOM. So for instance, Bard. Bard is trained on loads of bits of code, so is Chat GPT. So I have, I've created something and my JavaScript is, okay. And that's generous. My JavaScript is okay. But I was able to go, I was basically able to take some of the guidance that I got from Velo. So Velo says, oh, this bit of code isn't quite right. And I'm like, okay. So I popped that into GPT and I was like, hey, GPT, I got this error for this code, but I wanted to do this. And GPT was like, yeah, try this bit of code. So then I popped it back into Velo and then I got a different error and then I put that back into GPT, and by the time I'd gone back and forth between these two things, I was able to build something that was amazing. So what's really cool is that we have... It's got so many different functionalities in it. There's something called Velo Examples, which is a collection of lots of really cool things that people have built on Velo. And on each of those pages there is, there's the code, there's a demo, and you can copy the code from it. The other thing that's great about Velo is that the code is transferable. So for instance, we have lots, it's all sort of API based, and we have a library that's Wix SEO. So if you have a piece of code that is for changing the canonical, we had this situation, didn't we Mordy? Mordy, you were like, oh- Mordy Oberstein: A bomb, A podcast website. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Somebody was like, oh, I want to change the canonical on this podcast change. I was like, oh, you can do this. He was like, oh, maybe you can set up a call. I was like, no, literally just copy and paste this code. Mordy Oberstein: The code, yeah. Crystal Carter: Copy and paste this code and put it on that page and it will work because it's all sort of set up to work. Mordy Oberstein: You could do that dynamically. You could dynamically as structured data to whatever you want, kind of set up pages, you want to do it. There's so much you can do with it. Crystal Carter: And you can create your own variable. So if you have a piece of content on your page, let's say you've got the word or something, you can create a variable. You can name that variable, you can use that variable in your code further down. We also have connections into NPM. So there's like lots of API integrations that are built in Google sheets and Google Maps, for instance. But you can also connect into NPM. I literally love Velo. The team behind Velo have nurtured this and have spent so much time making it fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: And there's so much content, by the way. If you, we'll link to a bunch of it. But there's an endless amount of content they've put out there... It's a cavernous library of content Velo, which we'll link to it. It's awesome. Crystal Carter: And I think the thing that's great is working with those things, but also, particularly if you're a noob, like me, to JavaScript, is that the things like GPT, like Bard that are trained on code, you can say in JavaScript, how do I do this? So if there's something that's specific, you can also back up some of the things with general information about JavaScript and things like that. So it's fantastic. And it also opens up a whole world of functionality on Wix, and I think it's going to be fantastic as we go into the headless space. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was going to say it. It's perfect. Because we've just gotten headless for this. For example, the CMS that you just mentioned. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You can use that. It's headless. You can take that and you can plug that into your front end, and you can use the Wix function, that CMS functionality kind of wherever. Crystal Carter: And the things that with the headless Wix situation, a lot of the things that they leaned on in the first instance are particularly lean themselves to programmatic SEO and programmatic data creation. So for instance, like the events, the bookings- Mordy Oberstein: Booking, products... Crystal Carter: Products, all of that sort of stuff, it leans itself really well... Lends itself really well to that. So between the headless space and the Velo and all of the amazing functionalities- Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of automation you could be doing. Crystal Carter: A lot of stuff you can do. I mean, who even needs to touch it? Mordy Oberstein: Who needs humans anymore? Crystal Carter: But I think it's really great, and I think it's great to see the combination of opening up the platform more and also bringing in some of the AI elements that we have and making it really accessible to lots of different developers and lots of different development needs. Mordy Oberstein: It's really cutting edge stuff from really great people. Now you know what else is new? The actual news. So here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, two little juicy SEO tidbits for you this week. First up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Neva, the ad free search engine announces closure. Neva was built, by the way, as a sort of a way to downplay the role of ads and search and increase the role of content creators. It had an AI chat experience, and it had a pretty good little search engine. Unfortunately will be shuttered, which is very unfortunate. You never want to see anything fail. It was a nice idea. It really does though, kind of highlight how hard it is to compete with Google. So as you see things developing in the AI world and you see, oh, Google's going down... Take a deep breath, take pause. It is very hard to compete with Google. From his royal Rustiness, the king of bricks, Mr. Rusty Brick, AKA Barry Schwartz, the fourth. Google helpful content update can demote and now promote content. As you may know, and as we've talked about here on this very podcast, Google announced that the helpful content update will be getting a revamp. This was announced at Google I/O 2023. In specific, Google said the system would help identify "hidden gems". Seeing this, friend of the show, an avid Yankees fan, Glen Gabe, asked Google search liaison Denny Sullivan, if this was an update to the current functioning of the ranking system or a new ability altogether. Denny said, "The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more hidden gems on search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well." So in a nutshell, the helpful content update will not only be about hitting sites with low quality, but will now have a net positive impact of uplifting the hidden gems of the web. I feel like there should be a special badge if you are one of these hidden gems of the web that says, hidden gem of the web, you could plaster on your homepage. And that is this week's Snappy News. I just got to say, I just love by the way, that when the news happens so organically like that, in this case, Glen Gabe asking a question, Barry covering it. They're great people, Glen and Barry. Speaking of people, by the way, that brings us to our follow of the week, which is, we've already mentioned him three or four times at this point. He is Glassdoor's, SEO, former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board. He's a writer for the Web Almanac. He's Colt Sliva. Crystal Carter: He's such a nice guy. He's so smart. Mordy Oberstein: The nicest dude, right? Crystal Carter: So nice. Mordy Oberstein: The nicest guy. Crystal Carter: And so smart. I think the first time that I came across Colt was he was speaking at SMX about something very clever, and I remember watching the talk and I was like- Mordy Oberstein: It was very clever. Crystal Carter: I remember watching him. I was like, this guy knows stuff. This guy is so smart. Mordy Oberstein: I came across him the first time at, when he was at IOL rank, we were working Gareth Sussman. I think he was on my podcast I was doing at the time. I don't remember anything about- Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: Probably. Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: The smartest guy, the nicest guy. I worked with him obviously on the Wix SEO advisory board, but also we worked together on the SEO section, on the web almanac. He was such a resource. I will tell you right now that Web Almanac, or at least the SEO section, would not have happened if it weren't for Colt. Crystal Carter: The other thing I would say about Colt is that he has such a healthy curiosity and people say, oh, what do you need to be in SEO? Like, do you need this skill or that skill or that skill. I'm like, fundamentally, you need to be curious. You need to be the kind of person who would talk about- Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you need to be the kind of person who wants to go down the rabbit hole who wants, hears like, oh, there's a new toilet. They're like, what does it do? What happens if I do this? What if I do that? What if I look at this? Mordy Oberstein: You change the JavaScript around on the toilet, what happens? Crystal Carter: Exactly. And Colt, he likes to build things. He likes to explore things, and he's super approachable and super interested. So yeah, can't say nice enough things about Colt, like do follow Colt. Mordy Oberstein: Don't just follow Colt, interact with Colt, talk to Colt. Crystal Carter: Tell him that we sent you. Tell him that Mordy and Crystal sent you. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to him. He's on Twitter at, S I G N O R C O L T. Of course, we'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes because I don't expect you remember how to spell that by listening to this in your car. But that does bring us to the end of the podcast. I would programmatically end the podcast now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: But I don't know how to do that with my VO. I guess I could record an ending and plug that in every single time, but I feel like that would not be doing justice to the audience and to the podcast. Crystal Carter: Yeah, well, you know... Mordy Oberstein: Not a good use of programmatic. Crystal Carter: No, I don't think so. No, not on this particular occasion. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. Crystal Carter: You betcha. Mordy Oberstein: Here's the custom ending. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to get started with international SEO as we chat with drum roll, Aleyda Solis. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning lab over at www.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning lab 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 Paul Andre De Vera Colt Sliva Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Programmatic content expansion The SEO Video Show Wix Velo News: Neeva, The Ad-Free Search Engine, Announces Closure Google Helpful Content Update Can Demote & Now Promote Content: Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Paul Andre De Vera Colt Sliva Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Programmatic content expansion The SEO Video Show Wix Velo News: Neeva, The Ad-Free Search Engine, Announces Closure Google Helpful Content Update Can Demote & Now Promote Content: Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast, we're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of Brand SEO at Wix. Joined by Better Head SEO Communications. The person who knows all about all of the things most of the time. Because if I say all of the time, I'll get a snarky look. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There's no snarky looks. It's only happy looks. Mordy Oberstein: I say, you know all of the things, but everything. Like you're like, oh no, that's a lot of pressure Mordy. I don't like that. So... Crystal Carter: That's true. They say a man who knows something, knows that he knows nothing at all, or at least that's what Erica Badu said that one time. She's very wise. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, she's wise. I think Socrates said like, the only difference between me and you is that I know what I don't know. Crystal Carter: There you go. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: And you're a narcissistic, self-centered... I think that was the implication, what he was saying. Crystal Carter: Erica Badu and Socrates obviously like two grateful... Mordy Oberstein: He's a pod. Crystal Carter: Designs entirely. Mordy Oberstein: This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can combine the power of Python and Wix's full stack dev tool Velo to build out programmatic dynamic content for yourself. Behold the full-on nerdiness and power of Wix. And if you don't believe you can do it, Colt Sliva over on Glassdoor did in his article all about just that because he literally did just that. We'll link to it in the show notes because today, guess what we're talking about? Programmatic SEO. That's right. We're talking about programmatic SEO as in what the heck is programmatic SEO? Is programmatic SEO a zero-sum game? Can everyone get with the program? What works, what doesn't work, and what to be wary of when doing programmatic SEO. And all-time SEO, all star and knowledge bomb dropper, Paul Andre De Vera will join us, share his tips on keeping things personal when working programmatically, and we'll dive into a special tool around programmatic SEO and beyond. As I already mentioned, Wix is Velo, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO News and who should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So program, get your program here as episode number 39 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you get with the program, the programmatic SEO program that is. I went full on, I'm a vendor at a baseball stadium. Crystal Carter: Well, I mean, they're very good at their jobs. I do love that when they, the guy's got the train. They- Mordy Oberstein: Programs! Crystal Carter: Who wants? I'm like, yeah- Mordy Oberstein: Hear hear! At Bryant, that's like, we had our stand-up Brighten SEO. We were giving out beer. I'm like, this is a perfect time to be a baseball stadium and a beer here. They don't do that anymore. You have to go to the stands to get your, that was half the fun. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Guy walking around yelling, hotdog! And then you have to pass it through the row to the person who actually ordered the hotdog. So everyone's hands all over your hotdog. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all very communal. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Very authentic. Sometimes you buy a thing just because of the experience. I used to go to green grocers and he just had platitudes for everything. I'd be like, oh, can I buy some grapes? He's like, all right, sweetheart, can I have some oranges? All right treacle. And what about some satsumas or something's like, oh, all right my pet. And I just kept buying things just to see if he ran out of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, nice. Crystal Carter: He never did. I don't know how, but yeah, I found it quite amusing. Mordy Oberstein: That is an amazing set. It's almost like Trader Joe's. When you go to Trader Joe's, they have a whole experience, ringing the bell, or wearing the pirate shirt. You go just for that. Crystal Carter: My Trader Joe's experience has never been like that. I've never worn a pirate shirt. Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't wear the pirate shirt, but they're wearing pirate shirts and stuff and Hawaiian shirts and pirate patches and all... It's all thematic at Trader Joe's. Crystal Carter: Thematic programmatic. What are we talking about today? Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so looking to create hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of pages of content that follow the same template or format? Then programmatic SEO might for you. It also might not be for you, but we'll get to that in due course. So programmatic SEO, if I had to define it while standing on one foot, should I stand on, I will stand on one foot. I'm sitting down. I don't know how to do that. It's when you pull data or content in from a database into a content template, and then by natural result you have a heap of pages for your website. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: While some would argue that e-com, Kevin Indig, isn't a case for programmatic SEO, I would perhaps argue and say that it is a really easy case to point to about using programmatic SEO wisely. You pull things in like the product name, the description, which you can use for your title tag and meta description respectively as well, and all the naming from the inventory database. And you plug that in with your usual shipping and return policies you have on every page. And you basically have spun up programmatic content for who knows how many number of product pages without actually typing a single word. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's programmatic. I feel like some will disagree. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of people who are using this for e-commerce, incredibly, incredibly productively. Wayfair is someone who used programmatic SEO and has used some of Google's own tools for some of them work in there and they're crushing it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Hey, look. It works and it's good. Crystal Carter: I think it's entirely the kind of thing where you have something that has a lot of attributes, that has a lot of structured data, has a lot of things. For instance, if you think about a sofa, you're going to talk about the material. You're going to talk about how many seats it has. You're going to talk about whether it reclines, whether it has Bluetooth. I saw a sofa with Bluetooth- Mordy Oberstein: No. We were just shopping for a new sofa. Our children have destroyed it. And we had it for 16 years. I love it. It's great. I'm going to keep it, but not in the living room because I can't part with it. Crystal Carter: That's such a dad thing to do. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And there's like all these, I just want a sofa. And it's so much stuff. Sorry, sidetrack. Crystal Carter: Right. But I think when you have a product that has lots of attributes, and particularly if you're thinking about something like Google Merchant Center encourages you, it requires you to add in all of those attributes to your data sets, to the information that you have about your products anyway. So it makes sense to take that data, take those attributes, take that information and use it to generate content in a programmatic way. And so e-commerce is absolutely perfect for this. And it also means that you're much more consistent with your product pages when you're creating your product pages so that everything has the same information- Mordy Oberstein: Which makes making changes and fixing things. And it's also easier. So just one last point before we actually dive into the thick of it. Often is what I think separates our programmatic SEO as a content strategy from regular traditional SEO is that often when you're doing this, your goal is not to rank well for a specific page or specific keyword word, but to spin up so much content that it doesn't really matter. That if you have a hundred thousand pages ranking nine or 10 on the SERP, you'll get all of that same kind of traffic or the amount of traffic that you would've had if you were ranking number one with a far fewer pages kind of thing. So that's of course is kind of tricky from a strategic point of view. And all of the metrics might not be the same or as important when you're working programmatically and dynamically. So that's another thing to kind of keep in mind. But that's sort of the general gist on programmatic SEO. I for one, just going to say this at the onset. I'm a bit of a programmatic SEO, curmudgeon, even though I do think it's a great place to test things, but that's just me. Crystal, what about you? Crystal Carter: I think that it gives you the opportunity to serve content for really long tail keywords. This is something that Miriam Myriam Jessier talks about in one of the articles that we have on the SEO hub. And because you're able to use the information about your products, the entities associated with your products, the keywords associated with your products as fodder for content creation in a programmatic way, it's easy to spin up very long tail, very specific keyword categories or category pages or product pages for specific things. And so I think programmatic SEO is great when it solves a problem. Like any SEO. All of the SEO that you're doing is all about adding value for users. That's at the end of the day, adding value for users. And Google's measuring whether or not you're adding value for users. So when they ranking, that's a reflection of the value that they can ascertain that you add for users. So Etsy does this programmatic SEO, Wayfair I mentioned as well. If you're able to drill down into those Etsy keywords, gold earrings with leopard print trim in a hoop shape, and I'm looking specifically for those things, or shoes in this size and this color of this thing. And I'm able to drill all the way down and not have to filter through all of your pages and not have to navigate to everything, but to get exactly what I want from the SERP, then absolutely that's where programmatic SEO wins. And I think that that's where programmatic SEO really, really succeeds. Mordy Oberstein: So let me ask, when would you specifically recommend or not recommend programmatic SEO? Crystal Carter: If you have a large amount of content and you have a large number of products, and also if you have the tooling to do so, as well and to maintain it, I think also a lot of businesses that are working in a sort of high product turnover, like fast moving consumer goods space, they're going to need to do that because they need to be able to spin up content straight away so that they can sort of say, let's capitalize on say a trend that's happening straight away, or let's take this massive catalog. Because I've worked in, I previously worked for a toy manufacturer and we had all of our products, that we manufactured and we had the one, all these giant spreadsheets and all of that sort of stuff. And if you are trying to manually implement making all these changes to every particular product, then it's impossible. It is an impossible task. So when you have a big product set, then programmatic SEO is a fantastic one. Also, if it's something that you're seeing that your competitors are doing, and you might want to think, I need to keep pace because this is what consumers are going to be expecting to see. So it's always important to think about not just how people are searching on your site or how people are arriving on your site, but how the wider ecosystem is also experiencing a search. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point because it doesn't, first up, doesn't have to be zero-sum. It doesn't mean I only doing programmatic SEO. If you see that competitors doing it for certain types of keywords, certain types of pages or whatever it is, and you can do that for that. And if you want to take a demonstrate for different pages, you can do that for that. You could also programmatically build on certain elements of a page. Why wouldn't you? For example, on the e-comm side. Let's say for whatever reason you want to write custom descriptions. God bless. The shipping and the return policy. If you're not just reusing that on every page programmatically, I don't know why you wouldn't, for example. So that's a very hyperbolic example, but it's not zero-sum. You can use programmatic SEO in certain places on your website. You can programmatically build certain parts of the page. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. But I will say, the way I think about it as well, going back to my point of being an SEO curmudgeon about programmatic SEO is I kind of view it AI. AI generated content. It's very, very similar in my mind because you're talking about the possibility of running into creating a lot of low quality content. Or a lot of un-targeted content. And I feel like sometimes you do need to be careful. Cases where the language structure does matter. So for example, in the product review space. To programmatically build out product review pages, if you're a website that has, that's your whole thing, you're like a CNET and you're programmatically just like you're taking certain inputs, taking output certain inputs and creating pros and cons list out of them whatever you're doing. I think that's going to be a space where you have to be careful. Where you might build it out programmatically, but somehow supplement it at the same time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that goes back to your point of having a mix of programmatic content and I guess more manually created content. But I think that essentially we're working in a space where a lot of times we have massive data sets that we're trying to wrangle both from an SEO point of view, but also from a sort of just general marketing point of view. And I think that the efficiency that the programmatic SEO potentially combined with it, because this is the other thing that a lot of people are combining programmatic SEO and AI content, particularly for content generation. So for instance, you would say, I have a product with this attribute, this attribute, that attribute and that attribute. And then it'll write a product description for that particular, then you can use generative AI to write a product description for that content. And that is something that is going to be saving a lot of time. And also, again, producing a lot of consistency with those things. Though again, as we have with any AI thing, editing is key and QA is crucial. So checking over those things and making sure that you're not publishing things, that AI generated content that isn't accurate and making sure that you've trained your prompts so that they accurately reflect what your products do, how they work. So I think that we did a webinar on chat GPT and AI writers and how to use them. And one of the really good examples that Ross Hudgins showed was giving a generative tool, a dataset, for instance, say a product dataset and asking them to create a piece of copy based on that. And I think that if you're able to figure out the best prompt that works for your type of data set, then that can help you to scale content very quickly. So I think that it can help you to, could connect with niches really quickly. It can help you to spin up a lot of things. But also I think from a programmatic point of view, if you're talking about thin content, or maybe not necessarily low quality content, but maybe sort of fairly repetitive content, and Google talks about this, they show a case study for Wayfair, for instance, about this, for ads. So for instance, if you're a locksmith and you're working generally in New York, you might want a PPC landing page that's locksmith for the Bronx, locksmith for Brooklyn, locksmith for Westchester, locksmith, for Manhattan, for Harlem, for wherever. And spinning those out programmatically? Yeah, brilliant, because you're not indexing them anyway and you just need them to match what the query is that you're serving for your ads. And this is something that Google is advertising on their Think With Google, there's a great Think With Google example- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, on the ads side. It makes absolute total sense to do that. And even on the SEO side, a lot of it's the same thing. If it's a local pages go, most of that page's content is going to be very, very, very similar. And it's a matter of going in and changing a couple things around here and there and make it a little bit better and unique then do that. One of the other things that kind of touch on, something you were talking about that I wanted to quickly bring up is that when you do this, it's a great environment to test things. So if you want to have a certain way of constructing the page or certain type of description, it's a way of figuring out what really works, what doesn't work. Because you're working with A, a huge amount of page, so the data you're going to get back is going to be way more accurate than, oh, I have a couple of pages made a title tag change here. Is that really, so you are in an environment that already lends itself the testing where the results are way more accurate equals make those changes much quicker and it helps you drive. Okay. Here's how I think Google's kind of understanding me, which is kind of what Colt did in the post that we mentioned before. He spun up a website programmatically and he wanted with the idea of seeing, okay, what sticks? How is Google understanding this content and is this the right way to go with it or is it not the right way to go? So he spun up the programmatic content as a way of seeing what direction to take the final draft, which I thought was really interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Testing is absolutely crucial because Google will very often look at pages as a page type. So for instance, if you see a search console error, they will say, here's an example of a page like this. If you have 45,000 product pages, they're not going to show you the error for every single, the in-detail for every single product page. But they'll say, here's an example of one that you have. And then you can look at that. And so if you submit it up programmatically, then the fix, you might make a big mistake at once, but you can also make a big fix at once. That's really useful to being able to test that. And also, if you've ever done CRO testing, one of the things that can sometimes be a challenge, particularly when you're doing one page at a time, is actually getting the traffic volume to get any kind of data that's of any use. So if you're spinning up, many many pages have the same basic format, the same kind of iterations in terms of your CRO, then you're going to be able to get a lot more data more quickly than if you were to do it one page at a time. I think one of the other benefit, I can't remember if Colt touched on this as well, but one of the other benefits of programmatic SEO is that it's really easy to align it with things like schema markup, for instance. So I'm think I've mentioned them before, but I remember I judged as a search award and one of the entries was from Dairy Queen. And one of the things I love, they spun up all of these and they programmatically did this. They spun up all of these pages for their Dairy Queen locations and it has all of the attributes and they're aligned with the things that are on Google business profile. They're aligned with the things that are in their structured data and they're aligned with the things that are on their page. And so you can see that consistency going all the way through, what the hours are, where the location is, what the amenities are, whether they have delivery or pickup, or whether they accept credit cards and all of that sort of stuff. So they're able to spin those all up and they're also able to roll them all out to multiple channels. So you get all your pages that are marked up in the same way, and you have all the schema that works with all of those. And then you have all of those are also attributed to each of those Google business profiles. So what you get with programmatic SEO is the ability to use your content as a data set and to be able to use it consistently across multiple channels, which is epic. Mordy Oberstein: So taking into a completely different direction, going back to what we were talking about before about trying to add a personal touch, all your programmatic content to help us with that is the host of the SEO Video Show great YouTube show. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: At SEO. Knowledge Bombs. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's fantastic. Here's Paul Andre De Vera about when working with content at scale, how do you ensure you keep the right tone and personal touch with your content? Paul Andre De Vera: Maintaining a personal touch in your content is important to building a strong personal brand voice and establishing connection with your audience. One effective way I achieve this is by writing the way I speak. Recording yourself, taking and getting it transcribed can be an awesome exercise to help you capture your personal tone and language. You can then use transcriptions as a basis for your content, editing and refining it as needed to make sure it meets your personal language and fits within the context of your content strategy. However, when working with tools like Grammarly, it's important not to accept every suggestion blindly. These tools can help identify and correct grammar and spelling errors, and they may also try to substitute words and phrases that are part of your natural speaking style. I personally like using words such as, awesome, love it, fabulous. These are examples of words that Grammarly may flag, but is part of my personal language. Incorporating personal touches like these can help your content feel more genuine and relatable to your audience, building a stronger connection and establishing your brand as approachable and authentic. Just be your silly self consistently online just as you are offline. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Paul. Definitely. Again, check out Paul on Twitter at Paul Andre and check out the SEO Video Show Crystal Carter: On YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: On YouTube. Look, by the way, his point about Grammarly. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I feel that in every bone of my body. Crystal Carter: Yo. Mordy Oberstein: Because sometimes it's like, change this change. I'm like, no. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: No. I'm not changing that. Mordy Oberstein: Not changing that. That's a whole linchpin. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Like Grammarly, that's my vibes. That's just my style. That's how I do it. Also with Grammarly, it's obviously they're making it so they and talk about Grammarly all the time. But I remember reading, I'm sure I mentioned this before Toni Morrison had a book and she just, she's, it was one sentence for the whole page and it was beautiful and it was fantastic. But I also say, and and and and and. And sometimes I'm trying to get some rhythm. Mordy Oberstein: Like, like, like, like. Crystal Carter: I do say like. Mordy Oberstein: I'm talking about myself. I say it all the time. Crystal Carter: I'm from California. That's how we do... it is what it is. But I think that, yeah, what he's saying about adding in, making sure that you keep your tone of voice is really important. I think about brands that have a tone and it's really important. So for instance, MailChimp has a tone that they just sort of have a tone, even when it's a small little piece of micro copy, there's definitely a tone of voice to it. There's a couple of other brands that I can think of that are a little bit, there's brands that are a little bit salty sometimes. So the- Mordy Oberstein: Wendy's? Crystal Carter: Duolingo can be a little bit salty sometimes. Duolingo has a very dry sense of humor as a brand, and that's kind of their style. And even sometimes to the point where you can recognize the style, you can recognize someone from their styles. And I think with some of the AI things, like Google I/O thing announced that Google Cloud is making it so that you can use your own data sets to train information. So it might be that you add your language style guide into something to maybe move that into programmatic SEO. There's a lot of moving parts going on at the moment, but I think that making sure that you've got your clear tone of voice when you're spinning things up programmatically is, yeah, really important. Mordy Oberstein: Super important. This again, it tells all the time, and I like my soapbox where brand marketing overlaps with SEO, it's such an under discussed undervalued point. And it's something that I know we talk about, you need to align with your designers and your devs, but a lot of times you need to align more with your brand marketers because they're the ones defining how you're going to have to speak publicly. And if they see the programmatic content and they see that it's not in line with the brand tone of voice, they're not going to be happy. So better get that done beforehand as opposed to after hand, which is, I know not a word, but it definitely- Crystal Carter: After hand? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Why would you say beforehand and then after the fact? Makes no sense. Let's be- Crystal Carter: Should it be before fact and- Mordy Oberstein: It should either be before fact or it should be after hand. Crystal Carter: After... Nobody's saying after hand, it's- Mordy Oberstein: Now we are. Crystal Carter: Stop trying to make fetch happen. Mordy Oberstein: So anyway, after hand that, speaking of programmatic content and SEO, we already mentioned cold sliver and how we use a combination of Python and a little tool we call Velo to dynamically create pages at scale. So we figured we jump into this fellow called Velo with a programmatic edition of Tool Time. Velo is a full stack dev tool inbuilt into Wix. So you can enable dev mode, which by the way, Phil should be getting a Mortal Combat... Enable dev mode. Crystal Carter: We should talk to the team and be like, what we need is an explosion though. It goes... Dev mode. Mordy Oberstein: And just like a firebomb goes off on the page. Crystal Carter: Instead of deploying, you should just go finish him. Mordy Oberstein: Dev mode activated. Finish him. Crystal Carter: And then when you run your code, it should go ….. Mordy Oberstein: I'll see if we can add to the roadmap. Crystal Carter: Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that. Mordy Oberstein: I'll advocate. This is why we advocate very much a lot internally. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I feel we should add this to our list of things to advocate for. Crystal Carter: Dev mode. Mordy Oberstein: Activate it. Okay. So yeah, back on track. Velo. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Velo. So Velo, I love Velo. I love Velo so much. Velo is absolutely brilliant. It is a JavaScript like playground essentially within Wix. And you can build JavaScript things all the way through it. And there's lots of fantastic stuff. So we have something called the content manager, and essentially you can take a spreadsheet, it's a spreadsheet sort of format, and it works really well for programmatic- Mordy Oberstein: Programmatic SEO. Because you're connected to a data set and there's your content. Crystal Carter: You can also connect to external datasets, you can add your own datasets, you can connect to other databases as well. And there's lots of tools for Tree to be able to do that. And basically you can use it for, you can use it with JavaScript to create all sorts of fantastic things. So Mark Preston is somebody who created an SEO jobs board, for instance, using Velo. And so you're able to create tools there. And I've also created a few tools myself. I created a Bingo game on my website. Mordy Oberstein: Did you really? You used it to get a Bingo game. I did not know that. How did I not know that? Crystal Carter: I need a bingo game for, it's like a conference SEO bingo game. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's right, you did. I do remember that. Okay, fine. I'm not a horrible friend. Crystal Carter: So the other thing that's great about Velo is that Velo has, so you might say, well, but I'm not a JavaScript person. I don't know all the things. That's okay. Because first of all, our documentation is extremely extensive. Second of all, within Velo, they have tons of guidance in the actual code. So if you input the code incorrectly, it will tell you. It will give you an error or it'll give you a little thing that says, hey, you should have this, or there should be a variable, or you should update that part. So that's really useful. The other thing that's great is that you can use it with an LOM. So for instance, Bard. Bard is trained on loads of bits of code, so is Chat GPT. So I have, I've created something and my JavaScript is, okay. And that's generous. My JavaScript is okay. But I was able to go, I was basically able to take some of the guidance that I got from Velo. So Velo says, oh, this bit of code isn't quite right. And I'm like, okay. So I popped that into GPT and I was like, hey, GPT, I got this error for this code, but I wanted to do this. And GPT was like, yeah, try this bit of code. So then I popped it back into Velo and then I got a different error and then I put that back into GPT, and by the time I'd gone back and forth between these two things, I was able to build something that was amazing. So what's really cool is that we have... It's got so many different functionalities in it. There's something called Velo Examples, which is a collection of lots of really cool things that people have built on Velo. And on each of those pages there is, there's the code, there's a demo, and you can copy the code from it. The other thing that's great about Velo is that the code is transferable. So for instance, we have lots, it's all sort of API based, and we have a library that's Wix SEO. So if you have a piece of code that is for changing the canonical, we had this situation, didn't we Mordy? Mordy, you were like, oh- Mordy Oberstein: A bomb, A podcast website. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Somebody was like, oh, I want to change the canonical on this podcast change. I was like, oh, you can do this. He was like, oh, maybe you can set up a call. I was like, no, literally just copy and paste this code. Mordy Oberstein: The code, yeah. Crystal Carter: Copy and paste this code and put it on that page and it will work because it's all sort of set up to work. Mordy Oberstein: You could do that dynamically. You could dynamically as structured data to whatever you want, kind of set up pages, you want to do it. There's so much you can do with it. Crystal Carter: And you can create your own variable. So if you have a piece of content on your page, let's say you've got the word or something, you can create a variable. You can name that variable, you can use that variable in your code further down. We also have connections into NPM. So there's like lots of API integrations that are built in Google sheets and Google Maps, for instance. But you can also connect into NPM. I literally love Velo. The team behind Velo have nurtured this and have spent so much time making it fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: And there's so much content, by the way. If you, we'll link to a bunch of it. But there's an endless amount of content they've put out there... It's a cavernous library of content Velo, which we'll link to it. It's awesome. Crystal Carter: And I think the thing that's great is working with those things, but also, particularly if you're a noob, like me, to JavaScript, is that the things like GPT, like Bard that are trained on code, you can say in JavaScript, how do I do this? So if there's something that's specific, you can also back up some of the things with general information about JavaScript and things like that. So it's fantastic. And it also opens up a whole world of functionality on Wix, and I think it's going to be fantastic as we go into the headless space. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was going to say it. It's perfect. Because we've just gotten headless for this. For example, the CMS that you just mentioned. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You can use that. It's headless. You can take that and you can plug that into your front end, and you can use the Wix function, that CMS functionality kind of wherever. Crystal Carter: And the things that with the headless Wix situation, a lot of the things that they leaned on in the first instance are particularly lean themselves to programmatic SEO and programmatic data creation. So for instance, like the events, the bookings- Mordy Oberstein: Booking, products... Crystal Carter: Products, all of that sort of stuff, it leans itself really well... Lends itself really well to that. So between the headless space and the Velo and all of the amazing functionalities- Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of automation you could be doing. Crystal Carter: A lot of stuff you can do. I mean, who even needs to touch it? Mordy Oberstein: Who needs humans anymore? Crystal Carter: But I think it's really great, and I think it's great to see the combination of opening up the platform more and also bringing in some of the AI elements that we have and making it really accessible to lots of different developers and lots of different development needs. Mordy Oberstein: It's really cutting edge stuff from really great people. Now you know what else is new? The actual news. So here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, two little juicy SEO tidbits for you this week. First up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Neva, the ad free search engine announces closure. Neva was built, by the way, as a sort of a way to downplay the role of ads and search and increase the role of content creators. It had an AI chat experience, and it had a pretty good little search engine. Unfortunately will be shuttered, which is very unfortunate. You never want to see anything fail. It was a nice idea. It really does though, kind of highlight how hard it is to compete with Google. So as you see things developing in the AI world and you see, oh, Google's going down... Take a deep breath, take pause. It is very hard to compete with Google. From his royal Rustiness, the king of bricks, Mr. Rusty Brick, AKA Barry Schwartz, the fourth. Google helpful content update can demote and now promote content. As you may know, and as we've talked about here on this very podcast, Google announced that the helpful content update will be getting a revamp. This was announced at Google I/O 2023. In specific, Google said the system would help identify "hidden gems". Seeing this, friend of the show, an avid Yankees fan, Glen Gabe, asked Google search liaison Denny Sullivan, if this was an update to the current functioning of the ranking system or a new ability altogether. Denny said, "The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more hidden gems on search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well." So in a nutshell, the helpful content update will not only be about hitting sites with low quality, but will now have a net positive impact of uplifting the hidden gems of the web. I feel like there should be a special badge if you are one of these hidden gems of the web that says, hidden gem of the web, you could plaster on your homepage. And that is this week's Snappy News. I just got to say, I just love by the way, that when the news happens so organically like that, in this case, Glen Gabe asking a question, Barry covering it. They're great people, Glen and Barry. Speaking of people, by the way, that brings us to our follow of the week, which is, we've already mentioned him three or four times at this point. He is Glassdoor's, SEO, former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board. He's a writer for the Web Almanac. He's Colt Sliva. Crystal Carter: He's such a nice guy. He's so smart. Mordy Oberstein: The nicest dude, right? Crystal Carter: So nice. Mordy Oberstein: The nicest guy. Crystal Carter: And so smart. I think the first time that I came across Colt was he was speaking at SMX about something very clever, and I remember watching the talk and I was like- Mordy Oberstein: It was very clever. Crystal Carter: I remember watching him. I was like, this guy knows stuff. This guy is so smart. Mordy Oberstein: I came across him the first time at, when he was at IOL rank, we were working Gareth Sussman. I think he was on my podcast I was doing at the time. I don't remember anything about- Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: Probably. Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: The smartest guy, the nicest guy. I worked with him obviously on the Wix SEO advisory board, but also we worked together on the SEO section, on the web almanac. He was such a resource. I will tell you right now that Web Almanac, or at least the SEO section, would not have happened if it weren't for Colt. Crystal Carter: The other thing I would say about Colt is that he has such a healthy curiosity and people say, oh, what do you need to be in SEO? Like, do you need this skill or that skill or that skill. I'm like, fundamentally, you need to be curious. You need to be the kind of person who would talk about- Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you need to be the kind of person who wants to go down the rabbit hole who wants, hears like, oh, there's a new toilet. They're like, what does it do? What happens if I do this? What if I do that? What if I look at this? Mordy Oberstein: You change the JavaScript around on the toilet, what happens? Crystal Carter: Exactly. And Colt, he likes to build things. He likes to explore things, and he's super approachable and super interested. So yeah, can't say nice enough things about Colt, like do follow Colt. Mordy Oberstein: Don't just follow Colt, interact with Colt, talk to Colt. Crystal Carter: Tell him that we sent you. Tell him that Mordy and Crystal sent you. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to him. He's on Twitter at, S I G N O R C O L T. Of course, we'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes because I don't expect you remember how to spell that by listening to this in your car. But that does bring us to the end of the podcast. I would programmatically end the podcast now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: But I don't know how to do that with my VO. I guess I could record an ending and plug that in every single time, but I feel like that would not be doing justice to the audience and to the podcast. Crystal Carter: Yeah, well, you know... Mordy Oberstein: Not a good use of programmatic. Crystal Carter: No, I don't think so. No, not on this particular occasion. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. Crystal Carter: You betcha. Mordy Oberstein: Here's the custom ending. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to get started with international SEO as we chat with drum roll, Aleyda Solis. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning lab over at www.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning lab 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