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Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing. She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies for global companies. Adriana Stein CEO and Founder, AS Marketing Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing . She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies for global companies. Articles & Resources 28 Sept 2023 Can AI perform multilingual SEO translation and localization? 6 Jul 2023 ChatGPT for business-to-business SEO: A 2-star review 2 May 2023 Can AI-generated content work for eCommerce? 4 Apr 2023 An introduction to crawling, indexing, and ranking for SEO 25 Oct 2022 How to approach SEO localization and SEO website translations Resources Adriana Stein SEO blog writing Google Doc template Craft blog articles that give search engines and users what they’re looking for with this SEO template. Adriana Stein SEO landing page copywriting template Ensure your landing page copy is set up to convert and perform well on search with this SEO template. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com. Miriam Ellis Local SEO Subject Matter Expert, Moz Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com . Articles & Resources 14 Apr 2026 SEO tips for artists who want to reach more patrons 16 Jun 2025 Your About page: Why it isn’t converting customers & how to fix it 13 Feb 2025 Your local SEO career kit: How to develop expertise, decide where to work, and develop your professional profile 5 Dec 2024 Passive vs. Active search marketing: Embrace Google’s modern SERP with old-school strategies 30 Nov 2023 Local SEO for COVID-consciousness 14 Sept 2023 Multi-location local SEO: A framework for organizational success 18 Apr 2023 How local businesses can use low-code solutions for SEO success Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Aoife McIlraith is owner and MD of Luminosity Digital marketing agency and founder of Searchmastermind.org and Speakerlineup.com. With 22+ years of international marketing expertise, Aoife helps brands get the right content to the right audience at the right time to drive sales. Aoife McIlraith Managing Director, Luminosity Digital Aoife McIlraith is owner and MD of Luminosity Digital marketing agency and founder of Searchmastermind.org and Speakerlineup.com. With 22+ years of international marketing expertise, Aoife helps brands get the right content to the right audience at the right time to drive sales. Articles & Resources 17 May 2024 Judges share how to write a successful industry awards entry Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

With 20+ years of working in digital, from developer to account manager, Sarah works for some of the big-name brands in Australia and several not-for-profit and charity organizations. Her consultancy, Meliorum, works with clients in implementation, reporting, and analysis. Sarah Crooke Analytics Specialist and Owner of Meliorum With 20+ years of working in digital, from developer to account manager, Sarah works for some of the big-name brands in Australia and several not-for-profit and charity organizations. Her consultancy, Meliorum , works with clients in implementation, reporting, and analysis. Articles & Resources 28 May 2025 Trend analysis: How to turn imperfect data into marketing wins 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

Whether they be clients, C-level executives or marketing managers, there’s a slew of both external and internal stakeholders who rely on your SEO information. Good SEO reporting puts them in the game with you. It’s what gets buy-in and what proves the value of your work. After all, it's a lot easier to get a designer, developer, or another stakeholder to align with your SEO recommendations if they know that organic search drives revenue for the business. Reporting can be labor-intensive and cumbersome if you don’t know what to report on, to whom to report, and which datasets are most important to focus on. That’s why Mordy and Crystal discuss the critical nature of SEO reporting in today’s modern marketing and SEO departments. Joe Hall, SEO Consultant & Principal Analyst at Hall Analysis, shares his 3-pillared framework for choosing which SEO KPIs to report on: communication KPIs, strategic KPIs, and business KPIs. He explains that reporting should educate, inform, and align with key business objectives. We’re talking all things SEO reporting today on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Removing the fluff from SEO reporting Whether they be clients, C-level executives or marketing managers, there’s a slew of both external and internal stakeholders who rely on your SEO information. Good SEO reporting puts them in the game with you. It’s what gets buy-in and what proves the value of your work. After all, it's a lot easier to get a designer, developer, or another stakeholder to align with your SEO recommendations if they know that organic search drives revenue for the business. Reporting can be labor-intensive and cumbersome if you don’t know what to report on, to whom to report, and which datasets are most important to focus on. That’s why Mordy and Crystal discuss the critical nature of SEO reporting in today’s modern marketing and SEO departments. Joe Hall, SEO Consultant & Principal Analyst at Hall Analysis, shares his 3-pillared framework for choosing which SEO KPIs to report on: communication KPIs, strategic KPIs, and business KPIs. He explains that reporting should educate, inform, and align with key business objectives. We’re talking all things SEO reporting today on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 14 | November 23, 2022 | 35 MIN 00:00 / 34:32 This week’s guests Joe Hall Joe Hall is an SEO Consultant and web developer at HallAnalysis.com that drinks too much coffee and has a very complicated relationship with JavaScript. He has been working on the web since the late 90s and has a passion for bringing new opportunities for his clients and users. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the one, the only, the greatest, the best ever, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. I mean Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello Internet friends and welcome to SERP's Up. I'm very pleased to be here with you. Mordy Oberstein: You were just at a recent event and saw some really cool friends of ours at the- Crystal Carter: Yes, I did. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember the name of the event that you were doing. Crystal Carter: I've been doing loads. I've been doing loads of events this autumn. It was a local event called Building Brands, which I was really pleased to be doing because they're actually on a Wix website. And they rank really well. There was another I did- Mordy Oberstein: How appropriate. Crystal Carter: I know, I know. I did another event for another team, PPC Live UK. They're also on a Wix website Mordy Oberstein: Also on a Wix website. Amazing. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And both of them are ranking really well and both of them sold out their events. So I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: ASMX, MozCon, brightonSEO, Pubcon. Just saying. Crystal Carter: This is the kind of fun you could have. Yeah, just throwing that out there. Mordy Oberstein: Which is perfect placement for the SERP's Up Podcast, is brought to you by Wix, where you can rank and get all of your conference people into your conference. Or if you want to earn click from Google Discover, you don't need to change your max image preview robot's meta tag in order to produce that gloriously large image within Google Discovery, you know the big image that drives the clicks, not the little one that doesn't drive the clicks, because we set it to the max image preview by default. You could change it manually by the page or folder level, but why would you? You don't have to. It's one less thing at Wix. Crystal Carter: One less thing. That's what we're trying to do. Trying to save you time so that you can get out there and make money, get leads, do the things you want to do on the internet. Mordy Oberstein: Or at least brag that you were in Google Discover and got clicks. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's what's up. Mordy Oberstein: Bragging rights are a real thing. Crystal Carter: Bragging rights are definitely valuable. I will work for bragging rights. Mordy Oberstein: Basically. Right? So another great episode for you today, actually, a really important topic, SEO reporting. You know the point in time where you show the value of your work to your boss, client or friends, it's kind of a big deal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's kind of a big deal. Normally happens once a month. Mordy Oberstein: So we're going to get into some of the challenges come with reporting on your SEO effort as well as a mindset that sets up your reporting for success. And we have SEO OG, Joe Hall will join us to share how he decides on which KPIs he reports on. From there, we'll make a stop over at the top of the SERP to see what works and what doesn't work when trying to rank it, including relevant topical matter. And of course, on from there to the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO Awesome. All aboard, episode four 14 of the SERP's Up Podcast. So SEO reporting, everyone's best friend. Crystal Carter: It's really not. I'm pretty sure Aleyda Solis did a Twitter survey on this and they were like, what is the thing that you most dread? And I'm pretty sure that the answer came out being SEO reporting. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're doing this episode. SEO reporting is really important. Your SEO efforts don't exist in a vacuum. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's all part of the sites and their businesses' overall goals, whatever those may be. And because SEO is part of the site's overall business goals, all sorts of stakeholders are interested in what's happening with the SEO work that you're doing. And then if they're not interested, you need to get the buy-in to make them interested so that they keep the SEO services that you're offering up. You might say they want to know, what's going on. Crystal Carter: I wasn't ready for those delta tones, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have that deep voice to really nail that song, but you know what I'm trying to say. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Kidding aside, folks, whether they be clients, C-level executives and marketing managers, slew of other internal teams who you need help from need good SEO reporting. I'll just say it's a lot easier to get a designer or developer, whoever, to help you out if they know that organic search drives a lot of revenue for the business. So even cross team SEO reporting can be really, really important for getting buy-in. Nothing I'm saying here is novel. It's all pretty intuitive until you get into the weeds and until you start thinking about what to actually report on to whom to report it to and what data sets to use for what data source. Because there are all sorts of pitfalls, all sorts of pitfalls when it comes to SEO reporting, from vanity metrics to overlying on whatever graphs and charts the SEO tools are throwing your way and well beyond, which is why Crystal and I are here to help you with the help of SEO and Joe Hall, to discuss the framework of mindset that you should have behind the reporting that goes into your SEO efforts. And that could be reporting to, again, whatever client, manager or stakeholder, because there's a lot to say about be getting this right. And I've been talking a lot. So Crystal, take it away. What goes into reporting SEO efforts properly? Crystal Carter: I think when you decide what you're going to report on, you need to understand what's most important to the business or the project that you're working on. I've worked on projects before where we were reporting a certain conversion, which was an existing metric on a Google Analytics account. And we got to the end of the month and we were like, "Ugh, we have crushed this. We got way more leads than we've ever seen before. We doubled your leads. They were amazing." And we sat and spoke to the client about this and they're like, "Oh, we didn't notice that." And we were like, "What?" We were like, "Well, it says that all the leads came in and stuff." And they were like, "Oh, well did you get those?" It's like, "No, I didn't because some so and so was on holiday, someone was on vacation, they didn't pick them up, we're not even checking that email anymore."And all of this sort of stuff. So we were reporting on something and thinking we were doing amazing when this was not having any business value because the infrastructure for instance, wasn't set up for that. And so I think that it's very important to understand that whatever you're reporting on actually has some business value to the business. Sometimes people say, "Oh, we increased traffic." But if you increase traffic full stop, that's not necessarily valuable unless it's traffic to the right pages. Sometimes there are websites where they will have lots of tag pages, for instance, or lots of category pages which happen to rank and happen to get lots of traffic and things like that. And cool, awesome. Do you know what I mean? If those don't have actual value to the business, then getting traffic to those pages isn't of any worth. So it's really important that you understand the connection to the business with whatever it is you're reporting on. So I always recommend actually talking to the business owners about what they need to know in order to make actionable decisions across the business and what metrics actually reflect business value to them. With e-commerce, it's fairly straightforward. Sales for instance, is going to be your top metric and then maybe email signups for newsletter or maybe video views or something like that. With lead gen, it can be a little bit trickier. And so you need to understand and make sure that any metrics that you're measuring actually are going somewhere and actually have business value. Talking to the business owners about what they need outside of SEO, outside of the website, is really, really important for them. Mordy Oberstein: And I think for SEO or in SEO, it's really easy to get caught up in vanity metrics because the data is amazing. There's so much data, there's a whole industry of data providers and a lot of it looks pretty linear. Let's say rank. I've always found rank to sometimes lend itself to being a vanity metric. Because as you mentioned, I could rank a website for a million keywords and it's totally irrelevant. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes you're right, it's a little bit harder with rank or things like that because if it's not, let's say an e-commerce, say it's a blog site and they're bringing, they just have ads sense, they're running ads on the blog and that's how they're bringing... So the traffic's super important. But yeah, so I'm bringing all this traffic or we're ranking for all these keywords and it's bringing in all this traffic, but are those going to be users going to click on those ads or those ads are relevant for? So you sort of always have to qualify what the data is you're showing. And I feel that's a point about data in general that goes well beyond just SEO reporting. Data needs to be qualified because data as a concept is fundamentally, you're taking a quantitative thing, numbers or amounts, and you're often trying to explain qualitative things with them. For example, user behavior. And you need to be able to show or to be able to explain how that quantitative metric, and usually it's because there's so much quantity we use to be able to explain the qualitative behavior. But you still sometimes need to bridge that gap and qualify it. And a lot of that is not just in the data that you're presenting, but how you're presenting it and the notes that you're doing it with. And I think it's super valuable. And a lot of the data reporting tools that are out there will do this. They'll give you a point where you can add on notes. And use the heck out of those things to be able to explain, here's what the data is, here's what it says. Because again, not everybody looking at what you're going to have on that report really understands it right off the bat. So you need to explain it and then show them the value. Here's why this data matters for what you're doing, like you said before. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And also, I think you touched on something really important. So with every tool you have, they'll be like, "Oh, you have this chart and that chart and this chart and this one and these scatter points and these averages and this percentage and all of that sort of stuff." And it can be really easy to over report. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It can be really, really easy. Mordy Oberstein: And it looks really cool, like, "Oh, look at this really cool thing." I had an SEO tool ask me recently, "Can you take a look at this tool?" Blah, blah blah, "What it'd say? Do you know what it does and how you'd use it?" I'm like, "It looks really cool. I'm not really sure how I'd actually use this, actually." Crystal Carter: If you're working with clients or if you're working with stakeholders who are not in the weeds, like you are on the SEO, sometimes if you just give them a wall of stats, they'll just completely turn off, they'll completely switch off. Whereas, if what they need to know is, we got this ROI, we got this ROAS, we got this many clicks, we have this many impressions, just to give them some signals that it's working. If they need to know five metrics, then give them the five metrics, and have the data available if you need to do a deep dive. But just give them the five metrics and they will trust the rest of your data a lot more than if you just give them a wall of data that they don't understand at all. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's a great point. You said that you want to show them whatever you're doing is working. In other words, don't get lost in the numbers per se. Use the numbers to show that it's working. And sometimes, I think we get lost in, especially as SEOs like, "Oh, here are the numbers." First off, no numbers are exact. Whether it be Google's own data, whether it be third party data numbers. These are not the actual number of links that you have. Even the rankings may not be the actual rankings right now. It could have changed, whatever it is. But the numbers indicate a trend of where things are going. And I think that's more important than anything. Are we headed in the right direction? Crystal Carter: Right. Have you moved the needle? Are there some green chutes in this tactic? Because sometimes you'll have a tactic that you're just rolling out and you want to have some kind of sign that it's working in some way and whether or not, as a sort of test. So we're doing this test on a few blogs before we roll it out to hundreds and hundreds of blogs and you want to be able to see some signals that it's beneficial. So yeah, you want to have those metrics. But as you say, yeah, not exact. And I always say don't rely on a single data source. Make sure that you have a few different data sources. Because sometimes it might be that if you're reporting... Because that's another pitfall, you don't want to report on wrong data. So if you're somebody who is a client and you're looking to get SEO support, your SEO will almost certainly go through analytics and make sure that everything is set up properly in the first place. Because if you're getting information that's incorrect, then you will be making incorrect actions based on incorrect data. So you need to make sure that you're getting good data sets, good information, and make sure that you're cross referencing that data from a number of different points. So third party tools will have one set of information about where you're ranking and Google will have another set of information about where you're ranking. For instance, if you go to the SERP, you might see certain something else to show you where you're ranking. So it's important to think about all of those things when you're thinking about data and when you're thinking about reporting. And that's what makes it really interesting because you want to show you're going in a certain direction with things and you use multiple data sources for multiple providers to do that. And it also means, I think reporting is not marketing, reporting is reporting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And because you're trying to show directionally where things are going, don't worry, "Oh this one data point, or these two data points are showing not the right results, I won't include them." First off, you are ethically obligated to tell the client or manager, whoever it is, the stakeholders, what's happening, even if it's not good. And also, it's going to hit the fan at a certain point. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: So you might as well instill the confidence that you know there's a problem, it's not going where we want it to go or this particular aspect is not going where you want it to go. "I've identified the problem, here's the recommended fixes. I got this." Because again, you want to instill confidence and the only way to do this is not to hide the problem because they're going to find out eventually. Oh, and I always say within marketing, if something doesn't go... We're not magicians. Nobody expects you to be a magician. Nobody expects you to be right 100% of the time, every single time about every single idea that you have. However, in marketing, it's not a problem until you run out of ideas. If you don't know what to do next, if you are like, "Oh, this blog's going to be amazing, it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread," and it hits and it's kind of like straightaway doesn't quite do it. If you just go, "Oh, it wasn't good." If your reporting's like, the report says it was bad and that's it, that's not good. Don't do that. If the report's like, "Oh, our numbers are saying that it didn't work, we should do this next." If you say we should do this next or we should try that, or maybe we should try a different topic or maybe we should try a different content medium, that's beneficial. And the reporting can help you prompt new action, new ideas with regards to SEO. And also, if you're able to come out of that, it can build a lot more trust with your stakeholders when you're working. So if you're like, "Okay, I found this problem, it doesn't work, but we can try this based on the data that we have and we'll get a better result." And if you do, then that's great. They'll know that when you hit a bump in the road, you can get out of it. Mordy Oberstein: And that's fundamentally, I think, what reporting... To me, if you want to break it down to what is it fundamentally, it's trust between the stakeholders, between you and your clients or you and the other stakeholders, whoever they may be. And I think if you look at reporting that way, and I think one of the things you can do with reporting to build that trust is to educate whoever it is you're reporting to. Really taking the time to use it as, I think you called this a one point, a teachable moment where you can be able to explain what's happening, what it means, and dragging someone along with you on that journey and bringing them along with you rather on that journey. Crystal Carter: Dragging. Mordy Oberstein: A bad way to put it. You don't want to drag anybody anywhere. You want to bring them along autonomously. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Creates a deep relationship that's built on trust and mutual work forward to the next goal. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that SEO touches on so many different parts of a business that if you're able to do that, then you're more likely to have more conversations about other parts of the business and about analyzing different elements of things that they can do. So yeah, it's really, really valuable. And I think that there are some great tools that help you to do that. So Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio, allows you to make templates, templates which you can add new data sources to. So for instance, if you make an organic performance template, you can plug in different data sources. So you can make one organic performance template and then with using one set of data, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, whatever, and then you can build on that. So if you're working on multiple projects, you can also make a copy and input new data. And so, as you're building on this, if you get client questions, you can add notes to them, you can add links to them that can help you to educate your stakeholders. So if they don't know what this metric means, if they don't know how to use the document, you can make a link. And I would link to looms. So I'd make looms that said, if you don't know how to use this report, here's a link to a quick walkthrough of how this report works. And that means that when they're sharing it across the business, anybody can understand it. Because that's the other thing about reports, they should be readable by anyone in the business, not just people who are right in it. They should be readable by anyone. Mordy Oberstein: But first off, there's a lot of great templates that are already out there, which I'll link some in the show notes. But let's run a couple Google searches for SEO reporting templates on Looker, or you can use Data Studio because maybe Google doesn't know what Looker is yet. I don't know, it's very confusing at this point. Crystal Carter: There's also templates in Google Data Studio/Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Again, confusing. Name switch is always confusing. But there's also the idea of, okay, now that you have... And I personally think with these sort of things, the framework and the mindset is more important than anything. But there still is a question of what exactly do you report on? Which is why we ask an absolute legend, Joe Hall, who is again an absolute legend in the SEO community. We asked him, "Hey Joe, how do you decide what KPIs to use in your reporting?" Hey, here's what Joe had to say. Joe Hall: When trying to decide which is the right KPI for a client or project, I like to set it up in three different ways. I like to think about KPIs as either communication KPIs, strategic KPIs or business KPIs. Communication KPIs are measurements that communicate an idea and educate the client every time you talk about them. They are used to educate and inform about bigger ideas and things they need to focus on. I usually find these KPIs by talking to the client and asking them specifically what they're interested in. This is because these are the KPIs that they are already used to talking about and they already are familiar with. So it's easier to have a conversation around those KPIs. The second set of KPIs I like to look at are what I call strategic KPIs. These are metrics that are aligned with strategic objectives. So typically, when you are starting out to do SEO, you have some sort of strategy development. And in that strategy development, you have a specific objective. And so to find these strategic KPIs, we can start backwards by looking at the intended objective for the strategy and deciding what types of metrics that can be counted to ascertain the success of that objective, or not, and these are called strategic KPIs. The last type of KPI that I like to look at are called business KPIs. And these are metrics that are aligned with business goals. And I like these because it helps connect the dots between the SEO process and the business objectives, the bigger business objectives. So basically, we could find these KPIs by trying to understand how does the SEO process impact the business model or the bottom line. So for example, if you are a publisher, then the specific KPI that might be good for you would be organic page views because many publishers sell advertising and the amount of page views can make for more expensive advertising. But whatever method you use to pick out your KPIs, whether it's communication, strategic or business, just know that the intention is to educate, inform, and align with key business objectives. And I think if you follow those three areas, you should not have any trouble picking out the perfect KPI for yourself or your client. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Joe. As a really nuance and layered way of looking at KPIs and to the point you are reporting to your clients or internally to whoever should be multi-perspective, multi-layered and tell the entire story. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Like a fantastic sandwich. It should have many layers and lots of textures and something that- Mordy Oberstein: Something crunchy. Something slightly crunchy. Crystal Carter: Something crunchy, something you can really sink your teeth. Mordy Oberstein: But not lettuce. Lettuce is crunchy but doesn't count. Crystal Carter: Something you can really sink your teeth into. But also something that's really satisfying basically, for everyone. So I think he was talking about lots of different elements of lots of different stakeholders and how he thinks about stakeholders all the way through. So the business KPIs, the strategic KPIs, the SEO KPIs. I think it's a really, really interesting way of thinking about it. And I think it's something that makes sure that everyone feels involved from the beginning because you don't want to have to redo your KPIs further down the line. It's like if you're playing Uno or something and then they start changing the rules. Nobody likes that. You don't want to change- Mordy Oberstein: Wait, there are rules in Uno? Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course there's rules in Uno. Mordy Oberstein: I honestly make those up as you go along. Crystal Carter: No, they got some new ones where you like swap hands or something like that. Mordy Oberstein: You see the double sided UNO cards? Those are awesome. Crystal Carter: I have not. Mordy Oberstein: So we'll talk about that later. Crystal Carter: Other cards are available. But yeah, nobody likes it when you have to change the rules in the middle, it does not build trust at all. So it's really good to think about what he was talking about with regards to the multiple stakeholders and making sure that everyone has a KPI that makes sense to them is super, super valuable. Incredible, great advice. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And don't forget to give Joe Hall a follow on Twitter, @JoeHall. That's J-O-E H-A-L-L. Joe Hall. It's pretty straightforward, it's Joe Hall. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Joe. So speaking of reporting, I was looking at a little nifty reporting dashboard that I have behind the scenes from folks at Semrush. And I was looking at some data about page or pages that we're ranking for a given keyword and I figured I would share what I found with you because we haven't done this little segment in a while. Personally, it's one of my favorites. And we're going to take a little bit of a thematic look at what kind of works for ranking overall from this particular case of what I saw was ranking at the top of the SERP, which is why we call the name of the segment, From the Top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: All the way from the top. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like these used to be some kind of '80s rock song about being on top, coming right after this segment. Know we got the whole surf thing going on? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Rocky. Crystal Carter: (singing) Mordy Oberstein: I'll arm wrestle you to the top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: There'll be like a montage and some power cords. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a montage things ranking at the top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I was looking at ranking after a Google algorithm update and I happened to stumble on something I thought was really interesting. The key word is WHO hand washing. Not like who, as in who are you, but World Health Organization, WHO hand washing. It's confusing. The intent is I think finding what WHO, not the band, but the World Health Organization, recommends as who how to wash your hands. Crystal Carter: What they recommend that you do? Mordy Oberstein: Wash your hands. Who are you? Anyway. Wow, there's a lot of singing in this episode. Crystal Carter: Too much. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the musical version of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: We should totally do a musical. Mordy Oberstein: It's the SERP's Up Podcast on ice. Crystal Carter: We should absolutely do that. Mordy Oberstein: We should do a musical version of... Anyway, I was looking at this keyword and I saw that Google was ranking a page from, it's from one of the universities, I think, it was the University of Minnesota or something like that, or it was the Minnesota Department of Health. And what I noticed was Google was ranking one page from their website about washing your hands and their hands, everyone's hands, for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, Google stopped ranking that page and swapped it out for a different page. Like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, why did Google do that? Crystal Carter: On the same domain. So it's a different page on the same domain. Mordy Oberstein: Same domain. Different page for the same website. That's really interesting. So naturally, curiosity got the better of me. I went to the old page and I went to the new page. I'm like, what's the difference between these two pages, that Google would say no more ranking of that page and now let's start ranking this page? And that was really perplexed because the new page I thought wasn't as good. I thought the old page was better. I thought the old page was more... It had better page structure, the information was more digestible, it was a little bit clearer. The UX and the UI of that page was better and the new page was not as good. I'm like, "That's so weird." Okay, what's going on here? But I noticed that topically, the new page included talking about hand sanitizer and washing hands. I'm like, isn't that interesting? And then I dived even deeper, and I noticed that most of the pages ranking on page one all talk about washing their hands with water and with hand sanitizer. And when you go to page two, it gets a little more spotty. Some pages do, some pages don't. I'm like, "Ah, I see what's going on here." Crystal Carter: Right. Google's made a decision that hand sanitizer is something that's important for ranking for this term. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Topically speaking, hand sanitizer and hand washing, if you want to adequately comprehensively cover hand washing, you must also cover hand sanitizing. Crystal Carter: So I'm interested in this one because Google sometimes curates SERP. So for instance, during peak COVID, if you were to look up something like COVID testing, they'd have a very specific set of websites that would rank for that, for instance. And none of them were commercial. All of them were health organizations, for instance. So I'd be interested in knowing where they added that criteria, whether that was criteria that came from, say like the CDC or something. Maybe the CDC changed their criteria because that's the other thing, sometimes with certain SERPs, they will prioritize content that aligns with official information. So I wondered if that decision came from something like the CDC or if that's something that they saw from consensus that they saw that users were looking more for hand sanitizer when they were looking at hand washing. Because that's probably a question, can I wash my hands with hand sanitizer or- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, totally. Crystal Carter: ... Hand sanitizer instead of washing my hands if I don't have option to wash my hands or something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And in fact, when I looked at, not just this query, but I started looking at a whole bunch of other kinds of hand washing queries, and it's the same pattern. The hand sanitizer pages or the pages that talk about hand sanitizing with the hand washing all started to rank. I think that's what's happening. I think that semantically speaking, Google realized at a certain point, topically speaking, these two things now are very much a part of the same corpus of content. And you sort of have to have both. Not as a hard fast rule. But again, to comprehensively cover the topic, google kind of realize this has to be there. Because yeah, all the time when you're out there and you're like, "I'm not near a sink. Can I wash my hands or can I sanitize my hands with sanitizer?" By the way, I think at a certain point you can't. You need to actually wash it off at a certain point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I only know that because my wife's a nurse and she told me that. Google didn't tell me that. Crystal Carter: This is true. But I wonder if this changes with different relationships between other entities. So for instance, if you think of famous couples or something, I don't know, Jennifer Lopez recently got remarried to Ben Affleck. Mordy Oberstein: What? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: Last time I checked. You didn't know? Mordy Oberstein: Poor A-Rod. Crystal Carter: It's not new. It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: This is not new? Crystal Carter: Not new. So sometimes when you look up SERPS, for instance, certainly Wikipedia will say the spouse is this person or sometimes when you look up SERPs like that, they'll have an information box that just says who the spouse is, for instance. So I'd be interested to know if Google changes that information, that they'll rank information around content that has the most recent connection, for instance, if it's like a spouse or something. Mordy Oberstein: I know for a fact, because I've tested this out. I've tested it out on sports trades. So a player has traded on one team to the next team. It's so quick. The knowledge panel updates, not the pictures. The pictures obviously don't, takes us a little bit of time or it might not get it all right. But it'll tell you who is this, what team they play for. It'll the new team right within an hour. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It's super quick. Crystal Carter: Right. So then does that mean that the pages that rank within the sort of core search results, do they adjust the ranking there so that whichever one has the most recent one and ranks better? Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. That's a really good question. But it also just goes to show you that it's not just what's on your page that it helps you rank, but it's also what's not on your page that helps you not rank. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is something that people need to think about. And I think it's again, one of the reasons why we do this segment at all the Top of the SERP, because it's worth looking at what's on the SERP as well in order to make sure that you've got the right content for what you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: So From the Top of the SERP, to the top of what's happening in the SEO news, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, they have arrived. Some of the product updates around Google Shopping and local search now previously at Google's search on event have arrived, or arriving, depending on where you live. Per Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Google's new local search features are finally here. So these updates include being able to use serve to find local eateries that serve a certain dish, meaning you could search for General Tso's chicken near me, which I plan on doing immediately following this recording. You could also take a picture of the dish via Google Lens and use that to search for local establishment that serve that particular dish that you a picture of, which is amazing. Also, and this is super cool, in my honest opinion, AR is coming to local search in London, New York, LA, Paris, and Tokyo to start. It's called Search With Live You. And it basically means you can use your phone's camera point in a local shop, and you'll get a layover of visual information as to if the establishment is open, how busy it is and so forth. I was just in Times Square, New York City visiting my father. This would've been super useful. There were a million business around. If I could have simply picked up my phone, pointed it at the various establishments and just kind of did a 360, I could see how busy they were, which ones are open and made a better decision, which one I wanted to frequent instead walking around for a half hour, in and out of various shops, which we actually did. Anyway, can be very, very highly useful, super cool technology and is absolutely amazing, particularly in an area like Times Square, New York where there's a high concentration of businesses. And with that, that is this week's snappiest of Snappy News. Boy, that Snappy News of short tops. Now I'm connecting back the other segment. You see what I'm doing there? Top of the SERP, Top SEO news, so much- Crystal Carter: Flawless- Mordy Oberstein: Flawless. Flawless victory for all you video game folks in the 1990s, not in the 1990s, it's got to be later in the '90s, right? Crystal Carter: Finish him. Mordy Oberstein: Mortal Kombat. And speaking of finishing, let's finish this podcast by ending off with who you should be following for SEO Awesome. And since we're talking about SEO reporting, I think one of the greatest people out there who has done a lot by way of SEO reporting is speaking of Google Data Studio or Google Looker Dashboard, she definitely has one. She is the one, the only, Christina Brodzky LeVasseur. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. She has some fantastic Google Data Studio templates she shares around G4, around other types of reporting. And she's a great person to follow, particularly if you're getting started with SEO. She talks about reporting, she also talks about client relationships, which is why you're reporting it all, is to make sure that you're managing your client relationships. And yeah, she's a great person to follow for lots of different reasons- Mordy Oberstein: And is super helpful. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Super accessible. So if you have questions and we'll link to her Google Looker, I'm never going to get this right, template. And if you have questions, just go on Twitter and she'll answer them for you. She's super accessible, so I think she's a great resource for you. So don't just follow Christina, but engage and interact with Christina because she's a wealth of information and super happy to share it. And on Twitter, it's @CBrodzky. That's B-R-O-D-Z-K-Y, over on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. And that's it. Crystal Carter: That's it, that's all. Is that everything? Mordy Oberstein: I'm here to report that we finished the episode. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see. We have a fantastic KPI of having recorded a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: How many recordings? One. Mordy Oberstein: One. One recording. That's our data, one. Crystal Carter: That is our data. Our data says one recording. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like the Count from Sesame Street right now. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with an all new episode. We dive into the value of Google Reviews. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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, we're already on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Joe Hall Christina Levasseur Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Hall Analysis SEO Reporting Dashboard Templates News: Google’s New Local Search Features Are Finally Here Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Joe Hall Christina Levasseur Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Hall Analysis SEO Reporting Dashboard Templates News: Google’s New Local Search Features Are Finally Here Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the one, the only, the greatest, the best ever, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. I mean Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello Internet friends and welcome to SERP's Up. I'm very pleased to be here with you. Mordy Oberstein: You were just at a recent event and saw some really cool friends of ours at the- Crystal Carter: Yes, I did. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember the name of the event that you were doing. Crystal Carter: I've been doing loads. I've been doing loads of events this autumn. It was a local event called Building Brands, which I was really pleased to be doing because they're actually on a Wix website. And they rank really well. There was another I did- Mordy Oberstein: How appropriate. Crystal Carter: I know, I know. I did another event for another team, PPC Live UK. They're also on a Wix website Mordy Oberstein: Also on a Wix website. Amazing. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And both of them are ranking really well and both of them sold out their events. So I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: ASMX, MozCon, brightonSEO, Pubcon. Just saying. Crystal Carter: This is the kind of fun you could have. Yeah, just throwing that out there. Mordy Oberstein: Which is perfect placement for the SERP's Up Podcast, is brought to you by Wix, where you can rank and get all of your conference people into your conference. Or if you want to earn click from Google Discover, you don't need to change your max image preview robot's meta tag in order to produce that gloriously large image within Google Discovery, you know the big image that drives the clicks, not the little one that doesn't drive the clicks, because we set it to the max image preview by default. You could change it manually by the page or folder level, but why would you? You don't have to. It's one less thing at Wix. Crystal Carter: One less thing. That's what we're trying to do. Trying to save you time so that you can get out there and make money, get leads, do the things you want to do on the internet. Mordy Oberstein: Or at least brag that you were in Google Discover and got clicks. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's what's up. Mordy Oberstein: Bragging rights are a real thing. Crystal Carter: Bragging rights are definitely valuable. I will work for bragging rights. Mordy Oberstein: Basically. Right? So another great episode for you today, actually, a really important topic, SEO reporting. You know the point in time where you show the value of your work to your boss, client or friends, it's kind of a big deal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's kind of a big deal. Normally happens once a month. Mordy Oberstein: So we're going to get into some of the challenges come with reporting on your SEO effort as well as a mindset that sets up your reporting for success. And we have SEO OG, Joe Hall will join us to share how he decides on which KPIs he reports on. From there, we'll make a stop over at the top of the SERP to see what works and what doesn't work when trying to rank it, including relevant topical matter. And of course, on from there to the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO Awesome. All aboard, episode four 14 of the SERP's Up Podcast. So SEO reporting, everyone's best friend. Crystal Carter: It's really not. I'm pretty sure Aleyda Solis did a Twitter survey on this and they were like, what is the thing that you most dread? And I'm pretty sure that the answer came out being SEO reporting. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're doing this episode. SEO reporting is really important. Your SEO efforts don't exist in a vacuum. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's all part of the sites and their businesses' overall goals, whatever those may be. And because SEO is part of the site's overall business goals, all sorts of stakeholders are interested in what's happening with the SEO work that you're doing. And then if they're not interested, you need to get the buy-in to make them interested so that they keep the SEO services that you're offering up. You might say they want to know, what's going on. Crystal Carter: I wasn't ready for those delta tones, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have that deep voice to really nail that song, but you know what I'm trying to say. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Kidding aside, folks, whether they be clients, C-level executives and marketing managers, slew of other internal teams who you need help from need good SEO reporting. I'll just say it's a lot easier to get a designer or developer, whoever, to help you out if they know that organic search drives a lot of revenue for the business. So even cross team SEO reporting can be really, really important for getting buy-in. Nothing I'm saying here is novel. It's all pretty intuitive until you get into the weeds and until you start thinking about what to actually report on to whom to report it to and what data sets to use for what data source. Because there are all sorts of pitfalls, all sorts of pitfalls when it comes to SEO reporting, from vanity metrics to overlying on whatever graphs and charts the SEO tools are throwing your way and well beyond, which is why Crystal and I are here to help you with the help of SEO and Joe Hall, to discuss the framework of mindset that you should have behind the reporting that goes into your SEO efforts. And that could be reporting to, again, whatever client, manager or stakeholder, because there's a lot to say about be getting this right. And I've been talking a lot. So Crystal, take it away. What goes into reporting SEO efforts properly? Crystal Carter: I think when you decide what you're going to report on, you need to understand what's most important to the business or the project that you're working on. I've worked on projects before where we were reporting a certain conversion, which was an existing metric on a Google Analytics account. And we got to the end of the month and we were like, "Ugh, we have crushed this. We got way more leads than we've ever seen before. We doubled your leads. They were amazing." And we sat and spoke to the client about this and they're like, "Oh, we didn't notice that." And we were like, "What?" We were like, "Well, it says that all the leads came in and stuff." And they were like, "Oh, well did you get those?" It's like, "No, I didn't because some so and so was on holiday, someone was on vacation, they didn't pick them up, we're not even checking that email anymore."And all of this sort of stuff. So we were reporting on something and thinking we were doing amazing when this was not having any business value because the infrastructure for instance, wasn't set up for that. And so I think that it's very important to understand that whatever you're reporting on actually has some business value to the business. Sometimes people say, "Oh, we increased traffic." But if you increase traffic full stop, that's not necessarily valuable unless it's traffic to the right pages. Sometimes there are websites where they will have lots of tag pages, for instance, or lots of category pages which happen to rank and happen to get lots of traffic and things like that. And cool, awesome. Do you know what I mean? If those don't have actual value to the business, then getting traffic to those pages isn't of any worth. So it's really important that you understand the connection to the business with whatever it is you're reporting on. So I always recommend actually talking to the business owners about what they need to know in order to make actionable decisions across the business and what metrics actually reflect business value to them. With e-commerce, it's fairly straightforward. Sales for instance, is going to be your top metric and then maybe email signups for newsletter or maybe video views or something like that. With lead gen, it can be a little bit trickier. And so you need to understand and make sure that any metrics that you're measuring actually are going somewhere and actually have business value. Talking to the business owners about what they need outside of SEO, outside of the website, is really, really important for them. Mordy Oberstein: And I think for SEO or in SEO, it's really easy to get caught up in vanity metrics because the data is amazing. There's so much data, there's a whole industry of data providers and a lot of it looks pretty linear. Let's say rank. I've always found rank to sometimes lend itself to being a vanity metric. Because as you mentioned, I could rank a website for a million keywords and it's totally irrelevant. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes you're right, it's a little bit harder with rank or things like that because if it's not, let's say an e-commerce, say it's a blog site and they're bringing, they just have ads sense, they're running ads on the blog and that's how they're bringing... So the traffic's super important. But yeah, so I'm bringing all this traffic or we're ranking for all these keywords and it's bringing in all this traffic, but are those going to be users going to click on those ads or those ads are relevant for? So you sort of always have to qualify what the data is you're showing. And I feel that's a point about data in general that goes well beyond just SEO reporting. Data needs to be qualified because data as a concept is fundamentally, you're taking a quantitative thing, numbers or amounts, and you're often trying to explain qualitative things with them. For example, user behavior. And you need to be able to show or to be able to explain how that quantitative metric, and usually it's because there's so much quantity we use to be able to explain the qualitative behavior. But you still sometimes need to bridge that gap and qualify it. And a lot of that is not just in the data that you're presenting, but how you're presenting it and the notes that you're doing it with. And I think it's super valuable. And a lot of the data reporting tools that are out there will do this. They'll give you a point where you can add on notes. And use the heck out of those things to be able to explain, here's what the data is, here's what it says. Because again, not everybody looking at what you're going to have on that report really understands it right off the bat. So you need to explain it and then show them the value. Here's why this data matters for what you're doing, like you said before. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And also, I think you touched on something really important. So with every tool you have, they'll be like, "Oh, you have this chart and that chart and this chart and this one and these scatter points and these averages and this percentage and all of that sort of stuff." And it can be really easy to over report. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It can be really, really easy. Mordy Oberstein: And it looks really cool, like, "Oh, look at this really cool thing." I had an SEO tool ask me recently, "Can you take a look at this tool?" Blah, blah blah, "What it'd say? Do you know what it does and how you'd use it?" I'm like, "It looks really cool. I'm not really sure how I'd actually use this, actually." Crystal Carter: If you're working with clients or if you're working with stakeholders who are not in the weeds, like you are on the SEO, sometimes if you just give them a wall of stats, they'll just completely turn off, they'll completely switch off. Whereas, if what they need to know is, we got this ROI, we got this ROAS, we got this many clicks, we have this many impressions, just to give them some signals that it's working. If they need to know five metrics, then give them the five metrics, and have the data available if you need to do a deep dive. But just give them the five metrics and they will trust the rest of your data a lot more than if you just give them a wall of data that they don't understand at all. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's a great point. You said that you want to show them whatever you're doing is working. In other words, don't get lost in the numbers per se. Use the numbers to show that it's working. And sometimes, I think we get lost in, especially as SEOs like, "Oh, here are the numbers." First off, no numbers are exact. Whether it be Google's own data, whether it be third party data numbers. These are not the actual number of links that you have. Even the rankings may not be the actual rankings right now. It could have changed, whatever it is. But the numbers indicate a trend of where things are going. And I think that's more important than anything. Are we headed in the right direction? Crystal Carter: Right. Have you moved the needle? Are there some green chutes in this tactic? Because sometimes you'll have a tactic that you're just rolling out and you want to have some kind of sign that it's working in some way and whether or not, as a sort of test. So we're doing this test on a few blogs before we roll it out to hundreds and hundreds of blogs and you want to be able to see some signals that it's beneficial. So yeah, you want to have those metrics. But as you say, yeah, not exact. And I always say don't rely on a single data source. Make sure that you have a few different data sources. Because sometimes it might be that if you're reporting... Because that's another pitfall, you don't want to report on wrong data. So if you're somebody who is a client and you're looking to get SEO support, your SEO will almost certainly go through analytics and make sure that everything is set up properly in the first place. Because if you're getting information that's incorrect, then you will be making incorrect actions based on incorrect data. So you need to make sure that you're getting good data sets, good information, and make sure that you're cross referencing that data from a number of different points. So third party tools will have one set of information about where you're ranking and Google will have another set of information about where you're ranking. For instance, if you go to the SERP, you might see certain something else to show you where you're ranking. So it's important to think about all of those things when you're thinking about data and when you're thinking about reporting. And that's what makes it really interesting because you want to show you're going in a certain direction with things and you use multiple data sources for multiple providers to do that. And it also means, I think reporting is not marketing, reporting is reporting. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And because you're trying to show directionally where things are going, don't worry, "Oh this one data point, or these two data points are showing not the right results, I won't include them." First off, you are ethically obligated to tell the client or manager, whoever it is, the stakeholders, what's happening, even if it's not good. And also, it's going to hit the fan at a certain point. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: So you might as well instill the confidence that you know there's a problem, it's not going where we want it to go or this particular aspect is not going where you want it to go. "I've identified the problem, here's the recommended fixes. I got this." Because again, you want to instill confidence and the only way to do this is not to hide the problem because they're going to find out eventually. Oh, and I always say within marketing, if something doesn't go... We're not magicians. Nobody expects you to be a magician. Nobody expects you to be right 100% of the time, every single time about every single idea that you have. However, in marketing, it's not a problem until you run out of ideas. If you don't know what to do next, if you are like, "Oh, this blog's going to be amazing, it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread," and it hits and it's kind of like straightaway doesn't quite do it. If you just go, "Oh, it wasn't good." If your reporting's like, the report says it was bad and that's it, that's not good. Don't do that. If the report's like, "Oh, our numbers are saying that it didn't work, we should do this next." If you say we should do this next or we should try that, or maybe we should try a different topic or maybe we should try a different content medium, that's beneficial. And the reporting can help you prompt new action, new ideas with regards to SEO. And also, if you're able to come out of that, it can build a lot more trust with your stakeholders when you're working. So if you're like, "Okay, I found this problem, it doesn't work, but we can try this based on the data that we have and we'll get a better result." And if you do, then that's great. They'll know that when you hit a bump in the road, you can get out of it. Mordy Oberstein: And that's fundamentally, I think, what reporting... To me, if you want to break it down to what is it fundamentally, it's trust between the stakeholders, between you and your clients or you and the other stakeholders, whoever they may be. And I think if you look at reporting that way, and I think one of the things you can do with reporting to build that trust is to educate whoever it is you're reporting to. Really taking the time to use it as, I think you called this a one point, a teachable moment where you can be able to explain what's happening, what it means, and dragging someone along with you on that journey and bringing them along with you rather on that journey. Crystal Carter: Dragging. Mordy Oberstein: A bad way to put it. You don't want to drag anybody anywhere. You want to bring them along autonomously. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Creates a deep relationship that's built on trust and mutual work forward to the next goal. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that SEO touches on so many different parts of a business that if you're able to do that, then you're more likely to have more conversations about other parts of the business and about analyzing different elements of things that they can do. So yeah, it's really, really valuable. And I think that there are some great tools that help you to do that. So Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio, allows you to make templates, templates which you can add new data sources to. So for instance, if you make an organic performance template, you can plug in different data sources. So you can make one organic performance template and then with using one set of data, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, whatever, and then you can build on that. So if you're working on multiple projects, you can also make a copy and input new data. And so, as you're building on this, if you get client questions, you can add notes to them, you can add links to them that can help you to educate your stakeholders. So if they don't know what this metric means, if they don't know how to use the document, you can make a link. And I would link to looms. So I'd make looms that said, if you don't know how to use this report, here's a link to a quick walkthrough of how this report works. And that means that when they're sharing it across the business, anybody can understand it. Because that's the other thing about reports, they should be readable by anyone in the business, not just people who are right in it. They should be readable by anyone. Mordy Oberstein: But first off, there's a lot of great templates that are already out there, which I'll link some in the show notes. But let's run a couple Google searches for SEO reporting templates on Looker, or you can use Data Studio because maybe Google doesn't know what Looker is yet. I don't know, it's very confusing at this point. Crystal Carter: There's also templates in Google Data Studio/Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Again, confusing. Name switch is always confusing. But there's also the idea of, okay, now that you have... And I personally think with these sort of things, the framework and the mindset is more important than anything. But there still is a question of what exactly do you report on? Which is why we ask an absolute legend, Joe Hall, who is again an absolute legend in the SEO community. We asked him, "Hey Joe, how do you decide what KPIs to use in your reporting?" Hey, here's what Joe had to say. Joe Hall: When trying to decide which is the right KPI for a client or project, I like to set it up in three different ways. I like to think about KPIs as either communication KPIs, strategic KPIs or business KPIs. Communication KPIs are measurements that communicate an idea and educate the client every time you talk about them. They are used to educate and inform about bigger ideas and things they need to focus on. I usually find these KPIs by talking to the client and asking them specifically what they're interested in. This is because these are the KPIs that they are already used to talking about and they already are familiar with. So it's easier to have a conversation around those KPIs. The second set of KPIs I like to look at are what I call strategic KPIs. These are metrics that are aligned with strategic objectives. So typically, when you are starting out to do SEO, you have some sort of strategy development. And in that strategy development, you have a specific objective. And so to find these strategic KPIs, we can start backwards by looking at the intended objective for the strategy and deciding what types of metrics that can be counted to ascertain the success of that objective, or not, and these are called strategic KPIs. The last type of KPI that I like to look at are called business KPIs. And these are metrics that are aligned with business goals. And I like these because it helps connect the dots between the SEO process and the business objectives, the bigger business objectives. So basically, we could find these KPIs by trying to understand how does the SEO process impact the business model or the bottom line. So for example, if you are a publisher, then the specific KPI that might be good for you would be organic page views because many publishers sell advertising and the amount of page views can make for more expensive advertising. But whatever method you use to pick out your KPIs, whether it's communication, strategic or business, just know that the intention is to educate, inform, and align with key business objectives. And I think if you follow those three areas, you should not have any trouble picking out the perfect KPI for yourself or your client. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Joe. As a really nuance and layered way of looking at KPIs and to the point you are reporting to your clients or internally to whoever should be multi-perspective, multi-layered and tell the entire story. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Like a fantastic sandwich. It should have many layers and lots of textures and something that- Mordy Oberstein: Something crunchy. Something slightly crunchy. Crystal Carter: Something crunchy, something you can really sink your teeth. Mordy Oberstein: But not lettuce. Lettuce is crunchy but doesn't count. Crystal Carter: Something you can really sink your teeth into. But also something that's really satisfying basically, for everyone. So I think he was talking about lots of different elements of lots of different stakeholders and how he thinks about stakeholders all the way through. So the business KPIs, the strategic KPIs, the SEO KPIs. I think it's a really, really interesting way of thinking about it. And I think it's something that makes sure that everyone feels involved from the beginning because you don't want to have to redo your KPIs further down the line. It's like if you're playing Uno or something and then they start changing the rules. Nobody likes that. You don't want to change- Mordy Oberstein: Wait, there are rules in Uno? Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course there's rules in Uno. Mordy Oberstein: I honestly make those up as you go along. Crystal Carter: No, they got some new ones where you like swap hands or something like that. Mordy Oberstein: You see the double sided UNO cards? Those are awesome. Crystal Carter: I have not. Mordy Oberstein: So we'll talk about that later. Crystal Carter: Other cards are available. But yeah, nobody likes it when you have to change the rules in the middle, it does not build trust at all. So it's really good to think about what he was talking about with regards to the multiple stakeholders and making sure that everyone has a KPI that makes sense to them is super, super valuable. Incredible, great advice. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And don't forget to give Joe Hall a follow on Twitter, @JoeHall. That's J-O-E H-A-L-L. Joe Hall. It's pretty straightforward, it's Joe Hall. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, Joe. So speaking of reporting, I was looking at a little nifty reporting dashboard that I have behind the scenes from folks at Semrush. And I was looking at some data about page or pages that we're ranking for a given keyword and I figured I would share what I found with you because we haven't done this little segment in a while. Personally, it's one of my favorites. And we're going to take a little bit of a thematic look at what kind of works for ranking overall from this particular case of what I saw was ranking at the top of the SERP, which is why we call the name of the segment, From the Top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: All the way from the top. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like these used to be some kind of '80s rock song about being on top, coming right after this segment. Know we got the whole surf thing going on? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Rocky. Crystal Carter: (singing) Mordy Oberstein: I'll arm wrestle you to the top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: There'll be like a montage and some power cords. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a montage things ranking at the top of the SERP. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I was looking at ranking after a Google algorithm update and I happened to stumble on something I thought was really interesting. The key word is WHO hand washing. Not like who, as in who are you, but World Health Organization, WHO hand washing. It's confusing. The intent is I think finding what WHO, not the band, but the World Health Organization, recommends as who how to wash your hands. Crystal Carter: What they recommend that you do? Mordy Oberstein: Wash your hands. Who are you? Anyway. Wow, there's a lot of singing in this episode. Crystal Carter: Too much. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the musical version of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: We should totally do a musical. Mordy Oberstein: It's the SERP's Up Podcast on ice. Crystal Carter: We should absolutely do that. Mordy Oberstein: We should do a musical version of... Anyway, I was looking at this keyword and I saw that Google was ranking a page from, it's from one of the universities, I think, it was the University of Minnesota or something like that, or it was the Minnesota Department of Health. And what I noticed was Google was ranking one page from their website about washing your hands and their hands, everyone's hands, for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, Google stopped ranking that page and swapped it out for a different page. Like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, why did Google do that? Crystal Carter: On the same domain. So it's a different page on the same domain. Mordy Oberstein: Same domain. Different page for the same website. That's really interesting. So naturally, curiosity got the better of me. I went to the old page and I went to the new page. I'm like, what's the difference between these two pages, that Google would say no more ranking of that page and now let's start ranking this page? And that was really perplexed because the new page I thought wasn't as good. I thought the old page was better. I thought the old page was more... It had better page structure, the information was more digestible, it was a little bit clearer. The UX and the UI of that page was better and the new page was not as good. I'm like, "That's so weird." Okay, what's going on here? But I noticed that topically, the new page included talking about hand sanitizer and washing hands. I'm like, isn't that interesting? And then I dived even deeper, and I noticed that most of the pages ranking on page one all talk about washing their hands with water and with hand sanitizer. And when you go to page two, it gets a little more spotty. Some pages do, some pages don't. I'm like, "Ah, I see what's going on here." Crystal Carter: Right. Google's made a decision that hand sanitizer is something that's important for ranking for this term. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Topically speaking, hand sanitizer and hand washing, if you want to adequately comprehensively cover hand washing, you must also cover hand sanitizing. Crystal Carter: So I'm interested in this one because Google sometimes curates SERP. So for instance, during peak COVID, if you were to look up something like COVID testing, they'd have a very specific set of websites that would rank for that, for instance. And none of them were commercial. All of them were health organizations, for instance. So I'd be interested in knowing where they added that criteria, whether that was criteria that came from, say like the CDC or something. Maybe the CDC changed their criteria because that's the other thing, sometimes with certain SERPs, they will prioritize content that aligns with official information. So I wondered if that decision came from something like the CDC or if that's something that they saw from consensus that they saw that users were looking more for hand sanitizer when they were looking at hand washing. Because that's probably a question, can I wash my hands with hand sanitizer or- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, totally. Crystal Carter: ... Hand sanitizer instead of washing my hands if I don't have option to wash my hands or something to that effect. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And in fact, when I looked at, not just this query, but I started looking at a whole bunch of other kinds of hand washing queries, and it's the same pattern. The hand sanitizer pages or the pages that talk about hand sanitizing with the hand washing all started to rank. I think that's what's happening. I think that semantically speaking, Google realized at a certain point, topically speaking, these two things now are very much a part of the same corpus of content. And you sort of have to have both. Not as a hard fast rule. But again, to comprehensively cover the topic, google kind of realize this has to be there. Because yeah, all the time when you're out there and you're like, "I'm not near a sink. Can I wash my hands or can I sanitize my hands with sanitizer?" By the way, I think at a certain point you can't. You need to actually wash it off at a certain point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I only know that because my wife's a nurse and she told me that. Google didn't tell me that. Crystal Carter: This is true. But I wonder if this changes with different relationships between other entities. So for instance, if you think of famous couples or something, I don't know, Jennifer Lopez recently got remarried to Ben Affleck. Mordy Oberstein: What? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: Last time I checked. You didn't know? Mordy Oberstein: Poor A-Rod. Crystal Carter: It's not new. It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: This is not new? Crystal Carter: Not new. So sometimes when you look up SERPS, for instance, certainly Wikipedia will say the spouse is this person or sometimes when you look up SERPs like that, they'll have an information box that just says who the spouse is, for instance. So I'd be interested to know if Google changes that information, that they'll rank information around content that has the most recent connection, for instance, if it's like a spouse or something. Mordy Oberstein: I know for a fact, because I've tested this out. I've tested it out on sports trades. So a player has traded on one team to the next team. It's so quick. The knowledge panel updates, not the pictures. The pictures obviously don't, takes us a little bit of time or it might not get it all right. But it'll tell you who is this, what team they play for. It'll the new team right within an hour. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It's super quick. Crystal Carter: Right. So then does that mean that the pages that rank within the sort of core search results, do they adjust the ranking there so that whichever one has the most recent one and ranks better? Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting. That's a really good question. But it also just goes to show you that it's not just what's on your page that it helps you rank, but it's also what's not on your page that helps you not rank. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is something that people need to think about. And I think it's again, one of the reasons why we do this segment at all the Top of the SERP, because it's worth looking at what's on the SERP as well in order to make sure that you've got the right content for what you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: So From the Top of the SERP, to the top of what's happening in the SEO news, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, they have arrived. Some of the product updates around Google Shopping and local search now previously at Google's search on event have arrived, or arriving, depending on where you live. Per Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Google's new local search features are finally here. So these updates include being able to use serve to find local eateries that serve a certain dish, meaning you could search for General Tso's chicken near me, which I plan on doing immediately following this recording. You could also take a picture of the dish via Google Lens and use that to search for local establishment that serve that particular dish that you a picture of, which is amazing. Also, and this is super cool, in my honest opinion, AR is coming to local search in London, New York, LA, Paris, and Tokyo to start. It's called Search With Live You. And it basically means you can use your phone's camera point in a local shop, and you'll get a layover of visual information as to if the establishment is open, how busy it is and so forth. I was just in Times Square, New York City visiting my father. This would've been super useful. There were a million business around. If I could have simply picked up my phone, pointed it at the various establishments and just kind of did a 360, I could see how busy they were, which ones are open and made a better decision, which one I wanted to frequent instead walking around for a half hour, in and out of various shops, which we actually did. Anyway, can be very, very highly useful, super cool technology and is absolutely amazing, particularly in an area like Times Square, New York where there's a high concentration of businesses. And with that, that is this week's snappiest of Snappy News. Boy, that Snappy News of short tops. Now I'm connecting back the other segment. You see what I'm doing there? Top of the SERP, Top SEO news, so much- Crystal Carter: Flawless- Mordy Oberstein: Flawless. Flawless victory for all you video game folks in the 1990s, not in the 1990s, it's got to be later in the '90s, right? Crystal Carter: Finish him. Mordy Oberstein: Mortal Kombat. And speaking of finishing, let's finish this podcast by ending off with who you should be following for SEO Awesome. And since we're talking about SEO reporting, I think one of the greatest people out there who has done a lot by way of SEO reporting is speaking of Google Data Studio or Google Looker Dashboard, she definitely has one. She is the one, the only, Christina Brodzky LeVasseur. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. She has some fantastic Google Data Studio templates she shares around G4, around other types of reporting. And she's a great person to follow, particularly if you're getting started with SEO. She talks about reporting, she also talks about client relationships, which is why you're reporting it all, is to make sure that you're managing your client relationships. And yeah, she's a great person to follow for lots of different reasons- Mordy Oberstein: And is super helpful. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Super accessible. So if you have questions and we'll link to her Google Looker, I'm never going to get this right, template. And if you have questions, just go on Twitter and she'll answer them for you. She's super accessible, so I think she's a great resource for you. So don't just follow Christina, but engage and interact with Christina because she's a wealth of information and super happy to share it. And on Twitter, it's @CBrodzky. That's B-R-O-D-Z-K-Y, over on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. And that's it. Crystal Carter: That's it, that's all. Is that everything? Mordy Oberstein: I'm here to report that we finished the episode. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see. We have a fantastic KPI of having recorded a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: How many recordings? One. Mordy Oberstein: One. One recording. That's our data, one. Crystal Carter: That is our data. Our data says one recording. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like the Count from Sesame Street right now. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with an all new episode. We dive into the value of Google Reviews. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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, we're already 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

With so many SEO tasks how do you know where to start first?! Get your (SEO) priorities in order as Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter help you bring order to the chaos with tips on how to prioritize SEO tasks. SEO priorities are not a linear equation and can differ from one SEO to another. Learn how priorities change if you’re an SEO consultant as compared to being at an SEO agency with Nicky LeRoy and Griffen Roer. The team also explores Google's efforts to compete with Amazon in the e-commerce market and the impact of the August 2023 Google Core update, which had a unique rollout and caused significant rank fluctuations. Relax as this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast gives you a healthy look at prioritization of work and goals. Back How to set SEO priorities With so many SEO tasks how do you know where to start first?! Get your (SEO) priorities in order as Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter help you bring order to the chaos with tips on how to prioritize SEO tasks. SEO priorities are not a linear equation and can differ from one SEO to another. Learn how priorities change if you’re an SEO consultant as compared to being at an SEO agency with Nicky LeRoy and Griffen Roer. The team also explores Google's efforts to compete with Amazon in the e-commerce market and the impact of the August 2023 Google Core update, which had a unique rollout and caused significant rank fluctuations. Relax as this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast gives you a healthy look at prioritization of work and goals. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 56 | September 20, 2023 | 45 MIN 00:00 / 45:08 This week’s guests Nick LeRoy Nick LeRoy is a freelance SEO consultant, podcaster, and newsletter author in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in SEO strategy, technical SEO, editorial strategy, and website migrations through his company Nick LeRoy Consulting Nick is the author of the #SEOForLunch newsletter and owner of the boutique job board SEOjobs.com Griffin Roer Griffin Roer is the founder & CEO of Uproer, a search marketing agency that partners with SaaS & Ecommerce companies. He discovered SEO in 2012 during a self-taught web development course and hasn’t looked back. After years of working as an SEO consultant to some of the country’s largest retail and tech brands, Griffin pursued his entrepreneurial calling of starting an agency in 2017. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Maholo 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 Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who knows how to set priorities right, our Head of SEO Communications, the one of the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, Mordy Oberstein, the fantastic, incredible, amazing, stupendous, magnificent Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: Your nose is growing. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy, who cannot- Mordy Oberstein: If you know, you know. Crystal Carter: ... take a compliment, but is- Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't do compliments well. I have a hard time. Crystal Carter: It's always fun to give Mordy Oberstein a compliment because you can just see him squirming so much. Mordy Oberstein: People are saying nice things about me? Crystal Carter: "Why are they saying them? I must say something. It's ridiculous to deflect from the appreciation that sat befalling me." I would like to encourage everyone who's listening to this podcast to send Mordy Oberstein a compliment on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and CC Barry Schwartz while you're at it. Get two birds with one stone. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. That's right. Well, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also prioritize your SEO tasks on your blog pages and for your site overall with our SEO Assistant, which literally tells you which tasks are critical, which are high priority, which are medium, and which are low-priority SEO tasks because knowing what to work on and when, it's not always easy. Which is why today, we're helping you understand how to prioritize your SEO tasks. Look how seamless the line about what Wix does and what we're doing today meshed together perfectly. Crystal Carter: It was flawless. Mordy Oberstein: I take compliments on that. I take compliments on my pivots. Crystal Carter: It was very good. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you That's right. Today, we're dealing with the reality that you got to start somewhere. You can't do it all at once. It's not Star Trek. You're not Scotty. You're beyond being a miracle worker. It's not realistic. We're diving into how to set SEO priorities. Are certain SEO tasks actually more important than others? How does limited time and resources factor into SEO prioritization? And how do you know if you are or aren't prioritizing the right SEO task? Also, how does prioritization differ from an SEO agency to an SEO consultancy to an SEO freelancer? We get both sides of the coin as the CEO of Uproer, Griffin Roer, an advocate of all that is SEO freelancing, Nick LeRoy, take SEO prioritization from different corners of the SEO world. Plus, we'll have a look at what different search engines tend to prioritize in their results. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's all hands on deck for this code red alert or perhaps merely a yellow alert. Time will tell as episode number 56 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you set your alerts and your SEO priorities straight. Crystal Carter: There we go. We're just going to get into something and I'm going to start with something a little bit philosophical, a little bit intellectual because we like to go highbrow here on the SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I can't do that. Get it? Crystal Carter: Maybe you could put it on a Play-Doh. I don't know. That's terrible. Anyway, so I'm going to start with something called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, this is something... Yeah, Mordy's very excited about this. This is something that it's essentially a framework on a theory of human motivation. It's created by a guy called Maslow and it talks about psychological stuff and things like that. I would pause it that this also applies to websites and priorities as well. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a simplified version of it, you'll generally see a pyramid and at the base of the pyramid will be physiological needs. Things like whether or not you have air and whether or not you have a good safe environment, food, shelter, et cetera. Then there'll be safety needs like personal security, employment resources, et cetera. Then there'll be things like love and belonging, whether or not you have friendship and family and a sense of connection. Then there'll be things like esteem, whether or not you feel respected and have strength and freedom. Then there's self actualization, so the desire to become more than you currently are or become the most that you can be. This is the sort of general simplified idea of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, I highly recommend checking out because it's something that's really, really interesting for general personal development. You didn't realize that you were listening to a general growth hacking podcast, but here we are. Anyway, now when we talk about websites, I would posit that this also applies. When we're thinking about the physiological needs, this is essentially your baseline. This is stuff like your technical SEO and whether or not things actually work on the page. This might be as technical as whether or not you have site maps and whether or not things are working in terms of your robots at TXT and things like that. If you don't have this stuff working, if your pages are all blocked from crawling for instance, no amount of fantastic SEO content things is going to do anything if all the pages are blocked from crawling. If you're thinking about priorities, always check out making sure that you have the sort of technical nuts and bolts things covered. One of the things we really pride ourselves on Wix is making sure that a lot of that stuff is covered for anybody who creates a Wix website straight off the bat. You also want to think about the sort of things are covered from a business point of view view, so does the website actually do what you need it to do in the first place? For instance. If you have a bricks and mortar business, does it actually tell people how to get to your business? Does it tell people how to phone you? Does it tell people how to connect with you and things like that? Can people actually complete the sale on your e-commerce website? Is that possible? Are they able to do that? That's something to think about that. From a project point of view, this also means thinking about are you able to complete the task in a set amount of time? Do you know how much time you have and are you able to actually complete that task in that amount of time? Because you could have a fantastic audit and do amazing stuff, but if you don't know how much time or what resources you have, then those fundamental physiological sort of actual nuts and bolts things, if you haven't taken care of those, it's very difficult to do anything else. That should be a top priority, is making sure that those things are understood and are working well. Mordy, you're nodding. I don't know if you want to come in on this one before we get into the next one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. You're on a roll. Crystal Carter: Okay, all right. Mordy Oberstein: You're on a roll. I'm good. Thank you for checking in on me. I'm just sitting back and enjoying. Crystal Carter: Checking to make sure that your needs are met. Okay, so then we go into safety needs. Now in terms of safety needs for a website, first of all, there's things like SSL. That's a standard security thing, but there's also making sure that you have things like EEAT. Within EEAT, which stands for expertise, experience- Mordy Oberstein: Experience, yeah, they added the extra E. Crystal Carter: ... authority and trust from Google. They also talk about things, making sure that you're trustworthy. A lot of these things have to do with your trust score. Your website should also have safety needs that have to do with your trustability and how trustworthy you are. Where you have your SSL on your website, that that works, where you have return policies that helps users to know that it's easier for them to enter their credit card details and that it's a secure website for them to enter their credit card details, that they know that you know what you're doing, that you have certificates and that they know that you are an actual place. You have very clear name, address, phone number on your website. I always get a little bit sketched out if I'm on a website and they're trying to sell me something or trying to tell me something and I'm like, "Where are you? Who are you? Who are these people?" Mordy Oberstein: That's why I always have a sticky point with PPC people on the landing page idea of don't have any menu up there, just leave on the landing page to confirm. I want the context. Crystal Carter: Right. I want to know who you are. Who am I even talking to? So making sure You've got those sorts of trust things is also really useful. I've seen this from an SEO point of view and they tend to be pretty quick to implement. Both are pretty straightforward to implement, shall I say. The technical things, it's either broken or it's fixed. It's fairly straightforward to get those things going. The trust elements, particularly on e-commerce, Google will guide you on a lot of those things. If you're signing up to Google Merchant Center, they'll be like, "Well you don't have a return policy. You haven't done this part. We need to know what currency you're selling in. We need to know all of these sorts of stuff." Google will guide you with a lot of those things. So think about that. And also, I always say with PPC, particularly with sensitive verticals, YMYL verticals, they will also guide you on that. If you're trying to do any PPC, look at what they expect for PPC for your vertical. If you're into medical, for instance they'll say "If you want to advertise for medical, you need to have this and this." Even if you're not advertising, you can look at the PPC requirements for that vertical to see what kinds of trust signals they need for that and it's really useful. Then from the love and belonging sort of place, this has to do with brand positioning. Is it clear that you know what's good about you? What are your USPs? What is unique about you? What is valuable about your brand, your product, your team, your service? Making sure that that's very clear. And also, are you able to show that other people think that as well? Are you able to show your reviews that other people also think you're great? Are you involved in different communities and things like that? When we think about an EEAT points of view, this kind of speaks to sort of authority points. We're part of the Better Business Bureau, we are part of this association of marketers or things like that, and all our reviews are five star reviews. That shows that people appreciate us and we say, "Oh this is the thing that's great about our products." So those things, you need to know what those are and you need to convey those things on your website. Then when we get to esteem, this is where your blog can help you shine and your content can really help you shine. Once you've got your technical things sorted out, once you've got all the safety stuff sorted, the trust signals, then you can get into being like, "Yeah, you know what, not only does everybody think I'm great, but I can share that knowledge with you." So I'm confident in my knowledge. I'm confident to be able to share this in a video, to share it in a blog, to share it in an infographic and to share it on social media, things like that. That can bring people to you. By the time they come to you, they already know that it's a safe place, that you know what your brand USPs are, that everything works technically. Then after that, we think of a sort of self-actualization. So all of those things I think are sort of need to have things, and then you have your nice to have stuff. It's like right, okay, we've got a good blog, we've got a good working website, all the trust signals are there and then you can be like how can we stretch? How can we do some really cool stuff now? You can look around and you go, "Well these guys are doing some other stuff and we are not doing that. Could we do that? I think we could because we have all of these skills and all these great things that we can do." You can look at bigger competitors that maybe aren't even in your vertical but are doing something online that's really cool. You could say "We could do that. I think we could start a channel. I think we could create some more stuff." I think that it might sound a little bit philosophical, but actually a good content audit, a good SEO audit for instance, will break things down in this way. You'll say, "What priority is this? High, low, medium. What is the estimated impact? High, low, medium." For instance, on a technical thing like priority, it might be like "Well this is high priority." Your page isn't getting crawled and then you can bring it down in the time estimation. You can say, "If you know what you're doing, this is going to take you 20 minutes to fix." So it's going to have a high impact and it's high priority, so you should probably do that and it can really, really help you to figure things out. I think that thinking about it in the same way that you would think about how you would go forth in improving yourself, improving your life et cetera is really, really good when you're thinking about how to prioritize for your website. Mordy Oberstein: If we can get some music or a sound please, like clapping in applause. I think that's an appropriate time right now. I'll give you a little behind the scenes of this podcast. Sometimes we really sync up exactly where we're going to go, exactly what we're going to do. We kind of really plan it out. Sometimes "I got this, I'll take care of it. You got this, you got that." Crystal got this, and I had no idea what I was really in for today. I will tell you right now, first off, I'm volunteering you for a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about the maturation process of a website because I feel like this conversation, I've had this conversation before about setting SEO priorities, and what you usually end up talking about is, "Okay, so if your page is not being discovered, if you can't get an index because you edited a no index tag," or whatever-whatever, then that's a foundational priority because that means that all the other things that you eventually want to do, you can't do now. That's a priority. But what you've done here is basically laid out how a website matures over time. How it should mature over time, and how priority really means doing the things that matter for the website at the current state of maturation that you're at right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And that's amazing, and that's where the clapping comes in, and that's where I figured you should write this up, because that was amazing. Crystal Carter: Thank you for the appreciate. I'm feeling some love and belonging right now. I'm feeling like that's really good, and It's really helping my self-esteem and maybe I will actualize that block. I think It's something that I think about as well. It's just sometimes people over-complicate these things, so sometimes they're like, "Oh, all this technical stuff," and I think a lot of people get lost in the jargon of it, but optimization is about making it better. You can't start from where you're not. You have to start from where you are. If you get better that's, great and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that. You need to know where you're starting. I think some people get tripped up on some of the technical stuff for instance, and so they just ignore it. But a lot of times you can't. But the good thing about the technical stuff is it's fairly mathematical. Like I said, it's either broken or it's fixed. You can sort of go in and you can fix it, or if you don't know you can ask for help or you can just follow some... I'm sure there'll be somebody who's done a YouTube video or something that's gone into very extensive detail of how to do it and people will very much help you. But yeah, I think don't skip the steps and don't think that you can skip the steps because you do need to cover the steps or find tools that can help you do that so that you can get better and build on all of your work. Mordy Oberstein: This is how it goes with creating, we'll call it content in general, because your website is a piece of content and that content has technical underpinnings you need to address. It has design underpinnings that you need to address, all these kinds of things. I'll tell you, so LinkedIn carousels, I was avoiding them for a long, long time. It seemed like a lot of work. I didn't really have a lot of time. And now I'm starting to do them once in a while and I've noticed, okay I did X, this is not great. I'm looking at what somebody else did now. I'm like "Oh, that's really good." Really, it's a slow process of maturing. Your website is the same thing. You start with something, you have your pages, you have whatever it is, and you're thinking, you know what something doesn't feel right about this. I could probably take this to another level. Let's try this, let's try that and let's try this. Adding all of these things in let's say EEAT, adding a layer of real expertise and authority into the content on your website, that might not happen at the onset. You might write 10 blog posts because you got to get that content out there. You got to start from somewhere and you know what, that's fine and it won't rank. And you know what? That's also fine, because there's no cutoff date on ranking. "Oh, if I don't rank today that I can't rank tomorrow." Crystal Carter: One of the things that's great about SEO and it's the same thing with life is that you can try again. You can try again and you can keep practicing and you can keep improving. You post it now, you post that piece of content and like you said, maybe it doesn't rank, but maybe six months from now you'll have more data about how it's being seen online, maybe you'll have more feedback from people about what they think about it. You'll be able to see where It's sitting in the SERP and things like that. Then you can say, "Okay, now we can take that information and we can make this content better." Or we can take that information and go, "You know what we didn't need that content in the first place." But you have to start, but you need to take the feedback in order to improve. I think that when you're prioritizing, you should prioritize the thing that will get you to the next step. Mordy Oberstein: To the next step. That's exactly it. It is what gets you to the next step. I think that's a mistake people realize. You'll see people will talk about "I'm going to optimize," again, I'll go back to EEAT, "I'm going to optimize for EEAT," even somewhere like Lily Ray who's been doing this for years. You're looking at a cluster of content. You know what this needs to do to go from zero 100. You know the whole process. You've done it a million times before. You're an expert on that. You've got that. If you are an SEO that doesn't say focus on that, or you're a business owner or whoever you are, looking at it, "I'm going to optimize now for EEAT," it's like a one shot deal. It's not going to work. It's, "Okay, I've done this, the pose," I think we should talk about this podcast before "... and I've added X." Come back in three months from now, "You know what, X really wasn't enough. Now let's add Y." It's an ongoing process. SEO is an ongoing process. Looking at what will get me to the next step helps you do SEO the right way because it helps you say, "I'm going to do what I need to do to get to the next step, but I know that's not the last step." Crystal Carter: Right, because It's all rinse and repeat. I think that again, Maslow is good because if we think about the base of the pyramid, the sort of physiological technical leads in the case of a website, those things can change. As you grow, for instance, if you're a nine year old, you're a certain height, so you might need a step stool to reach the top of the cupboard or whatever. As you get older, you're going to get taller. You don't need the step stool, but you might need- Mordy Oberstein: You might need to climb. Just climb. You could be slither up a wall. Crystal Carter: These things will change. Similarly, I've started to wear glasses or whatever and I need those things. These are different things. Just like with your website. Your website doesn't exist in a vacuum, so there might be new SERP features that happen and then suddenly you have different technical needs for your website. It might be that suddenly your audience is way more mobile first and then you have different technical needs. Maybe there's an app that everybody's really, really into or maybe you've developed an app. That means that your website now has different technical needs and then that has knock on effect. So then you have to go back through all of the steps to make sure that they all align with each other. All of these things change. They're not set it and forget. It's like a person. Your website is grows, evolves and exists in an environment that is growing and evolving all of the time. Your priorities may very well change. It doesn't mean that you can't still have a North Star, say that if we talk about the self-actualization part where you really want to be, that can guide you, but how you get there might change a little bit. That's okay. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: And it's okay that it's not linear, either. You might say, "You know what, I really need a quick win right now. I am struggling. I need a quick win. This might not get me to the next level. It might not be part of my maturation process. But I know it's a quick way." That's fine too. Crystal Carter: I had a client and they had a website, and they did not have time for content. They did not. They were just like, "We don't have time for content. We don't have loads." They had been doing some Facebook stuff, so I was like, "Look, we have some stuff on Facebook. Let's take these Facebook posts, let's adapt them into blogs." Were they the best quality? I'm going, to be honest, they were not the best quality blogs, but this was a website that had no blog and had not posted any blogs ever or hadn't posted any blogs in sort of a year. We took these sorts of mid-level posts that had some information and we added them to the blog. Why? Because we wanted to be able to show the client that with this level of effort we can get this much. And then you can get a proof of concept and they can say, "Oh okay, so that blog that we all know was kind of okay, whatever got this much. What happens if we actually did a good blog on top of that?" Our goal was to get going. I just needed to get some content on there to get going. The goal was to get going. The goal wasn't to set the world on fire and make amazing, amazing, beautiful... The goal was to just get going. We got going and then they were like, "Okay, yeah, I can see the benefit of this," and helped with their self-esteem, their esteem. That meant that we could get investment and buy-in on doing something really good. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, 100%. It's a little bit messy. It's not like a linear kind of thing. It's a little bit messy. There's also resources to consider. Whether you have the resource, whether you don't have the resources, that's going to factor in. You might have a great projection plan maturation process for your website, but it'd be realistic with what you can and what you can't do. You might have to give up on certain things and that's normal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's normal. It's normal. I'll tell you right now, there's going to be certain benefits to doing things at whatever stage you're at. The important thing is to be aware of the impact and the important thing is to understand what you expect to come out of it so that it can help you to reach next goal and set your priorities based on that. If you're seeing that actually we did some blog and we saw no benefit of any kind and you go, "Okay, maybe this isn't what we need to do right now. Maybe we should invest in something else." If you see the blog and you see some benefit, for instance you're seeing that actually we're being crawled better. Actually, we have more internal links now. Actually, we're seeing some ranking that's happening out of this. Then yeah, that's good. That's a good sign and maybe they should be moved up the priority list for your overall activity. I think It's just important to think about what works for you and in terms of priorities, what will get you to the next step. Joe Hall, I talk about Joe Hall a lot, but he was talking a lot about MozCon last year about priorities and how he'd done this big audit for some folks. He was like, "Oh, we should do this, this and this." And he thought again about it, he was like "Actually, looking at what they need to do, I'm not sure this is the best course of action for them based on what would work best for them and what would..." Because I think sometimes people will do their go-to moves. You'll be like, "Oh, I always do this for everyone. This always works." And sometimes it does, but sometimes it's not always the best fit for them because of all of their other needs and all of their other priorities. So make sure that it aligns with the full flow of who the website is or what the website is at that time and what will get them to where they need to go. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of resources and how you work, and how you prioritize, where you work or who you work for can also impact how you prioritize SEO tasks. Specifically, if you're on the agency side and you're part of a large organizational, wider SEO team or digital marketing team, then you might prioritize SEO tasks in a certain way. If you're a consultant or a freelancer, well you might look at the same client and prioritize differently because based upon how you work. Because of that, we asked the CEO of Uproer, an SEO agency out of Minnesota, Griffin Roer, and Nick LeRoy, famed SEO consultant and a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board, how prioritizing your work as an SEO agency differs for prioritizing your work as a freelancer. So same task, same things, but from a different point of view. Here's Griffin and here's Nick together. Nick LeRoy: I know my skill sets. I know what I consider myself good at. I know where I struggle. And it's kind of more of a litmus test of check, check, check. But I also have that layer of does this make me excited? Do I enjoy it? That will go into again, how I set priorities in accepting a client or working, or even trying to pitch something. I know Griffin, you and I are the same. We're not really big into RFPs or having to truly sell ourselves. We would prefer to take a solid referral with kind of a baseline of trust. I think that kind of goes into my priorities as well. It's like if I have to put a lot of effort into trying to secure somewhere versus already being able to establish some trust on day one, that goes a long way on my end. Griffin Roer: There's definitely a difference there because you can look at a project and be like, "Do I have the time and interest to do this?" You can look at a project that is not super exciting and not super maybe challenging or whatever and just be like, "Well, I got some time and I can bang this one out. I'm not going to necessarily love this project, but it's going to help pay the bills." I can make that decision on behalf of myself. Whereas- Nick LeRoy: And price it at a level that will make it exciting. Griffin Roer: Yeah, exactly. I think one consideration on the agency side is I've got to be considerate of peoples' career development, and that might mean projects that I myself might be willing to take on and do and just gut out and be like, "All right, this is just going to help the bottom line." Or just as a freelancer maybe you're like, "Hey, if I do this project, I can get a new set of wheels for my car or something like that," you're kind of equating it to some reward. For me, if I'm going to put a project on somebody's plate, ideally It's going to align with their career progression and it's going to represent the next challenge, the thing they want to take on. If it's something that's going to be more like a step backwards, that makes it harder for us to accept that project. Even if it'd be a nice payday or even if it'd be just something to pad the business a little bit, I think there are some considerations there around career development because I think if an agency were to just take on kind of just un-challenging uninteresting projects all the time that just brought in cash, but didn't really push people, I don't think that agency is going to be really successful in retaining people. Nick LeRoy: Absolutely. Well Griffin, let me ask you a question here. I think building off of what we were just saying as a freelancer, I have the luxury of knowing this is short term. This is kind of a quick win. I schedule that work intentionally for that. It's like "Yeah, I want a new set of wheels. I want to take the kids on a vacation." But I'm being very intentional knowing that it's kind of like a one day payday. I suspect on the agency front you also have to be really cognizant of what type of short-term work you're taking on so that you don't necessarily lose out or have to turn down something that comes in that could be a multi-year or multi-channel engagement, which would obviously be your preferred client. Griffin Roer: Yeah, and obviously probably like you too, we're going to prioritize recurring business over project business any day of the week. There are those project opportunities that kind of come in and you do have to look at that against the overall pipeline and bandwidth of everybody that works at the agency to understand does this make sense? For myself being a leader at a small agency, I think it can be really tempting too for just myself to take on maybe the less than ideal projects, again just to help bring in some additional revenue and pad things and stuff like that. That can be counterproductive in and of itself because I'm expected to do a lot more than just assisting with client work and stuff like that. We've got sales and operations and hiring and just other things happening where my time is more valuable applied to those things versus- Nick LeRoy: Without a doubt. Griffin Roer: ... spending a couple of days working on a project that I was like, "Well this won't be really interesting for anything else, but It'll help the business from a revenue standpoint." I think That's a challenge probably that smaller agencies face moreso than bigger agencies, but it is a reality of trying to balance those competing interests and making sure that what I'm doing is not just in the best interest of myself but in the best interest of the agency at large, which represents 13 people at this point. Nick LeRoy: Absolutely, and I think you nailed on one of the most critical components when we're comparing small agency to freelancer. As a freelancer, I get to be very selfish. Everything is about me. I get to make the choices. All my choices impact me only. There's less risk in that aspect. Whereas when, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but as you had said 13 individuals that need to serve 13 meals every night, so you have to be very conscious of the type of work that you're taking, how do you prioritize it and even who works on what? Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you so much Nick and Griffin. Ironically, I approached them separately and I knew they both knew each other to answer this question like, "Hey, we'll just do a Zoom call together and we'll answer it together." It's an amazing conversation. There's actually a whole 30 minute piece that they did for them. We have to somehow repurpose it for something because it's amazing conversation that only we have listened to. We feel we need to share that somehow. But also, make sure you follow Griffin Roer. He's more on LinkedIn at @CGriffinRoerJr, a link to his LinkedIn account in the show notes. And follow Nick on Twitter @NickLeRoy, that's @ N-I-C-K-L-E-R-O-Y on Twitter. It is interesting, right? You think, okay, SEO is SEO, but You're going to be able to do different things, focus on different things, work in different ways, prioritize different things, all because of the way you work within your organization, at least on the SEO agency side, or the fact that you don't have an organization because you're a freelancer. It's fascinating to me. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that there is a lot of prioritization that has to do with the sort of ins and outs of an agency and working as a team because very often in an agency you are going to work in lots of different ways. So yeah, it's really interesting to hear the way that they discuss that and how you have to manage all of the bits and wheels and nuts and bolts of all of that. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot that goes into. It's the business side of it all, the billing and the client prioritization and all of that stuff is so different from just being let's say a consultant. Anyway, while we're talking about different situations and different circumstances that help dictate different SEO priorities, there are different things that different search engines prioritize within their results. With that, let's explore what the search engines of the world tend to prioritize differently as we go so many search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Let's take a look at Bing and Google, and let's take a look at how they handle different types of queries differently. Let's take entities to start. I always like looking at entities. I think they're a great way to dive into the mind of a search engine. I Googled, or one case Binged, a search bar is the word I'm looking for. I searched for John Lennon. I typed in John Lennon into Bing and I typed John Lennon into Google, and it's very different. Very, very different. For example, Bing tends for entities, like these kinds of entities and people, tries to push or tends to push the biographical information way harder than Google does. Google will show you, for example, when he was born, it'll give you some YouTube videos, a bunch of images, where you can listen to his music is above the fold. So Spotify and YouTube and Pandora. But Bing is pushing more the early years. It really gives you a great biographical breakdown of the different points of his life. It really tends to focus more on John Lennon as a person versus where Google is looking at it as here's an access or entry points to more various media about John Lennon. I thought that was interesting. Crystal Carter: I think that Google has been doing a lot particularly around the biographical entities here. It's been a very busy space in the last sort of year or so where they started adding- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they reformatted the whole knowledge panel thing. Crystal Carter: Right. They've added more of... It's more magazine sort of style. There's still the knowledge panel information, but for some people like Beyonce for instance, there's a lot more information around. They even have some quick answers. How old is this person? Or how tall is this person? Or things like that included in some of their search for this. I don't think that Bing has quite gone down that route for the biographical entity. Mordy Oberstein: No, not yet at least, or maybe they never will. Crystal Carter: Right. They have for a few other ones. There's a few sort of destination places where they'll pull things out. For instance, they used to have a SERP for a lion. If you look up what is a lion, you get a very interactive channel. It's got- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very cool. Crystal Carter: ... pictures from Wikipedia and a map and links within the knowledge panel within the knowledge panel content as well. I think that the overall goal for these things seems to be around just making sure that there's lots of content there. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It's very layered. I've seen this across all the entities. I looked at Aaron Judge, who's a baseball player. By the way, both Bing and Google, when you search for somebody who's in the news, will prioritize news content right away. Search for Aaron Judge. He's a baseball player. It's during baseball season. There's always news about him, and both Google and Bing prioritized news results right at the top. But again, Google kind of gives, like you're saying, kind of like a T-L-D-R. You want to get a real quick overview of who Aaron Judge is? Here. And go explore more. Here's access points to more. Whereas Bing again gives you a timeline of Aaron Judge. He was a rookie here in 2016. He did that in 2021. He did that. It's really trying to give you that layered approach of we want you to walk away really understanding who this person is. Which is ironic in my mind because a lot of SEOs give Google flack about, "Oh, you're taking away clicks to all its information," but Bing really gives you all of that information there. Whereas with Google, I really do have to click somewhere to explore more. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that Bing will very often add the information from other folks and they will reference it all together at the bottom. They'll reference all of it together. If you look up for instance, the Eiffel Tower, it has lots of facts about the Eiffel Tower and lots of information there. And It's clickable. It comes from somewhere, but it doesn't say it right next to it where it’s from. There's a bit of a balance of giving people lots of information but also making it more streamlined. I think that the entities around sort of multilayered entities are very interesting. So, something like the Eiffel Tower where you can buy tickets to the Eiffel Tower, where there's a Wikipedia page of the Eiffel Tower, and then there's also lots of historical things about the Eiffel Tower. There's a map and things like that. The entity management of that, then managing the knowledge panel I think for that is really interesting because there's so much in the knowledge panel for that. There's so much in the knowledge graph around something like the Eiffel Tower or even someone like Beyonce for instance. It's such a top level query to just enter something like Beyonce or Eiffel Tower or Aaron Judd that we need to have more there. So, it's kind of filtering as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's interesting because they don't always stick to that same paradigm. For example, if you were to search something about like, what did I search for? It's something to do with tires, like how to change a tire on the side of the road. Google just gives you the steps. Here's how you change a tire on the side of the road. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, right? And Bing gives you more context about tires, while it does give you those steps. Bing likes to give you that context. If I search for something like a song, best songs of the 1990s, Bing just gives me the bunch of videos. But Google has a whole carousel of little thumbnails of all the songs from the nineties, like Say My name or Torn. And if you click on the thumbnail, you get a carousel of results that give you more context about that song. They don't always follow the same paradigm. It's interesting to see just from a marketing perspective how Google and Bing both think about their audiences. In some cases Google thinks you know what you do want context and some cases they don't and sometimes those are the opposite cases of where Bing says you want context and Google says, no, you don't. Crystal Carter: I think It's also interesting that they're happy to get some of that context from people that are searching. We think about entities as being very much things and stuff like the Eiffel Tower, or Natalie Umbruglia song, or whatever it may be. But they also cover abstract things. If you look up something like courage, for instance, courage on Bing, there's a poll. There's a pole underneath that to get more context specifically from people. For instance, they're saying, "Which of the following do you think is the most important trait of a courageous person? A, fearlessness B, perseverance, C, self-discipline or decomp compassion." Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: What about E? Crystal Carter: What is E? What is E? Mordy Oberstein: I haven't thought about it yet. I have no pithy line. Crystal Carter: E is questioning the questions. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What about skepticism? Crystal Carter: Right. What about that? Mordy Oberstein: What about that? Crystal Carter: It's interesting. For instance, you see the same thing with films and stuff. It'll be like, you've just looked up the Barbie movie, what was your review of the Barbie movie. Barbie movie is also an interesting one because of branded entities, there's a potential option to sort of monetize that space or to change around that space. For instance, the Barbie movie, they changed the SERP, similarly with Wordle. So Wordle has a SERP that is dedicated to specifically to it. I don't know if the Barbie movie thing was paid for thing or if Google's just really into the Barbie movie. It's very interesting, that- Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting. They do that for the World Cup. They do that for the Olympics. They've done things like that for the Super Bowl. The day after the Super Bowl, you search who won the Super Bowl, the fireworks go off. Yeah, Google likes doing that stuff. I think that's Google's branding, "Hey, come here, we're fun." Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Exactly. So they know where those queries are going to be and they know where they can leverage that entity and leverage that sort of brand experience with that entity when It's related to a specific brand. Mordy Oberstein: Now another entity that We're quite fond of over here on the SERP's Up podcast is the entity of SEO News. I love news. I love SEO News. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Do you like shopping? Do you like Google? Do you like data? Do you like Barry Schwartz? Don't answer the last one. Then you'll like this per Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table, new Google Search Console shows Merchant Center visibility issues and changes. It's new. Google is now showing way more Merchant Center data and it is awesome and it is right inside of Google Search Console. Essentially, there are reports to help you see products that may have become ineligible for appearing in Google shopping. There's also a second part of the report that helps you get your listings more clicks and improve rankings so Google will actually tell you, "Hey, you should add return costs to the listing because that will get you more clicks." This is super important to Google and a super good move for them. Google needs to compete, wants to compete with Amazon. Obviously Amazon is the go-to place for e-commerce, shopping and listings and all that stuff. But by Google providing you with data such as this, it improves the chances that you'll be successful with Google shopping. The more success you have with Google shopping, the more Google can facilitate that success with Google shopping, the more you and people listing products on the internet will be invested in using Google Shopping and the more they can compete with Amazon. Very smart on Google's part. Have a look at the article in the show notes and you'll see a link in the article about how to activate the data. Also from Barry Schwartz, with a little help from a guy named Mordy, this time from Search Engine Land. How the August 2023 Google core update compared to March '23 core updates. The August 2023 core update finished after 16 days, which is a little bit longer than usual, on September 7th. And Barry, with the help of various tool providers dived into the impact of the update on rankings. I had the privilege of working with the Semrush data set to have a look at what the update provided in terms of rankings and it was unique. Usually, there's, a very, very demarcated spike increase in rank fluctuations meaning URLs moving up and down, changing positions all around the Google results pages. This time there wasn't that kind of spike. There was a prolonged period of really high and stably high, consistent that's the word I'm looking for, consistent rank fluctuations for a very long time. The initial spike actually occurred days before the update was officially announced. What to make of that is a great question for another time, but it was a definitely unique sort of rollout. Was the August 2023 core update more powerful and the March 2023 core update? Depends on how you slice it. Looking at peak rank volatility signals, it looks like the August 2023 update was more powerful. But you can't really look at that because rank volatility was already high coming into the update. If you look at what rank or how much rank volatility increased before the update versus during the update, it looks like the March update was perhaps more impactful. If you look at the average change in position, meaning how dramatic were the ranking changes, then the data shows that the August 2023 update was a little bit more impactful than the March 2023 core update. The point is slicing and dicing a core update and determining which one is more powerful is really complex. I have a whole post coming out on the SEMRush blog, so take a look for that when it comes out. I walk you through why analyzing these things are more complicated than it actually is using the August 2023 core update as an example. And that is this week's Snappy News. Always hard to prioritize which stories to cover in the SEO news each week on this podcast because It's snappy, so I can't cover them all. Crystal Carter: You have to prioritize which ones meet your needs. Mordy Oberstein: I try to prioritize which would meet our audience needs. Crystal Carter: Oh, see that's because you're so nice, Mordy. You're so nice and everyone appreciates you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. The face I'm making now does not say thank you, but I'm saying thank you. You know who I do want to thank though, our Follower of the Week. She's a great friend and a great person, and I feel that we should shout her out loud and clear for everyone to follow over on social media. It is Shelley Walsh. She's the SEO Content Strategist over at Search Engine Journal, and you should follow her on Twitter. She's also on threads, I believe, @TheShelleyWalsh, that's T-H-E-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-W-A-L-S-H. Link to her profile on the show notes. She's a fantastic person, does a ton for the industry and she has a lot of SEO knowledge. She's an SEO OG. She actually has a series called SEO Pioneers, where you can watch the OGs of SEO talk about how SEO has changed over the last 100 years kind of thing. It does help you kind of prioritize based on what they're saying, what does work, what doesn't work, because what used to work doesn't work anymore kind of thing. I’ve heard that many, many times on this podcast. Shelley Walsh for SEO prioritization and it's a priority for you to follow her on Twitter. Crystal Carter: I cannot recommend it enough. She's a great follow. I followed her recently as well, and my life has been much, much better since. So yes, I highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: She's super sweet. She was at our Brighton SEO dinner back in the UK, when was that, April? April, right? Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. That seems so long ago. Always nice to see her at Brighton SEO. If you do go to Brighton SEO, look for Shelley. She's usually there, I think. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. It's great. It's great. Absolutely great follow. Shout out to Shelley, and shout out to everyone in the SEO Pioneers Group, Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller. Barry Schwartz. I think. If she hasn't had Barry, she should have Barry. We'll. Make that happen, Shelley. All right, well, 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 why even SEO pros need a refresher about SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Nick LeRoy Griffin Roer Shelly Walsh Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO For Lunch Newsletter SEO Jobs Uproer SEO Agency SEO Pioneers News: New: Google Search Console Shows Merchant Center Visibility Issues & Changes How does the August 2023 Google core update compared to March 2023 core updates Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Nick LeRoy Griffin Roer Shelly Walsh Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO For Lunch Newsletter SEO Jobs Uproer SEO Agency SEO Pioneers News: New: Google Search Console Shows Merchant Center Visibility Issues & Changes How does the August 2023 Google core update compared to March 2023 core updates Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Maholo 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 Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who knows how to set priorities right, our Head of SEO Communications, the one of the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, Mordy Oberstein, the fantastic, incredible, amazing, stupendous, magnificent Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein: Your nose is growing. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy, who cannot- Mordy Oberstein: If you know, you know. Crystal Carter: ... take a compliment, but is- Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't do compliments well. I have a hard time. Crystal Carter: It's always fun to give Mordy Oberstein a compliment because you can just see him squirming so much. Mordy Oberstein: People are saying nice things about me? Crystal Carter: "Why are they saying them? I must say something. It's ridiculous to deflect from the appreciation that sat befalling me." I would like to encourage everyone who's listening to this podcast to send Mordy Oberstein a compliment on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah and CC Barry Schwartz while you're at it. Get two birds with one stone. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. That's right. Well, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also prioritize your SEO tasks on your blog pages and for your site overall with our SEO Assistant, which literally tells you which tasks are critical, which are high priority, which are medium, and which are low-priority SEO tasks because knowing what to work on and when, it's not always easy. Which is why today, we're helping you understand how to prioritize your SEO tasks. Look how seamless the line about what Wix does and what we're doing today meshed together perfectly. Crystal Carter: It was flawless. Mordy Oberstein: I take compliments on that. I take compliments on my pivots. Crystal Carter: It was very good. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you That's right. Today, we're dealing with the reality that you got to start somewhere. You can't do it all at once. It's not Star Trek. You're not Scotty. You're beyond being a miracle worker. It's not realistic. We're diving into how to set SEO priorities. Are certain SEO tasks actually more important than others? How does limited time and resources factor into SEO prioritization? And how do you know if you are or aren't prioritizing the right SEO task? Also, how does prioritization differ from an SEO agency to an SEO consultancy to an SEO freelancer? We get both sides of the coin as the CEO of Uproer, Griffin Roer, an advocate of all that is SEO freelancing, Nick LeRoy, take SEO prioritization from different corners of the SEO world. Plus, we'll have a look at what different search engines tend to prioritize in their results. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's all hands on deck for this code red alert or perhaps merely a yellow alert. Time will tell as episode number 56 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you set your alerts and your SEO priorities straight. Crystal Carter: There we go. We're just going to get into something and I'm going to start with something a little bit philosophical, a little bit intellectual because we like to go highbrow here on the SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I can't do that. Get it? Crystal Carter: Maybe you could put it on a Play-Doh. I don't know. That's terrible. Anyway, so I'm going to start with something called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, this is something... Yeah, Mordy's very excited about this. This is something that it's essentially a framework on a theory of human motivation. It's created by a guy called Maslow and it talks about psychological stuff and things like that. I would pause it that this also applies to websites and priorities as well. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a simplified version of it, you'll generally see a pyramid and at the base of the pyramid will be physiological needs. Things like whether or not you have air and whether or not you have a good safe environment, food, shelter, et cetera. Then there'll be safety needs like personal security, employment resources, et cetera. Then there'll be things like love and belonging, whether or not you have friendship and family and a sense of connection. Then there'll be things like esteem, whether or not you feel respected and have strength and freedom. Then there's self actualization, so the desire to become more than you currently are or become the most that you can be. This is the sort of general simplified idea of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, I highly recommend checking out because it's something that's really, really interesting for general personal development. You didn't realize that you were listening to a general growth hacking podcast, but here we are. Anyway, now when we talk about websites, I would posit that this also applies. When we're thinking about the physiological needs, this is essentially your baseline. This is stuff like your technical SEO and whether or not things actually work on the page. This might be as technical as whether or not you have site maps and whether or not things are working in terms of your robots at TXT and things like that. If you don't have this stuff working, if your pages are all blocked from crawling for instance, no amount of fantastic SEO content things is going to do anything if all the pages are blocked from crawling. If you're thinking about priorities, always check out making sure that you have the sort of technical nuts and bolts things covered. One of the things we really pride ourselves on Wix is making sure that a lot of that stuff is covered for anybody who creates a Wix website straight off the bat. You also want to think about the sort of things are covered from a business point of view view, so does the website actually do what you need it to do in the first place? For instance. If you have a bricks and mortar business, does it actually tell people how to get to your business? Does it tell people how to phone you? Does it tell people how to connect with you and things like that? Can people actually complete the sale on your e-commerce website? Is that possible? Are they able to do that? That's something to think about that. From a project point of view, this also means thinking about are you able to complete the task in a set amount of time? Do you know how much time you have and are you able to actually complete that task in that amount of time? Because you could have a fantastic audit and do amazing stuff, but if you don't know how much time or what resources you have, then those fundamental physiological sort of actual nuts and bolts things, if you haven't taken care of those, it's very difficult to do anything else. That should be a top priority, is making sure that those things are understood and are working well. Mordy, you're nodding. I don't know if you want to come in on this one before we get into the next one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. You're on a roll. Crystal Carter: Okay, all right. Mordy Oberstein: You're on a roll. I'm good. Thank you for checking in on me. I'm just sitting back and enjoying. Crystal Carter: Checking to make sure that your needs are met. Okay, so then we go into safety needs. Now in terms of safety needs for a website, first of all, there's things like SSL. That's a standard security thing, but there's also making sure that you have things like EEAT. Within EEAT, which stands for expertise, experience- Mordy Oberstein: Experience, yeah, they added the extra E. Crystal Carter: ... authority and trust from Google. They also talk about things, making sure that you're trustworthy. A lot of these things have to do with your trust score. Your website should also have safety needs that have to do with your trustability and how trustworthy you are. Where you have your SSL on your website, that that works, where you have return policies that helps users to know that it's easier for them to enter their credit card details and that it's a secure website for them to enter their credit card details, that they know that you know what you're doing, that you have certificates and that they know that you are an actual place. You have very clear name, address, phone number on your website. I always get a little bit sketched out if I'm on a website and they're trying to sell me something or trying to tell me something and I'm like, "Where are you? Who are you? Who are these people?" Mordy Oberstein: That's why I always have a sticky point with PPC people on the landing page idea of don't have any menu up there, just leave on the landing page to confirm. I want the context. Crystal Carter: Right. I want to know who you are. Who am I even talking to? So making sure You've got those sorts of trust things is also really useful. I've seen this from an SEO point of view and they tend to be pretty quick to implement. Both are pretty straightforward to implement, shall I say. The technical things, it's either broken or it's fixed. It's fairly straightforward to get those things going. The trust elements, particularly on e-commerce, Google will guide you on a lot of those things. If you're signing up to Google Merchant Center, they'll be like, "Well you don't have a return policy. You haven't done this part. We need to know what currency you're selling in. We need to know all of these sorts of stuff." Google will guide you with a lot of those things. So think about that. And also, I always say with PPC, particularly with sensitive verticals, YMYL verticals, they will also guide you on that. If you're trying to do any PPC, look at what they expect for PPC for your vertical. If you're into medical, for instance they'll say "If you want to advertise for medical, you need to have this and this." Even if you're not advertising, you can look at the PPC requirements for that vertical to see what kinds of trust signals they need for that and it's really useful. Then from the love and belonging sort of place, this has to do with brand positioning. Is it clear that you know what's good about you? What are your USPs? What is unique about you? What is valuable about your brand, your product, your team, your service? Making sure that that's very clear. And also, are you able to show that other people think that as well? Are you able to show your reviews that other people also think you're great? Are you involved in different communities and things like that? When we think about an EEAT points of view, this kind of speaks to sort of authority points. We're part of the Better Business Bureau, we are part of this association of marketers or things like that, and all our reviews are five star reviews. That shows that people appreciate us and we say, "Oh this is the thing that's great about our products." So those things, you need to know what those are and you need to convey those things on your website. Then when we get to esteem, this is where your blog can help you shine and your content can really help you shine. Once you've got your technical things sorted out, once you've got all the safety stuff sorted, the trust signals, then you can get into being like, "Yeah, you know what, not only does everybody think I'm great, but I can share that knowledge with you." So I'm confident in my knowledge. I'm confident to be able to share this in a video, to share it in a blog, to share it in an infographic and to share it on social media, things like that. That can bring people to you. By the time they come to you, they already know that it's a safe place, that you know what your brand USPs are, that everything works technically. Then after that, we think of a sort of self-actualization. So all of those things I think are sort of need to have things, and then you have your nice to have stuff. It's like right, okay, we've got a good blog, we've got a good working website, all the trust signals are there and then you can be like how can we stretch? How can we do some really cool stuff now? You can look around and you go, "Well these guys are doing some other stuff and we are not doing that. Could we do that? I think we could because we have all of these skills and all these great things that we can do." You can look at bigger competitors that maybe aren't even in your vertical but are doing something online that's really cool. You could say "We could do that. I think we could start a channel. I think we could create some more stuff." I think that it might sound a little bit philosophical, but actually a good content audit, a good SEO audit for instance, will break things down in this way. You'll say, "What priority is this? High, low, medium. What is the estimated impact? High, low, medium." For instance, on a technical thing like priority, it might be like "Well this is high priority." Your page isn't getting crawled and then you can bring it down in the time estimation. You can say, "If you know what you're doing, this is going to take you 20 minutes to fix." So it's going to have a high impact and it's high priority, so you should probably do that and it can really, really help you to figure things out. I think that thinking about it in the same way that you would think about how you would go forth in improving yourself, improving your life et cetera is really, really good when you're thinking about how to prioritize for your website. Mordy Oberstein: If we can get some music or a sound please, like clapping in applause. I think that's an appropriate time right now. I'll give you a little behind the scenes of this podcast. Sometimes we really sync up exactly where we're going to go, exactly what we're going to do. We kind of really plan it out. Sometimes "I got this, I'll take care of it. You got this, you got that." Crystal got this, and I had no idea what I was really in for today. I will tell you right now, first off, I'm volunteering you for a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about the maturation process of a website because I feel like this conversation, I've had this conversation before about setting SEO priorities, and what you usually end up talking about is, "Okay, so if your page is not being discovered, if you can't get an index because you edited a no index tag," or whatever-whatever, then that's a foundational priority because that means that all the other things that you eventually want to do, you can't do now. That's a priority. But what you've done here is basically laid out how a website matures over time. How it should mature over time, and how priority really means doing the things that matter for the website at the current state of maturation that you're at right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And that's amazing, and that's where the clapping comes in, and that's where I figured you should write this up, because that was amazing. Crystal Carter: Thank you for the appreciate. I'm feeling some love and belonging right now. I'm feeling like that's really good, and It's really helping my self-esteem and maybe I will actualize that block. I think It's something that I think about as well. It's just sometimes people over-complicate these things, so sometimes they're like, "Oh, all this technical stuff," and I think a lot of people get lost in the jargon of it, but optimization is about making it better. You can't start from where you're not. You have to start from where you are. If you get better that's, great and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that. You need to know where you're starting. I think some people get tripped up on some of the technical stuff for instance, and so they just ignore it. But a lot of times you can't. But the good thing about the technical stuff is it's fairly mathematical. Like I said, it's either broken or it's fixed. You can sort of go in and you can fix it, or if you don't know you can ask for help or you can just follow some... I'm sure there'll be somebody who's done a YouTube video or something that's gone into very extensive detail of how to do it and people will very much help you. But yeah, I think don't skip the steps and don't think that you can skip the steps because you do need to cover the steps or find tools that can help you do that so that you can get better and build on all of your work. Mordy Oberstein: This is how it goes with creating, we'll call it content in general, because your website is a piece of content and that content has technical underpinnings you need to address. It has design underpinnings that you need to address, all these kinds of things. I'll tell you, so LinkedIn carousels, I was avoiding them for a long, long time. It seemed like a lot of work. I didn't really have a lot of time. And now I'm starting to do them once in a while and I've noticed, okay I did X, this is not great. I'm looking at what somebody else did now. I'm like "Oh, that's really good." Really, it's a slow process of maturing. Your website is the same thing. You start with something, you have your pages, you have whatever it is, and you're thinking, you know what something doesn't feel right about this. I could probably take this to another level. Let's try this, let's try that and let's try this. Adding all of these things in let's say EEAT, adding a layer of real expertise and authority into the content on your website, that might not happen at the onset. You might write 10 blog posts because you got to get that content out there. You got to start from somewhere and you know what, that's fine and it won't rank. And you know what? That's also fine, because there's no cutoff date on ranking. "Oh, if I don't rank today that I can't rank tomorrow." Crystal Carter: One of the things that's great about SEO and it's the same thing with life is that you can try again. You can try again and you can keep practicing and you can keep improving. You post it now, you post that piece of content and like you said, maybe it doesn't rank, but maybe six months from now you'll have more data about how it's being seen online, maybe you'll have more feedback from people about what they think about it. You'll be able to see where It's sitting in the SERP and things like that. Then you can say, "Okay, now we can take that information and we can make this content better." Or we can take that information and go, "You know what we didn't need that content in the first place." But you have to start, but you need to take the feedback in order to improve. I think that when you're prioritizing, you should prioritize the thing that will get you to the next step. Mordy Oberstein: To the next step. That's exactly it. It is what gets you to the next step. I think that's a mistake people realize. You'll see people will talk about "I'm going to optimize," again, I'll go back to EEAT, "I'm going to optimize for EEAT," even somewhere like Lily Ray who's been doing this for years. You're looking at a cluster of content. You know what this needs to do to go from zero 100. You know the whole process. You've done it a million times before. You're an expert on that. You've got that. If you are an SEO that doesn't say focus on that, or you're a business owner or whoever you are, looking at it, "I'm going to optimize now for EEAT," it's like a one shot deal. It's not going to work. It's, "Okay, I've done this, the pose," I think we should talk about this podcast before "... and I've added X." Come back in three months from now, "You know what, X really wasn't enough. Now let's add Y." It's an ongoing process. SEO is an ongoing process. Looking at what will get me to the next step helps you do SEO the right way because it helps you say, "I'm going to do what I need to do to get to the next step, but I know that's not the last step." Crystal Carter: Right, because It's all rinse and repeat. I think that again, Maslow is good because if we think about the base of the pyramid, the sort of physiological technical leads in the case of a website, those things can change. As you grow, for instance, if you're a nine year old, you're a certain height, so you might need a step stool to reach the top of the cupboard or whatever. As you get older, you're going to get taller. You don't need the step stool, but you might need- Mordy Oberstein: You might need to climb. Just climb. You could be slither up a wall. Crystal Carter: These things will change. Similarly, I've started to wear glasses or whatever and I need those things. These are different things. Just like with your website. Your website doesn't exist in a vacuum, so there might be new SERP features that happen and then suddenly you have different technical needs for your website. It might be that suddenly your audience is way more mobile first and then you have different technical needs. Maybe there's an app that everybody's really, really into or maybe you've developed an app. That means that your website now has different technical needs and then that has knock on effect. So then you have to go back through all of the steps to make sure that they all align with each other. All of these things change. They're not set it and forget. It's like a person. Your website is grows, evolves and exists in an environment that is growing and evolving all of the time. Your priorities may very well change. It doesn't mean that you can't still have a North Star, say that if we talk about the self-actualization part where you really want to be, that can guide you, but how you get there might change a little bit. That's okay. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: And it's okay that it's not linear, either. You might say, "You know what, I really need a quick win right now. I am struggling. I need a quick win. This might not get me to the next level. It might not be part of my maturation process. But I know it's a quick way." That's fine too. Crystal Carter: I had a client and they had a website, and they did not have time for content. They did not. They were just like, "We don't have time for content. We don't have loads." They had been doing some Facebook stuff, so I was like, "Look, we have some stuff on Facebook. Let's take these Facebook posts, let's adapt them into blogs." Were they the best quality? I'm going, to be honest, they were not the best quality blogs, but this was a website that had no blog and had not posted any blogs ever or hadn't posted any blogs in sort of a year. We took these sorts of mid-level posts that had some information and we added them to the blog. Why? Because we wanted to be able to show the client that with this level of effort we can get this much. And then you can get a proof of concept and they can say, "Oh okay, so that blog that we all know was kind of okay, whatever got this much. What happens if we actually did a good blog on top of that?" Our goal was to get going. I just needed to get some content on there to get going. The goal was to get going. The goal wasn't to set the world on fire and make amazing, amazing, beautiful... The goal was to just get going. We got going and then they were like, "Okay, yeah, I can see the benefit of this," and helped with their self-esteem, their esteem. That meant that we could get investment and buy-in on doing something really good. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, 100%. It's a little bit messy. It's not like a linear kind of thing. It's a little bit messy. There's also resources to consider. Whether you have the resource, whether you don't have the resources, that's going to factor in. You might have a great projection plan maturation process for your website, but it'd be realistic with what you can and what you can't do. You might have to give up on certain things and that's normal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's normal. It's normal. I'll tell you right now, there's going to be certain benefits to doing things at whatever stage you're at. The important thing is to be aware of the impact and the important thing is to understand what you expect to come out of it so that it can help you to reach next goal and set your priorities based on that. If you're seeing that actually we did some blog and we saw no benefit of any kind and you go, "Okay, maybe this isn't what we need to do right now. Maybe we should invest in something else." If you see the blog and you see some benefit, for instance you're seeing that actually we're being crawled better. Actually, we have more internal links now. Actually, we're seeing some ranking that's happening out of this. Then yeah, that's good. That's a good sign and maybe they should be moved up the priority list for your overall activity. I think It's just important to think about what works for you and in terms of priorities, what will get you to the next step. Joe Hall, I talk about Joe Hall a lot, but he was talking a lot about MozCon last year about priorities and how he'd done this big audit for some folks. He was like, "Oh, we should do this, this and this." And he thought again about it, he was like "Actually, looking at what they need to do, I'm not sure this is the best course of action for them based on what would work best for them and what would..." Because I think sometimes people will do their go-to moves. You'll be like, "Oh, I always do this for everyone. This always works." And sometimes it does, but sometimes it's not always the best fit for them because of all of their other needs and all of their other priorities. So make sure that it aligns with the full flow of who the website is or what the website is at that time and what will get them to where they need to go. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of resources and how you work, and how you prioritize, where you work or who you work for can also impact how you prioritize SEO tasks. Specifically, if you're on the agency side and you're part of a large organizational, wider SEO team or digital marketing team, then you might prioritize SEO tasks in a certain way. If you're a consultant or a freelancer, well you might look at the same client and prioritize differently because based upon how you work. Because of that, we asked the CEO of Uproer, an SEO agency out of Minnesota, Griffin Roer, and Nick LeRoy, famed SEO consultant and a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board, how prioritizing your work as an SEO agency differs for prioritizing your work as a freelancer. So same task, same things, but from a different point of view. Here's Griffin and here's Nick together. Nick LeRoy: I know my skill sets. I know what I consider myself good at. I know where I struggle. And it's kind of more of a litmus test of check, check, check. But I also have that layer of does this make me excited? Do I enjoy it? That will go into again, how I set priorities in accepting a client or working, or even trying to pitch something. I know Griffin, you and I are the same. We're not really big into RFPs or having to truly sell ourselves. We would prefer to take a solid referral with kind of a baseline of trust. I think that kind of goes into my priorities as well. It's like if I have to put a lot of effort into trying to secure somewhere versus already being able to establish some trust on day one, that goes a long way on my end. Griffin Roer: There's definitely a difference there because you can look at a project and be like, "Do I have the time and interest to do this?" You can look at a project that is not super exciting and not super maybe challenging or whatever and just be like, "Well, I got some time and I can bang this one out. I'm not going to necessarily love this project, but it's going to help pay the bills." I can make that decision on behalf of myself. Whereas- Nick LeRoy: And price it at a level that will make it exciting. Griffin Roer: Yeah, exactly. I think one consideration on the agency side is I've got to be considerate of peoples' career development, and that might mean projects that I myself might be willing to take on and do and just gut out and be like, "All right, this is just going to help the bottom line." Or just as a freelancer maybe you're like, "Hey, if I do this project, I can get a new set of wheels for my car or something like that," you're kind of equating it to some reward. For me, if I'm going to put a project on somebody's plate, ideally It's going to align with their career progression and it's going to represent the next challenge, the thing they want to take on. If it's something that's going to be more like a step backwards, that makes it harder for us to accept that project. Even if it'd be a nice payday or even if it'd be just something to pad the business a little bit, I think there are some considerations there around career development because I think if an agency were to just take on kind of just un-challenging uninteresting projects all the time that just brought in cash, but didn't really push people, I don't think that agency is going to be really successful in retaining people. Nick LeRoy: Absolutely. Well Griffin, let me ask you a question here. I think building off of what we were just saying as a freelancer, I have the luxury of knowing this is short term. This is kind of a quick win. I schedule that work intentionally for that. It's like "Yeah, I want a new set of wheels. I want to take the kids on a vacation." But I'm being very intentional knowing that it's kind of like a one day payday. I suspect on the agency front you also have to be really cognizant of what type of short-term work you're taking on so that you don't necessarily lose out or have to turn down something that comes in that could be a multi-year or multi-channel engagement, which would obviously be your preferred client. Griffin Roer: Yeah, and obviously probably like you too, we're going to prioritize recurring business over project business any day of the week. There are those project opportunities that kind of come in and you do have to look at that against the overall pipeline and bandwidth of everybody that works at the agency to understand does this make sense? For myself being a leader at a small agency, I think it can be really tempting too for just myself to take on maybe the less than ideal projects, again just to help bring in some additional revenue and pad things and stuff like that. That can be counterproductive in and of itself because I'm expected to do a lot more than just assisting with client work and stuff like that. We've got sales and operations and hiring and just other things happening where my time is more valuable applied to those things versus- Nick LeRoy: Without a doubt. Griffin Roer: ... spending a couple of days working on a project that I was like, "Well this won't be really interesting for anything else, but It'll help the business from a revenue standpoint." I think That's a challenge probably that smaller agencies face moreso than bigger agencies, but it is a reality of trying to balance those competing interests and making sure that what I'm doing is not just in the best interest of myself but in the best interest of the agency at large, which represents 13 people at this point. Nick LeRoy: Absolutely, and I think you nailed on one of the most critical components when we're comparing small agency to freelancer. As a freelancer, I get to be very selfish. Everything is about me. I get to make the choices. All my choices impact me only. There's less risk in that aspect. Whereas when, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but as you had said 13 individuals that need to serve 13 meals every night, so you have to be very conscious of the type of work that you're taking, how do you prioritize it and even who works on what? Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you so much Nick and Griffin. Ironically, I approached them separately and I knew they both knew each other to answer this question like, "Hey, we'll just do a Zoom call together and we'll answer it together." It's an amazing conversation. There's actually a whole 30 minute piece that they did for them. We have to somehow repurpose it for something because it's amazing conversation that only we have listened to. We feel we need to share that somehow. But also, make sure you follow Griffin Roer. He's more on LinkedIn at @CGriffinRoerJr, a link to his LinkedIn account in the show notes. And follow Nick on Twitter @NickLeRoy, that's @ N-I-C-K-L-E-R-O-Y on Twitter. It is interesting, right? You think, okay, SEO is SEO, but You're going to be able to do different things, focus on different things, work in different ways, prioritize different things, all because of the way you work within your organization, at least on the SEO agency side, or the fact that you don't have an organization because you're a freelancer. It's fascinating to me. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that there is a lot of prioritization that has to do with the sort of ins and outs of an agency and working as a team because very often in an agency you are going to work in lots of different ways. So yeah, it's really interesting to hear the way that they discuss that and how you have to manage all of the bits and wheels and nuts and bolts of all of that. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot that goes into. It's the business side of it all, the billing and the client prioritization and all of that stuff is so different from just being let's say a consultant. Anyway, while we're talking about different situations and different circumstances that help dictate different SEO priorities, there are different things that different search engines prioritize within their results. With that, let's explore what the search engines of the world tend to prioritize differently as we go so many search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Let's take a look at Bing and Google, and let's take a look at how they handle different types of queries differently. Let's take entities to start. I always like looking at entities. I think they're a great way to dive into the mind of a search engine. I Googled, or one case Binged, a search bar is the word I'm looking for. I searched for John Lennon. I typed in John Lennon into Bing and I typed John Lennon into Google, and it's very different. Very, very different. For example, Bing tends for entities, like these kinds of entities and people, tries to push or tends to push the biographical information way harder than Google does. Google will show you, for example, when he was born, it'll give you some YouTube videos, a bunch of images, where you can listen to his music is above the fold. So Spotify and YouTube and Pandora. But Bing is pushing more the early years. It really gives you a great biographical breakdown of the different points of his life. It really tends to focus more on John Lennon as a person versus where Google is looking at it as here's an access or entry points to more various media about John Lennon. I thought that was interesting. Crystal Carter: I think that Google has been doing a lot particularly around the biographical entities here. It's been a very busy space in the last sort of year or so where they started adding- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they reformatted the whole knowledge panel thing. Crystal Carter: Right. They've added more of... It's more magazine sort of style. There's still the knowledge panel information, but for some people like Beyonce for instance, there's a lot more information around. They even have some quick answers. How old is this person? Or how tall is this person? Or things like that included in some of their search for this. I don't think that Bing has quite gone down that route for the biographical entity. Mordy Oberstein: No, not yet at least, or maybe they never will. Crystal Carter: Right. They have for a few other ones. There's a few sort of destination places where they'll pull things out. For instance, they used to have a SERP for a lion. If you look up what is a lion, you get a very interactive channel. It's got- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very cool. Crystal Carter: ... pictures from Wikipedia and a map and links within the knowledge panel within the knowledge panel content as well. I think that the overall goal for these things seems to be around just making sure that there's lots of content there. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It's very layered. I've seen this across all the entities. I looked at Aaron Judge, who's a baseball player. By the way, both Bing and Google, when you search for somebody who's in the news, will prioritize news content right away. Search for Aaron Judge. He's a baseball player. It's during baseball season. There's always news about him, and both Google and Bing prioritized news results right at the top. But again, Google kind of gives, like you're saying, kind of like a T-L-D-R. You want to get a real quick overview of who Aaron Judge is? Here. And go explore more. Here's access points to more. Whereas Bing again gives you a timeline of Aaron Judge. He was a rookie here in 2016. He did that in 2021. He did that. It's really trying to give you that layered approach of we want you to walk away really understanding who this person is. Which is ironic in my mind because a lot of SEOs give Google flack about, "Oh, you're taking away clicks to all its information," but Bing really gives you all of that information there. Whereas with Google, I really do have to click somewhere to explore more. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that Bing will very often add the information from other folks and they will reference it all together at the bottom. They'll reference all of it together. If you look up for instance, the Eiffel Tower, it has lots of facts about the Eiffel Tower and lots of information there. And It's clickable. It comes from somewhere, but it doesn't say it right next to it where it’s from. There's a bit of a balance of giving people lots of information but also making it more streamlined. I think that the entities around sort of multilayered entities are very interesting. So, something like the Eiffel Tower where you can buy tickets to the Eiffel Tower, where there's a Wikipedia page of the Eiffel Tower, and then there's also lots of historical things about the Eiffel Tower. There's a map and things like that. The entity management of that, then managing the knowledge panel I think for that is really interesting because there's so much in the knowledge panel for that. There's so much in the knowledge graph around something like the Eiffel Tower or even someone like Beyonce for instance. It's such a top level query to just enter something like Beyonce or Eiffel Tower or Aaron Judd that we need to have more there. So, it's kind of filtering as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's interesting because they don't always stick to that same paradigm. For example, if you were to search something about like, what did I search for? It's something to do with tires, like how to change a tire on the side of the road. Google just gives you the steps. Here's how you change a tire on the side of the road. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, right? And Bing gives you more context about tires, while it does give you those steps. Bing likes to give you that context. If I search for something like a song, best songs of the 1990s, Bing just gives me the bunch of videos. But Google has a whole carousel of little thumbnails of all the songs from the nineties, like Say My name or Torn. And if you click on the thumbnail, you get a carousel of results that give you more context about that song. They don't always follow the same paradigm. It's interesting to see just from a marketing perspective how Google and Bing both think about their audiences. In some cases Google thinks you know what you do want context and some cases they don't and sometimes those are the opposite cases of where Bing says you want context and Google says, no, you don't. Crystal Carter: I think It's also interesting that they're happy to get some of that context from people that are searching. We think about entities as being very much things and stuff like the Eiffel Tower, or Natalie Umbruglia song, or whatever it may be. But they also cover abstract things. If you look up something like courage, for instance, courage on Bing, there's a poll. There's a pole underneath that to get more context specifically from people. For instance, they're saying, "Which of the following do you think is the most important trait of a courageous person? A, fearlessness B, perseverance, C, self-discipline or decomp compassion." Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: What about E? Crystal Carter: What is E? What is E? Mordy Oberstein: I haven't thought about it yet. I have no pithy line. Crystal Carter: E is questioning the questions. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What about skepticism? Crystal Carter: Right. What about that? Mordy Oberstein: What about that? Crystal Carter: It's interesting. For instance, you see the same thing with films and stuff. It'll be like, you've just looked up the Barbie movie, what was your review of the Barbie movie. Barbie movie is also an interesting one because of branded entities, there's a potential option to sort of monetize that space or to change around that space. For instance, the Barbie movie, they changed the SERP, similarly with Wordle. So Wordle has a SERP that is dedicated to specifically to it. I don't know if the Barbie movie thing was paid for thing or if Google's just really into the Barbie movie. It's very interesting, that- Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting. They do that for the World Cup. They do that for the Olympics. They've done things like that for the Super Bowl. The day after the Super Bowl, you search who won the Super Bowl, the fireworks go off. Yeah, Google likes doing that stuff. I think that's Google's branding, "Hey, come here, we're fun." Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Exactly. So they know where those queries are going to be and they know where they can leverage that entity and leverage that sort of brand experience with that entity when It's related to a specific brand. Mordy Oberstein: Now another entity that We're quite fond of over here on the SERP's Up podcast is the entity of SEO News. I love news. I love SEO News. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Do you like shopping? Do you like Google? Do you like data? Do you like Barry Schwartz? Don't answer the last one. Then you'll like this per Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table, new Google Search Console shows Merchant Center visibility issues and changes. It's new. Google is now showing way more Merchant Center data and it is awesome and it is right inside of Google Search Console. Essentially, there are reports to help you see products that may have become ineligible for appearing in Google shopping. There's also a second part of the report that helps you get your listings more clicks and improve rankings so Google will actually tell you, "Hey, you should add return costs to the listing because that will get you more clicks." This is super important to Google and a super good move for them. Google needs to compete, wants to compete with Amazon. Obviously Amazon is the go-to place for e-commerce, shopping and listings and all that stuff. But by Google providing you with data such as this, it improves the chances that you'll be successful with Google shopping. The more success you have with Google shopping, the more Google can facilitate that success with Google shopping, the more you and people listing products on the internet will be invested in using Google Shopping and the more they can compete with Amazon. Very smart on Google's part. Have a look at the article in the show notes and you'll see a link in the article about how to activate the data. Also from Barry Schwartz, with a little help from a guy named Mordy, this time from Search Engine Land. How the August 2023 Google core update compared to March '23 core updates. The August 2023 core update finished after 16 days, which is a little bit longer than usual, on September 7th. And Barry, with the help of various tool providers dived into the impact of the update on rankings. I had the privilege of working with the Semrush data set to have a look at what the update provided in terms of rankings and it was unique. Usually, there's, a very, very demarcated spike increase in rank fluctuations meaning URLs moving up and down, changing positions all around the Google results pages. This time there wasn't that kind of spike. There was a prolonged period of really high and stably high, consistent that's the word I'm looking for, consistent rank fluctuations for a very long time. The initial spike actually occurred days before the update was officially announced. What to make of that is a great question for another time, but it was a definitely unique sort of rollout. Was the August 2023 core update more powerful and the March 2023 core update? Depends on how you slice it. Looking at peak rank volatility signals, it looks like the August 2023 update was more powerful. But you can't really look at that because rank volatility was already high coming into the update. If you look at what rank or how much rank volatility increased before the update versus during the update, it looks like the March update was perhaps more impactful. If you look at the average change in position, meaning how dramatic were the ranking changes, then the data shows that the August 2023 update was a little bit more impactful than the March 2023 core update. The point is slicing and dicing a core update and determining which one is more powerful is really complex. I have a whole post coming out on the SEMRush blog, so take a look for that when it comes out. I walk you through why analyzing these things are more complicated than it actually is using the August 2023 core update as an example. And that is this week's Snappy News. Always hard to prioritize which stories to cover in the SEO news each week on this podcast because It's snappy, so I can't cover them all. Crystal Carter: You have to prioritize which ones meet your needs. Mordy Oberstein: I try to prioritize which would meet our audience needs. Crystal Carter: Oh, see that's because you're so nice, Mordy. You're so nice and everyone appreciates you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you. The face I'm making now does not say thank you, but I'm saying thank you. You know who I do want to thank though, our Follower of the Week. She's a great friend and a great person, and I feel that we should shout her out loud and clear for everyone to follow over on social media. It is Shelley Walsh. She's the SEO Content Strategist over at Search Engine Journal, and you should follow her on Twitter. She's also on threads, I believe, @TheShelleyWalsh, that's T-H-E-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-W-A-L-S-H. Link to her profile on the show notes. She's a fantastic person, does a ton for the industry and she has a lot of SEO knowledge. She's an SEO OG. She actually has a series called SEO Pioneers, where you can watch the OGs of SEO talk about how SEO has changed over the last 100 years kind of thing. It does help you kind of prioritize based on what they're saying, what does work, what doesn't work, because what used to work doesn't work anymore kind of thing. I’ve heard that many, many times on this podcast. Shelley Walsh for SEO prioritization and it's a priority for you to follow her on Twitter. Crystal Carter: I cannot recommend it enough. She's a great follow. I followed her recently as well, and my life has been much, much better since. So yes, I highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: She's super sweet. She was at our Brighton SEO dinner back in the UK, when was that, April? April, right? Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. That seems so long ago. Always nice to see her at Brighton SEO. If you do go to Brighton SEO, look for Shelley. She's usually there, I think. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. It's great. It's great. Absolutely great follow. Shout out to Shelley, and shout out to everyone in the SEO Pioneers Group, Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller. Barry Schwartz. I think. If she hasn't had Barry, she should have Barry. We'll. Make that happen, Shelley. All right, well, 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 why even SEO pros need a refresher about SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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What skillsets make the perfect SEO team? Hard skills, soft skills, communication skills, etc.? What should you consider when making new SEO hires to build a solid SEO team for yourself? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein discuss what they look for when putting together the perfect SEO team. Plus, a very special guest as Google’s own John Mueller joins in to add his thoughts on the traits that make up a strong SEO team. Come join us as we help you put together an all-star SEO squad on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Building your SEO team, the right way What skillsets make the perfect SEO team? Hard skills, soft skills, communication skills, etc.? What should you consider when making new SEO hires to build a solid SEO team for yourself? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein discuss what they look for when putting together the perfect SEO team. Plus, a very special guest as Google’s own John Mueller joins in to add his thoughts on the traits that make up a strong SEO team. Come join us as we help you put together an all-star SEO squad on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 31 | March 29, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:59 This week’s guests John Mueller John is a Search Advocate at Google in Switzerland. He connects the world that's creating websites, with the Google-internal world of search engineering. He works with almost all teams on the search side, helping to make life easier for those making websites. He does not have a SEO team. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazingly fabulously, oh no, don't put pineapple on my pizza, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Thank you so much and thank you for reminding the world that pineapple on pizza is literally the worst thing that's ever happened to pizza, and also to mankind. It's like it's a terrible thing that I don't know who decided that was something. Mordy Oberstein: The plague, pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: Pineapple on pizza. It's worse. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: It's worse. I think that, yeah, it's awful. Mordy Oberstein: We were recently together at the Wix offices and- Crystal Carter: We were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, biyearly occurrence. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's something like that, and I wanted to bring you a can of pineapple so you can put it on your pizza. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that wouldn't happen. I would eat the pineapple separately. Pineapple's fine on its own, it's fine on its own. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple's delicious. Crystal Carter: It's that the two don't need to go together. I don't know. Me and skateboard. I don't need to skateboard. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce. Crystal Carter: Hot sauce is good. I would even have hot sauce on pizza. I'll tell you that. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce pizza's amazing. Crystal Carter: Right. This is good. I like broccoli on pizza. I don't mind- Mordy Oberstein: Also good. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? Because broccoli and cheese, that's a solid combination. You can have broccoli and cheese. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Cheese goes with everything. Maybe peanut butter and cheese would be a little weird. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I can see that, but nobody puts pineapple in pasta. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you could totally make a sauce that has pineapple and put it in your pasta. Pasta is like paper, it goes with everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but with garlic and basil and pineapple, it wouldn't. It's not a thing. It's fine. No one's going to convince me. People are like, "Oh, I'll-" You will not. No one will convince me. Mordy Oberstein: My subjective reality is greater than your subjective reality. Crystal Carter: I'm just saying like, no one's going to convince me that pineapple on pizza is ever a good idea. It's not. It's just not. I tried it. It's not that I have a closed mind, it's that I have an informed opinion. These are different things. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple and yogurt. Would you eat pineapple and yogurt? Crystal Carter: I have. It wasn't an enjoyable flavor sensation. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I'll throw one last curveball at you. I enjoy pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie? Mordy Oberstein: Pie. Yes. I was a kid growing a combination pie. It was a third blueberry, a third cherry and a third pineapple. The best slice was the part where the pineapple was connected to the cherry half. Crystal Carter: This- Mordy Oberstein: It's the New York thing. Crystal Carter: I'm not even sure if I know how to respond to that. It's- Mordy Oberstein: Blasphemous? Crystal Carter: It's something that I did not know existed, and so my brain is trying to take in a lot of new information right now. Mordy Oberstein: I have completely blown your mind with pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Basically. I am literally speechless about this particular topic, which is perfect for a podcast to leave your co-host literally speechless. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Let's just put it right out of that, where you can leave notes for your clients and even tag team members within the Wix blog. Nifty little feature not many know about, but if you have multiple hands, say optimizing a client's blog, it comes in handy, which is topical because today we're talking about how to build a strong SEO team with notes in your blog. That's how you do it. Crystal Carter: You can also bribe them with snacks that don't include pineapple pizza. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple pie would be fine. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie. It's really important to know your audience and to connect with your team in lots of different ways, including notes and including collaborative documents and other things. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, because today we're talking about what you want to consider when constructing your own megazord of SEOs to unite in the form of an ultimate SEO team. Power Rangers reference. They all climbed together to make one big robot thing. If you're not a fan, which I wasn't, but that's where I went. Crystal Carter: Go, go, go Power Rangers. Not pirate Rangers, Power Rangers. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, pirate rangers. That's interesting. Anyway, we're diving into specialists or generalists, whom should you hire? Spoiler alert. It depends. Don't forget the softer side of soft skills. Why you should not undervalue the SEO who knows how to communicate well, and doers and thinkers, why a good SEO team has a balance of both. Plus a very special and most honorable guest from the depth of the internet will stop by to share his thoughts on the traits of a strong SEO team. That person, by the way, drum roll please, is John Mueller. John Mueller is here to take us through a metaphysical journey towards SEO team strength. We'll also dive into Google's Looker to see how data centralization can help strengthen your SEO team. Of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Team up because episode number 31 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking you on a digital team retreat. We're going digital camping. Crystal Carter: I feel like, are we going to play some digital laser tag or do you some digital team building? Mordy Oberstein: We play laser tag at our little team. Who won? Crystal Carter: Who won? Mordy Oberstein: I won. Crystal Carter: What? No, I mean yes, that's true. I mean, okay. Basically to the people of the internet, let me just let you know that Mordy Oberstein essentially found himself a little spot and just like- Mordy Oberstein: Just snipering, lasering from a little corner. Crystal Carter: I realized that there were about five minutes left and went and sat down and had a nice drink. That's what I did. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I guess George won because he was the most accurate, but I'm always a big believer that you miss all the shots you don't take. Crystal Carter: It's a prime example of one of the things that's really important when you're thinking about teams, is making sure you have complementary skills. There are ways that you can sort of, some person does one thing, another person does another thing, another person decides that that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: We've completed this task. I have team built and we're done. That's fine as well. Mordy Oberstein: We have strength in our team. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Laser tag is over. Crystal Carter: That's important. I think that these are things you got to think about when you're thinking about your team. Mordy Oberstein: You're just sorry you didn't win, that's all. Anyway. Getting a strong team together is very hard, which is why you need laser tag. I can very much tell you the struggle of finding the right people, finding quality people. In previous roles, it was a very focused pain point for me. It is very hard to find the right fit, the right person for the right job. It's almost impossible. I think we all know that problem. It's just really not easy to find talented people, and of course every niche has its own idiosyncrasies, and SEO is not different in any way, shape or form. There are a variety of things you want to consider when you're building a team from what your focus area is, the types of SEO that you are doing or that you focus on, the various types of tasks that you have that come into focus for you, that has to be done either on your team as an agency or your in-house team. Of course, there are all sorts of, dare I say, financial considerations to think about, like your budget and what can cause a conflict when bringing up SEO teams when that goes into hiring. From a budgetary point of view. I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck by the way, between hiring an employee they feel fits a certain task or whether... Try that again, I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck between hiring the employee they feel they need to hire from a task or work point of view and the employee they feel they need to hire from financial point of view, which we'll get into later. That's a major problem for agencies in particular. The point is building a strong SEO team is much more than a little bit complicated. It's a lot of complicated, and to me it hinges on those complexities and it's about bringing those complexities that we're going to talk about to the conscious level, which is literally what we're doing here. I feel like with this episode, I'm not saying anything novel. I'm just taking what's very latent and trying to bring it to the conscious level. Crystal Carter: I think also when we think about what an SEO team is, an SEO team can include people who work at the same company. Let's say you've got an in-house team for a brand, so the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the marketing executive for instance, they're part of the team. If you have an agency that helps you with your PPC or your SEO or your design or whatever, they are also part of your team and vice versa as well. Let's say you're a freelancer and you work with a few other freelancers on a regular basis, they're also part of your team. I think that how everyone works together and the tools that you use and the people that you choose to bring in the fold, these are all things, as you say, that you need to be conscious of. The more conscious you are of what you need from your team, the better you'll be able to perform. Mordy Oberstein: What makes that really hard though is that there are certain points where what you need and what you want and what you're able to do or able to hire are not the same thing. I don't have a good answer for that. This comes down, I think in SEO in particular, I think what made it hard is that SEO has become a little bit more specialized. That means that in theory, and that's what makes it hard for an in-house team or an agency, you would need to have more specialized people, which means more people on your team, which means more money going to salaries than in the past. Where you could hire a generalist back in the day when SEO, I'll say was in its infancy, but back in the day when SEO was a little bit more straightforward perhaps, for lack of a better word, you could have one person to do it all. That's not necessarily the case anymore, and now what do you do? Because now you need to hire two people, but you're not necessarily bringing in more money because of it. You're just doing better work. Crystal Carter: I think that this is something that comes down to, so I asked on Twitter, I asked, I got 113 votes about this sort of thing and I said, "What's the secret ingredient for a good SEO team?" 33% of people said complementary skills, like you're saying. You've got a technical SEO, you have a content SEO, you have an e-commerce SEO, you have a so-and-so. Another 33% said ability to manage change. Then the next option that I gave was clear leadership. Then 10% of people said other. I also had somebody sub-tweet me saying, "What about skills for the job?" I think a lot of people, I've heard a lot of agency teams and a lot of other people say that acumen is really important because a lot of times you can teach some of the more technical skills. You can teach someone how to optimize content. If somebody has a general grasp of how to work with language, you can teach them how to optimize content for search, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: I guess as somebody who's hired many people over the course of my various careers at this point, the thing I was always looking for was not whether or not... I knew for the most part whether or not the person's skills were kind of in the ballpark of what I was looking for from the paper that I got from them. What I didn't know was their personality. Were they somebody who could fit into the team? Were they somebody who had that sort of it factor who I knew would work out well? It's almost like, I'll give a bad sports analogy. In football, American football, there's a person called the quarterback and that person is the most important person. They hold the ball the most, they distribute the ball to the other people. They're the central figure on the team. There are many different types of quarterbacks. Some quarterbacks are really fast. Some quarterbacks can throw the ball really far. What the good teams do is they find someone who has a lot of talent, whether it be a good runner, whether it be somebody who's really smart, whether it be somebody who makes good decisions with that smartness. This example would be Tom Brady, that kind of quarterback. Whether somebody's got a huge arm/ they design the system around them. They know, this person has a lot of good skills and a lot of things to offer, so let me build the system around them. I've always felt that. Find somebody who is a good, they're a team player, they're really intelligent, they're really adaptable, they have all those, I don't know what you want to call them, not personality skills, but persona skills I guess, and fit them into a place in your organization where they can thrive. Crystal Carter: Right. In the Twitter discussion, Jamar Ramos, who has managed an agency, who's managed teams, who works with developing SEOs, he said, "Critical thinking and a desire to grow are really important." He says, "Everything else can be taught." Similarly, Daniel K. Cheung said something similar. He said, "Mutual respect, overlapping work ethic and a similar hunger for learning." These are the things that you can build around, that you can, if you've got somebody who, let's say your team is really good at working on a particular CMS, you can say, "We're really good at this. We can build around that." Let's say your team is really good at content and and you're like, "We can make knockout content." You're like, "Ooh. What we really need though is some help with somebody who can get into back links, who can get us back links for this great content." It's like, I'm throwing you the ball and you can catch it and you can take it someplace where we're going to win. I mean, I recently watched a documentary about, it's interesting you're talking about sports teams because when we were thinking about this, I was thinking about the Michael Jordan's Bulls. I was also thinking about the Showtime Lakers. I recently saw there's a TV show about the Showtime Lakers that's actually pretty good. Have you seen it? John C. Reilly? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: It's pretty good. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy show. Crystal Carter: I think Kareem and Magic are a classic example. They're very different players and they were both at very different points in their career when they were working together, but they complemented each other really well. Because Magic could get the ball anywhere, and Kareem had a shot that was undefendable. They worked really well together. I think that that's really useful in teams. It also means that you can learn from each other, and that was a prime example. There was one point where Magic took over from Kareem because Kareem was injured and they still won because they learned from each other. This is a really good thing that you see in teams and it builds trust in teams and it helps you do well. It means that you celebrate your wins, and that's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I love that point about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being very different kinds of players because you do need that on a team. You sometimes don't need the most brilliant strategist. Sometimes you need somebody who can organize things, take it and execute that really well. It's always good to have that really great strategy person we always kind of focus on, I feel like, but you also need that person who can do all of the things and execute all of the things. One is not better than the other one. You kind of need both. You need people who can really see the bigger picture, and then you need people who can do. Sometimes I feel like at agencies, or I maybe even broaden out, I think at companies we often don't value the doer to the extent that we should. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the implementation work can sometimes go to executives or juniors and stuff like that. I feel like I've had it before where I had a junior and they're like, "Oh, I'm just doing this thing over and over and over again." I'm like, "I did that." The work that you're doing is so valuable. It's so valuable and it's so important. I had an exec who was helping me with a bunch of reports or whatever and I was like, "Thank you, thank you so much." Also in that process of doing that thing 400 times or whatever it is, you learn so much about that process and you learn how to fine tune that process and you know how to be more efficient with that process. That can help the whole team. The person who's doing the reports, for instance, who's doing 45 reports a month or something like that, they're going to look at that and they're going to go, "Oh my God, why aren't we automating this?" Then the team will go, "What do you mean?" They'll go, "We could use this and we could automate this and we can save ourselves four hours a month or something, and then we could use that doing more for our clients." That is brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. I remember talking to Nick LeRoy about this. I don't know, a podcast I used to do or still do. He was saying, because Nick used to work at an agency and he was saying that one of the things that was hard for him at an agency was all the after hours stuff. He had a family, they lived far away, and he remembers valuing juniors who are new, let's say, and it wasn't their career. They would come at nine, they would leave at five, and that was just their thing. He remembers them not being valued by the particular agency where he was working, but to him as the top level strategist, he didn't need that person to feel like I got to be here at eight in the morning and be done at seven o'clock at night. He needed the person who didn't want it to be a career, who just wanted a job, who wanted to do and execute and write meta descriptions, update title. He needed somebody like that. Just because it's somebody who may not see SEO as a career, they're just doing, we'll call it grunt work for a really lack of a better word, because I don't want to put that down at all. Because I'm trying to say the absolute opposite. You need somebody like that a lot of the times at an agency. Crystal Carter: I do a lot of that stuff and I'll tell you what, I think there's times when you're like, oh, good, I did all this planning, I did all this sorting out, and now I'm going to go hard on the copy and paste. I'm going to put on some music, and I'm just going to get all these things that I spent all this time writing and spent all these time strategizing and spent all this time, whatever. I'm going to put it in the computer, like we were saying before. This is something that Joseph Silber was talking about this as well for things that he looks for in team members. An eagerness to test, learn, build, rinse, and repeat. Again, you test, you learn, you build, you do it again and that sort of thing. I think that also what you're talking about, somebody who's solid and stable and can deliver and will deliver the things that you need when you need them. Going back to the sports analogy, this is Steve Kerr in that one shot. Everybody's looking at Michael Jordan to be this, that and the other, and everybody knows Steve Kerr is like, he's a rock. He does what he does, but he's not super flashy. Michael Jordan's like, "I'm going to give you the ball." Steve's like, "I got you." Mordy Oberstein: He used to click his heels together when he shot. This weird little tick. Yeah, I only know that because I used to do the same thing. It's a weird thing that Steve Kerr did. Now we haven't even gotten into the soft skills side of what you need on SEO team because that is incredibly valuable, but we don't have to get to it because guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Mordy Oberstein: Guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Who's it, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: I already told you, John Mueller's here from the depths of the internet. We asked John what he thought goes into building a strong SEO team, and John sent back a prolific amount of information, which we're now going to explore together with John, but we're not actually together, but we're going to do it together. Here's John. John Mueller: Hey, it's me, John, coming to you from the depth of the internet. Hello. Is anyone listening? Oh, you are. Oops, sorry. Anyway, Crystal and Mordy asked me, what are the traits of a strong SEO team? I mean, they asked me and how should I know? I don't even have an SEO team per se. My team does do awesome things and the content does end up in search engines, and of course we kind of optimize one particular search engine. Does that count? I don't know. Anyway, apparently I should know because I once dropped a fun tweet on everyone saying, "Curiosity and persistence are the skills that SEO should have in 2023." I mean, it's a tweet. How serious can you take this? Anyway, I still kind of like that and I'll map this to a smaller team, which I guess isn't really realistic, but honestly, what is a team anyway? Are we talking about a hundred person organization? Come on, Mordy and Crystal, give me something to work with. Persistence, the one I mentioned there, is all about waiting and all about those nitty-gritty details that you have to track and get right. You could say it's kind of a code name for technical SEO. If you want to get anything done with SEO, you need to stay on top of all of those technical details. You need to dot the I's and cross all the T's. You need to track all the URLs, all the structured data and make sure you get all of the details right. It's possible that Google or some tool will alert you if you get it wrong, but it's also possible that these tools don't even realize what you're trying to do and then they can't alert you. You or your SEO team, if you will, you need to stay on top of all of these things. You need to find more details and track them. If you make changes, you need to be able to monitor them clearly over time without having to worry about unknown quirks thrown your way. Obviously in reality, nothing is ever so controlled. Especially with larger websites, there are a lot of dark corners which no frog has ever visited or documented, but still, the more you know, the more you can spot and the more you can check when you later see changes. Be persistent, be complete, have attention to detail, make your lists and check them twice. What also comes with this is kind of the willingness to dive deep into technical topics to figure out how things tick. One way to know what to be nitpicky about is to take things apart and see how they work. The cool part about SEO is that not everything is documented, but a lot of technical things can be worked out. Mordy Oberstein: I found it really interesting that the first thing that John wanted to talk about was the tech SEO side of it and how he did, when John put out that tweet that persistence is part of a building a strong SEO team, I did not take him to mean that they're diving into the technical part of the SEO side of things, but it does make sense where you're trying to dig in to see what's actually going on with the website and then testing things in order to understand what does or what doesn't move the needle. Persistence does make sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think he talked about different tools and tracking changes and things like that, and absolutely one of the things that is really important, particularly with tech SEO, is that you've got a lot of eyes on the ground when there are new rollouts and things like that. The tools that people use in order to facilitate technical SEO changes, track, monitor, optimize technical SEO changes, will dictate how good and how effective your team is. A lot of people will be using Slack. A lot of people might be using GitHub. There's ways where you can track changes, and in some of those sort of code to playing things as well. There's lots of ways where you can think... People add annotations into their code, specifically into the code. If you download something, there's a README that tells you things like that. It's important to pay attention to which tools that you're using and make sure that they are enabling you in order to work well as a team, both technically and so that you've got a sort of paper trail. Because one of the things that happens a lot of times, particularly in tech stuff, is that your team might be, he talked about small teams and big teams. For instance, if there's a tech change on a website, a lot of times your team can be global, so your server team might be in another country on a different time zone. You might have people locally who are looking at things. You might have an SEO team who's doing something else. The tools that you have to communicate what you're doing is really important. If you can't communicate in real time, then that's the big challenge. I know people who are using Slack and then they'll have a bot that comes into Slack and then people will have a discussion about what they've seen in that. I was in a discussion the other day with some teams from the Wix SEO team who were talking about how they can work better with ContentKing and Conductor to monitor changes and things like that. Yeah, those things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: Now I told you that John was going to talk about the soft skills side of SEO and I am not a liar. He will, so let's get back to John as we start to dive less so on the technical side of the team and more on the softer side of the team. John Mueller: What's the best form of pagination for your site? What are the options even? How does it have any effect? How can you test the effect? From there, what are the things that you need to watch out for versus the things that some tool currently flags? You can test a lot of this and sometimes with your own sites, sometimes with a test site, sometimes with a random blog that you happen to run on the side. I mean, who doesn't have that? There are a lot of these details and systematically testing can lead you to figuring out a little bit more. With all of these trials, you need to figure out how strong the individual effects are. It might be that linking from the top or the bottom of the page for pagination has an effect, but it might also be that the effect is so tiny that it's not worth considering. This kind of leads into the whole discussion around prioritization. Then there's kind of the curiosity part from my tweet, which is more I'd say the creative part. Like I suggested, sometimes you need to take things apart to see how things work when it comes to SEO. This includes looking at old things that you newly discover and all of the new things that constantly pop up. How do they work? Do they work at all? Should I care about them? Should I care about them in the future at some point? All of these things aren't pieces of information that you can just look up when you need it. You kind of need to be curious and dig for it yourself. Maybe there's a new Sitemaps extension that just came out. What does that actually mean for me? It might mean a lot of things to the SEO community out there, but you're working on one specific site or one specific set of sites, and you kind of want to know what does this is actually have as an effect for me? There's also WebAssembly that came out a couple of years ago, and this is kind of in addition to JavaScript, a way to make an interactive website. I haven't seen any SEOs talk about WebAssembly. What does it mean for SEO? How can you figure this out? This is something that you can test, that you can try out. The same goes for the more fad type things. Well, I don't know if they're a fad, we'll see. Things like ChatGPT, where you kind of have to look at it and think about, well, what could this actually mean for us? Is this something that we have to plan for? Is this something we have to do something urgently for, or is this something where maybe it's worthwhile to just wait and see? To see how things settle down and then try things out and see where that fits in. Without digging into any of these details, you'll never know. It's trivial to keep chasing squirrels all day without making a move. You kind of need to figure out what it is that makes a lot of sense for your site and then be able to focus on that a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this is similar to what we were talking about before where you mentioned something that Jamar mentioned, Jamar Ramos, that you want somebody who's going to be persistent, who's going to be a critical thinker. All those sort of underlying skills or traits is kind of what you're looking for when constructing your team. Crystal Carter: I think, yeah. The curiosity element is really important. I've had someone intern for me, and she was completely new to doing SEO, to doing digital marketing and things like that, but she asked great questions. When somebody asks the question and you're like, yes, that is the question that you need to ask in order to do this well. I'm sorry I missed it, and I will come and I will explain to you in great detail because that is a fantastic question. I think that what he's talking about, that curiosity of trying to figure out if something works for you, trying to test it, trying to see what we can do, trying to explore, that's a really great tool for teams and a really great exercise for teams to be able to be creative together and to be able to try things together and to be able to understand new things together. Because in the digital space, things are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools, there's constantly new techniques, there's constantly new information. If you have a team that's able to explore these new things, new social media platforms or new tools like ChatGPT or other things, then that means that you can grow together well and create new things. I mean, Wix for instance, is very innovation focused, and Dayful, for instance, is something that came out of something that Wix people were building and working on and things. They were able to create something new from that. Similarly, we have a logo maker that's very similar as well. Those things are really great for your team, for your bottom line, and for keeping your team vibrant and active. Mordy Oberstein: Now let's get back to John one last time as we go into the actual communication side of the SEO team. John Mueller: The other part when it comes to SEO, especially when I think about an SEO team, is you need to be able to engage a broad audience internally. On the one hand, obviously you need to be able to tweet in ways that drive a lot of engagement in ways that makes people face palm publicly so they're like, "Oh God, look what this person wrote and let me link to their tweets while I discuss it." I think the more important part is actually that you're able to engage internally. It starts with maybe the marketing team who can give you a heads-up on what is about to happen or about the target audience, or just generally maybe they're the ones that tell you what to do actually. Then there's the developers who actually make the websites that you work on. This includes everyone from someone who's creating some HTML, who's maybe installing WordPress, who is configuring a CDN for the whole website. All of these technical aspects there, you need to be able to talk with them. Then of course, there are the people who make the decisions, who decide when you get money or when you don't get money. All of the managers internally that kind of want to know what it is that you've been working on and they want to see kind of the effects that you've had on the website, or they want to know from you what are the trends, what is happening on the web that they should be watching out for. Maybe you want to go to them and say, "Well, actually we need to create a new VR based website, and this is why." All of these things are things that you need to be able to package up in a way that your management chain will be able to understand. In short, I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Thank you, John. If you're not following John Mueller on Twitter, you most definitely should be following John Mueller on Twitter. He is also on LinkedIn and Mastadon as well. Crystal's nodding her head, like don't forget that part, Mordy. I did not. On Twitter, it's @JohnMU. So @-J-O-H-N-M-U. Mastadon, I don't remember, I'll be honest. On LinkedIn, you just look for John Mueller, Google. Crystal Carter: On his Twitter, he tells you where his Mastadon is. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there we go. Perfect. Of course, we'll link to all of John's profiles, his many profiles, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I think we need to say, thank you, John, for putting up with the entire SEO industry and all that you do for the industry. You have an extreme amount of patience, insights, and virtue. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, John, and thank you for those fantastic insights. Brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking about building a strong SEO team and speaking about Google, because again, John is a search advocate at Google, there are a lot of tools that help your team collaborate and remain strong. You can call them SEO team building tools. One of these tools is Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio. Join us now for a special tool time as we have a look at Looker. Looker, the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a very lovely tool if you would like to collaborate with data across your entire team. In fact, you can custom create all sorts of data and segments and reports to speak to various types of team members doing various different things, even beyond, dare I say, just SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fantastic. The other thing that I think is great about Looker Studio is that it also allows you to collaborate with other people that you've never even met. Some of my favorite Data Studio, Looker Studio tools have actually come from other people. Christina [inaudible 00:32:50], she had a fantastic reporting tool that I've used regularly. Also the crux, there's a crux tool that allows you to sort of track, so like HTTP archive has their core vitals technology report that is publicly available and you can see core vitals report reports from all over the world, filtered down to all different things. It allows you to create collaborative documents that you can customize yourself and that you can share with others, and it helps the web overall. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically taking data that would be behind a wall and putting it out there for the public to see. The Crux data is a great example of that. You're showing core web vitals data, and everyone has the link to that dashboard, and now look at that. You can segment all sorts of things. It lets you manipulate the data. For example, you could take Google Search Console data and turn into trends data. If running through a whole table or a whole spreadsheet is not on your team's radar, or the person that you're sharing it with on your team, it's not their jam, you could turn a lot of that data into trends data. Unless you manipulate data, unless you connect multiple sources, so you connect search console, Google Analytics, or even your SEMRush data, or any other million other source of data points into the reports. You can create internal reports, even external reports that speak to whoever it is that you're trying to target with the data. Again, another great point of it is that there's a lot of templates already out there that you don't have to do anything. People have created for you and you just plug in your data source. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They have some templates that exist in the first space, or some templates that just exist that are already in the tool section. You can also, there are people who will share with you. I'm looking at, Lazarina Stoy has a fantastic Google search console URL inspection API dashboard. She has a few different dashboards on her website. She's a contributor to the Wix SEO hub. Shout out to Lazarina. Her dashboard that she made is really useful. I'm sure that lots of other SEOs share them as well. Looking at how other people are configuring their dashboards can be really useful to help you understand both the kinds of data that you could be reporting, but also some of the functionalities of some the sort of data sets that we have. We have a lot. You get information from Google Search Console. You're getting information from GA4, you're getting information from other... From YouTube you can also connect really easily. If you're looking at other people's reports, it can help you make sense of that. I mentioned Christina earlier, and Christina had a really great GA4 dashboard that she shared. Having a look at her GA4 dashboard helped me to better understand GA4 because of the parameters that she was using. Mordy Oberstein: Literally same here on that. Crystal Carter: Right. I think she was showing page view or page path. She was showing page path, and I was like, oh, okay, so I understand that. That's the equivalent of this and that makes sense of that and da, da, da. These are really useful. It's also great for creating customer reports. If push comes to shove, if you've got some manual data that's in a data silo somewhere, and I don't know, how many people are walking through a door at your cafe or something like that. Let's say there's a little ticker and somebody has to go and look at the little thing and see what it says. If you've got something manual like that, you can connect it to Google Sheets for instance. You can still present it in a really accessible way via a Google Looker studio, but it can still work with your manual data. Let's say you've had to export some data from something that doesn't exist anymore, like say Universal Analytics come this autumn. Let's say you've got some old data from somewhere, you can add that into a Google Sheet and you can use it as a benchmark and present it how you need to do it as well. It's a fantastic tool. It's amazing that it's free and it's really worth learning. It can be a little bit of a learning curve getting used to it, but as I say, there's a lot of templates that you can start with and all of the templates are fully customizable. If you're not using Looker Studio, I highly recommend that you start with something simple and build on it. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely dive into it. From what you heard here, sounds a little bit interesting, also a little bit confusing. We're basically telling you what a nutshell is. Dive into Google Looker. I'm calling it Data Studio, Google Looker, have a look around and see what's there. I would be remiss, by the way, if we didn't mention that Daniel Waisberg, also a search advocate over at Google, not as great as John, but another wonderful search advocate over at Google, has some really cool Google search console templates that he built. Scatter plots inside of Looker that you can access and plug in your own data for. We'll try to link to all of these different templates in the show notes. Now, if Google Looker was new to you, you know what else might be new to you? Crystal Carter: What might be new to you? Mordy Oberstein: Is this new? The actual news. Crystal Carter: The actual news. Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thought? Who would've thought it would've been new? Crystal Carter: There's so many surprises today. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like there's a Barry Schwartz reference in every single podcast episode that we do. As well there should be, by the way. As well there should be, considering, by the way, that most of the articles we cover in the news are from Barry Schwartz. Barry this week, who knows? As we get into the snappy news. We're back, and before we go, we have one more little surprise for you. It's not a surprise, we do it every week. It's who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. This week, since we're going all Google all episode, we have Lizzi Sassman. Crystal Carter: Lizzi's fantastic. I met her at the Women in Tech SEO Festival in London, and also Cherry from her team as well. They're just fantastic. I'm a big fan of Lizzi on the Search Off The Record podcast as well, and also a big fan of her crochet skills. I had a great chat with her about crochet because I also do a little bit of crochet myself. I'm not as talented as Lizzi is, but it's great to have her on the team. If you're going to follow any other podcasts about search, it should absolutely be Search Off The Record. She's fantastic on it and shares some really great information in some new ways. Mordy Oberstein: She's one of these people who you can reach out to, have a conversation with out there on the social media space, whether it's Twitter or Mastadon. For example, Glenn Gabe and I were having a conversation about how Wix handles favicons and what Google's guidelines say, and what Wix does. Does it align, does it not align to the guidelines? Glen actually asked Lizzi what the story was and she clarified it and they even updated the documentation based upon what she updated Glenn about. It's real information, it's serious information, and it's official information. Crystal Carter: We've been talking about soft skills and we've been talking about team dynamics and things, and I think that the team at Google, they are very good at having a sort of spread of people, and they're all very much committed to making sure that people understand information. The way that Lizzi talks about it, she very much nurtures the sort of documentation space and making sure that people find the documentation really accessible. They created a document that explained exactly what, and I spoke to her about this and said how great it was, how much I really liked it, how they explained exactly what the things are called on the SERP. SEOs give lots of things lots of fun names, indented results, and like, oh, we saw this carousel thingy, and Lizzi did an update where she was like, "No, this is what it's actually called everyone. This is what we call it." Mordy Oberstein: It's less fun that way, to be honest. Little less fun that way. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We'll make sure to link to Lizzi's social profile in the show notes and make sure you give her a follow and that'll do it. Crystal Carter: That's it, team. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: All right. Go on three. Mordy Oberstein: One, two, three, go team. Crystal Carter: That was terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was good. Wow. Some team builder you are telling me it's terrible. I'm going to go sulk in a corner now. I though it was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Maybe we need another team building activity to re- Mordy Oberstein: How about laser tag again? No. Crystal Carter: How about pizza making without- Mordy Oberstein: Pizza making. I'll bring the pineapple. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. 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 gates, paywalls and exclusive content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning of 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 John Mueller Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Looker Google Search Console Bubble Chart Core Web Vitals Technology Report in Google Looker Lazarina Stoy Google Looker Resources Search Off the Record News: Bing Chat Image Creator Now Working Google Bard: Everything You Need To Know Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Tremors & Fluctuations Continue Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein John Mueller Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Looker Google Search Console Bubble Chart Core Web Vitals Technology Report in Google Looker Lazarina Stoy Google Looker Resources Search Off the Record News: Bing Chat Image Creator Now Working Google Bard: Everything You Need To Know Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Tremors & Fluctuations Continue Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazingly fabulously, oh no, don't put pineapple on my pizza, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Thank you so much and thank you for reminding the world that pineapple on pizza is literally the worst thing that's ever happened to pizza, and also to mankind. It's like it's a terrible thing that I don't know who decided that was something. Mordy Oberstein: The plague, pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: Pineapple on pizza. It's worse. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: It's worse. I think that, yeah, it's awful. Mordy Oberstein: We were recently together at the Wix offices and- Crystal Carter: We were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, biyearly occurrence. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's something like that, and I wanted to bring you a can of pineapple so you can put it on your pizza. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that wouldn't happen. I would eat the pineapple separately. Pineapple's fine on its own, it's fine on its own. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple's delicious. Crystal Carter: It's that the two don't need to go together. I don't know. Me and skateboard. I don't need to skateboard. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce. Crystal Carter: Hot sauce is good. I would even have hot sauce on pizza. I'll tell you that. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce pizza's amazing. Crystal Carter: Right. This is good. I like broccoli on pizza. I don't mind- Mordy Oberstein: Also good. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? Because broccoli and cheese, that's a solid combination. You can have broccoli and cheese. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Cheese goes with everything. Maybe peanut butter and cheese would be a little weird. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I can see that, but nobody puts pineapple in pasta. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you could totally make a sauce that has pineapple and put it in your pasta. Pasta is like paper, it goes with everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but with garlic and basil and pineapple, it wouldn't. It's not a thing. It's fine. No one's going to convince me. People are like, "Oh, I'll-" You will not. No one will convince me. Mordy Oberstein: My subjective reality is greater than your subjective reality. Crystal Carter: I'm just saying like, no one's going to convince me that pineapple on pizza is ever a good idea. It's not. It's just not. I tried it. It's not that I have a closed mind, it's that I have an informed opinion. These are different things. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple and yogurt. Would you eat pineapple and yogurt? Crystal Carter: I have. It wasn't an enjoyable flavor sensation. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I'll throw one last curveball at you. I enjoy pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie? Mordy Oberstein: Pie. Yes. I was a kid growing a combination pie. It was a third blueberry, a third cherry and a third pineapple. The best slice was the part where the pineapple was connected to the cherry half. Crystal Carter: This- Mordy Oberstein: It's the New York thing. Crystal Carter: I'm not even sure if I know how to respond to that. It's- Mordy Oberstein: Blasphemous? Crystal Carter: It's something that I did not know existed, and so my brain is trying to take in a lot of new information right now. Mordy Oberstein: I have completely blown your mind with pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Basically. I am literally speechless about this particular topic, which is perfect for a podcast to leave your co-host literally speechless. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Let's just put it right out of that, where you can leave notes for your clients and even tag team members within the Wix blog. Nifty little feature not many know about, but if you have multiple hands, say optimizing a client's blog, it comes in handy, which is topical because today we're talking about how to build a strong SEO team with notes in your blog. That's how you do it. Crystal Carter: You can also bribe them with snacks that don't include pineapple pizza. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple pie would be fine. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie. It's really important to know your audience and to connect with your team in lots of different ways, including notes and including collaborative documents and other things. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, because today we're talking about what you want to consider when constructing your own megazord of SEOs to unite in the form of an ultimate SEO team. Power Rangers reference. They all climbed together to make one big robot thing. If you're not a fan, which I wasn't, but that's where I went. Crystal Carter: Go, go, go Power Rangers. Not pirate Rangers, Power Rangers. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, pirate rangers. That's interesting. Anyway, we're diving into specialists or generalists, whom should you hire? Spoiler alert. It depends. Don't forget the softer side of soft skills. Why you should not undervalue the SEO who knows how to communicate well, and doers and thinkers, why a good SEO team has a balance of both. Plus a very special and most honorable guest from the depth of the internet will stop by to share his thoughts on the traits of a strong SEO team. That person, by the way, drum roll please, is John Mueller. John Mueller is here to take us through a metaphysical journey towards SEO team strength. We'll also dive into Google's Looker to see how data centralization can help strengthen your SEO team. Of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Team up because episode number 31 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking you on a digital team retreat. We're going digital camping. Crystal Carter: I feel like, are we going to play some digital laser tag or do you some digital team building? Mordy Oberstein: We play laser tag at our little team. Who won? Crystal Carter: Who won? Mordy Oberstein: I won. Crystal Carter: What? No, I mean yes, that's true. I mean, okay. Basically to the people of the internet, let me just let you know that Mordy Oberstein essentially found himself a little spot and just like- Mordy Oberstein: Just snipering, lasering from a little corner. Crystal Carter: I realized that there were about five minutes left and went and sat down and had a nice drink. That's what I did. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I guess George won because he was the most accurate, but I'm always a big believer that you miss all the shots you don't take. Crystal Carter: It's a prime example of one of the things that's really important when you're thinking about teams, is making sure you have complementary skills. There are ways that you can sort of, some person does one thing, another person does another thing, another person decides that that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: We've completed this task. I have team built and we're done. That's fine as well. Mordy Oberstein: We have strength in our team. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Laser tag is over. Crystal Carter: That's important. I think that these are things you got to think about when you're thinking about your team. Mordy Oberstein: You're just sorry you didn't win, that's all. Anyway. Getting a strong team together is very hard, which is why you need laser tag. I can very much tell you the struggle of finding the right people, finding quality people. In previous roles, it was a very focused pain point for me. It is very hard to find the right fit, the right person for the right job. It's almost impossible. I think we all know that problem. It's just really not easy to find talented people, and of course every niche has its own idiosyncrasies, and SEO is not different in any way, shape or form. There are a variety of things you want to consider when you're building a team from what your focus area is, the types of SEO that you are doing or that you focus on, the various types of tasks that you have that come into focus for you, that has to be done either on your team as an agency or your in-house team. Of course, there are all sorts of, dare I say, financial considerations to think about, like your budget and what can cause a conflict when bringing up SEO teams when that goes into hiring. From a budgetary point of view. I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck by the way, between hiring an employee they feel fits a certain task or whether... Try that again, I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck between hiring the employee they feel they need to hire from a task or work point of view and the employee they feel they need to hire from financial point of view, which we'll get into later. That's a major problem for agencies in particular. The point is building a strong SEO team is much more than a little bit complicated. It's a lot of complicated, and to me it hinges on those complexities and it's about bringing those complexities that we're going to talk about to the conscious level, which is literally what we're doing here. I feel like with this episode, I'm not saying anything novel. I'm just taking what's very latent and trying to bring it to the conscious level. Crystal Carter: I think also when we think about what an SEO team is, an SEO team can include people who work at the same company. Let's say you've got an in-house team for a brand, so the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the marketing executive for instance, they're part of the team. If you have an agency that helps you with your PPC or your SEO or your design or whatever, they are also part of your team and vice versa as well. Let's say you're a freelancer and you work with a few other freelancers on a regular basis, they're also part of your team. I think that how everyone works together and the tools that you use and the people that you choose to bring in the fold, these are all things, as you say, that you need to be conscious of. The more conscious you are of what you need from your team, the better you'll be able to perform. Mordy Oberstein: What makes that really hard though is that there are certain points where what you need and what you want and what you're able to do or able to hire are not the same thing. I don't have a good answer for that. This comes down, I think in SEO in particular, I think what made it hard is that SEO has become a little bit more specialized. That means that in theory, and that's what makes it hard for an in-house team or an agency, you would need to have more specialized people, which means more people on your team, which means more money going to salaries than in the past. Where you could hire a generalist back in the day when SEO, I'll say was in its infancy, but back in the day when SEO was a little bit more straightforward perhaps, for lack of a better word, you could have one person to do it all. That's not necessarily the case anymore, and now what do you do? Because now you need to hire two people, but you're not necessarily bringing in more money because of it. You're just doing better work. Crystal Carter: I think that this is something that comes down to, so I asked on Twitter, I asked, I got 113 votes about this sort of thing and I said, "What's the secret ingredient for a good SEO team?" 33% of people said complementary skills, like you're saying. You've got a technical SEO, you have a content SEO, you have an e-commerce SEO, you have a so-and-so. Another 33% said ability to manage change. Then the next option that I gave was clear leadership. Then 10% of people said other. I also had somebody sub-tweet me saying, "What about skills for the job?" I think a lot of people, I've heard a lot of agency teams and a lot of other people say that acumen is really important because a lot of times you can teach some of the more technical skills. You can teach someone how to optimize content. If somebody has a general grasp of how to work with language, you can teach them how to optimize content for search, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: I guess as somebody who's hired many people over the course of my various careers at this point, the thing I was always looking for was not whether or not... I knew for the most part whether or not the person's skills were kind of in the ballpark of what I was looking for from the paper that I got from them. What I didn't know was their personality. Were they somebody who could fit into the team? Were they somebody who had that sort of it factor who I knew would work out well? It's almost like, I'll give a bad sports analogy. In football, American football, there's a person called the quarterback and that person is the most important person. They hold the ball the most, they distribute the ball to the other people. They're the central figure on the team. There are many different types of quarterbacks. Some quarterbacks are really fast. Some quarterbacks can throw the ball really far. What the good teams do is they find someone who has a lot of talent, whether it be a good runner, whether it be somebody who's really smart, whether it be somebody who makes good decisions with that smartness. This example would be Tom Brady, that kind of quarterback. Whether somebody's got a huge arm/ they design the system around them. They know, this person has a lot of good skills and a lot of things to offer, so let me build the system around them. I've always felt that. Find somebody who is a good, they're a team player, they're really intelligent, they're really adaptable, they have all those, I don't know what you want to call them, not personality skills, but persona skills I guess, and fit them into a place in your organization where they can thrive. Crystal Carter: Right. In the Twitter discussion, Jamar Ramos, who has managed an agency, who's managed teams, who works with developing SEOs, he said, "Critical thinking and a desire to grow are really important." He says, "Everything else can be taught." Similarly, Daniel K. Cheung said something similar. He said, "Mutual respect, overlapping work ethic and a similar hunger for learning." These are the things that you can build around, that you can, if you've got somebody who, let's say your team is really good at working on a particular CMS, you can say, "We're really good at this. We can build around that." Let's say your team is really good at content and and you're like, "We can make knockout content." You're like, "Ooh. What we really need though is some help with somebody who can get into back links, who can get us back links for this great content." It's like, I'm throwing you the ball and you can catch it and you can take it someplace where we're going to win. I mean, I recently watched a documentary about, it's interesting you're talking about sports teams because when we were thinking about this, I was thinking about the Michael Jordan's Bulls. I was also thinking about the Showtime Lakers. I recently saw there's a TV show about the Showtime Lakers that's actually pretty good. Have you seen it? John C. Reilly? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: It's pretty good. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy show. Crystal Carter: I think Kareem and Magic are a classic example. They're very different players and they were both at very different points in their career when they were working together, but they complemented each other really well. Because Magic could get the ball anywhere, and Kareem had a shot that was undefendable. They worked really well together. I think that that's really useful in teams. It also means that you can learn from each other, and that was a prime example. There was one point where Magic took over from Kareem because Kareem was injured and they still won because they learned from each other. This is a really good thing that you see in teams and it builds trust in teams and it helps you do well. It means that you celebrate your wins, and that's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I love that point about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being very different kinds of players because you do need that on a team. You sometimes don't need the most brilliant strategist. Sometimes you need somebody who can organize things, take it and execute that really well. It's always good to have that really great strategy person we always kind of focus on, I feel like, but you also need that person who can do all of the things and execute all of the things. One is not better than the other one. You kind of need both. You need people who can really see the bigger picture, and then you need people who can do. Sometimes I feel like at agencies, or I maybe even broaden out, I think at companies we often don't value the doer to the extent that we should. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the implementation work can sometimes go to executives or juniors and stuff like that. I feel like I've had it before where I had a junior and they're like, "Oh, I'm just doing this thing over and over and over again." I'm like, "I did that." The work that you're doing is so valuable. It's so valuable and it's so important. I had an exec who was helping me with a bunch of reports or whatever and I was like, "Thank you, thank you so much." Also in that process of doing that thing 400 times or whatever it is, you learn so much about that process and you learn how to fine tune that process and you know how to be more efficient with that process. That can help the whole team. The person who's doing the reports, for instance, who's doing 45 reports a month or something like that, they're going to look at that and they're going to go, "Oh my God, why aren't we automating this?" Then the team will go, "What do you mean?" They'll go, "We could use this and we could automate this and we can save ourselves four hours a month or something, and then we could use that doing more for our clients." That is brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. I remember talking to Nick LeRoy about this. I don't know, a podcast I used to do or still do. He was saying, because Nick used to work at an agency and he was saying that one of the things that was hard for him at an agency was all the after hours stuff. He had a family, they lived far away, and he remembers valuing juniors who are new, let's say, and it wasn't their career. They would come at nine, they would leave at five, and that was just their thing. He remembers them not being valued by the particular agency where he was working, but to him as the top level strategist, he didn't need that person to feel like I got to be here at eight in the morning and be done at seven o'clock at night. He needed the person who didn't want it to be a career, who just wanted a job, who wanted to do and execute and write meta descriptions, update title. He needed somebody like that. Just because it's somebody who may not see SEO as a career, they're just doing, we'll call it grunt work for a really lack of a better word, because I don't want to put that down at all. Because I'm trying to say the absolute opposite. You need somebody like that a lot of the times at an agency. Crystal Carter: I do a lot of that stuff and I'll tell you what, I think there's times when you're like, oh, good, I did all this planning, I did all this sorting out, and now I'm going to go hard on the copy and paste. I'm going to put on some music, and I'm just going to get all these things that I spent all this time writing and spent all these time strategizing and spent all this time, whatever. I'm going to put it in the computer, like we were saying before. This is something that Joseph Silber was talking about this as well for things that he looks for in team members. An eagerness to test, learn, build, rinse, and repeat. Again, you test, you learn, you build, you do it again and that sort of thing. I think that also what you're talking about, somebody who's solid and stable and can deliver and will deliver the things that you need when you need them. Going back to the sports analogy, this is Steve Kerr in that one shot. Everybody's looking at Michael Jordan to be this, that and the other, and everybody knows Steve Kerr is like, he's a rock. He does what he does, but he's not super flashy. Michael Jordan's like, "I'm going to give you the ball." Steve's like, "I got you." Mordy Oberstein: He used to click his heels together when he shot. This weird little tick. Yeah, I only know that because I used to do the same thing. It's a weird thing that Steve Kerr did. Now we haven't even gotten into the soft skills side of what you need on SEO team because that is incredibly valuable, but we don't have to get to it because guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Mordy Oberstein: Guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Who's it, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: I already told you, John Mueller's here from the depths of the internet. We asked John what he thought goes into building a strong SEO team, and John sent back a prolific amount of information, which we're now going to explore together with John, but we're not actually together, but we're going to do it together. Here's John. John Mueller: Hey, it's me, John, coming to you from the depth of the internet. Hello. Is anyone listening? Oh, you are. Oops, sorry. Anyway, Crystal and Mordy asked me, what are the traits of a strong SEO team? I mean, they asked me and how should I know? I don't even have an SEO team per se. My team does do awesome things and the content does end up in search engines, and of course we kind of optimize one particular search engine. Does that count? I don't know. Anyway, apparently I should know because I once dropped a fun tweet on everyone saying, "Curiosity and persistence are the skills that SEO should have in 2023." I mean, it's a tweet. How serious can you take this? Anyway, I still kind of like that and I'll map this to a smaller team, which I guess isn't really realistic, but honestly, what is a team anyway? Are we talking about a hundred person organization? Come on, Mordy and Crystal, give me something to work with. Persistence, the one I mentioned there, is all about waiting and all about those nitty-gritty details that you have to track and get right. You could say it's kind of a code name for technical SEO. If you want to get anything done with SEO, you need to stay on top of all of those technical details. You need to dot the I's and cross all the T's. You need to track all the URLs, all the structured data and make sure you get all of the details right. It's possible that Google or some tool will alert you if you get it wrong, but it's also possible that these tools don't even realize what you're trying to do and then they can't alert you. You or your SEO team, if you will, you need to stay on top of all of these things. You need to find more details and track them. If you make changes, you need to be able to monitor them clearly over time without having to worry about unknown quirks thrown your way. Obviously in reality, nothing is ever so controlled. Especially with larger websites, there are a lot of dark corners which no frog has ever visited or documented, but still, the more you know, the more you can spot and the more you can check when you later see changes. Be persistent, be complete, have attention to detail, make your lists and check them twice. What also comes with this is kind of the willingness to dive deep into technical topics to figure out how things tick. One way to know what to be nitpicky about is to take things apart and see how they work. The cool part about SEO is that not everything is documented, but a lot of technical things can be worked out. Mordy Oberstein: I found it really interesting that the first thing that John wanted to talk about was the tech SEO side of it and how he did, when John put out that tweet that persistence is part of a building a strong SEO team, I did not take him to mean that they're diving into the technical part of the SEO side of things, but it does make sense where you're trying to dig in to see what's actually going on with the website and then testing things in order to understand what does or what doesn't move the needle. Persistence does make sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think he talked about different tools and tracking changes and things like that, and absolutely one of the things that is really important, particularly with tech SEO, is that you've got a lot of eyes on the ground when there are new rollouts and things like that. The tools that people use in order to facilitate technical SEO changes, track, monitor, optimize technical SEO changes, will dictate how good and how effective your team is. A lot of people will be using Slack. A lot of people might be using GitHub. There's ways where you can track changes, and in some of those sort of code to playing things as well. There's lots of ways where you can think... People add annotations into their code, specifically into the code. If you download something, there's a README that tells you things like that. It's important to pay attention to which tools that you're using and make sure that they are enabling you in order to work well as a team, both technically and so that you've got a sort of paper trail. Because one of the things that happens a lot of times, particularly in tech stuff, is that your team might be, he talked about small teams and big teams. For instance, if there's a tech change on a website, a lot of times your team can be global, so your server team might be in another country on a different time zone. You might have people locally who are looking at things. You might have an SEO team who's doing something else. The tools that you have to communicate what you're doing is really important. If you can't communicate in real time, then that's the big challenge. I know people who are using Slack and then they'll have a bot that comes into Slack and then people will have a discussion about what they've seen in that. I was in a discussion the other day with some teams from the Wix SEO team who were talking about how they can work better with ContentKing and Conductor to monitor changes and things like that. Yeah, those things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: Now I told you that John was going to talk about the soft skills side of SEO and I am not a liar. He will, so let's get back to John as we start to dive less so on the technical side of the team and more on the softer side of the team. John Mueller: What's the best form of pagination for your site? What are the options even? How does it have any effect? How can you test the effect? From there, what are the things that you need to watch out for versus the things that some tool currently flags? You can test a lot of this and sometimes with your own sites, sometimes with a test site, sometimes with a random blog that you happen to run on the side. I mean, who doesn't have that? There are a lot of these details and systematically testing can lead you to figuring out a little bit more. With all of these trials, you need to figure out how strong the individual effects are. It might be that linking from the top or the bottom of the page for pagination has an effect, but it might also be that the effect is so tiny that it's not worth considering. This kind of leads into the whole discussion around prioritization. Then there's kind of the curiosity part from my tweet, which is more I'd say the creative part. Like I suggested, sometimes you need to take things apart to see how things work when it comes to SEO. This includes looking at old things that you newly discover and all of the new things that constantly pop up. How do they work? Do they work at all? Should I care about them? Should I care about them in the future at some point? All of these things aren't pieces of information that you can just look up when you need it. You kind of need to be curious and dig for it yourself. Maybe there's a new Sitemaps extension that just came out. What does that actually mean for me? It might mean a lot of things to the SEO community out there, but you're working on one specific site or one specific set of sites, and you kind of want to know what does this is actually have as an effect for me? There's also WebAssembly that came out a couple of years ago, and this is kind of in addition to JavaScript, a way to make an interactive website. I haven't seen any SEOs talk about WebAssembly. What does it mean for SEO? How can you figure this out? This is something that you can test, that you can try out. The same goes for the more fad type things. Well, I don't know if they're a fad, we'll see. Things like ChatGPT, where you kind of have to look at it and think about, well, what could this actually mean for us? Is this something that we have to plan for? Is this something we have to do something urgently for, or is this something where maybe it's worthwhile to just wait and see? To see how things settle down and then try things out and see where that fits in. Without digging into any of these details, you'll never know. It's trivial to keep chasing squirrels all day without making a move. You kind of need to figure out what it is that makes a lot of sense for your site and then be able to focus on that a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this is similar to what we were talking about before where you mentioned something that Jamar mentioned, Jamar Ramos, that you want somebody who's going to be persistent, who's going to be a critical thinker. All those sort of underlying skills or traits is kind of what you're looking for when constructing your team. Crystal Carter: I think, yeah. The curiosity element is really important. I've had someone intern for me, and she was completely new to doing SEO, to doing digital marketing and things like that, but she asked great questions. When somebody asks the question and you're like, yes, that is the question that you need to ask in order to do this well. I'm sorry I missed it, and I will come and I will explain to you in great detail because that is a fantastic question. I think that what he's talking about, that curiosity of trying to figure out if something works for you, trying to test it, trying to see what we can do, trying to explore, that's a really great tool for teams and a really great exercise for teams to be able to be creative together and to be able to try things together and to be able to understand new things together. Because in the digital space, things are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools, there's constantly new techniques, there's constantly new information. If you have a team that's able to explore these new things, new social media platforms or new tools like ChatGPT or other things, then that means that you can grow together well and create new things. I mean, Wix for instance, is very innovation focused, and Dayful, for instance, is something that came out of something that Wix people were building and working on and things. They were able to create something new from that. Similarly, we have a logo maker that's very similar as well. Those things are really great for your team, for your bottom line, and for keeping your team vibrant and active. Mordy Oberstein: Now let's get back to John one last time as we go into the actual communication side of the SEO team. John Mueller: The other part when it comes to SEO, especially when I think about an SEO team, is you need to be able to engage a broad audience internally. On the one hand, obviously you need to be able to tweet in ways that drive a lot of engagement in ways that makes people face palm publicly so they're like, "Oh God, look what this person wrote and let me link to their tweets while I discuss it." I think the more important part is actually that you're able to engage internally. It starts with maybe the marketing team who can give you a heads-up on what is about to happen or about the target audience, or just generally maybe they're the ones that tell you what to do actually. Then there's the developers who actually make the websites that you work on. This includes everyone from someone who's creating some HTML, who's maybe installing WordPress, who is configuring a CDN for the whole website. All of these technical aspects there, you need to be able to talk with them. Then of course, there are the people who make the decisions, who decide when you get money or when you don't get money. All of the managers internally that kind of want to know what it is that you've been working on and they want to see kind of the effects that you've had on the website, or they want to know from you what are the trends, what is happening on the web that they should be watching out for. Maybe you want to go to them and say, "Well, actually we need to create a new VR based website, and this is why." All of these things are things that you need to be able to package up in a way that your management chain will be able to understand. In short, I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Thank you, John. If you're not following John Mueller on Twitter, you most definitely should be following John Mueller on Twitter. He is also on LinkedIn and Mastadon as well. Crystal's nodding her head, like don't forget that part, Mordy. I did not. On Twitter, it's @JohnMU. So @-J-O-H-N-M-U. Mastadon, I don't remember, I'll be honest. On LinkedIn, you just look for John Mueller, Google. Crystal Carter: On his Twitter, he tells you where his Mastadon is. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there we go. Perfect. Of course, we'll link to all of John's profiles, his many profiles, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I think we need to say, thank you, John, for putting up with the entire SEO industry and all that you do for the industry. You have an extreme amount of patience, insights, and virtue. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, John, and thank you for those fantastic insights. Brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking about building a strong SEO team and speaking about Google, because again, John is a search advocate at Google, there are a lot of tools that help your team collaborate and remain strong. You can call them SEO team building tools. One of these tools is Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio. Join us now for a special tool time as we have a look at Looker. Looker, the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a very lovely tool if you would like to collaborate with data across your entire team. In fact, you can custom create all sorts of data and segments and reports to speak to various types of team members doing various different things, even beyond, dare I say, just SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fantastic. The other thing that I think is great about Looker Studio is that it also allows you to collaborate with other people that you've never even met. Some of my favorite Data Studio, Looker Studio tools have actually come from other people. Christina [inaudible 00:32:50], she had a fantastic reporting tool that I've used regularly. Also the crux, there's a crux tool that allows you to sort of track, so like HTTP archive has their core vitals technology report that is publicly available and you can see core vitals report reports from all over the world, filtered down to all different things. It allows you to create collaborative documents that you can customize yourself and that you can share with others, and it helps the web overall. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically taking data that would be behind a wall and putting it out there for the public to see. The Crux data is a great example of that. You're showing core web vitals data, and everyone has the link to that dashboard, and now look at that. You can segment all sorts of things. It lets you manipulate the data. For example, you could take Google Search Console data and turn into trends data. If running through a whole table or a whole spreadsheet is not on your team's radar, or the person that you're sharing it with on your team, it's not their jam, you could turn a lot of that data into trends data. Unless you manipulate data, unless you connect multiple sources, so you connect search console, Google Analytics, or even your SEMRush data, or any other million other source of data points into the reports. You can create internal reports, even external reports that speak to whoever it is that you're trying to target with the data. Again, another great point of it is that there's a lot of templates already out there that you don't have to do anything. People have created for you and you just plug in your data source. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They have some templates that exist in the first space, or some templates that just exist that are already in the tool section. You can also, there are people who will share with you. I'm looking at, Lazarina Stoy has a fantastic Google search console URL inspection API dashboard. She has a few different dashboards on her website. She's a contributor to the Wix SEO hub. Shout out to Lazarina. Her dashboard that she made is really useful. I'm sure that lots of other SEOs share them as well. Looking at how other people are configuring their dashboards can be really useful to help you understand both the kinds of data that you could be reporting, but also some of the functionalities of some the sort of data sets that we have. We have a lot. You get information from Google Search Console. You're getting information from GA4, you're getting information from other... From YouTube you can also connect really easily. If you're looking at other people's reports, it can help you make sense of that. I mentioned Christina earlier, and Christina had a really great GA4 dashboard that she shared. Having a look at her GA4 dashboard helped me to better understand GA4 because of the parameters that she was using. Mordy Oberstein: Literally same here on that. Crystal Carter: Right. I think she was showing page view or page path. She was showing page path, and I was like, oh, okay, so I understand that. That's the equivalent of this and that makes sense of that and da, da, da. These are really useful. It's also great for creating customer reports. If push comes to shove, if you've got some manual data that's in a data silo somewhere, and I don't know, how many people are walking through a door at your cafe or something like that. Let's say there's a little ticker and somebody has to go and look at the little thing and see what it says. If you've got something manual like that, you can connect it to Google Sheets for instance. You can still present it in a really accessible way via a Google Looker studio, but it can still work with your manual data. Let's say you've had to export some data from something that doesn't exist anymore, like say Universal Analytics come this autumn. Let's say you've got some old data from somewhere, you can add that into a Google Sheet and you can use it as a benchmark and present it how you need to do it as well. It's a fantastic tool. It's amazing that it's free and it's really worth learning. It can be a little bit of a learning curve getting used to it, but as I say, there's a lot of templates that you can start with and all of the templates are fully customizable. If you're not using Looker Studio, I highly recommend that you start with something simple and build on it. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely dive into it. From what you heard here, sounds a little bit interesting, also a little bit confusing. We're basically telling you what a nutshell is. Dive into Google Looker. I'm calling it Data Studio, Google Looker, have a look around and see what's there. I would be remiss, by the way, if we didn't mention that Daniel Waisberg, also a search advocate over at Google, not as great as John, but another wonderful search advocate over at Google, has some really cool Google search console templates that he built. Scatter plots inside of Looker that you can access and plug in your own data for. We'll try to link to all of these different templates in the show notes. Now, if Google Looker was new to you, you know what else might be new to you? Crystal Carter: What might be new to you? Mordy Oberstein: Is this new? The actual news. Crystal Carter: The actual news. Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thought? Who would've thought it would've been new? Crystal Carter: There's so many surprises today. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like there's a Barry Schwartz reference in every single podcast episode that we do. As well there should be, by the way. As well there should be, considering, by the way, that most of the articles we cover in the news are from Barry Schwartz. Barry this week, who knows? As we get into the snappy news. We're back, and before we go, we have one more little surprise for you. It's not a surprise, we do it every week. It's who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. This week, since we're going all Google all episode, we have Lizzi Sassman. Crystal Carter: Lizzi's fantastic. I met her at the Women in Tech SEO Festival in London, and also Cherry from her team as well. They're just fantastic. I'm a big fan of Lizzi on the Search Off The Record podcast as well, and also a big fan of her crochet skills. I had a great chat with her about crochet because I also do a little bit of crochet myself. I'm not as talented as Lizzi is, but it's great to have her on the team. If you're going to follow any other podcasts about search, it should absolutely be Search Off The Record. She's fantastic on it and shares some really great information in some new ways. Mordy Oberstein: She's one of these people who you can reach out to, have a conversation with out there on the social media space, whether it's Twitter or Mastadon. For example, Glenn Gabe and I were having a conversation about how Wix handles favicons and what Google's guidelines say, and what Wix does. Does it align, does it not align to the guidelines? Glen actually asked Lizzi what the story was and she clarified it and they even updated the documentation based upon what she updated Glenn about. It's real information, it's serious information, and it's official information. Crystal Carter: We've been talking about soft skills and we've been talking about team dynamics and things, and I think that the team at Google, they are very good at having a sort of spread of people, and they're all very much committed to making sure that people understand information. The way that Lizzi talks about it, she very much nurtures the sort of documentation space and making sure that people find the documentation really accessible. They created a document that explained exactly what, and I spoke to her about this and said how great it was, how much I really liked it, how they explained exactly what the things are called on the SERP. SEOs give lots of things lots of fun names, indented results, and like, oh, we saw this carousel thingy, and Lizzi did an update where she was like, "No, this is what it's actually called everyone. This is what we call it." Mordy Oberstein: It's less fun that way, to be honest. Little less fun that way. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We'll make sure to link to Lizzi's social profile in the show notes and make sure you give her a follow and that'll do it. Crystal Carter: That's it, team. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: All right. Go on three. Mordy Oberstein: One, two, three, go team. Crystal Carter: That was terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was good. Wow. Some team builder you are telling me it's terrible. I'm going to go sulk in a corner now. I though it was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Maybe we need another team building activity to re- Mordy Oberstein: How about laser tag again? No. Crystal Carter: How about pizza making without- Mordy Oberstein: Pizza making. I'll bring the pineapple. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. 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 gates, paywalls and exclusive content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning of 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

What is seasonality, and how does it affect SEO? In what ways does the holiday season shape the user mindset? What impact do the holidays have on shaping brand positioning? The holidays are upon us, so it’s time for you to start thinking about the nuances of seasonal shifts in SEO. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter along with the Chief Growth Officer of Sharma Brands, Ari Murray, as they weigh in on how to approach SEO for the holiday season and how you can get creative with holiday season campaigns. Unwrap insights beyond SEO, and learn how to position your brand so that it doesn’t miss the mark and aligns with the unique user mindset seen during the holidays. ‘Tis the season to rank highly, as we are dashing through the holiday SERP this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back 'Tis the season for SEO What is seasonality, and how does it affect SEO? In what ways does the holiday season shape the user mindset? What impact do the holidays have on shaping brand positioning? The holidays are upon us, so it’s time for you to start thinking about the nuances of seasonal shifts in SEO. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter along with the Chief Growth Officer of Sharma Brands, Ari Murray, as they weigh in on how to approach SEO for the holiday season and how you can get creative with holiday season campaigns. Unwrap insights beyond SEO, and learn how to position your brand so that it doesn’t miss the mark and aligns with the unique user mindset seen during the holidays. ‘Tis the season to rank highly, as we are dashing through the holiday SERP this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 66 | December 13, 2023 | 39 MIN 00:00 / 39:15 This week’s guests Ari Murray Hi! I’m Ari Murray! By night, I write my love letter to ecommerce (oops, I mean my DTC newsletter that's read by 42,000 Go-to-Millionaires). By day, I'm Chief Growth Officer at Sharma Brands, a DTC consultancy that launches the biggest brands in the world. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights on what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the festive, the fabulously festive, the incredibly festive, the oh, so festive head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Welcome and hello to all you SEO, oh, oh people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Festivus for the rest of us. Crystal Carter: Festivus, indeed, all of the things. I wish you all of the holiday loveliness, and I hope you eat too much food because that's... Mordy Oberstein: That's a great wish. Crystal Carter: ... the whole point of the whole thing. Like Viva la Carbs, enjoy all of the potatoes and bread and cake and various other carbohydrates. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, we want you to eat too much. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed, indeed. Like 'tis the season for stuffing your face. Mordy Oberstein: Just not the season for hopping on a scale. Crystal Carter: Oh, me. Honestly, honestly, they will tell all your business. They'll just be like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'm feeling good about myself. And then the scale's like, nah, nah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Scalability Season, that little SEO. Okay, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter search slide over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tags generator to add 2024 to all of your title tags. Actually, don't do that. That was a joke. Crystal Carter: Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. But if you do want to update your title tags for the holiday season in a real way, and if you're running specific campaigns and want to create new pages and create title tags for those new pages and meta descriptions, you can use our AI meta tags generator to do it, which is why today we're talking about SEO for the holiday season as we ho, ho, ho, all the way to the top of the serp while we look at keyword research for seasonal topics, updating content for your campaigns and when to get started with holiday season SEO. Spoiler alert, by the time you're listening to this podcast, it's too late. But anyway, Ari Murray of Sharma Brands weighs in on how to get creative with the holiday season campaigns. Plus, we talked about how to position your brand during the holiday season, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So hop on the sleigh as we take flight to light up the holiday season or holiday season SEO brighter than your annoying neighbor who goes way too far with their holiday season decor on episode number 66 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Fantastic intro as ever, as ever, as ever. Okay, so seasonality. Seasonality, what are we talking about? Seasonality is essentially like when you see regular increases or decreases in organic traffic in line with annual or occasional events. And so the seasonal traffic's patterns can mean that you see traffic increased loads on particular blogs or across your whole website depending on what you're doing. I've worked with a few seasonal businesses and it can be very much night and day in terms of traffic. So for instance, I worked with an amusement park client and in the wintertime, they were based in a place where they had Halloween, they had a Christmas sort of thing, and then pretty much in Q1 or January to March, it was pretty quiet, very, very, very quiet, and then things would start ramping up in the summer. And it's really important to think about that when you're working with a business and to understand your traffic trends because this can affect lots of things. This can affect how you do your reporting. This can affect when you invest your time, when you start asking people for questions. So for instance, with a seasonal business where they're peaking in summer or they're peaking in other times of year, that's not the time to ask them to review a bunch of blog posts. That's not the time to ask them to sort of, let's do a content refresh of everything. That's the time for you to carry out stuff that you can do without them being involved, that you can do on your own, and you can let them know that it's done and they can be happy with that. But I think also there's a couple of other things to think about. A seasonality, there's weekly cadence. So B2B businesses, for instance, will see a lot of their traffic Monday to Friday. I've worked with retail clients and they often see a spike over the weekend, for instance. So they start seeing their spikes coming in on the sort of Friday, and then they see people increasing their shopping over to Saturday and Sunday. So that's really important to think about. And again, that can affect when you do your reporting. If you're reporting everything on Monday, say, and let's say that the sales from Saturday or Sunday haven't actually come in yet, then that's not a good time to do your reporting. You might want to do your reporting later in the week. You might want to do your reporting on a Wednesday so that they can make any actions on Thursday so that they can be ready for Friday, for instance. Then there's quarterly trends. So for instance, some traffic patterns don't follow a specific month. So things like Easter or Passover, Chinese New Year, school vacation, Diwali, things like that, they change from year to year. So these are all dates that will change over year to year. So for instance, for things like that, you'll need to think about maybe let's compare the quarter to the quarter, not necessarily the month, year-on-year, for instance. So that's something to think about as well. And then you have annual spikes that happen, which are your typical seasonality. And I think the other thing that I find about this is that with B2B businesses, for instance, people tend to think that B2B businesses don't have seasonality, that this is all B2C, with hotels, with summer stuff. Mordy Oberstein: It's not true. Crystal Carter: It's not true. So for instance, divorce lawyers, and I didn't know this until I was working with a lawyer client, but they will see a peak following school vacations and public holidays. So after big seasonal, end of the year, for instance. So there's a lot of people stop at the end of the year, there's often a big spike in divorces after that, and it's sad but true. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also you see in January, for instance, Wix often sees a surge in people wanting to build websites. Maybe people thought, you know what, this year I'm going to start that new thing. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a quarter's ending or the financial year ending. My uncle does title closings, and at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's a huge spike and everyone wants to get it, right? So it's across the board. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: It impacts everybody and everything in a way. You cannot escape seasonality. Crystal Carter: No, you can't. So it's really important to understand the business and to chat to them about that because you might not realize those things until you actually speak to the team. For instance, if you're working in the public sector, one phenomena that I've seen is that towards the end of the financial year, there's some situations where in the public sector, if you don't spend your budget, you don't get the budget for the next year. Mordy Oberstein: And governments sometimes have different financial years or points of the year than the average quarter. I think their financial year might start in September or something like that. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, I worked with the university before, in the university, their financial year ended in the summer time, for instance, because that had a thing. So that's important to think about, and that will impact all of your SEO activity, because when the season- Mordy Oberstein: Money always does. Crystal Carter: Right. So when peak season hits, you should already be live with whatever you need. You should be preparing in the off season, just like if you were on a sports team, you prepare on the off season, you prepare all your content, you get everything ready so that when peak season hits, you're already ranking and maybe you're ranking 20, right? Maybe you updated the content and it's just hanging around at number 20. But by the time people are sort of getting into search, Google seeing your content, they're coming back to your content, they're seeing that you're getting some activity on your content, and then you will move up the ranks very quickly. I've seen this happen. I've done this before and it works really, really well. So you want to be thinking about how you can manage that. But in order to do that, you need to understand your data and you need to understand the seasonality of your business. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get started again with the SEO stuff. I think the natural place you want to start is keywords. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I'll give you a stupid example. Like outdoor ceiling fans, probably not a big thing in the winter time, by the way, unless your market is in Arizona, which because it's summertime all the time. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, so those are the things you need to think about. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You may be dealing with a seasonal product, but your market is not seasonal, or you have an international market and it's always summer somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So things like Google trends come into play as opposed to looking at additional keyword tool, for example. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think that when we think about the keywords, it's also important to understand that some of those keywords can give you viral seasonality. So I asked a few people on Women in Tech SEO about this, and I had some folks come back to me, and essentially what you get is you sometimes get a situation, and I've seen this before as well, where you basically have something that... So I was working with a client and they were a financial client, and they had this particular account that they talked about, this particular financial account or whatever, and every time there was a new regulation around that, or every time it was updated, if you think about mortgage rates, for instance, that's something that we'll say, oh, mortgage rates are up. So every time that hit the news, they would see a big spike on this particular article. They didn't have to update it all the time, but they would see a big spike on that particular article. If you were looking at that particular thing and you wanted to see whether or not that had a good impact on your SEO, you wouldn't want to necessarily compare it to last month necessarily. I mean, last month you say, oh, this month we did it well, last month we did it not so well. But if you wanted to look at it, you'd want to look at the pattern of how much- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the pattern's more important than anything else. Crystal Carter: Right. So you want to see the last time this spiked, we got this much traffic, and this time it spiked, we got that much traffic. And then you want to look and you want to compare the things there. So I think that people think about seasonality literally as winter or summer or things like that, but there are nuances, and the keywords can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I'm trying to say before. There is no such a thing as escaping seasonality. If you're in the financial world, your season is whenever the Fed makes an update. That's your season. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. It's definitely going to go up and down, and you need to understand that. Also, if you're working with different teams, you need to understand the different seasonality of the different parts of the team. So for instance, if you're working with a law firm, the divorce lawyer folks are going to be busy in January. The people who are working with financial stuff or the people who do, like tax attorneys, et cetera, they're going to be busy at the end of the year. And you need to think about, you can need to stagger your updates. You need to stagger your part of your partnership. Mordy Oberstein: That's my point where I mentioned the ceiling fans. So imagine no one just sells outdoor... Maybe somebody does, I don't know. Maybe someone sells outdoor ceiling fans. Crystal Carter: Outdoorceilingfans.com. Mordy Oberstein: That's your whole bit, outdoorceilingfans.com. But usually something like Home Depot. If you're on the Home Depot team or something like the Home Depot team, your job is to understand seasonality. Your job is to understand where on the website seasonality will impact it, because hammers might not be impacted by winter or summertime. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe people will do more home repairs in the summertime. Again, I'm not an expert, especially not home repairs. But all things being equal, hammers would seemingly be something that's pretty consistent across the board. But outdoor ceiling fans, you need to identify where... And you have also need to qualify like what's the proportion of sales and traffic that come from hammers versus what's the proportion of sale and traffic that come from outdoor ceiling fans? And when you see a decline, you're like, oh, no, there's a decline. No, because if you have an over proportionate amount of sales and traffic and performance that come from outdoor ceiling fans relative to hammers, that's actually logical and probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And if you want to keep things rolling in a business like that, for instance, then you figure out which ones are the seasonal things that are going to flow through. And this is where you also need to coordinate your SEO with your sales teams, for instance. So if you have a shop like say Home Depot or something where they actually have a physical venue, they will know what things they're going to be displaying over the course of the year. For instance, it's autumn, right now. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. It is flu season, right? I have a little bit of a cold right now. Okay so- Mordy Oberstein: You feel clumped? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit clumped. So I was at a shop today and in their display they had sunscreen. And I was like, why y'all got sunscreen out? There's no need for sunscreen. And then they had some of the cold and flu things. Like that's what people are looking for. People are looking for cold and flu. People are not looking for sunscreen right now in the Northern Hemisphere particularly. And so I think it's important to think about that so that your online stuff can reflect what's going on right now in store and in the zeitgeist and in what people are talking about because that is what's front of mind. Mordy Oberstein: The other thing I wanted to talk about is content. Because inevitably, you're going to update, create content, do something with content around the holiday season. For example, is a good one, we're talking about holiday season SEO or any sort of seasonality. But let's just sit with holiday season, for example, because it is such a clear case. You're going to update content inevitably. You're going to have different sales and specials and whatever. And I find a big mistake that SEOs make is in not realizing that you can't just change content at one point. It has to go all the way through. So let's just say for argument's sake, and I'm not advocating you do this, you update your title tag to say holiday season. So our outdoor ceiling fans for the holiday season, because what I want for Christmas is an outdoor ceiling fan, because I live in Arizona. I don't actually live in Arizona. I don't even celebrate Christmas. So whatever. But let's just say that was the case and you updated the title tag there, but when you get to the actual page, nothing changed. So make sure that all along the way, all of the pain points, all the touch points actually align to what you're doing on the SEO side, because inevitably, what's going to happen is you'll get the click, because oh, it's a holiday season, ceiling fan. Grandma wants a holiday season... She wants a festive outdoor ceiling fan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I will click on this. And then you get to the page and it's your regular commercial outdoor ceiling fan. Where's the festivity in this? And folks will be like, hey, you got me the traffic, thank you, but nothing's actually converting, what's going on? And that's because you didn't think about the full touch point. Crystal Carter: Right. So there are tons of seasonal cues that you can do. So, again, you can think about your title tag. I've done this before. We had a shop and they generally had like, oh, buy sustainable clothing, candles and more, was in their title tag or whatever. And I was like, well, we can change that to gifts, because that's what people are looking for. So we'll just change it. So it says, gifts, and yeah, we saw a big impact for that. So that's a title tag that you can update. Also, your OG tags. I'll tell you what, Starbucks is updating everything in store and all of their online stuff to pumpkin spice as soon as a leaf turns yellow, okay? As soon as- Mordy Oberstein: They have a scout. They have someone looking at leaves, like, do you see a change of yellow? I do. I do. I see yellow. Crystal Carter: I do. Go. Go. Mordy Oberstein: Update, go, pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Everything's pumpkin spice. Go, go, go. Mordy Oberstein: They have one button and then it changes everything to pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Right. So they know this. And basically, this is really important because when people are sharing, when people are saying, oh, hey, I saw this thing. I really think that grandma's going to love it, or whatever. It's got the little festive thing, that's going to give people signals without them even reading anything, without them even clicking through, you know that they're ready, et cetera, et cetera. So your OG image is super, super easy to change. Changing the banner images on your website, updating those images so that they're more festive can make a really big difference. And also you want to think about updating your links and so updating comments and also consolidating content. So for instance, I had a client and they had a seasonal thing and they did every year, and I see this all the time, and something I've seen work for multiple clients is that there's an awareness day or there's a holiday or there's whatever. And every year, they go, Groundhog Day, 2021. Groundhog Day, 2022. Groundhog Day, whatever, whatever. Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, make a page. If you're doing it every year. If you are an Owl Sanctuary, and every year there's National Owl Day. I have no idea if there's National Owl Day or who celebrates it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you did there. Crystal Carter: If there is a National Owl Day, for instance, and you're an Owl Sanctuary, and every year you do something for a National Owl day, you can have one page that on your website that's National Owl Day. And you can update that with National Owl Day. You can put the content, the content can be about 2024, 2025, whatever it may be. But you can update that. And as soon as the event finishes, you can say, National Owl Day 2025 is going to be on this day. And then if anybody's looking for that over the course of the year, if you have any other owl enthusiasts who are looking for that, they'll be able to find that on your website, and you'll be able to keep that link warm in the off season before things come back. So then when it is time to go full steam ahead with whatever it is, then you can add your links from there. But treat it as a pillar page. And so before National Owl Day or Groundhog Day, or whatever it is, start consolidating your links. Go through any content that you have that's older or that maybe is from years ago. Consolidate that content into something that makes sense. Get rid of old content that you don't need. Update the links across there so that Google, so that users are focused on the content that's happening right now. Because if it is that you have this fantastic, wonderful day planned for this year, and the page from two years ago is ranking, that's not going to help you. That's going to confuse users, and that's going to confuse Google. So make sure that you go through and you update all your links, and you update all of the things that are going on and all of the content, and consolidate any content where you can. Mordy Oberstein: And with the holiday season, it's important not just to go through and make sure you've updated everything, everything gets checked off, and you have all your ducks in a row or owls in a row, just to keep with that. I don't know if owls go in a row, but they... Crystal Carter: You know in England they say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: In England, what say? Crystal Carter: Owls say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: No, the English people talking or mimicking an owl goes... Crystal Carter: They say, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: ... an owl goes hoot, hoot. Crystal Carter: No, no, they go, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: I will die in this hill. But it's not as important to have all your ducks or owls in a row, as I was saying, it's important to get creative with your holiday content campaigns and even your holiday SEO. To help us talk about getting creative, we have Ari Murray, who's the chief growth officer over at Sharma Brands, and who runs the Go-to-Millions newsletter to talk about how to get creative with your holiday season campaigns. Ari Murray: So every holiday I think about first how I shop, and how I shop is how everyone shops, which is I go to Google and I search my heart out. I think that we always forget that when you're running any sort of campaign on paid social or even on organic social, when you're running on paid social and you're thinking about Google and you're thinking about Meta and you're thinking about LinkedIn or wherever you're running your campaign, when I'm thinking about paid social, I always first think to Meta because that's where I spend most of my time, but I know that if I'm running an Instagram ad that my audience is being interrupted at what they do. We have to show them a flashy video, and we need them to stop and really understand and click, and we need their thumb stop to be there. But for search, it's so different. And for me, I think about when I shop, I am searching for something. And so I'm really quick to look for terms that I wouldn't use to describe the brand if I was making an ad for that brand. So let's pretend I'm working on a really expensive glassware company. If I was this glassware company, I would have a lot of rules. I would have, we don't use the word luxury, we don't use the word elegant. We don't even use the word necessarily holiday or gifting. We want to speak of ourselves as something that can be for every day and not for this temporary season. So for search and for SEO, we would write a listicle and an advertorial that lives as long form content on the site. And the sole purpose is for you to search extensive gifts for the woman who has it all, or fancy glassware for mother-in-law, or what to get the person who has everything. And those are the terms, and those are the words that I would incorporate into my long form content. But then when they take the click and once they find us and they've found us, then it's really about making sure that they actually get to read what we said we were going to give them, which is a really cheeky article that has a lot of content and shoppable links, but also just a deep understanding of they're here to shop and they're here searching for something for this person. And that's what we're writing. So my whole technique here is I don't want you as a brand to shy away from a word that you don't feel is brand safe. Just because it's not on brand doesn't make it off brand. And for SEO and for SEM, it's always about what can we do to really meet our customer where they are? And they're trying to shop and discern through all of the things that Google and search can feed them. And I don't want them to not find us because we don't want to call ourselves luxury, or we don't want to call ourselves elegant, or we don't want to call ourselves designer. That's what people are looking for if they're looking for this brand, because their price range. And so maybe not on an Instagram ad would this be comfortable, but for search, it's something we're willing to bend on. So for holiday campaigns, I guess my single tip is to be creative, you have to break the brand guidelines so long as you're not off brand. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ari. Really love that point at the end too for a second. But just make sure you give Ari a follow over @arihappywick, That's A-R-I-H-A-P-P-Y-W-I-C-K over on X, formerly known as Twitter, or I like to call it, Twitter, still known as Twitter, and not X. A link to their profile in the show notes. I just want to say amen to that. By the way, that whole, not the Twitter thing, what she was saying, just talk to the audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Just talk to the audience. And by the way, it is a good point because sometimes you can do things that in the pages that you find through search, because they are like two or three clicks deep that you may not want to say on your homepage or use the brand terms on your homepage. But I've done this a gazillion times. We're like, hey, you know what, it's three clicks deep. No one other than people finding us on search or maybe through social media, depending on how you want to run your campaigns, aren't going to find this. So it's okay to be a little bit more flexible and it just talk to them the way your audience wants to be talked to, not the way, like, oh, I'm going to position my brand this way. That's great. But if nobody's looking for that and nobody wants that and no one's talking about that product in that way... Crystal Carter: They're not going to find it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I don't want to call our car an SUV. I want to call it a four by four, then does anybody still call them four by fours anymore, like is the '90s? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But if you find that people aren't calling it that anymore, then you have to change it because people won't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not on brand, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Well, maybe your brand should have to think about- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's on brand? Making money, that's what's on brand. Crystal Carter: Your brand needs to think about what it is. So for instance, if we were in England and I said, oh yeah, the owl goes hoo-hoo or toot-toot or hoot-hoot, people would be like, what are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: That's not a good example. We go for accuracy. Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: And there has to be a line somewhere, Crystal. You can't just spread lies and say owls say things they don't say. Crystal Carter: Look, look, look. They call it coriander in England, for instance, rather than cilantro. But if I started talking about coriander all over the place, people would be like, I don't know what you mean. If I was in, I don't know, Poughkeepsie or something, and I was like, who wants some coriander? Nobody would say anything, because nobody knows what we're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: It's like calling an eggplant, an eggplant in England. What do they call it? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, say that in Jersey, see what happens. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they would be like, you call me what? Mordy Oberstein: Did you just say to me? Say that to my face. Crystal Carter: With a nice Parmesan. Mordy Oberstein: So it's such a basic point, but it's something that I think sometimes brands... She's right. Sometimes brands can get a little caught up into that's not our brand language, which is a little bit snobbish, I'll say. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But I think with content, you can be clever with that. I think you can be creative. Again, if you put something on, it doesn't have to be the homepage. You don't have to hit people over the head with it as soon as they get to website. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do it on the homepage. Yeah. Like fine. Do your thing on the homepage, fine. Crystal Carter: Right. But you could have a blog that addresses that and links off to other comments and other content that is more on brand or whatever, and you can say, hey, this isn't what we normally do, but we found that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just be honest. I think that's the other thing is that consumers are so much more sophisticated these days because a lot of consumers are also content creators as well. So it's most important to think about that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a hundred percent. And with that, so I think, and well, Ari said, and we were talking before about creating content on the SEO side itself, we keep coming back to a point of your brand and how it uses content to relate to the audience. So with all of this talk about SEO strategies and a wider a brand strategy and in getting creative, Chris and I thought, let's take a deep look at what it means for your brand to actually speak to their audience during the holiday season. So here is a deep thought about your brand talking to your actual consumers during the holiday season, so a Deep Thought with Crystal and me, Mordy. So okay. I see a lot of on social media or top five ways to align your brand to the holiday season or whatever, whatever, and it talks about product all the time. Make sure your product... Whatever it is, it's very... When we talk about seasonality, I find, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's my personal bias, but I find we get very product-focused. But I want to talk about that your brand and the messaging and the positioning and the tone it takes should also adjust to this season. So I'll say, for example... And by the way, the product side, it's super easy to see. During the summer, IPA sales go up a ton because everyone wants an IPA during... It's refreshing. It's not refreshing in the middle of the winter. It's just like weird. I would drink an IPA in- Crystal Carter: You want a stout in the middle of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you feel your beer. In the summer, you're fun, you have an IPA. In the wintertime, it's time for a Guinness, which is a meal, it's not even a drink. But it's the same thing with the way you speak. So for example, let's just say for argument's sake, your audience are cutthroat business people. So you're going to speak to them in a cutthroat business kind of way. Let's get right to the bottom line. But during the holiday season, even your most cutthroat executives, I would hope their heart is warm, just a tinge. Crystal Carter: And I think it has to do with value. I think it has to do with the value of something and how you articulate value. Google is trying to deliver customer value. So people search for something and then they're trying to give them a valuable search result that will either get them to the good information or help them to achieve a goal or something to that effect. And all of the things on your website should be helping to point people to the value of it. Now, the value of something will change depending on seasonality, but also depending on how you speak to them. So for instance, if you had, I think there's a lot of these exciting nightlights for kids, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: My kids have a dinosaur one. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, and some of them do other things. For the child, the value for that is like, oh, it's shaped like a dinosaur. Oh, it'll sing you a song. For the parent, the value of that is that it might get your kid to actually go to sleep on time. And when you're talking to those two different audiences, it's still the same product, but you need to make sure that you're illustrating the value to them in a way that it resonates with them. Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is sometimes that same person, sometimes they're the kid and sometimes they're the parent. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes even as a parent, I want a dinosaur nightlight. No, but I'm saying you change throughout the year. It's summertime, I don't want to go like, don't bog me down with business details. It's summertime, I want to have fun. It should be a little fun. I'm not saying you got to go crazy, but speak to your audience where they're at. If it's the holiday season time, it's not like blow the competition out of the water time. That's not the vibe. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: So just make sure that you're adjusting. Just like you would adjust your product, make sure you're adjusting your brand terminology, your brand tone, the way your brand is positioning itself. It's not time to talk about how competitive and great... It might be time to show like, hey, we're donating to a charity, which you should do for a legit reason, not just because I want to get more customers. But those are the kind of things that you should be doing to reach people where they're at, not where you think they're at. Crystal Carter: Read the room, people. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. Crystal Carter: Read the room. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. But we do it all the time. I'm not saying anything complicated, but we do it all the time with product. We read the room with a product. We change the title tag and say, holiday season. We add, I don't know, a peppermint cane to the image of the cell phone. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because just like there's a pumpkin spice button, there's also a peppermint cane button that you push. It's the leaves have turned brown, it's peppermint cane time. Crystal Carter: Right. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Hit the button. Crystal Carter: And I think also your customers will be at different points in their life as well. So I think it's important to think about that. So for instance, I work with a library, Libraries Unlimited, shout out to them. England's been having what they call a cost of living crisis, for instance. And there's been a lot of trouble with people having warm spaces and things. So the library's library all the time. But what they started doing was they were saying, hey, just in case you need a warm place to hang out, we are also that as well. Like, hey, there customer. If you're having trouble with any of that sort of stuff, we can help. Did you know that we also offer this thing that we can help you with? And it's the same customers. They're talking to the same customer, and they have the same offering that they always did. It was always a nice, warm, cozy place to be in the library. But just reminding people that we also have this, that is also a value to you at this particular time. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, this particular time. There's seasonality in the product. There's seasonality in the brand, positioning, language, marketing, all of it needs to change to match seasonality. You know what never changes though? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: The SEO news. Not that the news hasn't changed, but who covers it and what he does, and how he does it does not change. He's as constant as the North Star, then pretty sure is not the idiom, but it doesn't matter. He is Barry Schwartz, and he is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. It's in the stars this week as Google announced Gemini. Inserts Oracle sounds. For Christie Hines at Search Engine Journal, Google introduces Gemini and updates Bard with Gemini Pro. So a few things to note. Gemini is a competitor of GPT-4, and always at the Chat and can't help myself of GPT-4, and according to studies, seemingly performs better perform than GPT-4. Gemini aims at making multimodal connections. That's fancy talk for saying it can understand audio, video and text inputs and all other sorts of inputs in combination. Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro. There are different levels of Gemini. I'm making the quotation marks of when I say levels with my hands, you can't see that. I just realize, but I'm making quotation marks for levels of Gemini. And Gemini Pro is what is now powering Bard. And, this is where I think it's super interesting, it can also create custom UX to address user questions. So basically, let's say you're searching for, tell me a good recipe for cornbread. It'll adjust the layout and format to help you better explore that type of query as opposed to, let's say, you search for who are the top five best baseball players ever. It might produce a different kind of format for that. I think something like this allows for what I like to call content portals where you can dive down or dive deep down a rabbit hole of a particular subset of topics in a way that kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, come out of that rabbit hole and then explore something else, which is helped by the fact that anything on the screen that Gemini shows you, you can sort of click on and say, okay, let me know about this a little bit more. So you can sort of really dive down the rabbit hole. The way the UX is set up, I think it's super interesting, and I think something like that would be fascinating on the SERP. I know everyone will kind of freak out about that, but I do think it's fascinating. Okay, back to Barry. And this one is nuts. From Search Engine Roundtable report, Google local rankings now look if a business is open or closed, i.e business hours. This came from a study done by Joy Hawkins at the great Sterling Sky agency in Toronto. And what they basically saw was that when a business is closed, it kind of gets pulled out of the local packs. Let's say I'm searching for, I don't know, a pizza near me, and there are a bunch of listings that are now closed and some that are open. The ones that are open will appear. The ones that are closed will not appear. If later in the day, some close and I search forward again, and now there's different ones that are now open, I'll get the ones that are now open in the local pack and not the ones that are closed. Barry himself tested it out for a bunch of different types of queries and pretty much saw the same thing. I am not a big fan of this, to be honest with you. I think, for example, I might be searching for... Let's break it down. If I'm searching for pizza near me, okay, probably I want the restaurant that's open right now. If I'm searching for something like, I don't know, lawyer near me, if it's 12 o'clock at night, I'm not looking to call a lawyer. I'm probably looking just to do some research and maybe call them tomorrow. So I don't think this, as a ranking, factor, quote, unquote, "really" meets user needs in the way that it's supposed to. Anyway. And lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, and from, again, from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, November 2023 reviews update completes after 29 days. That is a long rollout. Check your rankings. It's a reviews update. It's not limited anymore to just products. So check your rankings out. Going to be hard to pull data on this at the aggregate level because you had an overlap between the November 2023 core update and the reviews update. I'm not really sure how you separate that out. I'm actually in conversation with December team to see, maybe somehow we could, but I don't know. And with that ambiguity, this is this week's version of the Snappy News. I want to say something. So we record the main part of the podcast before we actually record the news, but we are so confident that we're going to cover at least one article from Barry that I am confident saying your news from this week is from Barry. Hope you had a nice holiday, Barry. Hope you're having a nice holiday, Barry, and we appreciate you and thank you and love you. Now you feel awkward, Barry. You know what's not awkward? Following people on social media? That's never awkward. I think it's always a good thing. Crystal Carter: No, it's never... It's always- Mordy Oberstein: No, you're like, yeah, follow? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: That's not awkward. That's a good thing. This week's follow of the week is none other than the founder and CEO of Rise at Seven, a fabulous agency based out of the UK and I think now globally around the world, if I'm not- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The US as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay, there we go. And it is one of the only Carrie Rose who you can follow over on Twitter. I'll not call it X. @CarrieRosePR. At C-A-R-R-I-R-O-S-E-P-R. Link in the show notes. But give her a great follow. She's fabulous. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. Do follow her. She's got some great case studies. She's great for this particular episode. She did something with Game called The Christmas Tinner or something like that. And essentially it was a Christmas dinner in a can, and they did a fantastic- I know. Exactly. Your face. Mordy Oberstein: I'm making a face that sounds like Spam. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you're making a face. No. So it was a fantastic, incredible campaign. They got some really good traction for it. And when we were thinking about seasonality, that was the first campaign that came to my mind. At Rise at Seven, they do a lot of creative campaigns that are connected with SEO. That's really sort of their bread and butter. That's a great example of it. They also had one with dog sweaters as well, where you could wear a matching sweater with your dog, which is another campaign that they did that went really well, which is kind of seasonal as well, because sweaters are cozy and stuff. But yeah, Carrie and the team do some great work. Follow her. She also shares a lot of digital PR examples. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ton of stuff. Crystal Carter: Which are great, particularly for seasonal ideas. Mordy Oberstein: So give her a follow. Again, it's @CarrieRosePR. That's Carrie with a C on Twitter, whatever, X, link in the show notes. And well, by the way, bread and butter, that's an underrated meal. Think of meal and talking like her bread and butter. Crystal Carter: I love bread. We talked about carbs. We talked about carbs. When I came to visit you, I was like, bring me carbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. And I did. Crystal Carter: You did and I was like, yeah... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I brought you carbs. Crystal Carter: ... this is a good colleague. I was like, you see, you see. Mordy Oberstein: But you ever go to a restaurant and they don't do it where I live now, but they give the basket bread with the little like, the restaurant butters. And the pumpernickel! Crystal Carter: But when they're warm. When they're warm, that's great. I mean, Olive Garden made their entire, the whole thing about Olive Garden is bread. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some bread. Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, I ate the bread. Also, Red Lobster have very good cheese rolls as well. Those are good as well. But yeah, I love carbs. I love bread. Mordy Oberstein: Best part, okay. I have my cheat days on my diet. I'm like, carbs. I don't want to go like the fanciest... I want carbs. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pumpernickel, pretzels. I love their pretzels. Mordy Oberstein: Hot pretzels, bagels. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. With good mustard. You got to have the good mustard with the pretzel. People put other stuff on it, but I'm like, nah, it's about the mustard. Mordy Oberstein: And it can't be like, it's more than sitting in the case. You go buy a hot pretzel for weeks on end, that's all crusty. That's not good. Mordy Oberstein: That's not what you want. What you do want though, is check us out next week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Sorry you're going to miss us. Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to hand off your SEO work to clients. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning up at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a reading on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ari Murray Carrie Rose Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Go-To-Millions Newsletter Sharma Brands Rise at seven News: Google Introduces Gemini And Updates Bard With Gemini Pro Report: Google Local Ranking Now Looks If A Business Is Open Or Closed (Business Hours) Google November 2023 Reviews Update Completed After 29 Days Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ari Murray Carrie Rose Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Go-To-Millions Newsletter Sharma Brands Rise at seven News: Google Introduces Gemini And Updates Bard With Gemini Pro Report: Google Local Ranking Now Looks If A Business Is Open Or Closed (Business Hours) Google November 2023 Reviews Update Completed After 29 Days 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 on what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the festive, the fabulously festive, the incredibly festive, the oh, so festive head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Welcome and hello to all you SEO, oh, oh people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Festivus for the rest of us. Crystal Carter: Festivus, indeed, all of the things. I wish you all of the holiday loveliness, and I hope you eat too much food because that's... Mordy Oberstein: That's a great wish. Crystal Carter: ... the whole point of the whole thing. Like Viva la Carbs, enjoy all of the potatoes and bread and cake and various other carbohydrates. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, we want you to eat too much. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed, indeed. Like 'tis the season for stuffing your face. Mordy Oberstein: Just not the season for hopping on a scale. Crystal Carter: Oh, me. Honestly, honestly, they will tell all your business. They'll just be like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'm feeling good about myself. And then the scale's like, nah, nah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Scalability Season, that little SEO. Okay, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter search slide over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tags generator to add 2024 to all of your title tags. Actually, don't do that. That was a joke. Crystal Carter: Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. But if you do want to update your title tags for the holiday season in a real way, and if you're running specific campaigns and want to create new pages and create title tags for those new pages and meta descriptions, you can use our AI meta tags generator to do it, which is why today we're talking about SEO for the holiday season as we ho, ho, ho, all the way to the top of the serp while we look at keyword research for seasonal topics, updating content for your campaigns and when to get started with holiday season SEO. Spoiler alert, by the time you're listening to this podcast, it's too late. But anyway, Ari Murray of Sharma Brands weighs in on how to get creative with the holiday season campaigns. Plus, we talked about how to position your brand during the holiday season, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So hop on the sleigh as we take flight to light up the holiday season or holiday season SEO brighter than your annoying neighbor who goes way too far with their holiday season decor on episode number 66 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Fantastic intro as ever, as ever, as ever. Okay, so seasonality. Seasonality, what are we talking about? Seasonality is essentially like when you see regular increases or decreases in organic traffic in line with annual or occasional events. And so the seasonal traffic's patterns can mean that you see traffic increased loads on particular blogs or across your whole website depending on what you're doing. I've worked with a few seasonal businesses and it can be very much night and day in terms of traffic. So for instance, I worked with an amusement park client and in the wintertime, they were based in a place where they had Halloween, they had a Christmas sort of thing, and then pretty much in Q1 or January to March, it was pretty quiet, very, very, very quiet, and then things would start ramping up in the summer. And it's really important to think about that when you're working with a business and to understand your traffic trends because this can affect lots of things. This can affect how you do your reporting. This can affect when you invest your time, when you start asking people for questions. So for instance, with a seasonal business where they're peaking in summer or they're peaking in other times of year, that's not the time to ask them to review a bunch of blog posts. That's not the time to ask them to sort of, let's do a content refresh of everything. That's the time for you to carry out stuff that you can do without them being involved, that you can do on your own, and you can let them know that it's done and they can be happy with that. But I think also there's a couple of other things to think about. A seasonality, there's weekly cadence. So B2B businesses, for instance, will see a lot of their traffic Monday to Friday. I've worked with retail clients and they often see a spike over the weekend, for instance. So they start seeing their spikes coming in on the sort of Friday, and then they see people increasing their shopping over to Saturday and Sunday. So that's really important to think about. And again, that can affect when you do your reporting. If you're reporting everything on Monday, say, and let's say that the sales from Saturday or Sunday haven't actually come in yet, then that's not a good time to do your reporting. You might want to do your reporting later in the week. You might want to do your reporting on a Wednesday so that they can make any actions on Thursday so that they can be ready for Friday, for instance. Then there's quarterly trends. So for instance, some traffic patterns don't follow a specific month. So things like Easter or Passover, Chinese New Year, school vacation, Diwali, things like that, they change from year to year. So these are all dates that will change over year to year. So for instance, for things like that, you'll need to think about maybe let's compare the quarter to the quarter, not necessarily the month, year-on-year, for instance. So that's something to think about as well. And then you have annual spikes that happen, which are your typical seasonality. And I think the other thing that I find about this is that with B2B businesses, for instance, people tend to think that B2B businesses don't have seasonality, that this is all B2C, with hotels, with summer stuff. Mordy Oberstein: It's not true. Crystal Carter: It's not true. So for instance, divorce lawyers, and I didn't know this until I was working with a lawyer client, but they will see a peak following school vacations and public holidays. So after big seasonal, end of the year, for instance. So there's a lot of people stop at the end of the year, there's often a big spike in divorces after that, and it's sad but true. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also you see in January, for instance, Wix often sees a surge in people wanting to build websites. Maybe people thought, you know what, this year I'm going to start that new thing. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a quarter's ending or the financial year ending. My uncle does title closings, and at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's a huge spike and everyone wants to get it, right? So it's across the board. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: It impacts everybody and everything in a way. You cannot escape seasonality. Crystal Carter: No, you can't. So it's really important to understand the business and to chat to them about that because you might not realize those things until you actually speak to the team. For instance, if you're working in the public sector, one phenomena that I've seen is that towards the end of the financial year, there's some situations where in the public sector, if you don't spend your budget, you don't get the budget for the next year. Mordy Oberstein: And governments sometimes have different financial years or points of the year than the average quarter. I think their financial year might start in September or something like that. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, I worked with the university before, in the university, their financial year ended in the summer time, for instance, because that had a thing. So that's important to think about, and that will impact all of your SEO activity, because when the season- Mordy Oberstein: Money always does. Crystal Carter: Right. So when peak season hits, you should already be live with whatever you need. You should be preparing in the off season, just like if you were on a sports team, you prepare on the off season, you prepare all your content, you get everything ready so that when peak season hits, you're already ranking and maybe you're ranking 20, right? Maybe you updated the content and it's just hanging around at number 20. But by the time people are sort of getting into search, Google seeing your content, they're coming back to your content, they're seeing that you're getting some activity on your content, and then you will move up the ranks very quickly. I've seen this happen. I've done this before and it works really, really well. So you want to be thinking about how you can manage that. But in order to do that, you need to understand your data and you need to understand the seasonality of your business. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get started again with the SEO stuff. I think the natural place you want to start is keywords. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I'll give you a stupid example. Like outdoor ceiling fans, probably not a big thing in the winter time, by the way, unless your market is in Arizona, which because it's summertime all the time. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, so those are the things you need to think about. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You may be dealing with a seasonal product, but your market is not seasonal, or you have an international market and it's always summer somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So things like Google trends come into play as opposed to looking at additional keyword tool, for example. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think that when we think about the keywords, it's also important to understand that some of those keywords can give you viral seasonality. So I asked a few people on Women in Tech SEO about this, and I had some folks come back to me, and essentially what you get is you sometimes get a situation, and I've seen this before as well, where you basically have something that... So I was working with a client and they were a financial client, and they had this particular account that they talked about, this particular financial account or whatever, and every time there was a new regulation around that, or every time it was updated, if you think about mortgage rates, for instance, that's something that we'll say, oh, mortgage rates are up. So every time that hit the news, they would see a big spike on this particular article. They didn't have to update it all the time, but they would see a big spike on that particular article. If you were looking at that particular thing and you wanted to see whether or not that had a good impact on your SEO, you wouldn't want to necessarily compare it to last month necessarily. I mean, last month you say, oh, this month we did it well, last month we did it not so well. But if you wanted to look at it, you'd want to look at the pattern of how much- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the pattern's more important than anything else. Crystal Carter: Right. So you want to see the last time this spiked, we got this much traffic, and this time it spiked, we got that much traffic. And then you want to look and you want to compare the things there. So I think that people think about seasonality literally as winter or summer or things like that, but there are nuances, and the keywords can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I'm trying to say before. There is no such a thing as escaping seasonality. If you're in the financial world, your season is whenever the Fed makes an update. That's your season. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. It's definitely going to go up and down, and you need to understand that. Also, if you're working with different teams, you need to understand the different seasonality of the different parts of the team. So for instance, if you're working with a law firm, the divorce lawyer folks are going to be busy in January. The people who are working with financial stuff or the people who do, like tax attorneys, et cetera, they're going to be busy at the end of the year. And you need to think about, you can need to stagger your updates. You need to stagger your part of your partnership. Mordy Oberstein: That's my point where I mentioned the ceiling fans. So imagine no one just sells outdoor... Maybe somebody does, I don't know. Maybe someone sells outdoor ceiling fans. Crystal Carter: Outdoorceilingfans.com. Mordy Oberstein: That's your whole bit, outdoorceilingfans.com. But usually something like Home Depot. If you're on the Home Depot team or something like the Home Depot team, your job is to understand seasonality. Your job is to understand where on the website seasonality will impact it, because hammers might not be impacted by winter or summertime. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe people will do more home repairs in the summertime. Again, I'm not an expert, especially not home repairs. But all things being equal, hammers would seemingly be something that's pretty consistent across the board. But outdoor ceiling fans, you need to identify where... And you have also need to qualify like what's the proportion of sales and traffic that come from hammers versus what's the proportion of sale and traffic that come from outdoor ceiling fans? And when you see a decline, you're like, oh, no, there's a decline. No, because if you have an over proportionate amount of sales and traffic and performance that come from outdoor ceiling fans relative to hammers, that's actually logical and probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And if you want to keep things rolling in a business like that, for instance, then you figure out which ones are the seasonal things that are going to flow through. And this is where you also need to coordinate your SEO with your sales teams, for instance. So if you have a shop like say Home Depot or something where they actually have a physical venue, they will know what things they're going to be displaying over the course of the year. For instance, it's autumn, right now. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. It is flu season, right? I have a little bit of a cold right now. Okay so- Mordy Oberstein: You feel clumped? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit clumped. So I was at a shop today and in their display they had sunscreen. And I was like, why y'all got sunscreen out? There's no need for sunscreen. And then they had some of the cold and flu things. Like that's what people are looking for. People are looking for cold and flu. People are not looking for sunscreen right now in the Northern Hemisphere particularly. And so I think it's important to think about that so that your online stuff can reflect what's going on right now in store and in the zeitgeist and in what people are talking about because that is what's front of mind. Mordy Oberstein: The other thing I wanted to talk about is content. Because inevitably, you're going to update, create content, do something with content around the holiday season. For example, is a good one, we're talking about holiday season SEO or any sort of seasonality. But let's just sit with holiday season, for example, because it is such a clear case. You're going to update content inevitably. You're going to have different sales and specials and whatever. And I find a big mistake that SEOs make is in not realizing that you can't just change content at one point. It has to go all the way through. So let's just say for argument's sake, and I'm not advocating you do this, you update your title tag to say holiday season. So our outdoor ceiling fans for the holiday season, because what I want for Christmas is an outdoor ceiling fan, because I live in Arizona. I don't actually live in Arizona. I don't even celebrate Christmas. So whatever. But let's just say that was the case and you updated the title tag there, but when you get to the actual page, nothing changed. So make sure that all along the way, all of the pain points, all the touch points actually align to what you're doing on the SEO side, because inevitably, what's going to happen is you'll get the click, because oh, it's a holiday season, ceiling fan. Grandma wants a holiday season... She wants a festive outdoor ceiling fan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I will click on this. And then you get to the page and it's your regular commercial outdoor ceiling fan. Where's the festivity in this? And folks will be like, hey, you got me the traffic, thank you, but nothing's actually converting, what's going on? And that's because you didn't think about the full touch point. Crystal Carter: Right. So there are tons of seasonal cues that you can do. So, again, you can think about your title tag. I've done this before. We had a shop and they generally had like, oh, buy sustainable clothing, candles and more, was in their title tag or whatever. And I was like, well, we can change that to gifts, because that's what people are looking for. So we'll just change it. So it says, gifts, and yeah, we saw a big impact for that. So that's a title tag that you can update. Also, your OG tags. I'll tell you what, Starbucks is updating everything in store and all of their online stuff to pumpkin spice as soon as a leaf turns yellow, okay? As soon as- Mordy Oberstein: They have a scout. They have someone looking at leaves, like, do you see a change of yellow? I do. I do. I see yellow. Crystal Carter: I do. Go. Go. Mordy Oberstein: Update, go, pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Everything's pumpkin spice. Go, go, go. Mordy Oberstein: They have one button and then it changes everything to pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Right. So they know this. And basically, this is really important because when people are sharing, when people are saying, oh, hey, I saw this thing. I really think that grandma's going to love it, or whatever. It's got the little festive thing, that's going to give people signals without them even reading anything, without them even clicking through, you know that they're ready, et cetera, et cetera. So your OG image is super, super easy to change. Changing the banner images on your website, updating those images so that they're more festive can make a really big difference. And also you want to think about updating your links and so updating comments and also consolidating content. So for instance, I had a client and they had a seasonal thing and they did every year, and I see this all the time, and something I've seen work for multiple clients is that there's an awareness day or there's a holiday or there's whatever. And every year, they go, Groundhog Day, 2021. Groundhog Day, 2022. Groundhog Day, whatever, whatever. Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, make a page. If you're doing it every year. If you are an Owl Sanctuary, and every year there's National Owl Day. I have no idea if there's National Owl Day or who celebrates it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you did there. Crystal Carter: If there is a National Owl Day, for instance, and you're an Owl Sanctuary, and every year you do something for a National Owl day, you can have one page that on your website that's National Owl Day. And you can update that with National Owl Day. You can put the content, the content can be about 2024, 2025, whatever it may be. But you can update that. And as soon as the event finishes, you can say, National Owl Day 2025 is going to be on this day. And then if anybody's looking for that over the course of the year, if you have any other owl enthusiasts who are looking for that, they'll be able to find that on your website, and you'll be able to keep that link warm in the off season before things come back. So then when it is time to go full steam ahead with whatever it is, then you can add your links from there. But treat it as a pillar page. And so before National Owl Day or Groundhog Day, or whatever it is, start consolidating your links. Go through any content that you have that's older or that maybe is from years ago. Consolidate that content into something that makes sense. Get rid of old content that you don't need. Update the links across there so that Google, so that users are focused on the content that's happening right now. Because if it is that you have this fantastic, wonderful day planned for this year, and the page from two years ago is ranking, that's not going to help you. That's going to confuse users, and that's going to confuse Google. So make sure that you go through and you update all your links, and you update all of the things that are going on and all of the content, and consolidate any content where you can. Mordy Oberstein: And with the holiday season, it's important not just to go through and make sure you've updated everything, everything gets checked off, and you have all your ducks in a row or owls in a row, just to keep with that. I don't know if owls go in a row, but they... Crystal Carter: You know in England they say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: In England, what say? Crystal Carter: Owls say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: No, the English people talking or mimicking an owl goes... Crystal Carter: They say, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: ... an owl goes hoot, hoot. Crystal Carter: No, no, they go, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: I will die in this hill. But it's not as important to have all your ducks or owls in a row, as I was saying, it's important to get creative with your holiday content campaigns and even your holiday SEO. To help us talk about getting creative, we have Ari Murray, who's the chief growth officer over at Sharma Brands, and who runs the Go-to-Millions newsletter to talk about how to get creative with your holiday season campaigns. Ari Murray: So every holiday I think about first how I shop, and how I shop is how everyone shops, which is I go to Google and I search my heart out. I think that we always forget that when you're running any sort of campaign on paid social or even on organic social, when you're running on paid social and you're thinking about Google and you're thinking about Meta and you're thinking about LinkedIn or wherever you're running your campaign, when I'm thinking about paid social, I always first think to Meta because that's where I spend most of my time, but I know that if I'm running an Instagram ad that my audience is being interrupted at what they do. We have to show them a flashy video, and we need them to stop and really understand and click, and we need their thumb stop to be there. But for search, it's so different. And for me, I think about when I shop, I am searching for something. And so I'm really quick to look for terms that I wouldn't use to describe the brand if I was making an ad for that brand. So let's pretend I'm working on a really expensive glassware company. If I was this glassware company, I would have a lot of rules. I would have, we don't use the word luxury, we don't use the word elegant. We don't even use the word necessarily holiday or gifting. We want to speak of ourselves as something that can be for every day and not for this temporary season. So for search and for SEO, we would write a listicle and an advertorial that lives as long form content on the site. And the sole purpose is for you to search extensive gifts for the woman who has it all, or fancy glassware for mother-in-law, or what to get the person who has everything. And those are the terms, and those are the words that I would incorporate into my long form content. But then when they take the click and once they find us and they've found us, then it's really about making sure that they actually get to read what we said we were going to give them, which is a really cheeky article that has a lot of content and shoppable links, but also just a deep understanding of they're here to shop and they're here searching for something for this person. And that's what we're writing. So my whole technique here is I don't want you as a brand to shy away from a word that you don't feel is brand safe. Just because it's not on brand doesn't make it off brand. And for SEO and for SEM, it's always about what can we do to really meet our customer where they are? And they're trying to shop and discern through all of the things that Google and search can feed them. And I don't want them to not find us because we don't want to call ourselves luxury, or we don't want to call ourselves elegant, or we don't want to call ourselves designer. That's what people are looking for if they're looking for this brand, because their price range. And so maybe not on an Instagram ad would this be comfortable, but for search, it's something we're willing to bend on. So for holiday campaigns, I guess my single tip is to be creative, you have to break the brand guidelines so long as you're not off brand. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ari. Really love that point at the end too for a second. But just make sure you give Ari a follow over @arihappywick, That's A-R-I-H-A-P-P-Y-W-I-C-K over on X, formerly known as Twitter, or I like to call it, Twitter, still known as Twitter, and not X. A link to their profile in the show notes. I just want to say amen to that. By the way, that whole, not the Twitter thing, what she was saying, just talk to the audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Just talk to the audience. And by the way, it is a good point because sometimes you can do things that in the pages that you find through search, because they are like two or three clicks deep that you may not want to say on your homepage or use the brand terms on your homepage. But I've done this a gazillion times. We're like, hey, you know what, it's three clicks deep. No one other than people finding us on search or maybe through social media, depending on how you want to run your campaigns, aren't going to find this. So it's okay to be a little bit more flexible and it just talk to them the way your audience wants to be talked to, not the way, like, oh, I'm going to position my brand this way. That's great. But if nobody's looking for that and nobody wants that and no one's talking about that product in that way... Crystal Carter: They're not going to find it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I don't want to call our car an SUV. I want to call it a four by four, then does anybody still call them four by fours anymore, like is the '90s? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But if you find that people aren't calling it that anymore, then you have to change it because people won't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not on brand, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Well, maybe your brand should have to think about- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's on brand? Making money, that's what's on brand. Crystal Carter: Your brand needs to think about what it is. So for instance, if we were in England and I said, oh yeah, the owl goes hoo-hoo or toot-toot or hoot-hoot, people would be like, what are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: That's not a good example. We go for accuracy. Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: And there has to be a line somewhere, Crystal. You can't just spread lies and say owls say things they don't say. Crystal Carter: Look, look, look. They call it coriander in England, for instance, rather than cilantro. But if I started talking about coriander all over the place, people would be like, I don't know what you mean. If I was in, I don't know, Poughkeepsie or something, and I was like, who wants some coriander? Nobody would say anything, because nobody knows what we're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: It's like calling an eggplant, an eggplant in England. What do they call it? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, say that in Jersey, see what happens. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they would be like, you call me what? Mordy Oberstein: Did you just say to me? Say that to my face. Crystal Carter: With a nice Parmesan. Mordy Oberstein: So it's such a basic point, but it's something that I think sometimes brands... She's right. Sometimes brands can get a little caught up into that's not our brand language, which is a little bit snobbish, I'll say. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But I think with content, you can be clever with that. I think you can be creative. Again, if you put something on, it doesn't have to be the homepage. You don't have to hit people over the head with it as soon as they get to website. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do it on the homepage. Yeah. Like fine. Do your thing on the homepage, fine. Crystal Carter: Right. But you could have a blog that addresses that and links off to other comments and other content that is more on brand or whatever, and you can say, hey, this isn't what we normally do, but we found that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just be honest. I think that's the other thing is that consumers are so much more sophisticated these days because a lot of consumers are also content creators as well. So it's most important to think about that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a hundred percent. And with that, so I think, and well, Ari said, and we were talking before about creating content on the SEO side itself, we keep coming back to a point of your brand and how it uses content to relate to the audience. So with all of this talk about SEO strategies and a wider a brand strategy and in getting creative, Chris and I thought, let's take a deep look at what it means for your brand to actually speak to their audience during the holiday season. So here is a deep thought about your brand talking to your actual consumers during the holiday season, so a Deep Thought with Crystal and me, Mordy. So okay. I see a lot of on social media or top five ways to align your brand to the holiday season or whatever, whatever, and it talks about product all the time. Make sure your product... Whatever it is, it's very... When we talk about seasonality, I find, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's my personal bias, but I find we get very product-focused. But I want to talk about that your brand and the messaging and the positioning and the tone it takes should also adjust to this season. So I'll say, for example... And by the way, the product side, it's super easy to see. During the summer, IPA sales go up a ton because everyone wants an IPA during... It's refreshing. It's not refreshing in the middle of the winter. It's just like weird. I would drink an IPA in- Crystal Carter: You want a stout in the middle of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you feel your beer. In the summer, you're fun, you have an IPA. In the wintertime, it's time for a Guinness, which is a meal, it's not even a drink. But it's the same thing with the way you speak. So for example, let's just say for argument's sake, your audience are cutthroat business people. So you're going to speak to them in a cutthroat business kind of way. Let's get right to the bottom line. But during the holiday season, even your most cutthroat executives, I would hope their heart is warm, just a tinge. Crystal Carter: And I think it has to do with value. I think it has to do with the value of something and how you articulate value. Google is trying to deliver customer value. So people search for something and then they're trying to give them a valuable search result that will either get them to the good information or help them to achieve a goal or something to that effect. And all of the things on your website should be helping to point people to the value of it. Now, the value of something will change depending on seasonality, but also depending on how you speak to them. So for instance, if you had, I think there's a lot of these exciting nightlights for kids, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: My kids have a dinosaur one. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, and some of them do other things. For the child, the value for that is like, oh, it's shaped like a dinosaur. Oh, it'll sing you a song. For the parent, the value of that is that it might get your kid to actually go to sleep on time. And when you're talking to those two different audiences, it's still the same product, but you need to make sure that you're illustrating the value to them in a way that it resonates with them. Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is sometimes that same person, sometimes they're the kid and sometimes they're the parent. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes even as a parent, I want a dinosaur nightlight. No, but I'm saying you change throughout the year. It's summertime, I don't want to go like, don't bog me down with business details. It's summertime, I want to have fun. It should be a little fun. I'm not saying you got to go crazy, but speak to your audience where they're at. If it's the holiday season time, it's not like blow the competition out of the water time. That's not the vibe. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: So just make sure that you're adjusting. Just like you would adjust your product, make sure you're adjusting your brand terminology, your brand tone, the way your brand is positioning itself. It's not time to talk about how competitive and great... It might be time to show like, hey, we're donating to a charity, which you should do for a legit reason, not just because I want to get more customers. But those are the kind of things that you should be doing to reach people where they're at, not where you think they're at. Crystal Carter: Read the room, people. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. Crystal Carter: Read the room. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. But we do it all the time. I'm not saying anything complicated, but we do it all the time with product. We read the room with a product. We change the title tag and say, holiday season. We add, I don't know, a peppermint cane to the image of the cell phone. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because just like there's a pumpkin spice button, there's also a peppermint cane button that you push. It's the leaves have turned brown, it's peppermint cane time. Crystal Carter: Right. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Hit the button. Crystal Carter: And I think also your customers will be at different points in their life as well. So I think it's important to think about that. So for instance, I work with a library, Libraries Unlimited, shout out to them. England's been having what they call a cost of living crisis, for instance. And there's been a lot of trouble with people having warm spaces and things. So the library's library all the time. But what they started doing was they were saying, hey, just in case you need a warm place to hang out, we are also that as well. Like, hey, there customer. If you're having trouble with any of that sort of stuff, we can help. Did you know that we also offer this thing that we can help you with? And it's the same customers. They're talking to the same customer, and they have the same offering that they always did. It was always a nice, warm, cozy place to be in the library. But just reminding people that we also have this, that is also a value to you at this particular time. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, this particular time. There's seasonality in the product. There's seasonality in the brand, positioning, language, marketing, all of it needs to change to match seasonality. You know what never changes though? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: The SEO news. Not that the news hasn't changed, but who covers it and what he does, and how he does it does not change. He's as constant as the North Star, then pretty sure is not the idiom, but it doesn't matter. He is Barry Schwartz, and he is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. It's in the stars this week as Google announced Gemini. Inserts Oracle sounds. For Christie Hines at Search Engine Journal, Google introduces Gemini and updates Bard with Gemini Pro. So a few things to note. Gemini is a competitor of GPT-4, and always at the Chat and can't help myself of GPT-4, and according to studies, seemingly performs better perform than GPT-4. Gemini aims at making multimodal connections. That's fancy talk for saying it can understand audio, video and text inputs and all other sorts of inputs in combination. Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro. There are different levels of Gemini. I'm making the quotation marks of when I say levels with my hands, you can't see that. I just realize, but I'm making quotation marks for levels of Gemini. And Gemini Pro is what is now powering Bard. And, this is where I think it's super interesting, it can also create custom UX to address user questions. So basically, let's say you're searching for, tell me a good recipe for cornbread. It'll adjust the layout and format to help you better explore that type of query as opposed to, let's say, you search for who are the top five best baseball players ever. It might produce a different kind of format for that. I think something like this allows for what I like to call content portals where you can dive down or dive deep down a rabbit hole of a particular subset of topics in a way that kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, come out of that rabbit hole and then explore something else, which is helped by the fact that anything on the screen that Gemini shows you, you can sort of click on and say, okay, let me know about this a little bit more. So you can sort of really dive down the rabbit hole. The way the UX is set up, I think it's super interesting, and I think something like that would be fascinating on the SERP. I know everyone will kind of freak out about that, but I do think it's fascinating. Okay, back to Barry. And this one is nuts. From Search Engine Roundtable report, Google local rankings now look if a business is open or closed, i.e business hours. This came from a study done by Joy Hawkins at the great Sterling Sky agency in Toronto. And what they basically saw was that when a business is closed, it kind of gets pulled out of the local packs. Let's say I'm searching for, I don't know, a pizza near me, and there are a bunch of listings that are now closed and some that are open. The ones that are open will appear. The ones that are closed will not appear. If later in the day, some close and I search forward again, and now there's different ones that are now open, I'll get the ones that are now open in the local pack and not the ones that are closed. Barry himself tested it out for a bunch of different types of queries and pretty much saw the same thing. I am not a big fan of this, to be honest with you. I think, for example, I might be searching for... Let's break it down. If I'm searching for pizza near me, okay, probably I want the restaurant that's open right now. If I'm searching for something like, I don't know, lawyer near me, if it's 12 o'clock at night, I'm not looking to call a lawyer. I'm probably looking just to do some research and maybe call them tomorrow. So I don't think this, as a ranking, factor, quote, unquote, "really" meets user needs in the way that it's supposed to. Anyway. And lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, and from, again, from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, November 2023 reviews update completes after 29 days. That is a long rollout. Check your rankings. It's a reviews update. It's not limited anymore to just products. So check your rankings out. Going to be hard to pull data on this at the aggregate level because you had an overlap between the November 2023 core update and the reviews update. I'm not really sure how you separate that out. I'm actually in conversation with December team to see, maybe somehow we could, but I don't know. And with that ambiguity, this is this week's version of the Snappy News. I want to say something. So we record the main part of the podcast before we actually record the news, but we are so confident that we're going to cover at least one article from Barry that I am confident saying your news from this week is from Barry. Hope you had a nice holiday, Barry. Hope you're having a nice holiday, Barry, and we appreciate you and thank you and love you. Now you feel awkward, Barry. You know what's not awkward? Following people on social media? That's never awkward. I think it's always a good thing. Crystal Carter: No, it's never... It's always- Mordy Oberstein: No, you're like, yeah, follow? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: That's not awkward. That's a good thing. This week's follow of the week is none other than the founder and CEO of Rise at Seven, a fabulous agency based out of the UK and I think now globally around the world, if I'm not- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The US as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay, there we go. And it is one of the only Carrie Rose who you can follow over on Twitter. I'll not call it X. @CarrieRosePR. At C-A-R-R-I-R-O-S-E-P-R. Link in the show notes. But give her a great follow. She's fabulous. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. Do follow her. She's got some great case studies. She's great for this particular episode. She did something with Game called The Christmas Tinner or something like that. And essentially it was a Christmas dinner in a can, and they did a fantastic- I know. Exactly. Your face. Mordy Oberstein: I'm making a face that sounds like Spam. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you're making a face. No. So it was a fantastic, incredible campaign. They got some really good traction for it. And when we were thinking about seasonality, that was the first campaign that came to my mind. At Rise at Seven, they do a lot of creative campaigns that are connected with SEO. That's really sort of their bread and butter. That's a great example of it. They also had one with dog sweaters as well, where you could wear a matching sweater with your dog, which is another campaign that they did that went really well, which is kind of seasonal as well, because sweaters are cozy and stuff. But yeah, Carrie and the team do some great work. Follow her. She also shares a lot of digital PR examples. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ton of stuff. Crystal Carter: Which are great, particularly for seasonal ideas. Mordy Oberstein: So give her a follow. Again, it's @CarrieRosePR. That's Carrie with a C on Twitter, whatever, X, link in the show notes. And well, by the way, bread and butter, that's an underrated meal. Think of meal and talking like her bread and butter. Crystal Carter: I love bread. We talked about carbs. We talked about carbs. When I came to visit you, I was like, bring me carbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. And I did. Crystal Carter: You did and I was like, yeah... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I brought you carbs. Crystal Carter: ... this is a good colleague. I was like, you see, you see. Mordy Oberstein: But you ever go to a restaurant and they don't do it where I live now, but they give the basket bread with the little like, the restaurant butters. And the pumpernickel! Crystal Carter: But when they're warm. When they're warm, that's great. I mean, Olive Garden made their entire, the whole thing about Olive Garden is bread. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some bread. Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, I ate the bread. Also, Red Lobster have very good cheese rolls as well. Those are good as well. But yeah, I love carbs. I love bread. Mordy Oberstein: Best part, okay. I have my cheat days on my diet. I'm like, carbs. I don't want to go like the fanciest... I want carbs. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pumpernickel, pretzels. I love their pretzels. Mordy Oberstein: Hot pretzels, bagels. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. With good mustard. You got to have the good mustard with the pretzel. People put other stuff on it, but I'm like, nah, it's about the mustard. Mordy Oberstein: And it can't be like, it's more than sitting in the case. You go buy a hot pretzel for weeks on end, that's all crusty. That's not good. Mordy Oberstein: That's not what you want. What you do want though, is check us out next week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Sorry you're going to miss us. Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to hand off your SEO work to clients. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning up at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a reading 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

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

Want to build your brand up? Start a podcast. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss the art of podcasting and how you can leverage podcasts to showcase expertise and drive market traction. Take a behind-the-scenes look with host of the SEO Video Show, Paul Andre de Vera, to discover what it takes to plan and execute a professional podcast. Plus, we look at how the podcast landscape is changing for creators with a host of Strategy Sessions, Andi Jarvis. Learn how to translate podcasting into marketing growth on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Everything (mostly) that a marketer could want to know about podcasting Want to build your brand up? Start a podcast. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss the art of podcasting and how you can leverage podcasts to showcase expertise and drive market traction. Take a behind-the-scenes look with host of the SEO Video Show, Paul Andre de Vera, to discover what it takes to plan and execute a professional podcast. Plus, we look at how the podcast landscape is changing for creators with a host of Strategy Sessions, Andi Jarvis. Learn how to translate podcasting into marketing growth on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 99 | August 7, 2024 | 63 MIN 00:00 / 1:03:23 This week’s guests Katy Powell Paul Andre de Vera is a 15+ year B2B digital marketer who creates engaging, educational, and entertaining video content that ranks. His innovative approach has made "Dre" a sought-after speaker, online educator, and organic growth strategist for B2B companies like SAP and Workday. He's a diehard Raiders fan who lives with his two Yorkies, Buddha and Santo. You'll find "Dre" hosting the livestream SEO Video Show during Friday lunch, which has accumulated over 75k watch hours. He always looks for the next great place to devour a delicious rib-eye steak and occasionally sip a glass of whiskey. Today, you'll find him providing SEO consultation to hyper-growth startups Andi Jarvis Andi is the Founder and Strategy Director of Eximo Marketing, a marketing strategy consultancy based in Belfast and Liverpool. Andi also hosts the Strategy Sessions podcast, a show that interviews some of the best marketers in the world. He holds an MSc in Marketing and the Marketing Week Mini MBA in Marketing. He also runs a fundraising project, Eximo & Friends with Barnardo’s, where marketers volunteer to provide consultations to small businesses in return for a donation to support refugees. You should also know that Andi likes to talk, at length, about: being a dad, his BBQ, rugby league, boxing and cricket Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the very vocal, the audiable, the shout it out to the world and tell them what you think head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Like Beyonce says, "Tell everybody. Tell everybody." She says it a lot in that song, "Tell everybody." And like her partner says, "I got 99 problems, but a podcast ain't one." That's right. Mordy Oberstein: I thought you'd say, 99 problems, but talking a lot is not one. Crystal Carter: It's not one. It's definitely not one, like when I was at school. No, it was one of those personality tests. They do the Myers-Briggs tests and things, and they're like, "Crystal talks a lot." I'm like, "Like Kelsa Priess said, water is wet. This is not news." Mordy Oberstein: I took one on the computer and the computer started to fume. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: I'm joking. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also use Wix Studio and the templates and the advanced design features to give your podcast a home that you can control across the web. As opposed to just using a podcast hosting platform, you should also have a website for your podcast. Anyway, today we're doing a podcast about podcasting for marketing growth with marketers who podcast. As we're pulling back the curtain on this very show by looking at what does and doesn't have to go into production for a podcast, how to manage the ins and outs of a podcast, how to use a podcast to gain market traction, and how to leverage your podcast for your and your client's brands. To show us that it ain't nothing but a podcast thing. Dre is in the house, the host of the SEO Show, Paul Andre De Vera will chat with Crystal in just a few moments. Plus we look at how the podcast landscape is changing with the one only Andi Jarvis. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So the next time someone tells you to "Shh and be quiet," you tell them "The world isn't a library, it's a podcast, and I'll talk about whatever I want to talk about whenever I want to talk about it," as we help you find your inner voice. No, not your inner voice, but your microphone voice on this, the 99th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. It's our Wayne Gretzky episode, 99 or our Aaron Judge episode if you like baseball. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's fine. Also, I think I mentioned this when we chatted to Andi as well, but also Agent 99 from Get Smart. Mordy Oberstein: 99's a good number. Crystal Carter: It's good. It's good. 99 Red Balloons, the classic song. Mordy Oberstein: That's classic. Crystal Carter: Bump Ba dum bum bum bum, ba dum, bum bum. Mordy Oberstein: It also means we're one away from our 100th episode and we have a surprise for you for that. Crystal Carter: It's true, it's true. 100 is good innings in cricket because we couldn't cover all the sports, all the sports fall. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, is there anything... I like bowling? Is anything with 99? No. Crystal Carter: No.- Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking like- Crystal Carter: ... Except for that's bad score. Mordy Oberstein: ... the perfect score is a hundred, but it's 300. Crystal Carter: Definitely 300. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: And to be honest, I'm a mediocre bowler. I'm very happy if I get three digits, if I'm completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a terrible bowler. Crystal Carter: My husband was never on a bowling team. I was in a bowling league with my mom and my sister, and my husband has never been in organized bowling of any kind, and yet he always beats me, which makes me upset because he's a non-bowler. It's not fair. It's not okay. Mordy Oberstein: I have a hard time. I think we talked about this at one point. The ball bothers me, it bothers my wrist. It just feels awkward in my hand for some reason. Crystal Carter: I always start off with a heavier one in the the first game, and then I go lighter for the next game and the game after that. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You really plan out your bowling strategy. Crystal Carter: I get tie ties, I get tired and stuff. I tell you what though, my dad is an epic bowler. When I was a kid, he was my hero because he had, it was like 14 pounds or whatever, and when he would bowl, he would throw it halfway down the lane and then when it hit the pins, it was like, clack, clack, clack, clack. And I was like, this is awesome- Mordy Oberstein: You know you don't want the ball to spin, you want it to glide. And at the very end it's supposed to spin. I saw a video about this. Anyway, I don't know a lot about bowling, but I know a lot about podcasting. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I've done a few podcasts in my day. Podcasting, before we get into Dre, I just want to say it is a phenomenal, phenomenal medium for you if you're thinking about doing a variety of different things with your business or your client's businesses, podcasting is fabulous. And I'm not saying that because I'm biased towards podcasting, which I am. First off, it's informal and connected, which I think works in today's ecosystem. Like this podcast in case you haven't figured it out, is not exactly a tuxedo. It's more like a baggy pair of jeans. We have a connection, we talk, we're informal, we're chit-chatting. It's a great way to connect in a real way with your audience and not in a very corporate way with your audience, which I think the world is leaning very much against that whole corporate kind of talk. Podcasting is great. You create actual relationships with your guests. There have been people who are my best friends at SEO that I met by doing podcasts and having them on a podcast. You make real connections. That first five minutes and last five minutes of an interview are connection gold. And it's fabulous for positioning yourself. Don't always, and we'll talk about this with Andi, don't always worry about the numbers. Podcasting is a great way to position yourself for getting more leads and getting more clients and whatnot. And it's also much easier to produce, which we'll get into with Dre than it is, I don't know, the ultimate guide to whatever, whatever, whatever, to try to get more traffic. It's just easier to produce. And here's the greatest part, it's repurposable. Audiograms, YouTube video. You can turn it into a blog post. And last but not least, the barrier to entry is higher than you think, but it's also not as high as you think at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's one of those things that with marketing, once you get going, it can become a lot more sort of second nature. I think Dre's been doing his podcast and his show for a long time. You've been podcasting for a very long time. And Andi talks about, it was tricky to get it going in the first instance, but now he's really, really gotten through it and he really goes through it regularly. And I think that it becomes a sort of part of your routine that you're going to connect with your audience and share whatever you're sharing. And I think that one of the other things that I think is great for audiences, and for people who are marketing and who are considering podcasts is that you can make sure that you are connecting with a particular audience at any time. So podcasting is something that can apply to lots of different audiences, whatever your vertical is. And I think that that's something that can be tricky for lots of different verticals. But if you were somebody who was really into pneumatic drills, you can make a podcast and people who are really into that would be really into it. If you were somebody who was really into epidemiology or something, you could do a podcast and then people would be interested in that as well. The numbers on podcasts are incredible across the board, and I think that, like you said, it's not always about numbers, but it is about showing a depth of knowledge. And one of the things that's really... and an interest in knowledge as well. So even if you're not a super, I don't know why I picked pneumatic drilling, but I think I've been thinking about that PN, that silent P in there. Anyway, but if you were interested in that particular topic, and let's say you were a noob, right? Let's say you were just getting started on your journey of becoming, I don't know, an engineer in that field or something, whatever it may be, you can connect with people who are further along in their journey to help you learn about what you're doing and to help your audience learn with you. So it's something where you can come at it from a source of truth and you can use that to both endear yourself to your audience, but also to demonstrate your expertise, whichever audience you're trying to apply to. And that's something that can be really rare. So if you were to start a TikTok channel on the same topic, you would probably have to test that audience and say, is this audience on TikTok? Et cetera, et cetera. But podcasts are something that cut across almost all aspects and almost all demographics. Mordy Oberstein: And it's super easy. It's a great way, as you're doing that to position yourself or your client the same way. Because if you're putting out a blog post or you're putting out whatever you're putting out on social media, sometimes it could be hard to let your brand personality come through. It's super easy on a podcast because your personality literally comes through and you can, by the way, that doesn't mean you have to be your actual self. You could be your podcast self on a podcast. I'm this way on this podcast. I can be very different on a different podcast. It's super easy and it's super visible and it's super transparent, or that's not even the word I'm looking for. I can't find the right word. But it's super distinct and it's super obvious, a way to position your brand, I'll say personality, just super upfront. You don't have to over time start creating a notion with our visual language. It comes out instantaneously. When you're podcasting. Crystal Carter: It can be really useful to connect with people in a way that is low-key. So one of the things that can happen sometimes is that if you're doing a talk and you say hi, I'm so-and-so, and I also host a podcast. So sometimes if you're presenting to people, if you're talking to people, if you're meeting people, then you might say, oh, I've got this blog, read my blog. And maybe people have time to read your blog, maybe they don't have time to read your blog or watch my videos, maybe they have time to do it, maybe they don't. If you say, download this free guide, think maybe they have time to do that, maybe they don't. However, if you say, oh, I've got a podcast, then maybe at some point when they've got 10 minutes while they're doing their working out or they're going for a walk or they're at the airport or whatever it may be, it's really, really low-key. They can sort of flip through and they can get an idea of who you are before they get involved with some of your other aspects of your business or your persona or whatever it may be. And it's something that can be really accessible for people in lots of different ways. And I think that for brands, that's something that is super important because you want to be able to have some access there. I think also from a technical point of view, particularly from an SEO point of view, podcasts have incredible distribution networks built in. So if you were thinking of from a brand point of view, when you have a podcast and if you were to search for the SERP's Up Podcast for instance on Google, and then you were to look at some of the places where the SERP's Up Podcast is, and if you were to leave a review, then you would be able to see that ours shows up on IMDB, it shows up on Google's things, it shows up on Apple, it shows up on Spotify, it shows up on Amazon, it shows up on lots of different things, and there are very few mediums that have that built in. It has a built-in distribution network that allows you to connect with lots of different folks both on the SERP and in the lots of other platforms as well. Mordy Oberstein: And the last thing that I'll say that it is because that's absolutely true, before we hand it over to you and Dre, it does something that brands should be doing more of by default, and that's putting the people who work at the brands out in front. So you're putting actual people that people can actually connect... I'll tell you a story where... I'm not going to say the company where it was, one company I used to work with, they were like, oh, I'm so glad you're there, because until... I had no idea anyone who worked there and I don't know who to connect to, who to ask questions to, who to chat about, whatever it was. Putting people out in front for your brand, again, especially in today's ecosystem, Lily Ray has put out a tweet about this a couple... By the time this comes out a couple of weeks ago, it's like, brands should do this more often. It's really effective, and she's somebody who does that for her brand. Putting people out there is a way for other people to connect with other people, while at the same time connecting with your brand. And by default, you're going to need somebody like myself and Crystal to host the podcast. So you by default need to put somebody at your company out there upfront for people to connect with. That's insanely powerful. With that, let's dive into how you actually go about podcasting, running it, what works, what doesn't work, what you should do, when you shouldn't do as Crystal talks with Dre. Crystal Carter: Oh, thank you so much for joining us. We are so honored to have you on the show. Mordy and I are both huge fans of everything you do online. Paul Andre De Vera: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Crystal. Thank you for having me on again. I mean, it was awesome having you as guests on my own podcast, right? Both you and Mordy were great guests dropping so many knowledge bombs. Great stuff. Crystal Carter: I'll be completely honest. You were like, "Do you want to do the podcast?" And I was like, "Absolutely. Just for the montage." If people aren't familiar with the SEO show and the podcast that Paul does, he does these amazing montages that make you look like the most amazing person. I'm like, "oh my gosh, I want to meet that person." I'm like, "oh, wait, no, that's me." And yeah, I think you have so much fun with your podcast, and I think it really, really shows. Paul Andre De Vera: That's the number one rule that I follow when it comes to podcasting and having guests, is making sure the guest feels like the hero, the superstar. That's how you get them to open up, feel comfortable, and be able to share knowledge that maybe they maybe scared to share. But one of the things that I love doing is when a lot of podcasters ask, "Hey, introduce yourself." I don't like doing that. You know why? Because that makes the guests kind of feel a little like, they kind of may be shy and scared in sharing some of their awards that they've won, and you as the outsider can do that research for them and make them... Sometimes when I introduce someone myself, one of the guests was like, it was Dixon. Dixon goes, "I didn't even know that I did that stuff. I didn't." You find things about someone that they didn't even know that was out there, right? So going the extra mile and making sure that your guest is the hero of the podcast is something that really, really will make it go really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that helps you build on the podcast as well, because I think that one of the things I think that you are really, really good at is elevating the art form, as it were. So if people haven't listened to your show, you add in even before the show starts. You've got the montage that's like the show's happening, it's going to be great, and you add in lots of sound effects and you add in lots of great stuff throughout the show. And I think that that element that you're talking about, that adding in that extra element of research and really hosting the show, really guiding that can really take it to a next level. What other things do you try to bring to really make it feel like a podcast experience? Not just like, oh, you're just listening to a podcast, but this is an experience. Paul Andre De Vera: Yes, definitely. Because right nowadays, we started the podcast, I started this remotely. And a lot of podcasts started by just going on a Zoom and now eventually started in... sometimes... before we were all stuck at home, people actually in person. There was mics in front of each other and you guys that was a podcast and you would actually record in studio. And now that everyone's going back into these elaborate studios and stuff like that, it's time to up level your game if you're going to do some video podcasts. So this is where you come in on upping your production value, whether it's either... obviously Podcast, you need great sound, you need a great mic. You were talking earlier today, let me get closer to my mic because you know the value of how the quality of the sound is, especially in podcasts, that's something can actually even extend out into video because you can watch a pixelated video and have clear sound. You still get value from it. But if you have muffled sound and clear video, you just watch people doing charades or something. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's something that can really tell people that you care, that they're taking the time to listen to your podcast. And in terms of the guests and the quality of the experience, it can help you to get better guests. It can help you to get better segments. Have you found that in your experience? Paul Andre De Vera: Oh, yes, yes. When I first started, it was tough getting guests. Getting guests... I got this question all the time, "how do you get your guests on your podcast?" So at first, of course, I connected to my actual network, going out to LinkedIn. People I've actually worked with in the past, SEOs and CEOs of companies that I've actually worked with and being able to tap them first, right? I'll tell you this, I did get rejected when I first started. You'll get rejected. Maybe they took a look at it and we'll pass, we'll pass. But I'll tell you this, a year or two years later, ask them the same again. I didn't mention anything about it from the past. I'm like, Hey, I still would love... I would say something, "I would still love to have you." It's like, "oh, okay. Of course, totally fine. Totally get it." There's that rule where you don't just want, want, want, want. So sometimes you want give back. And now knowing that the production value's the number one thing that actually people will accept my invitations like, wow, you put so much work into it, they want to be a part of it. So that's something... Having that extra touch of production will get you over the top. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally true. And I think also that not expecting to set the world on fire in the first couple of episodes I think is really important for expectations. I think there's a lot of people who sort of start a podcast and then it kind of fades away. This first little while can sometimes be tricky to get through. What is the thing that helps you to push through? What would you say to someone who's on the fence as to whether or not this is a good ROI for their investment either as a team or as an individual? Paul Andre De Vera: The best ROI is you're actually investing in yourself by doing this yourself. Obviously there's going to be the whole personal brand aspect and you developing your own personal brand can also uplift a company's brand. But at the same time when you're podcasting, even just for companies, you're really, really having another channel, an avenue where you can actually reach out to. This is something that when they now come on to clients, I'm like, Hey, have you ever thought about podcasting? If it's not something they're doing. Because I'll tell you this, there is some relation when it comes to SEO, right? I mean, you can get your show notes that you can add into that gets ranking. You can distribute your podcast through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, iHeartRadio, and then you get your show notes on there, you get back links back to your site. So there's some SEO value when it comes to podcasting, but at the same time... So that's one value you can prove like, hey, you want to help boost our rankings, let's start on podcasts. But at the same time, you're creating content. Content is currency nowadays. This is something that you want to have. And that's why I also mentioned to you like, Hey, when you're doing recordings like this, I feel like you add the extra layer of video. That video is going to help you repurpose the audio and repurpose the visuals. And again, you can do more cool things in your production, like how I do all the little magic effects on screen, you heard the little chime, but for those who are listening can see on screen, there was a little graphic that went overlay. So adding the extra touch, again, will help you up level your podcast. And then when it comes to ROI, it's like, again, I do see it more as more brand awareness and just being able to get out there. But there's also, when it comes to podcasts and video in particular, you can really, really have a call to action towards the end. And these podcasts where if you're an affiliate marketer, I put affiliate links in these show notes, and I've actually gotten income from that. That's something I actually didn't think, but hey, it's another avenue to include your affiliate links if you're promoting something. And that was another great source of income through podcasting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. And I think that for businesses who are... because there are a lot of branded podcasts, and this is something that you see across, we are a Wix podcast. We are a podcast for Wix, for instance. HubSpot has a whole podcast network. There are lots of brands who are putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of interest in podcasts. And I think that one of the reasons why they're doing that is for the brand visibility. And I think also for the flexibility. What we find certainly is that we are able to talk about topics that are maybe brand new topics that we're sort of exploring. And we find that that's a really interesting way and that people really engage with those new topics. That this is a sort of cutting edge topic. We're still exploring what it is, and we're having a discussion about it. And the expectation is that it's a discussion rather than necessarily, I know every single thing that there is to know about that. And I think that big brands are investing in these things for a lot of reasons. Are you finding that you're seeing more brands interested in getting involved with podcasts in your experience? Paul Andre De Vera: Oh, yes. Definitely seeing more interest. And if not, I'm the one that's going to bring it up to them. So I'm working with a company, I'm like, Hey, hey, I was able to build a brand, a huge brand that gets tons of sponsorships within just a few years. So this is something where you can really, really develop another asset for your company. If that asset's not just building your brand. You have another source of income where depending on the type of business model you have, your podcast can get sponsors and ads from your Google AdSense, whether it's you post on YouTube. And I really, really feel like, I haven't even looked into this, but I know there's podcasting agencies out there that you can actually get into actually more of the audio type of podcast and get advertising in there. And hopefully... And I feel like the ROI in there is pretty good because you know why? I feel the podcasters are authentic. We are two people. We know we are having a conversation. What we're talking about is about our experiences, and it really makes us have that authority within our space of what we're talking about right now. Both of us, we both run... both podcasters. Like you right now, you're running the Wix podcast. I'm here running my own podcast, and we're talking about podcasting… Crystal Carter: Right! Paul Andre De Vera: It's two really experts of what we're doing and we're sharing our experience. There's so much value in that. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And I think it's a super accessible thing as well, because anyone with ears, or whatever can listen to a podcast. And also there's audio transcripts as well for folks who are hearing impaired as well. So there's lots of ways that you can engage in, and I actually very often read podcast transcripts myself. I don't know that there's many other people like me, but I very often I look at podcasts that way and I find it super valuable. It's also a great place for quotes. So a lot of people talk about EEAT and that sort of thing, and I think that we had an episode about experts, and I think that around brand experts, subject matter experts, for instance, it can sometimes be difficult to get subject matter experts to write all what they're talking about, but podcasts are a much easier ask for those kinds of folks. Have you found that in your travels? Paul Andre De Vera: Yes, yes. I feel the entry into podcasting. Just getting people to talk is so much easier If you're coming on something like this, instead of me having a thought leader write something down, take exactly what I said, make a thought leadership piece out of it. This is something that we also do with... I'm seeing a lot with companies creating customer case studies as a podcast. They're bringing customers in, and I'm working with a company right now where I'm helping edit their podcast by them just having a conversation with one of their customers, and then I'm repurposing it into... well, there's little vertical shorts or an actual clip of the whole podcast, but then again, we're doing video just again, I'm going to keep pushing this. Do video when you're doing podcasting because there's so much more that you can repurpose, right? There's just that extra layer they can add. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I've not heard this case study example, but I think that's a really great trend. I think people are getting really creative with it as well. And I think interviews are a classic podcast format, but one of the other things I've seen is the people are doing sort of long reads. So for articles that are really, really long for... you start to see the author reading it and then they put it online as a podcast, and it's really engaging actually. It's really, really engaging. It's like a mini audiobook almost, which I find really interesting. Paul Andre De Vera: I love that. I love that. It kind of goes back to something what I'm doing here as well. I do have a podcast, so I do have the video podcast and the SEO Video Show, which I kind of like promoting more as a show, but I do have the Knowledge Bomb Podcast, right? The SEO Knowledge Bomb Podcast. And this is where it's not a complete copy of what I'm doing. I'm pretty much extracting all the knowledge bombs from one of my shows and then reading it out on a podcast with my voice and it becomes a five-minute podcast saying, Hey, SEO Knowledge Bombs of the Week. It's five minute audio clip of me kind of just summing up of what the knowledge bombs were dropped from my past guests from the previous week. So again, you can really create a podcast out of what you're already doing now. Say, if you want to get inventive, look and see what you're doing now. If you are writing blogs like we mentioned, take your blogs, maybe extract that and read it out and just talk to an audience so people just can hear your voice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think there's a lot of experimentation that people can do, and I think it's a really interesting landscape. What do you think the future holds for podcasts in the next year or so? Paul Andre De Vera: For the next year, again, I want to see more video podcasts. Like I said, I'm going to keep repeating it. I feel like right now you can already see the transition from say something like Spotify now I'm doing some video on there. So these directories are going to... I want to imagine once we see Apple Podcasts, those becoming starting showing videos. And I feel that that's the direction going there as well. But again, podcasting is something, is an easy way to just get into a channel of being able to show off your knowledge and your expertise and be able to reach out to other people. I started my podcast because I was stuck at home and everyone was stuck at home. I was like, I want to network. This is my way of networking and going out to just talk to people, smart people, and learn from them. That's how you were able to just learn by just talking to people, smart people, smart people like you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: No, you are smart. Paul Andre De Vera: You're smart. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It is always, always, always a pleasure, and I hope to see you soon at the next SEO conference. Thank you so much for your time today, Paul, and yeah, thanks for joining us. Paul Andre De Vera: Of course. Of course. Thank you Crystal, and thank you Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: That was super, super insightful chat Crystal. He has so much personality. And again, you see it come through and it builds his own brand, his personal brand, without him even having to say more than 10 words. Crystal Carter: It's something that he really, really utilizes really, really well with his channel. So it works really well for his YouTube channel. It works really well for the podcast. Dre's super nice when you meet him in person as well. And also, also, also, Dre is incredibly smart. Dre has a lot of fun with his podcast and stuff, and he has a lot of fun with his show, but I've been on discussions with him where he gets into some of the more technical stuff that he does, and my guy is incredibly astute at Enterprise SEO, and it is an absolute pleasure to hear him speak on that because he's proper nerd levels of really, really right in the weeds in that and so impressive. And I think that people underestimate the ability to be charismatic in certain spaces and assume that just because you're charismatic in one space that you're not necessarily a complete nerd in another space. Dre is absolutely one of those people. He really, really knows his stuff, and it's great to speak to him. Mordy Oberstein: He's one of my favorites. I am looking forward to seeing him again at some SEO conference in the near future. He was at Brighton San Diego last year. I'm like, "oh, I didn't know he was coming. I wish I would've been able to spend more time with him 'cause he's so sweet." Speaking of another sweet person, we're going to have a little chat with Andi Jarvis about- Crystal Carter: I don't know that anyone's ever called Andi sweet. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm saying... Well, I'm not saying that because he's actually sweet. I'm saying that purely for the sake of the transition. Crystal Carter: Which is an important thing that you must master as a podcaster. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. It's like the kung fu of podcasting, the transition. Crystal Carter: Wax on, wax off transition. Mordy Oberstein: Paint the fence transition. So Andi, I apologize for calling you sweet, but we're going to talk with Andi now. Okay, so the podcast game isn't what it used to be, which reminds me of baseball. I always do this. I'm always going to give a baseball reference. So back in the day, you didn't need to be super athletic to be a baseball player. Have you ever seen Babe Ruth? They just showed up after eating an all you can eat buffet down the block. Crystal Carter: Smoking cigarettes in the dugout. Mordy Oberstein: Smoking cigar... Literally, there is a picture of Keith Hernandez and the Mets smoking a cigarette in the dugout during a game like- Crystal Carter: Like spitting out tobacco in the kitchen. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I'm an athlete. Okay, that was the eighties, and I don't mean the 1880s, like the 1980s. Andi Jarvis: Listen, it was the same in football or soccer. There was a great Brazilian footballer called Socrates, one of the greatest Brazilians of all time. Goes under the radar 'cause he doesn't have a name, but an absolute genius of a football player. And footage exists of him in the early to mid-eighties, walking out at halftime after the halftime break, flicking a cigarette into the crowd and running onto the pitch. But this guy was just... he just ambled around the... he was amazing, but it just wouldn't happen these days. Mordy Oberstein: It's unbelievable, right? But now you're right. So now you can't. Now even the baseball players, they have weightlifting regimes. They do this and they have that, and they have set nap time now. Crystal Carter: They have GPS trackers to monitor their stress rating and what they were doing on the pitch and all that sort of stuff. Andi Jarvis: Can I bore you with a really quick story about why that happened as well? Mordy Oberstein: Surely. Andi Jarvis: Why it happened as well. It's all down to, you remember what? 20, maybe 25 years ago when baseball went on strike and there was a lockout for like a whole month. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, 1994, the Yankees would've won the World Series that year, by the way. So I'm pissed. Crystal Carter: But I mean, who's counting though? Mordy Oberstein: I am. Andi Jarvis: Yeah. Well, okay, so the lockout happened and baseball lost millions of fans. When it came back, TV ratings were through the floor, everything went to (beep), and it's never been proven. But the belief was that when the players came back, the executives of baseball clubs were like, look, we've got to have something to bring the crowds back. The crowds are through the floor, the TV floor. What happened after that lockout, if you remember, was the guy whose name I forget, suddenly went on a home run hitting streak, started hitting the ball- Mordy Oberstein: Mark McGwire. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Andi Jarvis: McGwire, right. And there was somebody else doing it as well. Mordy Oberstein: Sammy Sosa. Crystal Carter: Sammy Sosa. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, right. Okay. Now, I don't know if you remember looking at pictures of them pre-lockout and post-lockout, they got significantly bigger. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Andi Jarvis: And a number of guys in baseball had started juicing. Now, if you start taking steroids and start juicing, you don't just accidentally do that. And the belief was that it was, if not encouraged, the blind eye was turned by the baseball team- Mordy Oberstein: The blind eye was a million percent- Andi Jarvis: ... to allow the guys to bulk up because all they wanted was you start banging the ball out of the stadium and home runs happen, people start coming. But on the back of that, people started realizing maybe we better do it legally, but if I'm bigger and fitter, I can hit the ball further. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Andi Jarvis: Oh, and I can throw it further. Oh, okay. So it all spun out the back of that where they realized maybe if you are an athlete, it would help. Just don't do drugs. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Yeah. See, by way, I had a Barry Bonds card and a Sammy Sosa before they did steroids, they don't even look like the same person. By the way, in case you haven't noticed, we have a guest here with us. His name is Andi Jarvis, and that's why like baseball, we're going into the great beyond of the nature of podcasting nowadays. Andi, what's going on, man? Welcome to the show. Andi Jarvis: Thank you for having me I hope and thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just first off flattered that you regaled us with a baseball story and you're not even American. Andi Jarvis: It's my one and only baseball story. I'm sat here in a Canadian, Toronto Raptors T-shirt. I don't even know what sport that is. I've just got family there, so- Crystal Carter: It's basketball. Mordy Oberstein: It used to be basketball. Now it's just crap. But yeah. Crystal Carter: Also in this podcast about podcasting, can I just say that one of the first rules of podcasts is to not stay on topic. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Speaking of not staying on topic, Andi, what are you going to pitch us today? Andi Jarvis: Storytelling and the Strategy Sessions podcast and my marketing services. No, I'm not pitching all of that, but I'm here to talk podcasting coz I have a podcast which is called the Strategy Session. Crystal Carter: And you get some amazing guests on your podcast. I don't know how you convince these people to spend time with you. Mordy Oberstein: I really enjoy that episode that you did with that guest that you had, so-and-so. Crystal Carter: You get some great folks on your podcast. Andi Jarvis: All of them. So weirdly, this is the one thing if you're doing a guest podcast, which you don't have to do, but I find it easy 'cause you talk and you spark off somebody. But people are like, "how'd you get those guests?" I'm like, "genuinely, most of the time I just ask them." "What do you ask them?" I'm like, "will you come on my podcast and we'll talk about these things?" And you'd be amazed how many people go, "okay." Now some people have questions like, who else has done it and what's the commitment and how does it... Not everybody says yes, but I would say 50% of the people I ask say yes. And then once you get some good guests coming on, that can snowball, because the ones who do ask and go, "who else has been on?" You go, "oh, Rory Sutherland, Mark Ritson and Seth Godin." And they're like, "oh, right, okay." Now that's not- Mordy Oberstein: And you're rolling . Andi Jarvis: Yeah, and look, I named celebrities in the marketing industry there, but they're probably 15% of the episodes. And yes, they get bigger listening figures, but I don't want to turn it into kind of a celebrity led podcast, that it's more of an interesting stories about marketing podcast and lessons you can learn. But yeah, those people undoubtedly just help. Definitely. Crystal Carter: But I think that's one of the really interesting things about a podcast is it's a really good opportunity to connect with folks that you might not connect with in another way. So like you said, you've got people like Mark Ritson, you've got people like Seth Godin, Britney Muller, I love Britney. But then you also have people who are up and coming in their careers, people who have a good following, but maybe it's more niche. And so as well as you say, you ask them, how do you find them? Is there a particular criteria that you're looking for that makes you think this person's going to be great for a podcast? Andi Jarvis: Yes. So a lot of the time... I read a lot about marketing, so I sometimes just, I'll read something in Marketing Week, or if I see some awards that look rigorous, 'cause let's be honest, not every awards are rigorous. So if I see some awards that look rigorous, I'll be... sometimes if I've got half an hour, I'm sat at an airport, I'll have a look through who's shortlisted, not necessarily worried about who's won, but who's shortlisted and who's done something that I find really interesting. So sometimes that, look, the big budget thing won, but somebody did this thing that was really interesting and scrappy that nobody else considered. Yeah, that's it. And then just send them a message. LinkedIn's great. Or find their email or just like, Hey, I see you did this thing. Would you be interested in coming on the podcast? Here's a link to the show. Genuinely, we just want to sit and have a chat. And so I do a lot of background research to try and find the right guests. And yeah, that's it really. Mordy Oberstein: Not rocket science, but it's hard work. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, look, it takes time, and I think I pride myself in making things look and seem a little bit off the cuff, and it's all kind of laid back and relaxed, and it's not structured, and that's part of it. But you have to plan to be not structured and you have to put the effort in to find the guest. And some guests are really happy to just go, yeah, look, we're talking about this thing that I know a lot about. Just ask whatever. Other guests are a bit more nervous, and they're like, can you send me the questions? Now, I don't do that because you can always tell a podcast to me when someone's been sent the questions or when... you'll hear them say... you'll ask someone a question, they'll give this amazing answer and the host will go, oh, that's really interesting. Anyway, so next question, but follow up. They've just told you about this huge thing that they did. They won a gold medal for something or other, and you're like, that's really interesting. So tell us about your childhood. No, tell us about the thing they've just said. So I work with the guests. Some guests need a little bit more work than others. Some are just like, yeah, just shoot me a time and we'll do it. Crystal Carter: Can you tell us a little bit about your journey for podcasting? So did you have to learn that skill and is it different now from when you started? Andi Jarvis: It's a bit less chaotic now, I would say. I started in 2020 peak lockdown May 2020, and didn't know what I was doing. What I knew was I knew how to talk to people. I knew how to ask questions I found interesting about marketing. So if you think about this, I work on my own anyway. I was then forced on my own or away from all of the marketers because of COVID lockdown, and it just felt quite isolating. But also, I like to learn and I go to conferences to learn and I talk to people to learn, and I just wasn't getting it from virtual events. But talking to people was really interesting. So I was like, right, a podcast is the way to go. But I was just kind of making it up as I was going along. And there was different segments to the show edited together because one of the things was I had a bit more time, so I wanted to learn how to edit. I was like, right, well, I'm going to learn how to edit different bits into the show. I'm going to have a different guest. I'm going to have different sections, I'm going to do... And what you realize as the world started to reopen again is that that's just a real (beep) ton of work as well. So I streamlined it a little bit and now it's just an interview, minimal editing and get that out. But in terms of the format, and it's still me interviewing someone for 45 minutes to an hour depending on who the guest is, really. Mordy Oberstein: Looking back, it was like three, four years ago already, the pandemic. Do you feel like the ecosystem that you started off in and where you are now, it's a different world for your podcast? The world changed around you kind of thing? Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And I think the main driver of that is just the changing listening habits. So back in 2020, any idiot with a microphone, I, started a podcast. A lot of those, let's be honest, a lot of people who start a podcast and a lot of you listening go, I'm going to start a podcast about this thing. If you get five episodes in, you've done really, really well and you're miles in front of most people who start a podcast and do one episode. I feel lucky that I started during lockdown because I committed to doing... and I went out publicly and I said on LinkedIn, and I said, on social, 26 episodes, one every two weeks, I'm going to do it for a year. And there's times where it felt like a little bit of a millstone. I'm like, oh God, what have I done? But you get into the rhythm of just making sure you deliver it and you did. And that kind of got me up and running. So what's changed though since then is as radio listening figures have changed and as media habits have changed, the media group certainly in the UK have realized the value of podcasting. So Spotify weren't paying people millions to do podcasts. They were just hosting podcasts. In fact, I don't even think Spotify were hosting podcasts when I started. They bought Anchor, and that's how they do their hosting. If you look at the top charts in the UK now, it's all the same company. So radio stations have podcasts now. So every celebrity, it's an extension of the radio's brand, and all they're interested in is keeping the audience so they can sell advertising or in the BBC's case, just keeping their audience. So it's a different world. And what that means for an amateur bedroom podcaster is that you've got to pay a lot of attention to production values. People would just like, it's a podcast, it's just a guy on his own. If the sound quality went a bit wobbly or your mic starts to kick up, it didn't really matter. But now people are like, every podcast you listen to has professional level audio. So if you are not delivering something similar, people are just like, "this is awful." And just turn off. So you've really got to pay attention to the stuff that you never really bothered with before and get into that side of it a bit more. But look, I still enjoy it and mine's still entirely self-produced 'cause I enjoy that bit of it. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, that point on the radio station, so for example, I listen to a sports podcast every day, it's ESPN's New York Radio Station, one of their shows, they're just repurposing it for podcast form and they lose out to the other New York's radio station in the actual ratings, but they beat them out on the podcast numbers, and the podcast numbers are so significant. They pour a ton of production effort into the podcast, whereas the other radio station completely ignores the podcast. So if you don't think to your point that big players are paying attention to their podcasts, they 100% most definitely are because another channel for them to beat other competitors. Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And you look at the other thing as well is that celebrities have decided that podcasting now is an extension of their social brand. Now, whether this is what I would call pointless celebrities who are famous for being famous, I'm not a fan of that (beep), or whether it's movie stars or actors or sports people or politicians or whatever, they've realized that declining social audiences and organic reach is a problem. But if you build an audience in a podcast, you have this deeper longer conversation with them. So people are like, "who do you want to hear talking about marketing?" "Andi Jarvis." "Who's that guy? I've never heard of him." Or some idiot who used to do social media because they were on a TV program. Oh, they must know what they're talking about. Not that mine's a social media podcast, but if you want to do a social media podcast, there's probably some idiot who's been on a TV show doing a social media podcast, and you're like, what are you going to learn from them? They literally had 8 million people watching them for 15 nights. That's why they've got a big social media following, not going to help your small business mate. It really isn't. Crystal Carter: When I talk to people who are running smaller podcasts who aren't Joe Rogan, not that I'm chatting to Joe, but people who are running smaller podcasts, they say that their expectations are different. So think the expected outcomes that they plan to get, the ROI that they plan to get from the podcasts are different. Would you agree with that? Would you agree that maybe it's not about getting a million listeners? Andi Jarvis: Yeah, and look, let's be honest, anyone who tells you they don't want a million listeners is lying. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, I'll take it. Andi Jarvis: But a win is not a million listeners. And I can tell you the top performing, so "performing" in air quotes episodes of my podcast, they're the ones with the celebrity guests on, the Seth Godins, Rory Sutherlands, Mark Ritsons. They are the top three. Yeah, they're the top three. Now, I can also tell you, and that's success apparently, but I podcast because I run a small business. Success to me is my business keeping going and winning more business. I don't think I've ever landed any business because of either any of those episodes. Now, I can point you to many other episodes where people have reached out and got in touch, and went, "I heard you speak to this person. Can we talk about this thing that you talked about?" So the listener figures aren't there, but the money in my bank account tells me they are there. So it's about what is success and being hyper clear on that. But one thing I would say is that there's a real fine line, and there are lots and lots of podcasts in marketing, and I've never bothered to count them, but I was going to say bajillions of podcasts in marketing that are set up by consultants and agencies that are sales podcasts. That are, oh, hi. Who are my ideal clients? Mordy and Crystal, how do I get in front of them? Let's invite them on a podcast. And then they sit on that podcast and sell to them. Let me tell you Crystal about this amazing thing I once did that sort of is right in your sector. And when you're listening to them, you can feel the pitch. And it's like, now, I would say to anyone, I think, I don't how many episodes I've got, I must be nearly 70 episodes now in total, because every season we start the numbering. Must be at 70 episodes now. And if you can hear me sell more than... Sorry, I've sold like I'm going to conferences or I'm doing this event, which unashamedly sell that, but if you listen to me interviewing a guest, point to somewhere you can hear me selling to that person. I don't have people on who I want to sell to. And this to me is top of funnel awareness and getting me out there and having people going, Eximo Marketing, Andi Jarvis, this guy knows his stuff, he understands this thing. That's what this is doing. It's not bottom of the funnel sales. Mordy Oberstein: I always feel that a podcast is really, outside of maybe the Joe Rogans of the world, it's a brand play. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, a hundred percent. Mordy Oberstein: It's a brand positioning play, you're having a constant conversation, you're reinforcing messaging, you're reinforcing that you're an expert, you're reinforcing this and that. It's not necessarily about the numbers, but people do really think it's about the numbers. I was saying before we record, I was at my kid's kindergarten graduation and some neighbor of mine said, "Hey, I heard you do a podcast. I want to get in and do a podcast 'cause I heard it's really easy to get in and do a podcast." I'm like, "yeah, it's pretty easy to do a podcast. You need basically some kind of recorder and you need a voice and you need to talk and you need to record that voice. And then you put it out there, SoundCloud or whatever you want to put it, fine, really easy. But it's not as easy as you think it is to get traction now because it's so saturated. Unless you're talking about some random, random topic, there's so many people doing the same thing that you're doing. You need to find an angle to differentiate yourself." Like this Break the Fourth Wall, this podcast, how do we differentiate this podcast? One is we started doing segments. Most SEO podcasts don't really do segments, and we also pitched it in a way or not pitched it. We positioned it in a way where, hey, if you're really advanced in SEO, you've been doing SEO for a long time, you'll get X value out of it. And if you are looking to break into the SEO world or digital marketing world, you also get y value out of it at the same time. And that's unique. That's a really cool way of positioning a podcast. You need to find some kind of angle because at the end of the day, if it's a branding play, if you don't position it in a unique way, you've lost the value of it. Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And I think one of the things with that positioning is if I look back early on, it was too broad, but I didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up. And the next series, series five, which will start in September, will probably be the most narrowly focused of the episodes in the series of them. Not every single episode, because there's a few that I have academics on as well 'cause I think there's a lot you can learn from academics, and so I probably won't be trying to get really niche with them. I actually want to explore the breadth of what they talk about. But one of the key things is maybe narrowing the focus of what we talk about and going a bit deeper on some of the episodes 'cause I think that that's right, is that it goes back to this concept of you needing a hundred fans or whatever it is. I can't remember, is it a thousand fans or a hundred fans, whatever. But if you are niche enough and talking about the right stuff, you don't need a million people listening to it. In fact, you've probably failed if you get a million people listening to it because you are mass market at that point. What you really want is a hundred or 500 or a thousand people who are here to hear what you have to say because they are in that particular sector. That's what you really need to get to. So if you are just talking to the right people, talk to your audience, understand your customers. Marketing basics, who are you talking and why do they care? And make a podcast about that, then you don't need to worry about the listening numbers. You just need to keep delivering that value and delivering that content. Crystal Carter: There's a couple of things that strike me from what you've just said. First of all, you were saying, oh, I'm talking to academics. I find them really interesting. You're like, I read a lot of marketing books, and you've got a lot of authors on your section. You're like, oh, I really want to drill down one of the things that I've read when somebody was like, how should you start a podcast? Or, which topic should you think about? And one of the things, I can't remember where I read it, I wish I could reference it, I'm sorry. But they said that. If it's not a topic that you could talk about a hundred times, like a hundred episodes, then it's probably not a good topic for you. So I know, Andi, that you are a marketing nerd because I know, I've seen your bookshelf, I'm sure behind you is full of all the marketing books. Andi Jarvis: Oh, yeah, I'm a bore. You say nerd, I'm a bore, right? I am. I'm boring in public. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's awesome. I think we get people on the podcast like yourself, other folks where I'm just like, I'm so excited. I cannot believe we got this guest to join us to talk about whatever the topic is. We have people on the podcast to talk about stuff that we wish we knew more about. And it's an incredible opportunity, an incredible privilege to be able to speak to them about that topic. And I think that that is another piece of value that you can add to your listening audience. If they're a niche audience and they're with you and they've been with you for that time, you can also help them to learn about this new thing. You can also help them explore that. You can also go on that journey. And in terms of long tail keywords, it's another great way to explore a long tail topic, like a really niche topic like you were saying, drilling down. It's a really good opportunity for that. Andi Jarvis: When I was 11 years old in school, one of my teachers, Mrs. Colling, what she was called, had a sign on her door, which she used to point to a lot. It said something like, "it's better to remain silent and be thought of a fool than to open your mouth and to remove all doubt." Now to someone who never shut up, she used to point, she'd be like, "Andrew." The reason I bring that up is that, the point you make about can you talk about it for a hundred episodes. If you are not an expert in something, you can probably bluff your way through a blog by reading enough blogs and copying the best bits and rewriting it with a little bit of your tone of voice. Not saying that's how all travel blogs are written, but you've not been to all those places you're writing about. But you can kind of do that. If you have to talk for 30 minutes on a subject and you don't know that subject, you will quite quickly have opened your mouth and be found to be a fool. And if you want to release 10 episodes about that subject, that's 300 minutes. That's five hours of talking about a subject. Can you do that? Now, I would say if someone gave me a microphone and went, listen, we just need to fill this 10 hours of silence. Can you talk about one subject? It would either be boring sports stories or marketing. Either of those two things I could probably talk about at length for about 10 days without stopping. I might even take breath- Mordy Oberstein: And we've covered both of them? Andi Jarvis: ... every now and again. Yeah, listen, I could put both of those two things together. I really could. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great podcast right there, by the way. Crystal Carter: You're speaking Mordy's language here. Could I just say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Boring sports stories and marketing with Andi Jarvis? Andi Jarvis: Yeah. Like that baseball story I told at the beginning. Now that means the editor has to leave it in on lobby. A boring story I told at the beginning, I love stuff like that. And I could fill time forever, but marketing, people are like, oh, I'm sorry we didn't have time to prepare for this. I was like, I've been preparing my whole life for this. You need me to talk about marketing, pass me that microphone. I am your guy. So have a passion for it and have a knowledge about it. The only caveat to that I would say is if you're going to do something out of passion, so say you, I don't know, you love Crocs or you love, it might be theater, it might be musicals, it might be Taylor Swift, whatever. If you're doing it out of passion, I think the passion carries you, not necessarily the knowledge. But if you're doing it for business, you have to show you're an expert in that field 'cause if you don't show you're an expert in that field, you're going to harm your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of your brand as time ebbs away on us, where can people find your brand and yourself? Andi Jarvis: Yeah, great segue, Mordy. Great segue. So, Andi Jarvis. I spell Andi with an I. so if you just put my name into Google, I appear everywhere. LinkedIn and Instagram and Threads are the places to find me. Unfortunately, I now stay away from Twitter since the Lunatic took over the asylum and don't really use it anymore. But yeah, so you find me. The company's called Eximo Marketing, E-X-I-M-O. So have a look for either of those and you'll find me. I'm also sure there's a link to the Strategy Sessions in the show notes. Is that correct? Mordy Oberstein: Heck yes. Andi Jarvis: Have a listen. I would say, if I can pitch this, so last year for the first time, so season four, I decided to do two mini seasons within the season. I did a Black History Month mini season, which in the UK is October, not February, and I did a Women's History Month, which is built around International Women's Day, so I did that as well. So I did, there was five Tuesdays in October, so I did five episodes with five guests and I did four for Women's History Month. I'm really proud of those miniseries. I'm proud of those nine episodes. They took us into slightly different conversations about different things. Now, I didn't just talk to black marketers about being black. They were just great at what they did and they happened to be black. That's the way the conversations went. But some of those episodes in those two miniseries are my favorites. You can't pick a favorite podcast, right? 'Cause It's like picking your favorite child, but some of those episodes are some of my top three, top five ever that I recorded and just really insightful deep conversations with really, really interesting people. People who I probably wouldn't have met before, some of them you might never have heard of either. If you're just thinking, where do I start listening to this Idiot's podcast? I would go back start of the Black History Month miniseries, started with an episode with a woman called Sherice Anibaba and you could probably see if you watch the video of me just sitting there going and just blown away by every word she says, I'm just hanging on it. Genuinely, she's genuinely amazing, so just start there. If you're going to start somewhere. I know you'll probably start with Seth Gordon, right? But if you're going to start somewhere, I'd got Black History. Mordy Oberstein: I like that by the way, not just a page, but where to start. That's unique. Andi Jarvis: I mean, you can go back to episode one if you like. It might take you, see if you're awake 12 hours a day, I give you ... you a whole week of your entire life doing nothing else other than listening to me on a podcast, which don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Podcast listening tip, never start with episode one. It's usually those first few episodes. You got to really work out the kinks. I would start at episode 20 or whatever it is. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, definitely. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thanks Andi. Thanks for coming on and Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Andi Jarvis: Thank you for having me. It's been a ride as always and lovely to see you both. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. From one sweet person to another sweet person to Barry, it's time for us to delve into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Starting off with not news from Barry Schwartz, but from Anu Adegbola over on Search Engine Land, running about, Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program for publishers. If you might recall, Perplexity got into a little bit of a snafu with various publishers about their content or about the publisher's content being shown in Perplexity without any real attribution and basically saying, "Hey, you took our content you just posted as your own and that's not cool." This seems like it might be atonement for that. There's a new pilot program where if you select publishers like Time, Der Spiegel and Fortune are included, that when their URLs appear within a Perplexity search and there's an ad on that search as well, those publishers will get some of the ad revenue from that ad. Doesn't seem like there's a ton of details about how exactly the program works and what the exact figures are and who exactly is in there. Also, the initial partners. And if this will expand or not expand. But it is really interesting 'cause I guess it's kind of the first real revenue sharing program we've seen, definitely on these AI search engine things, but across the board. There's no revenue sharing program with Google, for example, which I guess is a sore point for publishers, but that's a whole different topic for a whole different podcast. Anyway, on to Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Round Table. This was an interesting one, Barry writes, "Google 'hidden gem stores' search feature." What about it Barry? What Barry is saying is Google's testing a hidden gem store search feature that was spotted by Brody Clark where he was searching for sneakers and there was a little section on the mobile search for Hidden Gem stores, which is not, by the way, part of the Hidden Gems algorithm thing. That's a totally different thing. If you're not familiar with that, you don't need to know about that right now. If you are, just know this is not that. It was basically a little section on the mobile surface that says, Hey, hidden Gem Stores, which seems to imply these might be more niche stores or maybe local stores or whatever where you can buy said sneakers. In this case, it was New Balance, On and Running Warehouse US and Zappos, which are not really hidden gems. I mean, I've heard of New Balance before. And I’ve heard of Zappos before. On, I've heard of them too. Those are nice shoes. It's a really, really cool feature, if Google can refine this and actually get some hidden Gem stores in there. It's just a test, so who knows what it'll be, but if Google can do that or they can get the smaller niche stores in there, that'd be awesome. Okay. Also, from Barry Schwartz, also from Search Engine Roundtable. Google Search ranking volatility bursting at the seams. Barry getting real emotional with the headlines there. There's been an enormous amount of rank volatility being picked up by the various SEO weather tools for a good while now, I don't know, a good over a week, I'm going to say no more than a week, I don't know, 10 days. By the time you listen to this, it might be a full two weeks of high volatility. There's speculation, the speculation coming from me. I'm speculating that this is the storm before the other storm, so Google's Danny Sullivan said relatively recently that there's a core update coming soon, which we don't know what soon means. We covered this in the news a couple of weeks ago. Soon can mean tomorrow, soon can mean three weeks from now, soon can be a month from now. Who knows when soon actually is? But there is a tendency when Google, before Google releases a core algorithm update, two or three weeks before there's generally a period of intense ring volatility. I personally think combining the ring volatility we're seeing here and Danny's statement that maybe this is that ring volatility before the update, which would mean most likely if I'm right, which who knows if I am or not, after this set of ring volatility is completed, figured there's going to be a core algorithm update two or three weeks afterwards on its new our daily new series, which you can find over on the SEO hub and on Barry Schwartz's RustyBrick YouTube channel, Barry, Greg Finn and I have a pool on when Google will launch the next core update. I think I have August 17th, Barry has August 6th and Greg has August 12th. Share your date for when you think Google is going to release a core update 'cause that's fun. I guess one way of dealing with anxiety. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Okay. That's not to say Barry's not sweet 'cause the truth is he's one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet, even though he does not, again, does not want you to know this, but Barry is a very good sweet person. Crystal Carter: Barry's the best. Big shout-out to Barry. Mordy Oberstein: In my category of people who are sweet but don't want to be known as sweet. We've covered two edits that how many on this podcast already? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people who are nice and grumpy at the same time, which they're some of my favorite people. I used to know a shopkeeper and I would bother them all the time asking for boxes, asking if I could use their dolly because I needed to move something heavy and things like that, and they would always help me, but they were always grumpy about it. They were like, "yeah, it's in the back. Yeah, you're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: For the audio listener, I was pointing to myself the entire time. You know who is sweet and I don't think she would mind being called sweet would be Kristine Schachinger our follow of the week. Kristine is an SEO OG. Would be one for sure. But she's also a podcaster, she hosts the Webcology podcast. Wow. So much Podcasting and SEO. Barry also by the way, has technically a podcast. I should have mentioned that before. The video recaps that he does are also in podcast form, so technically Barry's also a podcaster. Crystal Carter: Everybody's at it. You got to get in there. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone's at it. But Kristine hosts the Webcology podcast. She's spoken at all the SEO conferences. She puts out a lot of great conversation and a lot of great insights about all things SEO over on X. Might it be on other social media platforms also? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: But you should definitely give her a follow on X. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely, and she can get really, really technical. She's got some really great insights and she has a really, really actionable approach to dealing with algorithm updates that I find really interesting. I think there's a lot of theoretical discussions around algorithm updates, which are great, and I think it's interesting to hear from somebody from a more sort of, she takes a very tactical approach as well. I followed it, and it's really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Very tactical. Yeah. I find her conversations really, really interesting and she is an absolute sweet person. Who we're looking forward to seeing at brightonSEO San Diego in November. So she's @-S-C-H-A-C-H-I-N on X. We'll link to it in the show notes. And it's hard to believe this, but I'm all out of words. I got nothing else to say. Crystal Carter: I don't believe that at all. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a lie because I got a million other things, but we eventually have to end the podcast at some point. Crystal Carter: Well, but we're just going to keep- Mordy Oberstein: Or not. Crystal Carter: ... we're just going to make another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: We can have an Infinite loop of podcasts that just goes on and on and on and on and on. Crystal Carter: This is the pod that never ends. It just goes on and on my friend. You know what I'm saying? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We just started singing it, but everybody- Crystal Carter: Not knowing what it was. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And they'll continue singing it forever just because it's the pod that never... yeah, sorry. Mordy Oberstein: There's no greater possible way to end a podcast other than with us singing. It's like, it's like Sonny and Cher. Crystal Carter: Basically. That's exactly what people are thinking. People were like, oh, was that Sonny and Cher? No, no, it was Mordy Crystal. Oh, really? I'm so surprised. I'm so surprised. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to shave my beard and grow one of those seventies mustaches now. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, totally. Mordy Oberstein: I should totally do that. Crystal Carter: Definitely worth doing. You could totally do the handlebar thing. Mordy Oberstein: I think I'd freak myself out. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode. No, we're back next week with a very special episode, our 100th episode. Look for it not just wherever you consume your podcasts, but look for in other special places. Check out our social media feeds to see where. Too much or not enough? Not enough. Look up Crystal and I on LinkedIn or X and see about the hundredth episode. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the other great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify, please. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Paul Andre De Vera Andi Jarvis Kristine Schachinger Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App The SEO Video Show Paul Andre De Vera SEO Consulting Eximo Marketing The Strategy Sessions Podcast News: Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program for publishers Google "Hidden Gem Stores" Search Feature Google Search Ranking Volatility Bursting At The Seams Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Paul Andre De Vera Andi Jarvis Kristine Schachinger Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App The SEO Video Show Paul Andre De Vera SEO Consulting Eximo Marketing The Strategy Sessions Podcast News: Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program for publishers Google "Hidden Gem Stores" Search Feature Google Search Ranking Volatility Bursting At The Seams Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the very vocal, the audiable, the shout it out to the world and tell them what you think head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Like Beyonce says, "Tell everybody. Tell everybody." She says it a lot in that song, "Tell everybody." And like her partner says, "I got 99 problems, but a podcast ain't one." That's right. Mordy Oberstein: I thought you'd say, 99 problems, but talking a lot is not one. Crystal Carter: It's not one. It's definitely not one, like when I was at school. No, it was one of those personality tests. They do the Myers-Briggs tests and things, and they're like, "Crystal talks a lot." I'm like, "Like Kelsa Priess said, water is wet. This is not news." Mordy Oberstein: I took one on the computer and the computer started to fume. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: I'm joking. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also use Wix Studio and the templates and the advanced design features to give your podcast a home that you can control across the web. As opposed to just using a podcast hosting platform, you should also have a website for your podcast. Anyway, today we're doing a podcast about podcasting for marketing growth with marketers who podcast. As we're pulling back the curtain on this very show by looking at what does and doesn't have to go into production for a podcast, how to manage the ins and outs of a podcast, how to use a podcast to gain market traction, and how to leverage your podcast for your and your client's brands. To show us that it ain't nothing but a podcast thing. Dre is in the house, the host of the SEO Show, Paul Andre De Vera will chat with Crystal in just a few moments. Plus we look at how the podcast landscape is changing with the one only Andi Jarvis. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So the next time someone tells you to "Shh and be quiet," you tell them "The world isn't a library, it's a podcast, and I'll talk about whatever I want to talk about whenever I want to talk about it," as we help you find your inner voice. No, not your inner voice, but your microphone voice on this, the 99th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. It's our Wayne Gretzky episode, 99 or our Aaron Judge episode if you like baseball. Crystal Carter: Okay, that's fine. Also, I think I mentioned this when we chatted to Andi as well, but also Agent 99 from Get Smart. Mordy Oberstein: 99's a good number. Crystal Carter: It's good. It's good. 99 Red Balloons, the classic song. Mordy Oberstein: That's classic. Crystal Carter: Bump Ba dum bum bum bum, ba dum, bum bum. Mordy Oberstein: It also means we're one away from our 100th episode and we have a surprise for you for that. Crystal Carter: It's true, it's true. 100 is good innings in cricket because we couldn't cover all the sports, all the sports fall. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, is there anything... I like bowling? Is anything with 99? No. Crystal Carter: No.- Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking like- Crystal Carter: ... Except for that's bad score. Mordy Oberstein: ... the perfect score is a hundred, but it's 300. Crystal Carter: Definitely 300. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: And to be honest, I'm a mediocre bowler. I'm very happy if I get three digits, if I'm completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a terrible bowler. Crystal Carter: My husband was never on a bowling team. I was in a bowling league with my mom and my sister, and my husband has never been in organized bowling of any kind, and yet he always beats me, which makes me upset because he's a non-bowler. It's not fair. It's not okay. Mordy Oberstein: I have a hard time. I think we talked about this at one point. The ball bothers me, it bothers my wrist. It just feels awkward in my hand for some reason. Crystal Carter: I always start off with a heavier one in the the first game, and then I go lighter for the next game and the game after that. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You really plan out your bowling strategy. Crystal Carter: I get tie ties, I get tired and stuff. I tell you what though, my dad is an epic bowler. When I was a kid, he was my hero because he had, it was like 14 pounds or whatever, and when he would bowl, he would throw it halfway down the lane and then when it hit the pins, it was like, clack, clack, clack, clack. And I was like, this is awesome- Mordy Oberstein: You know you don't want the ball to spin, you want it to glide. And at the very end it's supposed to spin. I saw a video about this. Anyway, I don't know a lot about bowling, but I know a lot about podcasting. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: I've done a few podcasts in my day. Podcasting, before we get into Dre, I just want to say it is a phenomenal, phenomenal medium for you if you're thinking about doing a variety of different things with your business or your client's businesses, podcasting is fabulous. And I'm not saying that because I'm biased towards podcasting, which I am. First off, it's informal and connected, which I think works in today's ecosystem. Like this podcast in case you haven't figured it out, is not exactly a tuxedo. It's more like a baggy pair of jeans. We have a connection, we talk, we're informal, we're chit-chatting. It's a great way to connect in a real way with your audience and not in a very corporate way with your audience, which I think the world is leaning very much against that whole corporate kind of talk. Podcasting is great. You create actual relationships with your guests. There have been people who are my best friends at SEO that I met by doing podcasts and having them on a podcast. You make real connections. That first five minutes and last five minutes of an interview are connection gold. And it's fabulous for positioning yourself. Don't always, and we'll talk about this with Andi, don't always worry about the numbers. Podcasting is a great way to position yourself for getting more leads and getting more clients and whatnot. And it's also much easier to produce, which we'll get into with Dre than it is, I don't know, the ultimate guide to whatever, whatever, whatever, to try to get more traffic. It's just easier to produce. And here's the greatest part, it's repurposable. Audiograms, YouTube video. You can turn it into a blog post. And last but not least, the barrier to entry is higher than you think, but it's also not as high as you think at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's one of those things that with marketing, once you get going, it can become a lot more sort of second nature. I think Dre's been doing his podcast and his show for a long time. You've been podcasting for a very long time. And Andi talks about, it was tricky to get it going in the first instance, but now he's really, really gotten through it and he really goes through it regularly. And I think that it becomes a sort of part of your routine that you're going to connect with your audience and share whatever you're sharing. And I think that one of the other things that I think is great for audiences, and for people who are marketing and who are considering podcasts is that you can make sure that you are connecting with a particular audience at any time. So podcasting is something that can apply to lots of different audiences, whatever your vertical is. And I think that that's something that can be tricky for lots of different verticals. But if you were somebody who was really into pneumatic drills, you can make a podcast and people who are really into that would be really into it. If you were somebody who was really into epidemiology or something, you could do a podcast and then people would be interested in that as well. The numbers on podcasts are incredible across the board, and I think that, like you said, it's not always about numbers, but it is about showing a depth of knowledge. And one of the things that's really... and an interest in knowledge as well. So even if you're not a super, I don't know why I picked pneumatic drilling, but I think I've been thinking about that PN, that silent P in there. Anyway, but if you were interested in that particular topic, and let's say you were a noob, right? Let's say you were just getting started on your journey of becoming, I don't know, an engineer in that field or something, whatever it may be, you can connect with people who are further along in their journey to help you learn about what you're doing and to help your audience learn with you. So it's something where you can come at it from a source of truth and you can use that to both endear yourself to your audience, but also to demonstrate your expertise, whichever audience you're trying to apply to. And that's something that can be really rare. So if you were to start a TikTok channel on the same topic, you would probably have to test that audience and say, is this audience on TikTok? Et cetera, et cetera. But podcasts are something that cut across almost all aspects and almost all demographics. Mordy Oberstein: And it's super easy. It's a great way, as you're doing that to position yourself or your client the same way. Because if you're putting out a blog post or you're putting out whatever you're putting out on social media, sometimes it could be hard to let your brand personality come through. It's super easy on a podcast because your personality literally comes through and you can, by the way, that doesn't mean you have to be your actual self. You could be your podcast self on a podcast. I'm this way on this podcast. I can be very different on a different podcast. It's super easy and it's super visible and it's super transparent, or that's not even the word I'm looking for. I can't find the right word. But it's super distinct and it's super obvious, a way to position your brand, I'll say personality, just super upfront. You don't have to over time start creating a notion with our visual language. It comes out instantaneously. When you're podcasting. Crystal Carter: It can be really useful to connect with people in a way that is low-key. So one of the things that can happen sometimes is that if you're doing a talk and you say hi, I'm so-and-so, and I also host a podcast. So sometimes if you're presenting to people, if you're talking to people, if you're meeting people, then you might say, oh, I've got this blog, read my blog. And maybe people have time to read your blog, maybe they don't have time to read your blog or watch my videos, maybe they have time to do it, maybe they don't. If you say, download this free guide, think maybe they have time to do that, maybe they don't. However, if you say, oh, I've got a podcast, then maybe at some point when they've got 10 minutes while they're doing their working out or they're going for a walk or they're at the airport or whatever it may be, it's really, really low-key. They can sort of flip through and they can get an idea of who you are before they get involved with some of your other aspects of your business or your persona or whatever it may be. And it's something that can be really accessible for people in lots of different ways. And I think that for brands, that's something that is super important because you want to be able to have some access there. I think also from a technical point of view, particularly from an SEO point of view, podcasts have incredible distribution networks built in. So if you were thinking of from a brand point of view, when you have a podcast and if you were to search for the SERP's Up Podcast for instance on Google, and then you were to look at some of the places where the SERP's Up Podcast is, and if you were to leave a review, then you would be able to see that ours shows up on IMDB, it shows up on Google's things, it shows up on Apple, it shows up on Spotify, it shows up on Amazon, it shows up on lots of different things, and there are very few mediums that have that built in. It has a built-in distribution network that allows you to connect with lots of different folks both on the SERP and in the lots of other platforms as well. Mordy Oberstein: And the last thing that I'll say that it is because that's absolutely true, before we hand it over to you and Dre, it does something that brands should be doing more of by default, and that's putting the people who work at the brands out in front. So you're putting actual people that people can actually connect... I'll tell you a story where... I'm not going to say the company where it was, one company I used to work with, they were like, oh, I'm so glad you're there, because until... I had no idea anyone who worked there and I don't know who to connect to, who to ask questions to, who to chat about, whatever it was. Putting people out in front for your brand, again, especially in today's ecosystem, Lily Ray has put out a tweet about this a couple... By the time this comes out a couple of weeks ago, it's like, brands should do this more often. It's really effective, and she's somebody who does that for her brand. Putting people out there is a way for other people to connect with other people, while at the same time connecting with your brand. And by default, you're going to need somebody like myself and Crystal to host the podcast. So you by default need to put somebody at your company out there upfront for people to connect with. That's insanely powerful. With that, let's dive into how you actually go about podcasting, running it, what works, what doesn't work, what you should do, when you shouldn't do as Crystal talks with Dre. Crystal Carter: Oh, thank you so much for joining us. We are so honored to have you on the show. Mordy and I are both huge fans of everything you do online. Paul Andre De Vera: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Crystal. Thank you for having me on again. I mean, it was awesome having you as guests on my own podcast, right? Both you and Mordy were great guests dropping so many knowledge bombs. Great stuff. Crystal Carter: I'll be completely honest. You were like, "Do you want to do the podcast?" And I was like, "Absolutely. Just for the montage." If people aren't familiar with the SEO show and the podcast that Paul does, he does these amazing montages that make you look like the most amazing person. I'm like, "oh my gosh, I want to meet that person." I'm like, "oh, wait, no, that's me." And yeah, I think you have so much fun with your podcast, and I think it really, really shows. Paul Andre De Vera: That's the number one rule that I follow when it comes to podcasting and having guests, is making sure the guest feels like the hero, the superstar. That's how you get them to open up, feel comfortable, and be able to share knowledge that maybe they maybe scared to share. But one of the things that I love doing is when a lot of podcasters ask, "Hey, introduce yourself." I don't like doing that. You know why? Because that makes the guests kind of feel a little like, they kind of may be shy and scared in sharing some of their awards that they've won, and you as the outsider can do that research for them and make them... Sometimes when I introduce someone myself, one of the guests was like, it was Dixon. Dixon goes, "I didn't even know that I did that stuff. I didn't." You find things about someone that they didn't even know that was out there, right? So going the extra mile and making sure that your guest is the hero of the podcast is something that really, really will make it go really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that helps you build on the podcast as well, because I think that one of the things I think that you are really, really good at is elevating the art form, as it were. So if people haven't listened to your show, you add in even before the show starts. You've got the montage that's like the show's happening, it's going to be great, and you add in lots of sound effects and you add in lots of great stuff throughout the show. And I think that that element that you're talking about, that adding in that extra element of research and really hosting the show, really guiding that can really take it to a next level. What other things do you try to bring to really make it feel like a podcast experience? Not just like, oh, you're just listening to a podcast, but this is an experience. Paul Andre De Vera: Yes, definitely. Because right nowadays, we started the podcast, I started this remotely. And a lot of podcasts started by just going on a Zoom and now eventually started in... sometimes... before we were all stuck at home, people actually in person. There was mics in front of each other and you guys that was a podcast and you would actually record in studio. And now that everyone's going back into these elaborate studios and stuff like that, it's time to up level your game if you're going to do some video podcasts. So this is where you come in on upping your production value, whether it's either... obviously Podcast, you need great sound, you need a great mic. You were talking earlier today, let me get closer to my mic because you know the value of how the quality of the sound is, especially in podcasts, that's something can actually even extend out into video because you can watch a pixelated video and have clear sound. You still get value from it. But if you have muffled sound and clear video, you just watch people doing charades or something. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's something that can really tell people that you care, that they're taking the time to listen to your podcast. And in terms of the guests and the quality of the experience, it can help you to get better guests. It can help you to get better segments. Have you found that in your experience? Paul Andre De Vera: Oh, yes, yes. When I first started, it was tough getting guests. Getting guests... I got this question all the time, "how do you get your guests on your podcast?" So at first, of course, I connected to my actual network, going out to LinkedIn. People I've actually worked with in the past, SEOs and CEOs of companies that I've actually worked with and being able to tap them first, right? I'll tell you this, I did get rejected when I first started. You'll get rejected. Maybe they took a look at it and we'll pass, we'll pass. But I'll tell you this, a year or two years later, ask them the same again. I didn't mention anything about it from the past. I'm like, Hey, I still would love... I would say something, "I would still love to have you." It's like, "oh, okay. Of course, totally fine. Totally get it." There's that rule where you don't just want, want, want, want. So sometimes you want give back. And now knowing that the production value's the number one thing that actually people will accept my invitations like, wow, you put so much work into it, they want to be a part of it. So that's something... Having that extra touch of production will get you over the top. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally true. And I think also that not expecting to set the world on fire in the first couple of episodes I think is really important for expectations. I think there's a lot of people who sort of start a podcast and then it kind of fades away. This first little while can sometimes be tricky to get through. What is the thing that helps you to push through? What would you say to someone who's on the fence as to whether or not this is a good ROI for their investment either as a team or as an individual? Paul Andre De Vera: The best ROI is you're actually investing in yourself by doing this yourself. Obviously there's going to be the whole personal brand aspect and you developing your own personal brand can also uplift a company's brand. But at the same time when you're podcasting, even just for companies, you're really, really having another channel, an avenue where you can actually reach out to. This is something that when they now come on to clients, I'm like, Hey, have you ever thought about podcasting? If it's not something they're doing. Because I'll tell you this, there is some relation when it comes to SEO, right? I mean, you can get your show notes that you can add into that gets ranking. You can distribute your podcast through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, iHeartRadio, and then you get your show notes on there, you get back links back to your site. So there's some SEO value when it comes to podcasting, but at the same time... So that's one value you can prove like, hey, you want to help boost our rankings, let's start on podcasts. But at the same time, you're creating content. Content is currency nowadays. This is something that you want to have. And that's why I also mentioned to you like, Hey, when you're doing recordings like this, I feel like you add the extra layer of video. That video is going to help you repurpose the audio and repurpose the visuals. And again, you can do more cool things in your production, like how I do all the little magic effects on screen, you heard the little chime, but for those who are listening can see on screen, there was a little graphic that went overlay. So adding the extra touch, again, will help you up level your podcast. And then when it comes to ROI, it's like, again, I do see it more as more brand awareness and just being able to get out there. But there's also, when it comes to podcasts and video in particular, you can really, really have a call to action towards the end. And these podcasts where if you're an affiliate marketer, I put affiliate links in these show notes, and I've actually gotten income from that. That's something I actually didn't think, but hey, it's another avenue to include your affiliate links if you're promoting something. And that was another great source of income through podcasting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. And I think that for businesses who are... because there are a lot of branded podcasts, and this is something that you see across, we are a Wix podcast. We are a podcast for Wix, for instance. HubSpot has a whole podcast network. There are lots of brands who are putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of interest in podcasts. And I think that one of the reasons why they're doing that is for the brand visibility. And I think also for the flexibility. What we find certainly is that we are able to talk about topics that are maybe brand new topics that we're sort of exploring. And we find that that's a really interesting way and that people really engage with those new topics. That this is a sort of cutting edge topic. We're still exploring what it is, and we're having a discussion about it. And the expectation is that it's a discussion rather than necessarily, I know every single thing that there is to know about that. And I think that big brands are investing in these things for a lot of reasons. Are you finding that you're seeing more brands interested in getting involved with podcasts in your experience? Paul Andre De Vera: Oh, yes. Definitely seeing more interest. And if not, I'm the one that's going to bring it up to them. So I'm working with a company, I'm like, Hey, hey, I was able to build a brand, a huge brand that gets tons of sponsorships within just a few years. So this is something where you can really, really develop another asset for your company. If that asset's not just building your brand. You have another source of income where depending on the type of business model you have, your podcast can get sponsors and ads from your Google AdSense, whether it's you post on YouTube. And I really, really feel like, I haven't even looked into this, but I know there's podcasting agencies out there that you can actually get into actually more of the audio type of podcast and get advertising in there. And hopefully... And I feel like the ROI in there is pretty good because you know why? I feel the podcasters are authentic. We are two people. We know we are having a conversation. What we're talking about is about our experiences, and it really makes us have that authority within our space of what we're talking about right now. Both of us, we both run... both podcasters. Like you right now, you're running the Wix podcast. I'm here running my own podcast, and we're talking about podcasting… Crystal Carter: Right! Paul Andre De Vera: It's two really experts of what we're doing and we're sharing our experience. There's so much value in that. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And I think it's a super accessible thing as well, because anyone with ears, or whatever can listen to a podcast. And also there's audio transcripts as well for folks who are hearing impaired as well. So there's lots of ways that you can engage in, and I actually very often read podcast transcripts myself. I don't know that there's many other people like me, but I very often I look at podcasts that way and I find it super valuable. It's also a great place for quotes. So a lot of people talk about EEAT and that sort of thing, and I think that we had an episode about experts, and I think that around brand experts, subject matter experts, for instance, it can sometimes be difficult to get subject matter experts to write all what they're talking about, but podcasts are a much easier ask for those kinds of folks. Have you found that in your travels? Paul Andre De Vera: Yes, yes. I feel the entry into podcasting. Just getting people to talk is so much easier If you're coming on something like this, instead of me having a thought leader write something down, take exactly what I said, make a thought leadership piece out of it. This is something that we also do with... I'm seeing a lot with companies creating customer case studies as a podcast. They're bringing customers in, and I'm working with a company right now where I'm helping edit their podcast by them just having a conversation with one of their customers, and then I'm repurposing it into... well, there's little vertical shorts or an actual clip of the whole podcast, but then again, we're doing video just again, I'm going to keep pushing this. Do video when you're doing podcasting because there's so much more that you can repurpose, right? There's just that extra layer they can add. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I've not heard this case study example, but I think that's a really great trend. I think people are getting really creative with it as well. And I think interviews are a classic podcast format, but one of the other things I've seen is the people are doing sort of long reads. So for articles that are really, really long for... you start to see the author reading it and then they put it online as a podcast, and it's really engaging actually. It's really, really engaging. It's like a mini audiobook almost, which I find really interesting. Paul Andre De Vera: I love that. I love that. It kind of goes back to something what I'm doing here as well. I do have a podcast, so I do have the video podcast and the SEO Video Show, which I kind of like promoting more as a show, but I do have the Knowledge Bomb Podcast, right? The SEO Knowledge Bomb Podcast. And this is where it's not a complete copy of what I'm doing. I'm pretty much extracting all the knowledge bombs from one of my shows and then reading it out on a podcast with my voice and it becomes a five-minute podcast saying, Hey, SEO Knowledge Bombs of the Week. It's five minute audio clip of me kind of just summing up of what the knowledge bombs were dropped from my past guests from the previous week. So again, you can really create a podcast out of what you're already doing now. Say, if you want to get inventive, look and see what you're doing now. If you are writing blogs like we mentioned, take your blogs, maybe extract that and read it out and just talk to an audience so people just can hear your voice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think there's a lot of experimentation that people can do, and I think it's a really interesting landscape. What do you think the future holds for podcasts in the next year or so? Paul Andre De Vera: For the next year, again, I want to see more video podcasts. Like I said, I'm going to keep repeating it. I feel like right now you can already see the transition from say something like Spotify now I'm doing some video on there. So these directories are going to... I want to imagine once we see Apple Podcasts, those becoming starting showing videos. And I feel that that's the direction going there as well. But again, podcasting is something, is an easy way to just get into a channel of being able to show off your knowledge and your expertise and be able to reach out to other people. I started my podcast because I was stuck at home and everyone was stuck at home. I was like, I want to network. This is my way of networking and going out to just talk to people, smart people, and learn from them. That's how you were able to just learn by just talking to people, smart people, smart people like you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: No, you are smart. Paul Andre De Vera: You're smart. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It is always, always, always a pleasure, and I hope to see you soon at the next SEO conference. Thank you so much for your time today, Paul, and yeah, thanks for joining us. Paul Andre De Vera: Of course. Of course. Thank you Crystal, and thank you Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: That was super, super insightful chat Crystal. He has so much personality. And again, you see it come through and it builds his own brand, his personal brand, without him even having to say more than 10 words. Crystal Carter: It's something that he really, really utilizes really, really well with his channel. So it works really well for his YouTube channel. It works really well for the podcast. Dre's super nice when you meet him in person as well. And also, also, also, Dre is incredibly smart. Dre has a lot of fun with his podcast and stuff, and he has a lot of fun with his show, but I've been on discussions with him where he gets into some of the more technical stuff that he does, and my guy is incredibly astute at Enterprise SEO, and it is an absolute pleasure to hear him speak on that because he's proper nerd levels of really, really right in the weeds in that and so impressive. And I think that people underestimate the ability to be charismatic in certain spaces and assume that just because you're charismatic in one space that you're not necessarily a complete nerd in another space. Dre is absolutely one of those people. He really, really knows his stuff, and it's great to speak to him. Mordy Oberstein: He's one of my favorites. I am looking forward to seeing him again at some SEO conference in the near future. He was at Brighton San Diego last year. I'm like, "oh, I didn't know he was coming. I wish I would've been able to spend more time with him 'cause he's so sweet." Speaking of another sweet person, we're going to have a little chat with Andi Jarvis about- Crystal Carter: I don't know that anyone's ever called Andi sweet. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm saying... Well, I'm not saying that because he's actually sweet. I'm saying that purely for the sake of the transition. Crystal Carter: Which is an important thing that you must master as a podcaster. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. It's like the kung fu of podcasting, the transition. Crystal Carter: Wax on, wax off transition. Mordy Oberstein: Paint the fence transition. So Andi, I apologize for calling you sweet, but we're going to talk with Andi now. Okay, so the podcast game isn't what it used to be, which reminds me of baseball. I always do this. I'm always going to give a baseball reference. So back in the day, you didn't need to be super athletic to be a baseball player. Have you ever seen Babe Ruth? They just showed up after eating an all you can eat buffet down the block. Crystal Carter: Smoking cigarettes in the dugout. Mordy Oberstein: Smoking cigar... Literally, there is a picture of Keith Hernandez and the Mets smoking a cigarette in the dugout during a game like- Crystal Carter: Like spitting out tobacco in the kitchen. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I'm an athlete. Okay, that was the eighties, and I don't mean the 1880s, like the 1980s. Andi Jarvis: Listen, it was the same in football or soccer. There was a great Brazilian footballer called Socrates, one of the greatest Brazilians of all time. Goes under the radar 'cause he doesn't have a name, but an absolute genius of a football player. And footage exists of him in the early to mid-eighties, walking out at halftime after the halftime break, flicking a cigarette into the crowd and running onto the pitch. But this guy was just... he just ambled around the... he was amazing, but it just wouldn't happen these days. Mordy Oberstein: It's unbelievable, right? But now you're right. So now you can't. Now even the baseball players, they have weightlifting regimes. They do this and they have that, and they have set nap time now. Crystal Carter: They have GPS trackers to monitor their stress rating and what they were doing on the pitch and all that sort of stuff. Andi Jarvis: Can I bore you with a really quick story about why that happened as well? Mordy Oberstein: Surely. Andi Jarvis: Why it happened as well. It's all down to, you remember what? 20, maybe 25 years ago when baseball went on strike and there was a lockout for like a whole month. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, 1994, the Yankees would've won the World Series that year, by the way. So I'm pissed. Crystal Carter: But I mean, who's counting though? Mordy Oberstein: I am. Andi Jarvis: Yeah. Well, okay, so the lockout happened and baseball lost millions of fans. When it came back, TV ratings were through the floor, everything went to (beep), and it's never been proven. But the belief was that when the players came back, the executives of baseball clubs were like, look, we've got to have something to bring the crowds back. The crowds are through the floor, the TV floor. What happened after that lockout, if you remember, was the guy whose name I forget, suddenly went on a home run hitting streak, started hitting the ball- Mordy Oberstein: Mark McGwire. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Andi Jarvis: McGwire, right. And there was somebody else doing it as well. Mordy Oberstein: Sammy Sosa. Crystal Carter: Sammy Sosa. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, right. Okay. Now, I don't know if you remember looking at pictures of them pre-lockout and post-lockout, they got significantly bigger. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Andi Jarvis: And a number of guys in baseball had started juicing. Now, if you start taking steroids and start juicing, you don't just accidentally do that. And the belief was that it was, if not encouraged, the blind eye was turned by the baseball team- Mordy Oberstein: The blind eye was a million percent- Andi Jarvis: ... to allow the guys to bulk up because all they wanted was you start banging the ball out of the stadium and home runs happen, people start coming. But on the back of that, people started realizing maybe we better do it legally, but if I'm bigger and fitter, I can hit the ball further. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Andi Jarvis: Oh, and I can throw it further. Oh, okay. So it all spun out the back of that where they realized maybe if you are an athlete, it would help. Just don't do drugs. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Yeah. See, by way, I had a Barry Bonds card and a Sammy Sosa before they did steroids, they don't even look like the same person. By the way, in case you haven't noticed, we have a guest here with us. His name is Andi Jarvis, and that's why like baseball, we're going into the great beyond of the nature of podcasting nowadays. Andi, what's going on, man? Welcome to the show. Andi Jarvis: Thank you for having me I hope and thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just first off flattered that you regaled us with a baseball story and you're not even American. Andi Jarvis: It's my one and only baseball story. I'm sat here in a Canadian, Toronto Raptors T-shirt. I don't even know what sport that is. I've just got family there, so- Crystal Carter: It's basketball. Mordy Oberstein: It used to be basketball. Now it's just crap. But yeah. Crystal Carter: Also in this podcast about podcasting, can I just say that one of the first rules of podcasts is to not stay on topic. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Speaking of not staying on topic, Andi, what are you going to pitch us today? Andi Jarvis: Storytelling and the Strategy Sessions podcast and my marketing services. No, I'm not pitching all of that, but I'm here to talk podcasting coz I have a podcast which is called the Strategy Session. Crystal Carter: And you get some amazing guests on your podcast. I don't know how you convince these people to spend time with you. Mordy Oberstein: I really enjoy that episode that you did with that guest that you had, so-and-so. Crystal Carter: You get some great folks on your podcast. Andi Jarvis: All of them. So weirdly, this is the one thing if you're doing a guest podcast, which you don't have to do, but I find it easy 'cause you talk and you spark off somebody. But people are like, "how'd you get those guests?" I'm like, "genuinely, most of the time I just ask them." "What do you ask them?" I'm like, "will you come on my podcast and we'll talk about these things?" And you'd be amazed how many people go, "okay." Now some people have questions like, who else has done it and what's the commitment and how does it... Not everybody says yes, but I would say 50% of the people I ask say yes. And then once you get some good guests coming on, that can snowball, because the ones who do ask and go, "who else has been on?" You go, "oh, Rory Sutherland, Mark Ritson and Seth Godin." And they're like, "oh, right, okay." Now that's not- Mordy Oberstein: And you're rolling . Andi Jarvis: Yeah, and look, I named celebrities in the marketing industry there, but they're probably 15% of the episodes. And yes, they get bigger listening figures, but I don't want to turn it into kind of a celebrity led podcast, that it's more of an interesting stories about marketing podcast and lessons you can learn. But yeah, those people undoubtedly just help. Definitely. Crystal Carter: But I think that's one of the really interesting things about a podcast is it's a really good opportunity to connect with folks that you might not connect with in another way. So like you said, you've got people like Mark Ritson, you've got people like Seth Godin, Britney Muller, I love Britney. But then you also have people who are up and coming in their careers, people who have a good following, but maybe it's more niche. And so as well as you say, you ask them, how do you find them? Is there a particular criteria that you're looking for that makes you think this person's going to be great for a podcast? Andi Jarvis: Yes. So a lot of the time... I read a lot about marketing, so I sometimes just, I'll read something in Marketing Week, or if I see some awards that look rigorous, 'cause let's be honest, not every awards are rigorous. So if I see some awards that look rigorous, I'll be... sometimes if I've got half an hour, I'm sat at an airport, I'll have a look through who's shortlisted, not necessarily worried about who's won, but who's shortlisted and who's done something that I find really interesting. So sometimes that, look, the big budget thing won, but somebody did this thing that was really interesting and scrappy that nobody else considered. Yeah, that's it. And then just send them a message. LinkedIn's great. Or find their email or just like, Hey, I see you did this thing. Would you be interested in coming on the podcast? Here's a link to the show. Genuinely, we just want to sit and have a chat. And so I do a lot of background research to try and find the right guests. And yeah, that's it really. Mordy Oberstein: Not rocket science, but it's hard work. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, look, it takes time, and I think I pride myself in making things look and seem a little bit off the cuff, and it's all kind of laid back and relaxed, and it's not structured, and that's part of it. But you have to plan to be not structured and you have to put the effort in to find the guest. And some guests are really happy to just go, yeah, look, we're talking about this thing that I know a lot about. Just ask whatever. Other guests are a bit more nervous, and they're like, can you send me the questions? Now, I don't do that because you can always tell a podcast to me when someone's been sent the questions or when... you'll hear them say... you'll ask someone a question, they'll give this amazing answer and the host will go, oh, that's really interesting. Anyway, so next question, but follow up. They've just told you about this huge thing that they did. They won a gold medal for something or other, and you're like, that's really interesting. So tell us about your childhood. No, tell us about the thing they've just said. So I work with the guests. Some guests need a little bit more work than others. Some are just like, yeah, just shoot me a time and we'll do it. Crystal Carter: Can you tell us a little bit about your journey for podcasting? So did you have to learn that skill and is it different now from when you started? Andi Jarvis: It's a bit less chaotic now, I would say. I started in 2020 peak lockdown May 2020, and didn't know what I was doing. What I knew was I knew how to talk to people. I knew how to ask questions I found interesting about marketing. So if you think about this, I work on my own anyway. I was then forced on my own or away from all of the marketers because of COVID lockdown, and it just felt quite isolating. But also, I like to learn and I go to conferences to learn and I talk to people to learn, and I just wasn't getting it from virtual events. But talking to people was really interesting. So I was like, right, a podcast is the way to go. But I was just kind of making it up as I was going along. And there was different segments to the show edited together because one of the things was I had a bit more time, so I wanted to learn how to edit. I was like, right, well, I'm going to learn how to edit different bits into the show. I'm going to have a different guest. I'm going to have different sections, I'm going to do... And what you realize as the world started to reopen again is that that's just a real (beep) ton of work as well. So I streamlined it a little bit and now it's just an interview, minimal editing and get that out. But in terms of the format, and it's still me interviewing someone for 45 minutes to an hour depending on who the guest is, really. Mordy Oberstein: Looking back, it was like three, four years ago already, the pandemic. Do you feel like the ecosystem that you started off in and where you are now, it's a different world for your podcast? The world changed around you kind of thing? Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And I think the main driver of that is just the changing listening habits. So back in 2020, any idiot with a microphone, I, started a podcast. A lot of those, let's be honest, a lot of people who start a podcast and a lot of you listening go, I'm going to start a podcast about this thing. If you get five episodes in, you've done really, really well and you're miles in front of most people who start a podcast and do one episode. I feel lucky that I started during lockdown because I committed to doing... and I went out publicly and I said on LinkedIn, and I said, on social, 26 episodes, one every two weeks, I'm going to do it for a year. And there's times where it felt like a little bit of a millstone. I'm like, oh God, what have I done? But you get into the rhythm of just making sure you deliver it and you did. And that kind of got me up and running. So what's changed though since then is as radio listening figures have changed and as media habits have changed, the media group certainly in the UK have realized the value of podcasting. So Spotify weren't paying people millions to do podcasts. They were just hosting podcasts. In fact, I don't even think Spotify were hosting podcasts when I started. They bought Anchor, and that's how they do their hosting. If you look at the top charts in the UK now, it's all the same company. So radio stations have podcasts now. So every celebrity, it's an extension of the radio's brand, and all they're interested in is keeping the audience so they can sell advertising or in the BBC's case, just keeping their audience. So it's a different world. And what that means for an amateur bedroom podcaster is that you've got to pay a lot of attention to production values. People would just like, it's a podcast, it's just a guy on his own. If the sound quality went a bit wobbly or your mic starts to kick up, it didn't really matter. But now people are like, every podcast you listen to has professional level audio. So if you are not delivering something similar, people are just like, "this is awful." And just turn off. So you've really got to pay attention to the stuff that you never really bothered with before and get into that side of it a bit more. But look, I still enjoy it and mine's still entirely self-produced 'cause I enjoy that bit of it. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, that point on the radio station, so for example, I listen to a sports podcast every day, it's ESPN's New York Radio Station, one of their shows, they're just repurposing it for podcast form and they lose out to the other New York's radio station in the actual ratings, but they beat them out on the podcast numbers, and the podcast numbers are so significant. They pour a ton of production effort into the podcast, whereas the other radio station completely ignores the podcast. So if you don't think to your point that big players are paying attention to their podcasts, they 100% most definitely are because another channel for them to beat other competitors. Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And you look at the other thing as well is that celebrities have decided that podcasting now is an extension of their social brand. Now, whether this is what I would call pointless celebrities who are famous for being famous, I'm not a fan of that (beep), or whether it's movie stars or actors or sports people or politicians or whatever, they've realized that declining social audiences and organic reach is a problem. But if you build an audience in a podcast, you have this deeper longer conversation with them. So people are like, "who do you want to hear talking about marketing?" "Andi Jarvis." "Who's that guy? I've never heard of him." Or some idiot who used to do social media because they were on a TV program. Oh, they must know what they're talking about. Not that mine's a social media podcast, but if you want to do a social media podcast, there's probably some idiot who's been on a TV show doing a social media podcast, and you're like, what are you going to learn from them? They literally had 8 million people watching them for 15 nights. That's why they've got a big social media following, not going to help your small business mate. It really isn't. Crystal Carter: When I talk to people who are running smaller podcasts who aren't Joe Rogan, not that I'm chatting to Joe, but people who are running smaller podcasts, they say that their expectations are different. So think the expected outcomes that they plan to get, the ROI that they plan to get from the podcasts are different. Would you agree with that? Would you agree that maybe it's not about getting a million listeners? Andi Jarvis: Yeah, and look, let's be honest, anyone who tells you they don't want a million listeners is lying. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, I'll take it. Andi Jarvis: But a win is not a million listeners. And I can tell you the top performing, so "performing" in air quotes episodes of my podcast, they're the ones with the celebrity guests on, the Seth Godins, Rory Sutherlands, Mark Ritsons. They are the top three. Yeah, they're the top three. Now, I can also tell you, and that's success apparently, but I podcast because I run a small business. Success to me is my business keeping going and winning more business. I don't think I've ever landed any business because of either any of those episodes. Now, I can point you to many other episodes where people have reached out and got in touch, and went, "I heard you speak to this person. Can we talk about this thing that you talked about?" So the listener figures aren't there, but the money in my bank account tells me they are there. So it's about what is success and being hyper clear on that. But one thing I would say is that there's a real fine line, and there are lots and lots of podcasts in marketing, and I've never bothered to count them, but I was going to say bajillions of podcasts in marketing that are set up by consultants and agencies that are sales podcasts. That are, oh, hi. Who are my ideal clients? Mordy and Crystal, how do I get in front of them? Let's invite them on a podcast. And then they sit on that podcast and sell to them. Let me tell you Crystal about this amazing thing I once did that sort of is right in your sector. And when you're listening to them, you can feel the pitch. And it's like, now, I would say to anyone, I think, I don't how many episodes I've got, I must be nearly 70 episodes now in total, because every season we start the numbering. Must be at 70 episodes now. And if you can hear me sell more than... Sorry, I've sold like I'm going to conferences or I'm doing this event, which unashamedly sell that, but if you listen to me interviewing a guest, point to somewhere you can hear me selling to that person. I don't have people on who I want to sell to. And this to me is top of funnel awareness and getting me out there and having people going, Eximo Marketing, Andi Jarvis, this guy knows his stuff, he understands this thing. That's what this is doing. It's not bottom of the funnel sales. Mordy Oberstein: I always feel that a podcast is really, outside of maybe the Joe Rogans of the world, it's a brand play. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, a hundred percent. Mordy Oberstein: It's a brand positioning play, you're having a constant conversation, you're reinforcing messaging, you're reinforcing that you're an expert, you're reinforcing this and that. It's not necessarily about the numbers, but people do really think it's about the numbers. I was saying before we record, I was at my kid's kindergarten graduation and some neighbor of mine said, "Hey, I heard you do a podcast. I want to get in and do a podcast 'cause I heard it's really easy to get in and do a podcast." I'm like, "yeah, it's pretty easy to do a podcast. You need basically some kind of recorder and you need a voice and you need to talk and you need to record that voice. And then you put it out there, SoundCloud or whatever you want to put it, fine, really easy. But it's not as easy as you think it is to get traction now because it's so saturated. Unless you're talking about some random, random topic, there's so many people doing the same thing that you're doing. You need to find an angle to differentiate yourself." Like this Break the Fourth Wall, this podcast, how do we differentiate this podcast? One is we started doing segments. Most SEO podcasts don't really do segments, and we also pitched it in a way or not pitched it. We positioned it in a way where, hey, if you're really advanced in SEO, you've been doing SEO for a long time, you'll get X value out of it. And if you are looking to break into the SEO world or digital marketing world, you also get y value out of it at the same time. And that's unique. That's a really cool way of positioning a podcast. You need to find some kind of angle because at the end of the day, if it's a branding play, if you don't position it in a unique way, you've lost the value of it. Andi Jarvis: Absolutely. And I think one of the things with that positioning is if I look back early on, it was too broad, but I didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up. And the next series, series five, which will start in September, will probably be the most narrowly focused of the episodes in the series of them. Not every single episode, because there's a few that I have academics on as well 'cause I think there's a lot you can learn from academics, and so I probably won't be trying to get really niche with them. I actually want to explore the breadth of what they talk about. But one of the key things is maybe narrowing the focus of what we talk about and going a bit deeper on some of the episodes 'cause I think that that's right, is that it goes back to this concept of you needing a hundred fans or whatever it is. I can't remember, is it a thousand fans or a hundred fans, whatever. But if you are niche enough and talking about the right stuff, you don't need a million people listening to it. In fact, you've probably failed if you get a million people listening to it because you are mass market at that point. What you really want is a hundred or 500 or a thousand people who are here to hear what you have to say because they are in that particular sector. That's what you really need to get to. So if you are just talking to the right people, talk to your audience, understand your customers. Marketing basics, who are you talking and why do they care? And make a podcast about that, then you don't need to worry about the listening numbers. You just need to keep delivering that value and delivering that content. Crystal Carter: There's a couple of things that strike me from what you've just said. First of all, you were saying, oh, I'm talking to academics. I find them really interesting. You're like, I read a lot of marketing books, and you've got a lot of authors on your section. You're like, oh, I really want to drill down one of the things that I've read when somebody was like, how should you start a podcast? Or, which topic should you think about? And one of the things, I can't remember where I read it, I wish I could reference it, I'm sorry. But they said that. If it's not a topic that you could talk about a hundred times, like a hundred episodes, then it's probably not a good topic for you. So I know, Andi, that you are a marketing nerd because I know, I've seen your bookshelf, I'm sure behind you is full of all the marketing books. Andi Jarvis: Oh, yeah, I'm a bore. You say nerd, I'm a bore, right? I am. I'm boring in public. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's awesome. I think we get people on the podcast like yourself, other folks where I'm just like, I'm so excited. I cannot believe we got this guest to join us to talk about whatever the topic is. We have people on the podcast to talk about stuff that we wish we knew more about. And it's an incredible opportunity, an incredible privilege to be able to speak to them about that topic. And I think that that is another piece of value that you can add to your listening audience. If they're a niche audience and they're with you and they've been with you for that time, you can also help them to learn about this new thing. You can also help them explore that. You can also go on that journey. And in terms of long tail keywords, it's another great way to explore a long tail topic, like a really niche topic like you were saying, drilling down. It's a really good opportunity for that. Andi Jarvis: When I was 11 years old in school, one of my teachers, Mrs. Colling, what she was called, had a sign on her door, which she used to point to a lot. It said something like, "it's better to remain silent and be thought of a fool than to open your mouth and to remove all doubt." Now to someone who never shut up, she used to point, she'd be like, "Andrew." The reason I bring that up is that, the point you make about can you talk about it for a hundred episodes. If you are not an expert in something, you can probably bluff your way through a blog by reading enough blogs and copying the best bits and rewriting it with a little bit of your tone of voice. Not saying that's how all travel blogs are written, but you've not been to all those places you're writing about. But you can kind of do that. If you have to talk for 30 minutes on a subject and you don't know that subject, you will quite quickly have opened your mouth and be found to be a fool. And if you want to release 10 episodes about that subject, that's 300 minutes. That's five hours of talking about a subject. Can you do that? Now, I would say if someone gave me a microphone and went, listen, we just need to fill this 10 hours of silence. Can you talk about one subject? It would either be boring sports stories or marketing. Either of those two things I could probably talk about at length for about 10 days without stopping. I might even take breath- Mordy Oberstein: And we've covered both of them? Andi Jarvis: ... every now and again. Yeah, listen, I could put both of those two things together. I really could. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great podcast right there, by the way. Crystal Carter: You're speaking Mordy's language here. Could I just say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Boring sports stories and marketing with Andi Jarvis? Andi Jarvis: Yeah. Like that baseball story I told at the beginning. Now that means the editor has to leave it in on lobby. A boring story I told at the beginning, I love stuff like that. And I could fill time forever, but marketing, people are like, oh, I'm sorry we didn't have time to prepare for this. I was like, I've been preparing my whole life for this. You need me to talk about marketing, pass me that microphone. I am your guy. So have a passion for it and have a knowledge about it. The only caveat to that I would say is if you're going to do something out of passion, so say you, I don't know, you love Crocs or you love, it might be theater, it might be musicals, it might be Taylor Swift, whatever. If you're doing it out of passion, I think the passion carries you, not necessarily the knowledge. But if you're doing it for business, you have to show you're an expert in that field 'cause if you don't show you're an expert in that field, you're going to harm your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of your brand as time ebbs away on us, where can people find your brand and yourself? Andi Jarvis: Yeah, great segue, Mordy. Great segue. So, Andi Jarvis. I spell Andi with an I. so if you just put my name into Google, I appear everywhere. LinkedIn and Instagram and Threads are the places to find me. Unfortunately, I now stay away from Twitter since the Lunatic took over the asylum and don't really use it anymore. But yeah, so you find me. The company's called Eximo Marketing, E-X-I-M-O. So have a look for either of those and you'll find me. I'm also sure there's a link to the Strategy Sessions in the show notes. Is that correct? Mordy Oberstein: Heck yes. Andi Jarvis: Have a listen. I would say, if I can pitch this, so last year for the first time, so season four, I decided to do two mini seasons within the season. I did a Black History Month mini season, which in the UK is October, not February, and I did a Women's History Month, which is built around International Women's Day, so I did that as well. So I did, there was five Tuesdays in October, so I did five episodes with five guests and I did four for Women's History Month. I'm really proud of those miniseries. I'm proud of those nine episodes. They took us into slightly different conversations about different things. Now, I didn't just talk to black marketers about being black. They were just great at what they did and they happened to be black. That's the way the conversations went. But some of those episodes in those two miniseries are my favorites. You can't pick a favorite podcast, right? 'Cause It's like picking your favorite child, but some of those episodes are some of my top three, top five ever that I recorded and just really insightful deep conversations with really, really interesting people. People who I probably wouldn't have met before, some of them you might never have heard of either. If you're just thinking, where do I start listening to this Idiot's podcast? I would go back start of the Black History Month miniseries, started with an episode with a woman called Sherice Anibaba and you could probably see if you watch the video of me just sitting there going and just blown away by every word she says, I'm just hanging on it. Genuinely, she's genuinely amazing, so just start there. If you're going to start somewhere. I know you'll probably start with Seth Gordon, right? But if you're going to start somewhere, I'd got Black History. Mordy Oberstein: I like that by the way, not just a page, but where to start. That's unique. Andi Jarvis: I mean, you can go back to episode one if you like. It might take you, see if you're awake 12 hours a day, I give you ... you a whole week of your entire life doing nothing else other than listening to me on a podcast, which don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Podcast listening tip, never start with episode one. It's usually those first few episodes. You got to really work out the kinks. I would start at episode 20 or whatever it is. Andi Jarvis: Yeah, definitely. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thanks Andi. Thanks for coming on and Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Andi Jarvis: Thank you for having me. It's been a ride as always and lovely to see you both. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. From one sweet person to another sweet person to Barry, it's time for us to delve into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Starting off with not news from Barry Schwartz, but from Anu Adegbola over on Search Engine Land, running about, Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program for publishers. If you might recall, Perplexity got into a little bit of a snafu with various publishers about their content or about the publisher's content being shown in Perplexity without any real attribution and basically saying, "Hey, you took our content you just posted as your own and that's not cool." This seems like it might be atonement for that. There's a new pilot program where if you select publishers like Time, Der Spiegel and Fortune are included, that when their URLs appear within a Perplexity search and there's an ad on that search as well, those publishers will get some of the ad revenue from that ad. Doesn't seem like there's a ton of details about how exactly the program works and what the exact figures are and who exactly is in there. Also, the initial partners. And if this will expand or not expand. But it is really interesting 'cause I guess it's kind of the first real revenue sharing program we've seen, definitely on these AI search engine things, but across the board. There's no revenue sharing program with Google, for example, which I guess is a sore point for publishers, but that's a whole different topic for a whole different podcast. Anyway, on to Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Round Table. This was an interesting one, Barry writes, "Google 'hidden gem stores' search feature." What about it Barry? What Barry is saying is Google's testing a hidden gem store search feature that was spotted by Brody Clark where he was searching for sneakers and there was a little section on the mobile search for Hidden Gem stores, which is not, by the way, part of the Hidden Gems algorithm thing. That's a totally different thing. If you're not familiar with that, you don't need to know about that right now. If you are, just know this is not that. It was basically a little section on the mobile surface that says, Hey, hidden Gem Stores, which seems to imply these might be more niche stores or maybe local stores or whatever where you can buy said sneakers. In this case, it was New Balance, On and Running Warehouse US and Zappos, which are not really hidden gems. I mean, I've heard of New Balance before. And I’ve heard of Zappos before. On, I've heard of them too. Those are nice shoes. It's a really, really cool feature, if Google can refine this and actually get some hidden Gem stores in there. It's just a test, so who knows what it'll be, but if Google can do that or they can get the smaller niche stores in there, that'd be awesome. Okay. Also, from Barry Schwartz, also from Search Engine Roundtable. Google Search ranking volatility bursting at the seams. Barry getting real emotional with the headlines there. There's been an enormous amount of rank volatility being picked up by the various SEO weather tools for a good while now, I don't know, a good over a week, I'm going to say no more than a week, I don't know, 10 days. By the time you listen to this, it might be a full two weeks of high volatility. There's speculation, the speculation coming from me. I'm speculating that this is the storm before the other storm, so Google's Danny Sullivan said relatively recently that there's a core update coming soon, which we don't know what soon means. We covered this in the news a couple of weeks ago. Soon can mean tomorrow, soon can mean three weeks from now, soon can be a month from now. Who knows when soon actually is? But there is a tendency when Google, before Google releases a core algorithm update, two or three weeks before there's generally a period of intense ring volatility. I personally think combining the ring volatility we're seeing here and Danny's statement that maybe this is that ring volatility before the update, which would mean most likely if I'm right, which who knows if I am or not, after this set of ring volatility is completed, figured there's going to be a core algorithm update two or three weeks afterwards on its new our daily new series, which you can find over on the SEO hub and on Barry Schwartz's RustyBrick YouTube channel, Barry, Greg Finn and I have a pool on when Google will launch the next core update. I think I have August 17th, Barry has August 6th and Greg has August 12th. Share your date for when you think Google is going to release a core update 'cause that's fun. I guess one way of dealing with anxiety. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Okay. That's not to say Barry's not sweet 'cause the truth is he's one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet, even though he does not, again, does not want you to know this, but Barry is a very good sweet person. Crystal Carter: Barry's the best. Big shout-out to Barry. Mordy Oberstein: In my category of people who are sweet but don't want to be known as sweet. We've covered two edits that how many on this podcast already? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people who are nice and grumpy at the same time, which they're some of my favorite people. I used to know a shopkeeper and I would bother them all the time asking for boxes, asking if I could use their dolly because I needed to move something heavy and things like that, and they would always help me, but they were always grumpy about it. They were like, "yeah, it's in the back. Yeah, you're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: For the audio listener, I was pointing to myself the entire time. You know who is sweet and I don't think she would mind being called sweet would be Kristine Schachinger our follow of the week. Kristine is an SEO OG. Would be one for sure. But she's also a podcaster, she hosts the Webcology podcast. Wow. So much Podcasting and SEO. Barry also by the way, has technically a podcast. I should have mentioned that before. The video recaps that he does are also in podcast form, so technically Barry's also a podcaster. Crystal Carter: Everybody's at it. You got to get in there. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone's at it. But Kristine hosts the Webcology podcast. She's spoken at all the SEO conferences. She puts out a lot of great conversation and a lot of great insights about all things SEO over on X. Might it be on other social media platforms also? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: But you should definitely give her a follow on X. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely, and she can get really, really technical. She's got some really great insights and she has a really, really actionable approach to dealing with algorithm updates that I find really interesting. I think there's a lot of theoretical discussions around algorithm updates, which are great, and I think it's interesting to hear from somebody from a more sort of, she takes a very tactical approach as well. I followed it, and it's really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Very tactical. Yeah. I find her conversations really, really interesting and she is an absolute sweet person. Who we're looking forward to seeing at brightonSEO San Diego in November. So she's @-S-C-H-A-C-H-I-N on X. We'll link to it in the show notes. And it's hard to believe this, but I'm all out of words. I got nothing else to say. Crystal Carter: I don't believe that at all. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a lie because I got a million other things, but we eventually have to end the podcast at some point. Crystal Carter: Well, but we're just going to keep- Mordy Oberstein: Or not. Crystal Carter: ... we're just going to make another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: We can have an Infinite loop of podcasts that just goes on and on and on and on and on. Crystal Carter: This is the pod that never ends. It just goes on and on my friend. You know what I'm saying? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We just started singing it, but everybody- Crystal Carter: Not knowing what it was. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And they'll continue singing it forever just because it's the pod that never... yeah, sorry. Mordy Oberstein: There's no greater possible way to end a podcast other than with us singing. It's like, it's like Sonny and Cher. Crystal Carter: Basically. That's exactly what people are thinking. People were like, oh, was that Sonny and Cher? No, no, it was Mordy Crystal. Oh, really? I'm so surprised. I'm so surprised. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to shave my beard and grow one of those seventies mustaches now. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, totally. Mordy Oberstein: I should totally do that. Crystal Carter: Definitely worth doing. You could totally do the handlebar thing. Mordy Oberstein: I think I'd freak myself out. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode. No, we're back next week with a very special episode, our 100th episode. Look for it not just wherever you consume your podcasts, but look for in other special places. Check out our social media feeds to see where. Too much or not enough? Not enough. Look up Crystal and I on LinkedIn or X and see about the hundredth episode. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the other great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify, please. 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 do you make local SEO scaleable? When should you be scaling your local SEO? How do you maintain consistency with your local SEO across a multi-location organization? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter talk about how you can level up your local SEO production. Learn what you should be doing in order to work more efficiently when doing SEO for sites with a local business presence. Sterling Sky’s Elizabeth Rule stops by giving direction on scaling your SEO when dealing with a multi-location business with some of her top tips. Climb on as this week’s SERP’s Up SEO Podcast will help you scale the ladder of local SEO! Back How to scale local SEO How do you make local SEO scaleable? When should you be scaling your local SEO? How do you maintain consistency with your local SEO across a multi-location organization? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter talk about how you can level up your local SEO production. Learn what you should be doing in order to work more efficiently when doing SEO for sites with a local business presence. Sterling Sky’s Elizabeth Rule stops by giving direction on scaling your SEO when dealing with a multi-location business with some of her top tips. Climb on as this week’s SERP’s Up SEO Podcast will help you scale the ladder of local SEO! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 51 | August 16, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 36:59 This week’s guests Elizabeth Rule Elizabeth is an expert local SEO analyst who has been working in the industry since 2015. She has a passion for content creation and loves working with local businesses to develop their website’s authority and expertise through well written, helpful content As a Google Business Profile Product Expert she is also in the unique position to help businesses crack the code to gain valuable visibility in local search maps and help solve complex GBP issues. In 2023, she was nominated as one of BrightLocal's Rising Stars of Local SEO. She currently works as a Local SEO Analyst at Sterling Sky, a Local SEO Agency in Canada and the USA. She is also a faculty member and speaker at Local U SEO Conference. 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, overseeing the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the always on point, always on target, always insightful, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic intro. I'm exactly where I want to be. Mordy Oberstein: For free. Crystal Carter: In the building. She's in the place. There's one announcer, speaking of local things, there's a local announcer in Cleveland, or he was in Cleveland who used to do the Cavaliers commentating, and every time anyone did a slam dunk, he would go, "Throw the hammer down." It was amazing. I feel like they should get him do commentary for Thor. So whenever Thor throws the hammer down, he would go, "And Thor throws the hammer down." Mordy Oberstein: Or if you're a carpenter, you could hire him to watch you as you work. Crystal Carter: Precisely. I feel like you could get a sound on your phone or something, and then just whenever you finish doing your carpentry, you just go- Mordy Oberstein: Every time you're hammering. Crystal Carter: Right, that sort of thing. But that's one of the fantastic things though about local sports announcers, is that each city will have their local announcers and it is unique to that location. So it's something that adds local color and helps you create a bespoke experience for people in that vicinity. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, bespoke. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also grab competitor analysis insights without ever leaving Wix, with our brand new SEO ranking app, a huge pull of competitor insights. Look for it in the Wix app market today. What does that have to do with today's topic? Absolutely nothing-ish. Well, no, no, not true, not true. Let me find the connection on the spot, fresh for you off the cuff. You can use the tool that I just mentioned to advance your local SEO efforts. Because oh, oh, oh, today is local SEO. We're talking how you can make your local SEO scalable. We're talking about leveling up local SEO production, scaling local landing pages like a beast, when to scale local SEO and when not to, and how to maintain consistency when scaling local SEO. To help us scale the ladder of local SEO, Elizabeth Rule over a sterling sky shares her most important tip to know when working with a business that has multiple locations. Plus, we take a look at what Google's People Also Ask teaches us about SMBs and SEO. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following in social media for more SEO awesomeness. So put on your best Spider-Man costume and join us as we scale the walls of local SEO in episode number 51 of the SERP's Up podcast. Disclaimer; if you wear a Spider-Man costume does not mean you'll be able to scale walls. Crystal Carter: No. You won't. Mordy Oberstein: But do try. Crystal Carter: No, please don't try. Don't try. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry. I mean, don't try. Don't try. Unless the wall is you're not high up and you're just trying to climb a wall, in which case you would look a little bit weird, but no harm would come to you. Crystal Carter: I'm sure Spider-Man jumped over short walls as well sometimes, if he was just in somebody's backyard or something. There's no need to do a full leap and bound, if you can just do a little hop. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. If you're Spider-Man, you jump over with maximum effort. Crystal Carter: Okay, I got you. I got you. Well, we are your friendly neighborhood SEOs, and we are going to be talking today about what it means to scale local SEO, why this is something that even needs to be discussed, and some of the challenges that I've experienced and other folks have experienced along the way. So when we say scaling local SEO, essentially what we mean is when you have multiple location businesses, or you might even have a franchise business model where you need to essentially scale your local SEO tasks. So these are all of the standard local SEO tasks. Things like location landing pages, like your Google business profile, like your citation management, reviews management, local keyword research. All of those things that you would do for a single business for local SEO, you now need to do for multiple businesses across local SEO. And this can get very complex very quickly, even as soon as you have two businesses, you have to start thinking about this. I've worked with clients who have three or four locations and they have similar challenges to clients who have had closer to 400 locations via franchisees. And this is something that can be really, really tricky. And the thing that's tricky about it is maintaining consistency and making sure that you're monitoring the implementation that you've established. So it's one of those things that actually thinking about some of the superhero things that you're talking about, it's a little bit like Batman. If you're trying to scale local SEO, one of the first things you need is tools. Just like Batman. Mordy Oberstein: And a Cape. Crystal Carter: And a Cape. And someone named Alfred as well will generally help. Mordy Oberstein: An acrobatic sidekick. Crystal Carter: Yes, of course. These are all important things when you're scaling. Mordy Oberstein: And a really awesome car. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Shall I keep going? Crystal Carter: Theme song? Theme song. I think a theme song would be good. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, always need a theme song. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course, obviously. So, you're going to need some tools. Tools are going to be incredibly important for you and incredibly useful for you. So if you think about something like Bright Local or something like Uberall, these are tools that come to mind when I think about managing citations for instance. And if you're not sure what a citation is, this is essentially a listing in the Yellow Pages or Yelp or in other things like that, you're going to want to make sure that you've got all of the listings for where your business is and your business information consistent across every single place your citation is listed. And this can get very tricky very quickly because if you're not managing this with a tool, with a centralized tool, then sometimes what can happen is you can have duplication, you can have the wrong information, people can leave the business, and then maybe you don't have the information to hand or don't have access to the accounts and things like that, which is why tools like Uberall, like Bright Local exist. So those can be really, really helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Also, there's Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, parenthetically. Crystal Carter: There is an Uberall. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry to interrupt, sorry. Had to, marketer's going to market. Crystal Carter: There is an Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, so you can get a look at that and get a taste of what that can do for you. And I've worked with clients where they don't know who set it up, they don't know where it came from. And so even if you only have one or two businesses at business locations, this is something that's really useful. The other thing that's really useful to think about is a Google business profile. They have some tools set up for helping you to manage multiple location businesses. So you can put all of the business locations for a single business into a folder. So if you have a Dairy Queen for instance, you can have a Dairy Queen folder and then you can have all the different locations for all of the places where you can go and get a lovely frosty treat there as well. Crystal Carter: The other tools you might want to think about is tools for social posting and managing some of the posts on your Google business profile. So one of the things that can again get really, really tricky with multiple business locations is, do you have separate Facebook pages for everything? Do you have a centralized Facebook page thing as well? These are things that can come up a lot, and also it's something that can be tricky to manage because if you don't have them all underneath the same account, then it can be tricky to get the logins and all of those sorts of things. So it's also really important to have your systems in place. So you want to make sure that you've got good systems. And when you're thinking about your location pages, that's something that's important as well. So making sure that you're templatizing how your pages are created. So things like your location, schema, your FAQ, your imagery, even how your heading tags are organized and how the page looks can be really important. So if you look at large scale businesses like McDonald's, they will have a template that is the same for every single location to make sure that it's consistent across every single location, so that everyone who comes to find a McDonald's location will be able to find that information. Mordy Oberstein: That's not to say though that you should have the exact same content across all 4,000 location pages, which is a very common problem, which is a no. Don't do that. Crystal Carter: Right. No, you absolutely shouldn't. You should have unique information, but the format of it should be similar. So for instance, again, you're going to have your schema, your location, your map, what services are available, all of that sort of thing. But they should also be specific to you. And you also touched on a point about content. Content can be very tricky when scaling local SEO, because you get into site architecture. Do you have one blog for everyone? Do you have mini blogs for other people? Do you have one website for everyone and then send out the information there? Do you have micro sites for each location? These are things to think about as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's really complicated, especially on the blog side. For example, let's say you're not McDonald's and you're not trying to rank for french fry, because it doesn't matter, right? Because as long as they get to McDonald's, there's a McDonald's near you no matter what. But if you're, let's say, only in LA, Boston, and Miami, then the blog content will probably have to be locally centric. So let's say you're offering medical services, I don't know, medical testing. So you have medical testing in Miami and medical testing in Boston. Ranking for medical testing as a keyword itself is probably not entirely relevant. Great if you can, but there's a lot of traffic that just could be not qualified because all the other locations people are searching from are not relevant to you. Then how do you do that? Because now you have one blog with multo….. If I'm coming from Boston, I don't care about the blog post about Miami. Crystal Carter: Right. So then you have to plan your content strategy to include touch points where you are doing specific local things. Like let's say you've got your medical testing or something, and let's say the medical test is for diabetes, and let's say there is a diabetes fun run, or something, like a charity fund run that's happening in Boston where your business is. Well, yeah, you should have some content around that if you're involved in that particular thing. But do you put that on the main blog? Do you put that on the thing? How do you spread that around? So you have to think about your site architecture, you have to think about your blog strategy. Crystal Carter: So you have to think about your site architecture. You have to think about your blog strategy and your content strategy so that your content includes those things and that you're surfacing it in places that are important. So for instance, if you have a location page for your Boston business and you have one blog a month that's specifically dedicated to Boston stuff, then you should make sure that on the feed for your Boston location page that you have the Boston specific blogs on that feed. There's no point putting the Miami specific ones on the Boston one. That will make things confusing. But you also want to think about things like your imagery so that you've got local imagery on there, that you've got people for the local team that are visible on that particular page as well. But basically when you're thinking about scaling SEO, you need to be extremely organized. The long and short of it is that you need to be extremely organized. And even if you're just thinking about three businesses, four businesses, or even if you're thinking about 400 business locations that you need to manage, you need to have systems in place so that you don't end up tripping over yourself, duplicating content, sending people to the wrong page, ranking on places where you shouldn't be, having content that's out of date or that is inaccurate in one location and not another, and things like that. So essentially you need to be extremely organized and you're going to need tools. We have a blog on the Wix SEO learning hub that says, do you need SEO tools? Not for everything, not all the time, but for this, you're going to need some tools. You're going to need some tools. Mordy Oberstein: Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with tools. Those are great. By the way, quick thing on the blog, if you're doing this, and let's say you have a location in Miami, Boston, and New York, so you could just make the locations of categories. So you show up at the blog, right? It's just blog or whatever. It describes the blog itself, and then you have the categories, and if you're from Boston, you click through the Boston. If you're from New York, you click through New York. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's one way to do it. You can do them with sub folders. There's a couple of ways to do it, so to have a think about your architecture, but yeah, you do need to think about your architecture. And also if you're planning on expanding further, that's something to think about as well. So how you're going to potentially expand. The other one to think about, I worked with a client who is dealing with franchisees and they were spinning up all kinds of websites and content and things, because another way that sometimes people do content for local things is they'll syndicate essentially. So you have one central blog that creates content and send it out to franchisees, and then franchisees can publish it on their smaller blogs things. The trick with that though is that you end up with a lot of content that's very similar across a lot of different URLs, which can be tricky. Mordy Oberstein: It's a big problem getting it all indexed. It's something you really have to think about, right? You think, okay, fine, I'm smart, right? I've automated all the content, it's all coming from a spreadsheet. It's all being automatically populated, which by the way, separate point, I will read to you from Google's guidelines around the helpful content update, describing something that is not helpful. Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics equals unhelpful. Side point. But yeah, if those pages are too similar outset of it not being helpful or it being unhelpful, Google will be like, this page looks like that page. I index it. Crystal Carter: And even if you think about users, users can't tell. They'll be like, this looks the same as the other page, and I can't tell this is the same page. I can't tell if this is the same page that I just looked at or not. So these are important things to think about, and I think with franchisees it's really useful to give them guidance. And I think for this particular client, it had all gotten very out of hand, and so my team had to just bring it all back in. So we centralized everything, and I'm working on another project right now with a local charity that's doing a similar thing and they've got 50 plus locations and everyone's been kind of doing things as ad hoc, which also can happen with legacy products. So for instance, this is an organization that's been around for a while and they have some content that was on Facebook, for instance, before Facebook centralized more of the multi-location pages. So that means that they have to retrofit how they are distributing their content and scaling their activity. So now that there's more tools available, they're able to centralize it. But again, this is one of the reasons why keeping things organized both within the actual content that you're outputting, but also who is the contact for the information about the location. If you're working with franchises or if you're working with multiple marketing teams, then you're going to need to make sure that you have the details for all of the multiple marketing teams and that you have access to all of the accounts for all the listing pages, for all the other things. Because I think one of the things that people forget about local SEO is there's a lot of off page SEO that happens with local SEO, and you sort of need to be able to do that and need to be able to manage that, and you have to be extremely, extremely organized in order to scale your local SEO. So if you learn nothing else from this, get yourself together, get a spreadsheet, get a checklist, get yourself together, make a plan before you start scaling local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: That's especially because it can be super complicated on the site structure side. For example, let's say you're a business that you have in New York, you have five locations, and in Boston, Massachusetts rather, you only have one location, but now the hierarchy is going to have to be different from New York if you want each page to have... Each location rather than have a specific page. A good one, yeah. Crystal Carter: Precisely. And I think sometimes you get where businesses are pretty much right next to each other, and that can be tricky as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's also very confusing. By the way, real quick one, if you can pull this out one way to differentiate for you, forget SEO for a second, because it is really weird. Sometimes you show up on a website and you're looking at multiple pages, say, I don't know. Let's say I'm looking at, I don't know, Bob's Burger, Bob's got a burger place on one block and like a Starbucks. There's a Starbucks on this street and Starbucks on the next street, and I don't even know which one I'm looking at anymore because they're exactly the same. Show a picture of the branch at the top of the page because it'll usually look different. Crystal Carter: Yeah, photos are really, really important, and I talked about this before, but photos are also particularly important with regards to visual search because if somebody is doing a visual search or Google's looking up what's near them, Google is able to discern location landmarks from images when they're doing their visual search information assessment. So if you're able to add in some landmarks, for instance, if you have a Bob's Burgers that's on Coney Island and you've got the big wheel behind you, Google's going to be able to place you and they can geotarget those things, particularly if there's a specific landmark on it. If you're Bob's Burgers on Liberty Island, is that the island that the Statue of Liberty's on? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Yes. By the way, my immediate association to Liberty Island, when you said that was X-Men. If you're from New York and I've been to Liberty Island like a dozen times. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: My state, that's how we're wired. That's pathetic. Sorry, everybody. Crystal Carter: I was thinking of Liberty City, which I think is the GTA game from years ago. Mordy Oberstein: There is a Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Crystal Carter: There we go. But yeah, look, I think it's just really important to keep organized. We've got some great resources around local SEO on the Wix SEO hub from some fantastic local SEOs, Claire Carlisle, Crystal Tang, Darren Shaw. They talk about a lot of this stuff, and they're all very well versed in scaling local SEO and also Amanda Jordan also has some great information about local landing pages. If you have a look at those and potentially get in touch with them, they're all super friendly and super, super involved with this kind of thing. So if you are interested in scaling this, and if you're looking at your local SEO situation and you have multiple locations and you are not organized and you are seeing that you do not have the consistent information for your businesses across all of your locations, that you don't quite have a content plan that's working for all of your locations, then have a look, get in touch, and try to get yourself together a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I know we mentioned it in the intro, when you have to start thinking about local SEO at scale, and when you have more than one location, like two. Crystal Carter: Literally. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of local SEO at scale, we wanted to know what the most important thing to consider when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view. So we asked just that to Elizabeth Rule, an SEO analyst over at Sterling Sky. So here's Elizabeth on what she thinks is the most important thing to remember or to know when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view. Elizabeth Rule: Hey there, this is Elizabeth Rule, a local SEO analyst with Sterling Sky. One of the most important things I think business owners should know about managing multiple locations is that more isn't necessarily better when it comes to Google Maps. So Google Maps rankings, most people know the three pack that shows up directly in the search results. What people don't know is that Google really doesn't show the same business twice in that map pack, that three pack ever. So if you have two locations for the same business in one city, you're going to have a really tough time ranking both of those in the same map pack. So if your locations are too close together that they would be eligible to show in the map pack together just because of their proximity, it's probably better to just focus on one and put all your effort into one of those locations to help it do better, rather than having two locations that are too close together. Trying to get both of those to rank is going to be pretty much impossible. What we recommend business owners do is to get locations outside of their main city to expand their service area if they're looking to get more traction on Google Maps. But you of course want to own your backyard first, but if you're looking to expand, you're really going to want to look outside of your current city to do that if you're looking to expand on Google Maps. But there is always the opportunity to expand organically, really anywhere. So business owners that are looking to expand their visibility outside of their current one location, I always tell them instead of looking for another location to get a Google business profile, which is extremely expensive most of the time, try adding more service area pages to your site and optimizing those for the people that are located- Elizabeth Rule: And optimizing those for the people that are located in your service area you're not currently serving because they're not finding you on Google Maps. Organic is still a great way to get a lot of local traffic and it's pretty inexpensive. You can create tons of service area pages and optimize them, add the information people are looking for pretty cheaply compared to getting an entire lease and maintaining a location, a physical location to have a Google Business Profile listing. So this is my biggest tip for people trying to manage multiple locations on Google Maps or local search, invest in service area pages aka city pages. They are going to be one of the biggest in best investments you can do for your local site to improve that local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Elizabeth for that. You can definitely follow Elizabeth over on Twitter @ownyourserp. That's O-W-N Y-O-U-R S-E-R-P. Own your SERP, get it? Own your SERP because it's a local business. You got to own your SERP. Elizabeth works over with Sterling Sky, with Jay Hawkins. Sterling Sky does amazing content about local SEO, a bunch of studies and Elizabeth is constantly sharing her knowledge about local SEO on Twitter, and you definitely want to give her a follow, join in the conversation with her. She's a lot of fun. And again, check her out on Twitter @ownyourserp. A link to her profile in the show notes. Now, speaking of local SEO, one of the things that you never actually look at when you're doing local, but you should be, is the PAA box? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Why? I'm going to show you why, because it's a wealth of information. As we go ahead and have some fun with Google's People Also Ask. So when you search for, are you thinking about rather local SEO and research and tools, as you mentioned before, one of the things you're probably not thinking about are the People Also Ask box. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But you absolutely should. You absolutely completely, completely, completely, absolutely should. I've looked at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square, for instance in London, and it's a prime example of the kinds of things that you'll get there. The thing about the PAA is that they are actually from the questions that people are asking. And what it will do is it will tell you the kinds of things that people want to know about your business. And this is something that I actually got clued up to from Lily Ray, and she was saying that it's worth looking at these things and seeing which questions you are answering on your website and which questions other people are answering on their website. And looking at the Leicester Square results I found, so for instance, they were asking how many seats does the ODEON Leicester Square have and the answer comes from Wikipedia. What's the biggest cinema in Leicester Square? And it says, oh Leicester Square ODEON and that comes from London Tourist Guide. Which screen is the best screen at the ODEON Leicester Square and that comes from insideci.co.uk. None of those are from Leicester Square ODEON. Y'all, guys. Guys, this is a huge opportunity for you. Mordy Oberstein: Super Hot Chili Pepper song talks about Leicester Square. That's totally random. No, that's totally random. Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is that in England you always get Americans who are like, "I'm going to Leicester Square." Mordy Oberstein: Nice. I had an Uncle Lester when I was a kid. My grandfather's friend, Uncle Lester. Anyway, one of the things that I like to do with this is when you were looking at a local business, if you look at the People Also Ask box, which again, those four questions, it's usually four, that Google shows that are questions that people also ask that you expand them. You get an answer with a URL to where the answer came from. Kind of like a featured snippet in there is you get to profile like what might be some problems with this business and also what are some unique things you could probably create content around. For example, I used to work in the West Village in New York City, and there was a great cafe on MacDougal Street between Bleecker and West Third, West Fourth, West Fourth called Caffe Reggio. And it's famous, it's been in a bunch of movies. I think it's in The Godfather. Yeah. For example, it says, what movie is Caffe Reggio in? What is Caffe Reggio known for? What is a history of Caffe Reggio? No one's asking what time do they serve their breakfast menu until, no one's asking how many flavors of coffee do they have at Caffe Reggio. They want to know about the movie. So you should have content about the movie on the website, which I didn't check. Maybe they do or don't. I don't know. I didn't look. I should have looked. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's absolutely worth doing it. I think it's also interesting you mentioned the problems. I've definitely had it where I've looked up at something and I've looked up the business and then it said something that was a negative that I'd never even thought of. Mordy Oberstein: I saw the same thing for Peter Luger was a famous steakhouse in Brooklyn. So the questions from the People Also Asked box are one, does Peter Luger have a Michelin Star? Two, how much do Peter Luger waiters make? We'll ignore that for a minute. Three, why did Peter Luger lose a Michelin Star? Crystal Carter: Okay, right. Mordy Oberstein: So addressing that Michelin Star fiasco, I'm assuming it's probably something- Crystal Carter: I'm sure Peter's making great food. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Peter Luger is famous. I don't know what the deal... I have no idea. I've never eaten there before, so I don't know. But it's something that you're going to have to, if you're a local SEO, it's something you're going to have to deal with because if that's in the People Also Ask box, it's probably in the reviews also. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it can sometimes be hot gossip. It's like you're going around, you're just searching for whatever it is- Mordy Oberstein: Meet up at Peter Lugers? Crystal Carter: Like you're going around and you're just searching for whatever, and then they're just like, "Why did so-and-so disappear?" And you're like, "What? I didn't even know that was a... that's a thing? I didn't even know that happened." And then suddenly you're looking at this saying for this other type of information from this business, but I think it's again, the business that we talked about, own your SERP. This is entirely a perfect example of how you should own your SERP for good, for bad, whatever. If your people are asking questions about you, you should be answering them. They shouldn't be getting that information from someone else. Mordy Oberstein: How about this one? Speaking of famous New York eatery landmarks, Tavern On The Green in Central Park. One of the questions in there, first one is, why is Tavern On The Green famous? What do people wear to Tavern On The Green? And three, is Tavern On The Green still around? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, that's a scandalous one for a business. Close down at one point and they opened up again. I think it's happened multiple times if I remember correctly. Let's mean you're going as a marketer and as an SEO, you clearly have something to deal with here because people don't even know that you're still around. So your client being SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO, maybe you need to go one step beyond SEO to like local advertising or local community stuff because people don't actually know that you're actually still around. They think you're not still around. So let them know you're still alive. Crystal Carter: Right. And also I think it can again, give you opportunities to sort of see about potential links as well. So for instance, if there's an article that's an older article that's saying that you closed and maybe you closed and reopened, or maybe you closed and you moved and someone posted a blog mistakenly maybe that said, "This business isn't here anymore. It's not there, you can't find it," and you're like, "No, we are here. We're just down the street," then it can give you an idea of maybe which communities you need to reach out to, maybe where you need to do some more link building in order to make sure that people know that you are still indeed around. Mordy Oberstein: And you know what we're going to do right now then, we're going to help the SEO news sites build their links as we get into this week's snappy news. The links to which will be in the show notes to read all the articles there. You're welcome to all the SEO publications that we're going to link to. Here's this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news. Let's start with a good SEO scandal. Who doesn't love a good SEO scandal. From Search Engine Land's Danny Goodwin, Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages. So CNET said they want to prune their content by deleting old pages of content as they believe Google only awards new content. I've seen many, many sites do this, and it's really the wrong way to go more often than not. In this case, Danny Goodwin writes quoting CNET, that content deprecation "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant, and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," that Danny says was according to an internal memo over at CNET. Danny goes on to write "Deleting content does not signal those three things. Publishing relevant, trustworthy, helpful, quality content for your audience on a technically sound website is what makes you worthy of greater organic visibility." Danny, I could not agree more. As I've said, I've seen sites delete content that wasn't getting a lot of traffic as they thought it would help Google see what pages should actually rank. More often than not, in my honest opinion, you are removing pages that help position your site as an authority. Just because a page per se doesn't get traffic or doesn't rank doesn't mean that it's not part of that authority equation that helps the other pages that do rank rank. So read the whole article. There's a lot of little juicy little tidbits in there. It's a great little case study about SEO and I think is for most instances an SEO myth. Okay, a little bit of sad news for you from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, he writes, "Google downgrades visibility of HowTo and FAQ rich results." So the FAQ feature took FAQ structured data markup and produced a set of expandable cards that was essentially your FAQ on your actual webpage on this Google Results page, on the SERP itself. It really made your results take up a lot more space on the results page and the HowTo carousel is very similar in that it was a set of visual cards that appeared on your result or within your result as a carousel that walked you through how to do something. So say how to sew a button, you get a little set of- Mordy Oberstein: How to do something. So say, how to sew a button. You get a little set of cards that visually show you how to sew a button with a couple of words on each card. So, that's basically gone well, I guess. I really like those. I really like the FAQ feature in particular. I felt that if your site was smart about it, it's a great way to compete with some of the larger powerhouse sites that maybe weren't paying attention to the FAQ feature. You could add markup for your FAQ, get a much bigger result as maybe one of your big competitors who wasn't really paying attention. But I guess, oh well, it's gone. If your site had them, they probably don't have them anymore, and it can really cause an impact on traffic from Google. So, keep an eye on your data to see if anything changed. The FAQ feature will still be there in select cases. Google has said, "Going forward, FAQ from FAQ page structured data, rich results will only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown. Regularly, sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on rather their eligibility." So this is basically talking your Harvard Health, Mayo Clinics, Web MDs of the world. Again, I thought it was a great feature, I'm sad to see it go. There's speculation that maybe it's because SCOs were kind of abusing it as putting FAQ markup and everything, I don't know. Anyway, last but not least, from search engine land, but not from Barry Schwartz, but rather about Barry Schwartz, this one coming from SEO legend JR Oakes. It's called Tracking 20 Years of Search: Key takeaways and findings from an analysis of SE Roundtable's historical Google Analytics data from 2003 to 2023. So, you all know at this point, Barry Schwartz covers the SEO news. We featured him on basically every show. He has been covering the news, as you can see here for 20 years. He's written over 30,000 articles. Anything and everything that's happened in SEO has been covered on seroundtable.com, which makes it really interesting, a really interesting place to study and see how SEO has evolved over time, which is what JR did. JR had access from Barry to search into Roundtable's Google Analytics data, and he used it to pull and create some really cool insights that will help you get a really nice history, as I mentioned, of SEO. As again, Barry has literally been the one creating the narrative around SEO by covering everything in SEO. So for example, you can read the article, you can see things around the popularity of various search engines based on how often Barry covered them over the years, which Google updates got the industry talking, the relevancy of certain aspects of SEO over time. For example, more recently, you see there's a little bit less about mobile SEO than in the past. I cannot more highly recommend you read this article. I will link to it in the show notes, check it out. It's a great ode to Barry, but it's also a great way for you to get a really nice understanding of how SEO has sort of evolved over time. And I'll just take the opportunity again to say I always try to thank Barry for his 20 years of service, 2003 to 2023, at least from the Google Analytics data here, for covering the SEO industry as well as he does, and as consistently he does. As JR says in the article, Barry is like a robot. He just covers everything all the time. So thank you Barry, and that is this week's snappy news. Always so snappy, always so newsy, and you're welcome for the links. Crystal Carter: You're welcome. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's all we're going to say. Now, speaking of that, I have no actual natural connection to this, but a follow up week, you thought there was going to be because I'm always so good at it, but I have nothing. I am out. Nada. No smart pivot. Crystal Carter: No smart pivot, just- Mordy Oberstein: No smart pivot. Crystal Carter: ... Just a straight pivot. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a smart SEO for you. There's a pivot. And I do have a smart SEO for you. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Which you should be following on Twitter, and/or whatever social media platform he's on, such as Threads, is now the new hot one. He's there also. He is local SEO legend Greg Gifford. Crystal Carter: Greg to the Gifford. The Gifford, the amazing Greg Gifford. Mordy Oberstein: The Giffster. Crystal Carter: He is the absolutely... He is absolutely a local SEO legend, and such a nice guy and such a fond of knowledge. Mordy Oberstein: Super nice guy. Crystal Carter: And he's full of energy and full of warmth and so kind, and you see him on lots of things. He's done the Semrush Introduction to SEO course as well. So, he's the guy with the glasses and the beard that you've seen on lots of things. And he seems really warm and friendly, and then you meet him in person and he's really warm and friendly. Mordy Oberstein: He's really warm and friendly, and he's got an amazing knowledge of pop culture. It's like- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Savant level knowledge of pop culture. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. He's so bubbly and friendly, but if you ask him specifically about SEO stuff, he goes straight into nerd mode. Mordy Oberstein: And it's just like, oh, epic decks. He's always a pop culture thing for all of his decks. He speaks all over the place. By the way, he works for some great people over at SearchLab, that's Mark Belan's Company out of Chicago. Greg puts on some great content local search Tuesdays, where he is giving you tips about local SEO, so we'll link to that in the show notes as well. He's an absolute legend, an absolute great follow. So please, give a follow over to Greg. Learn something about local SEO as you follow @Greg Gifford over on Twitter. And that's it. I don't have another pivots. I'm pivot-less today. Crystal Carter: Pivot near me. Mordy Oberstein: Pivot near me? Oh, I see. Perhaps I should next time scale all of my pivots so that I have a whole series to pick from. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pivot Chicago, pivot New York, pivot Los Angeles, pivot... Mordy Oberstein: Why did I pivot as a Michelin star? Because I didn't have any, that's why. Crystal Carter: Because it it moved to Montana? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I would love to move to Montana. Crystal Carter: Have you heard about the TV show Yellowstone? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's over. Crystal Carter: I know, you've been telling me about Yellowstone for months. Mordy Oberstein: Over. Kevin Costner's not coming back. It's over. It's a sore point for me. Crystal Carter: I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Are you looking for Yellowstone? You're not going to find it, but are you looking for the Serves Up podcast? If you're going to miss us, don't worry. We're back next week with new episodes as we dive into the role quality plays, and the people also ask Box. Look forward to wherever you can consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Elizabeth Rule Greg Gifford Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Sterling Sky SEO Agency News: Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages Google Downgrades Visibility of HowTo and FAQ Rich Results Tracking 20 years of search Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Elizabeth Rule Greg Gifford Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Sterling Sky SEO Agency News: Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages Google Downgrades Visibility of HowTo and FAQ Rich Results Tracking 20 years of search 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, overseeing the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the always on point, always on target, always insightful, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic intro. I'm exactly where I want to be. Mordy Oberstein: For free. Crystal Carter: In the building. She's in the place. There's one announcer, speaking of local things, there's a local announcer in Cleveland, or he was in Cleveland who used to do the Cavaliers commentating, and every time anyone did a slam dunk, he would go, "Throw the hammer down." It was amazing. I feel like they should get him do commentary for Thor. So whenever Thor throws the hammer down, he would go, "And Thor throws the hammer down." Mordy Oberstein: Or if you're a carpenter, you could hire him to watch you as you work. Crystal Carter: Precisely. I feel like you could get a sound on your phone or something, and then just whenever you finish doing your carpentry, you just go- Mordy Oberstein: Every time you're hammering. Crystal Carter: Right, that sort of thing. But that's one of the fantastic things though about local sports announcers, is that each city will have their local announcers and it is unique to that location. So it's something that adds local color and helps you create a bespoke experience for people in that vicinity. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, bespoke. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also grab competitor analysis insights without ever leaving Wix, with our brand new SEO ranking app, a huge pull of competitor insights. Look for it in the Wix app market today. What does that have to do with today's topic? Absolutely nothing-ish. Well, no, no, not true, not true. Let me find the connection on the spot, fresh for you off the cuff. You can use the tool that I just mentioned to advance your local SEO efforts. Because oh, oh, oh, today is local SEO. We're talking how you can make your local SEO scalable. We're talking about leveling up local SEO production, scaling local landing pages like a beast, when to scale local SEO and when not to, and how to maintain consistency when scaling local SEO. To help us scale the ladder of local SEO, Elizabeth Rule over a sterling sky shares her most important tip to know when working with a business that has multiple locations. Plus, we take a look at what Google's People Also Ask teaches us about SMBs and SEO. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following in social media for more SEO awesomeness. So put on your best Spider-Man costume and join us as we scale the walls of local SEO in episode number 51 of the SERP's Up podcast. Disclaimer; if you wear a Spider-Man costume does not mean you'll be able to scale walls. Crystal Carter: No. You won't. Mordy Oberstein: But do try. Crystal Carter: No, please don't try. Don't try. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry. I mean, don't try. Don't try. Unless the wall is you're not high up and you're just trying to climb a wall, in which case you would look a little bit weird, but no harm would come to you. Crystal Carter: I'm sure Spider-Man jumped over short walls as well sometimes, if he was just in somebody's backyard or something. There's no need to do a full leap and bound, if you can just do a little hop. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. If you're Spider-Man, you jump over with maximum effort. Crystal Carter: Okay, I got you. I got you. Well, we are your friendly neighborhood SEOs, and we are going to be talking today about what it means to scale local SEO, why this is something that even needs to be discussed, and some of the challenges that I've experienced and other folks have experienced along the way. So when we say scaling local SEO, essentially what we mean is when you have multiple location businesses, or you might even have a franchise business model where you need to essentially scale your local SEO tasks. So these are all of the standard local SEO tasks. Things like location landing pages, like your Google business profile, like your citation management, reviews management, local keyword research. All of those things that you would do for a single business for local SEO, you now need to do for multiple businesses across local SEO. And this can get very complex very quickly, even as soon as you have two businesses, you have to start thinking about this. I've worked with clients who have three or four locations and they have similar challenges to clients who have had closer to 400 locations via franchisees. And this is something that can be really, really tricky. And the thing that's tricky about it is maintaining consistency and making sure that you're monitoring the implementation that you've established. So it's one of those things that actually thinking about some of the superhero things that you're talking about, it's a little bit like Batman. If you're trying to scale local SEO, one of the first things you need is tools. Just like Batman. Mordy Oberstein: And a Cape. Crystal Carter: And a Cape. And someone named Alfred as well will generally help. Mordy Oberstein: An acrobatic sidekick. Crystal Carter: Yes, of course. These are all important things when you're scaling. Mordy Oberstein: And a really awesome car. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein: Shall I keep going? Crystal Carter: Theme song? Theme song. I think a theme song would be good. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, always need a theme song. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course, obviously. So, you're going to need some tools. Tools are going to be incredibly important for you and incredibly useful for you. So if you think about something like Bright Local or something like Uberall, these are tools that come to mind when I think about managing citations for instance. And if you're not sure what a citation is, this is essentially a listing in the Yellow Pages or Yelp or in other things like that, you're going to want to make sure that you've got all of the listings for where your business is and your business information consistent across every single place your citation is listed. And this can get very tricky very quickly because if you're not managing this with a tool, with a centralized tool, then sometimes what can happen is you can have duplication, you can have the wrong information, people can leave the business, and then maybe you don't have the information to hand or don't have access to the accounts and things like that, which is why tools like Uberall, like Bright Local exist. So those can be really, really helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Also, there's Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, parenthetically. Crystal Carter: There is an Uberall. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry to interrupt, sorry. Had to, marketer's going to market. Crystal Carter: There is an Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, so you can get a look at that and get a taste of what that can do for you. And I've worked with clients where they don't know who set it up, they don't know where it came from. And so even if you only have one or two businesses at business locations, this is something that's really useful. The other thing that's really useful to think about is a Google business profile. They have some tools set up for helping you to manage multiple location businesses. So you can put all of the business locations for a single business into a folder. So if you have a Dairy Queen for instance, you can have a Dairy Queen folder and then you can have all the different locations for all of the places where you can go and get a lovely frosty treat there as well. Crystal Carter: The other tools you might want to think about is tools for social posting and managing some of the posts on your Google business profile. So one of the things that can again get really, really tricky with multiple business locations is, do you have separate Facebook pages for everything? Do you have a centralized Facebook page thing as well? These are things that can come up a lot, and also it's something that can be tricky to manage because if you don't have them all underneath the same account, then it can be tricky to get the logins and all of those sorts of things. So it's also really important to have your systems in place. So you want to make sure that you've got good systems. And when you're thinking about your location pages, that's something that's important as well. So making sure that you're templatizing how your pages are created. So things like your location, schema, your FAQ, your imagery, even how your heading tags are organized and how the page looks can be really important. So if you look at large scale businesses like McDonald's, they will have a template that is the same for every single location to make sure that it's consistent across every single location, so that everyone who comes to find a McDonald's location will be able to find that information. Mordy Oberstein: That's not to say though that you should have the exact same content across all 4,000 location pages, which is a very common problem, which is a no. Don't do that. Crystal Carter: Right. No, you absolutely shouldn't. You should have unique information, but the format of it should be similar. So for instance, again, you're going to have your schema, your location, your map, what services are available, all of that sort of thing. But they should also be specific to you. And you also touched on a point about content. Content can be very tricky when scaling local SEO, because you get into site architecture. Do you have one blog for everyone? Do you have mini blogs for other people? Do you have one website for everyone and then send out the information there? Do you have micro sites for each location? These are things to think about as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's really complicated, especially on the blog side. For example, let's say you're not McDonald's and you're not trying to rank for french fry, because it doesn't matter, right? Because as long as they get to McDonald's, there's a McDonald's near you no matter what. But if you're, let's say, only in LA, Boston, and Miami, then the blog content will probably have to be locally centric. So let's say you're offering medical services, I don't know, medical testing. So you have medical testing in Miami and medical testing in Boston. Ranking for medical testing as a keyword itself is probably not entirely relevant. Great if you can, but there's a lot of traffic that just could be not qualified because all the other locations people are searching from are not relevant to you. Then how do you do that? Because now you have one blog with multo….. If I'm coming from Boston, I don't care about the blog post about Miami. Crystal Carter: Right. So then you have to plan your content strategy to include touch points where you are doing specific local things. Like let's say you've got your medical testing or something, and let's say the medical test is for diabetes, and let's say there is a diabetes fun run, or something, like a charity fund run that's happening in Boston where your business is. Well, yeah, you should have some content around that if you're involved in that particular thing. But do you put that on the main blog? Do you put that on the thing? How do you spread that around? So you have to think about your site architecture, you have to think about your blog strategy. Crystal Carter: So you have to think about your site architecture. You have to think about your blog strategy and your content strategy so that your content includes those things and that you're surfacing it in places that are important. So for instance, if you have a location page for your Boston business and you have one blog a month that's specifically dedicated to Boston stuff, then you should make sure that on the feed for your Boston location page that you have the Boston specific blogs on that feed. There's no point putting the Miami specific ones on the Boston one. That will make things confusing. But you also want to think about things like your imagery so that you've got local imagery on there, that you've got people for the local team that are visible on that particular page as well. But basically when you're thinking about scaling SEO, you need to be extremely organized. The long and short of it is that you need to be extremely organized. And even if you're just thinking about three businesses, four businesses, or even if you're thinking about 400 business locations that you need to manage, you need to have systems in place so that you don't end up tripping over yourself, duplicating content, sending people to the wrong page, ranking on places where you shouldn't be, having content that's out of date or that is inaccurate in one location and not another, and things like that. So essentially you need to be extremely organized and you're going to need tools. We have a blog on the Wix SEO learning hub that says, do you need SEO tools? Not for everything, not all the time, but for this, you're going to need some tools. You're going to need some tools. Mordy Oberstein: Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with tools. Those are great. By the way, quick thing on the blog, if you're doing this, and let's say you have a location in Miami, Boston, and New York, so you could just make the locations of categories. So you show up at the blog, right? It's just blog or whatever. It describes the blog itself, and then you have the categories, and if you're from Boston, you click through the Boston. If you're from New York, you click through New York. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's one way to do it. You can do them with sub folders. There's a couple of ways to do it, so to have a think about your architecture, but yeah, you do need to think about your architecture. And also if you're planning on expanding further, that's something to think about as well. So how you're going to potentially expand. The other one to think about, I worked with a client who is dealing with franchisees and they were spinning up all kinds of websites and content and things, because another way that sometimes people do content for local things is they'll syndicate essentially. So you have one central blog that creates content and send it out to franchisees, and then franchisees can publish it on their smaller blogs things. The trick with that though is that you end up with a lot of content that's very similar across a lot of different URLs, which can be tricky. Mordy Oberstein: It's a big problem getting it all indexed. It's something you really have to think about, right? You think, okay, fine, I'm smart, right? I've automated all the content, it's all coming from a spreadsheet. It's all being automatically populated, which by the way, separate point, I will read to you from Google's guidelines around the helpful content update, describing something that is not helpful. Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics equals unhelpful. Side point. But yeah, if those pages are too similar outset of it not being helpful or it being unhelpful, Google will be like, this page looks like that page. I index it. Crystal Carter: And even if you think about users, users can't tell. They'll be like, this looks the same as the other page, and I can't tell this is the same page. I can't tell if this is the same page that I just looked at or not. So these are important things to think about, and I think with franchisees it's really useful to give them guidance. And I think for this particular client, it had all gotten very out of hand, and so my team had to just bring it all back in. So we centralized everything, and I'm working on another project right now with a local charity that's doing a similar thing and they've got 50 plus locations and everyone's been kind of doing things as ad hoc, which also can happen with legacy products. So for instance, this is an organization that's been around for a while and they have some content that was on Facebook, for instance, before Facebook centralized more of the multi-location pages. So that means that they have to retrofit how they are distributing their content and scaling their activity. So now that there's more tools available, they're able to centralize it. But again, this is one of the reasons why keeping things organized both within the actual content that you're outputting, but also who is the contact for the information about the location. If you're working with franchises or if you're working with multiple marketing teams, then you're going to need to make sure that you have the details for all of the multiple marketing teams and that you have access to all of the accounts for all the listing pages, for all the other things. Because I think one of the things that people forget about local SEO is there's a lot of off page SEO that happens with local SEO, and you sort of need to be able to do that and need to be able to manage that, and you have to be extremely, extremely organized in order to scale your local SEO. So if you learn nothing else from this, get yourself together, get a spreadsheet, get a checklist, get yourself together, make a plan before you start scaling local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: That's especially because it can be super complicated on the site structure side. For example, let's say you're a business that you have in New York, you have five locations, and in Boston, Massachusetts rather, you only have one location, but now the hierarchy is going to have to be different from New York if you want each page to have... Each location rather than have a specific page. A good one, yeah. Crystal Carter: Precisely. And I think sometimes you get where businesses are pretty much right next to each other, and that can be tricky as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's also very confusing. By the way, real quick one, if you can pull this out one way to differentiate for you, forget SEO for a second, because it is really weird. Sometimes you show up on a website and you're looking at multiple pages, say, I don't know. Let's say I'm looking at, I don't know, Bob's Burger, Bob's got a burger place on one block and like a Starbucks. There's a Starbucks on this street and Starbucks on the next street, and I don't even know which one I'm looking at anymore because they're exactly the same. Show a picture of the branch at the top of the page because it'll usually look different. Crystal Carter: Yeah, photos are really, really important, and I talked about this before, but photos are also particularly important with regards to visual search because if somebody is doing a visual search or Google's looking up what's near them, Google is able to discern location landmarks from images when they're doing their visual search information assessment. So if you're able to add in some landmarks, for instance, if you have a Bob's Burgers that's on Coney Island and you've got the big wheel behind you, Google's going to be able to place you and they can geotarget those things, particularly if there's a specific landmark on it. If you're Bob's Burgers on Liberty Island, is that the island that the Statue of Liberty's on? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Yes. By the way, my immediate association to Liberty Island, when you said that was X-Men. If you're from New York and I've been to Liberty Island like a dozen times. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: My state, that's how we're wired. That's pathetic. Sorry, everybody. Crystal Carter: I was thinking of Liberty City, which I think is the GTA game from years ago. Mordy Oberstein: There is a Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Crystal Carter: There we go. But yeah, look, I think it's just really important to keep organized. We've got some great resources around local SEO on the Wix SEO hub from some fantastic local SEOs, Claire Carlisle, Crystal Tang, Darren Shaw. They talk about a lot of this stuff, and they're all very well versed in scaling local SEO and also Amanda Jordan also has some great information about local landing pages. If you have a look at those and potentially get in touch with them, they're all super friendly and super, super involved with this kind of thing. So if you are interested in scaling this, and if you're looking at your local SEO situation and you have multiple locations and you are not organized and you are seeing that you do not have the consistent information for your businesses across all of your locations, that you don't quite have a content plan that's working for all of your locations, then have a look, get in touch, and try to get yourself together a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I know we mentioned it in the intro, when you have to start thinking about local SEO at scale, and when you have more than one location, like two. Crystal Carter: Literally. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of local SEO at scale, we wanted to know what the most important thing to consider when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view. So we asked just that to Elizabeth Rule, an SEO analyst over at Sterling Sky. So here's Elizabeth on what she thinks is the most important thing to remember or to know when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view. Elizabeth Rule: Hey there, this is Elizabeth Rule, a local SEO analyst with Sterling Sky. One of the most important things I think business owners should know about managing multiple locations is that more isn't necessarily better when it comes to Google Maps. So Google Maps rankings, most people know the three pack that shows up directly in the search results. What people don't know is that Google really doesn't show the same business twice in that map pack, that three pack ever. So if you have two locations for the same business in one city, you're going to have a really tough time ranking both of those in the same map pack. So if your locations are too close together that they would be eligible to show in the map pack together just because of their proximity, it's probably better to just focus on one and put all your effort into one of those locations to help it do better, rather than having two locations that are too close together. Trying to get both of those to rank is going to be pretty much impossible. What we recommend business owners do is to get locations outside of their main city to expand their service area if they're looking to get more traction on Google Maps. But you of course want to own your backyard first, but if you're looking to expand, you're really going to want to look outside of your current city to do that if you're looking to expand on Google Maps. But there is always the opportunity to expand organically, really anywhere. So business owners that are looking to expand their visibility outside of their current one location, I always tell them instead of looking for another location to get a Google business profile, which is extremely expensive most of the time, try adding more service area pages to your site and optimizing those for the people that are located- Elizabeth Rule: And optimizing those for the people that are located in your service area you're not currently serving because they're not finding you on Google Maps. Organic is still a great way to get a lot of local traffic and it's pretty inexpensive. You can create tons of service area pages and optimize them, add the information people are looking for pretty cheaply compared to getting an entire lease and maintaining a location, a physical location to have a Google Business Profile listing. So this is my biggest tip for people trying to manage multiple locations on Google Maps or local search, invest in service area pages aka city pages. They are going to be one of the biggest in best investments you can do for your local site to improve that local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Elizabeth for that. You can definitely follow Elizabeth over on Twitter @ownyourserp. That's O-W-N Y-O-U-R S-E-R-P. Own your SERP, get it? Own your SERP because it's a local business. You got to own your SERP. Elizabeth works over with Sterling Sky, with Jay Hawkins. Sterling Sky does amazing content about local SEO, a bunch of studies and Elizabeth is constantly sharing her knowledge about local SEO on Twitter, and you definitely want to give her a follow, join in the conversation with her. She's a lot of fun. And again, check her out on Twitter @ownyourserp. A link to her profile in the show notes. Now, speaking of local SEO, one of the things that you never actually look at when you're doing local, but you should be, is the PAA box? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Why? I'm going to show you why, because it's a wealth of information. As we go ahead and have some fun with Google's People Also Ask. So when you search for, are you thinking about rather local SEO and research and tools, as you mentioned before, one of the things you're probably not thinking about are the People Also Ask box. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But you absolutely should. You absolutely completely, completely, completely, absolutely should. I've looked at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square, for instance in London, and it's a prime example of the kinds of things that you'll get there. The thing about the PAA is that they are actually from the questions that people are asking. And what it will do is it will tell you the kinds of things that people want to know about your business. And this is something that I actually got clued up to from Lily Ray, and she was saying that it's worth looking at these things and seeing which questions you are answering on your website and which questions other people are answering on their website. And looking at the Leicester Square results I found, so for instance, they were asking how many seats does the ODEON Leicester Square have and the answer comes from Wikipedia. What's the biggest cinema in Leicester Square? And it says, oh Leicester Square ODEON and that comes from London Tourist Guide. Which screen is the best screen at the ODEON Leicester Square and that comes from insideci.co.uk. None of those are from Leicester Square ODEON. Y'all, guys. Guys, this is a huge opportunity for you. Mordy Oberstein: Super Hot Chili Pepper song talks about Leicester Square. That's totally random. No, that's totally random. Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is that in England you always get Americans who are like, "I'm going to Leicester Square." Mordy Oberstein: Nice. I had an Uncle Lester when I was a kid. My grandfather's friend, Uncle Lester. Anyway, one of the things that I like to do with this is when you were looking at a local business, if you look at the People Also Ask box, which again, those four questions, it's usually four, that Google shows that are questions that people also ask that you expand them. You get an answer with a URL to where the answer came from. Kind of like a featured snippet in there is you get to profile like what might be some problems with this business and also what are some unique things you could probably create content around. For example, I used to work in the West Village in New York City, and there was a great cafe on MacDougal Street between Bleecker and West Third, West Fourth, West Fourth called Caffe Reggio. And it's famous, it's been in a bunch of movies. I think it's in The Godfather. Yeah. For example, it says, what movie is Caffe Reggio in? What is Caffe Reggio known for? What is a history of Caffe Reggio? No one's asking what time do they serve their breakfast menu until, no one's asking how many flavors of coffee do they have at Caffe Reggio. They want to know about the movie. So you should have content about the movie on the website, which I didn't check. Maybe they do or don't. I don't know. I didn't look. I should have looked. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's absolutely worth doing it. I think it's also interesting you mentioned the problems. I've definitely had it where I've looked up at something and I've looked up the business and then it said something that was a negative that I'd never even thought of. Mordy Oberstein: I saw the same thing for Peter Luger was a famous steakhouse in Brooklyn. So the questions from the People Also Asked box are one, does Peter Luger have a Michelin Star? Two, how much do Peter Luger waiters make? We'll ignore that for a minute. Three, why did Peter Luger lose a Michelin Star? Crystal Carter: Okay, right. Mordy Oberstein: So addressing that Michelin Star fiasco, I'm assuming it's probably something- Crystal Carter: I'm sure Peter's making great food. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Peter Luger is famous. I don't know what the deal... I have no idea. I've never eaten there before, so I don't know. But it's something that you're going to have to, if you're a local SEO, it's something you're going to have to deal with because if that's in the People Also Ask box, it's probably in the reviews also. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it can sometimes be hot gossip. It's like you're going around, you're just searching for whatever it is- Mordy Oberstein: Meet up at Peter Lugers? Crystal Carter: Like you're going around and you're just searching for whatever, and then they're just like, "Why did so-and-so disappear?" And you're like, "What? I didn't even know that was a... that's a thing? I didn't even know that happened." And then suddenly you're looking at this saying for this other type of information from this business, but I think it's again, the business that we talked about, own your SERP. This is entirely a perfect example of how you should own your SERP for good, for bad, whatever. If your people are asking questions about you, you should be answering them. They shouldn't be getting that information from someone else. Mordy Oberstein: How about this one? Speaking of famous New York eatery landmarks, Tavern On The Green in Central Park. One of the questions in there, first one is, why is Tavern On The Green famous? What do people wear to Tavern On The Green? And three, is Tavern On The Green still around? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, that's a scandalous one for a business. Close down at one point and they opened up again. I think it's happened multiple times if I remember correctly. Let's mean you're going as a marketer and as an SEO, you clearly have something to deal with here because people don't even know that you're still around. So your client being SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO, maybe you need to go one step beyond SEO to like local advertising or local community stuff because people don't actually know that you're actually still around. They think you're not still around. So let them know you're still alive. Crystal Carter: Right. And also I think it can again, give you opportunities to sort of see about potential links as well. So for instance, if there's an article that's an older article that's saying that you closed and maybe you closed and reopened, or maybe you closed and you moved and someone posted a blog mistakenly maybe that said, "This business isn't here anymore. It's not there, you can't find it," and you're like, "No, we are here. We're just down the street," then it can give you an idea of maybe which communities you need to reach out to, maybe where you need to do some more link building in order to make sure that people know that you are still indeed around. Mordy Oberstein: And you know what we're going to do right now then, we're going to help the SEO news sites build their links as we get into this week's snappy news. The links to which will be in the show notes to read all the articles there. You're welcome to all the SEO publications that we're going to link to. Here's this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news. Let's start with a good SEO scandal. Who doesn't love a good SEO scandal. From Search Engine Land's Danny Goodwin, Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages. So CNET said they want to prune their content by deleting old pages of content as they believe Google only awards new content. I've seen many, many sites do this, and it's really the wrong way to go more often than not. In this case, Danny Goodwin writes quoting CNET, that content deprecation "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant, and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," that Danny says was according to an internal memo over at CNET. Danny goes on to write "Deleting content does not signal those three things. Publishing relevant, trustworthy, helpful, quality content for your audience on a technically sound website is what makes you worthy of greater organic visibility." Danny, I could not agree more. As I've said, I've seen sites delete content that wasn't getting a lot of traffic as they thought it would help Google see what pages should actually rank. More often than not, in my honest opinion, you are removing pages that help position your site as an authority. Just because a page per se doesn't get traffic or doesn't rank doesn't mean that it's not part of that authority equation that helps the other pages that do rank rank. So read the whole article. There's a lot of little juicy little tidbits in there. It's a great little case study about SEO and I think is for most instances an SEO myth. Okay, a little bit of sad news for you from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, he writes, "Google downgrades visibility of HowTo and FAQ rich results." So the FAQ feature took FAQ structured data markup and produced a set of expandable cards that was essentially your FAQ on your actual webpage on this Google Results page, on the SERP itself. It really made your results take up a lot more space on the results page and the HowTo carousel is very similar in that it was a set of visual cards that appeared on your result or within your result as a carousel that walked you through how to do something. So say how to sew a button, you get a little set of- Mordy Oberstein: How to do something. So say, how to sew a button. You get a little set of cards that visually show you how to sew a button with a couple of words on each card. So, that's basically gone well, I guess. I really like those. I really like the FAQ feature in particular. I felt that if your site was smart about it, it's a great way to compete with some of the larger powerhouse sites that maybe weren't paying attention to the FAQ feature. You could add markup for your FAQ, get a much bigger result as maybe one of your big competitors who wasn't really paying attention. But I guess, oh well, it's gone. If your site had them, they probably don't have them anymore, and it can really cause an impact on traffic from Google. So, keep an eye on your data to see if anything changed. The FAQ feature will still be there in select cases. Google has said, "Going forward, FAQ from FAQ page structured data, rich results will only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown. Regularly, sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on rather their eligibility." So this is basically talking your Harvard Health, Mayo Clinics, Web MDs of the world. Again, I thought it was a great feature, I'm sad to see it go. There's speculation that maybe it's because SCOs were kind of abusing it as putting FAQ markup and everything, I don't know. Anyway, last but not least, from search engine land, but not from Barry Schwartz, but rather about Barry Schwartz, this one coming from SEO legend JR Oakes. It's called Tracking 20 Years of Search: Key takeaways and findings from an analysis of SE Roundtable's historical Google Analytics data from 2003 to 2023. So, you all know at this point, Barry Schwartz covers the SEO news. We featured him on basically every show. He has been covering the news, as you can see here for 20 years. He's written over 30,000 articles. Anything and everything that's happened in SEO has been covered on seroundtable.com, which makes it really interesting, a really interesting place to study and see how SEO has evolved over time, which is what JR did. JR had access from Barry to search into Roundtable's Google Analytics data, and he used it to pull and create some really cool insights that will help you get a really nice history, as I mentioned, of SEO. As again, Barry has literally been the one creating the narrative around SEO by covering everything in SEO. So for example, you can read the article, you can see things around the popularity of various search engines based on how often Barry covered them over the years, which Google updates got the industry talking, the relevancy of certain aspects of SEO over time. For example, more recently, you see there's a little bit less about mobile SEO than in the past. I cannot more highly recommend you read this article. I will link to it in the show notes, check it out. It's a great ode to Barry, but it's also a great way for you to get a really nice understanding of how SEO has sort of evolved over time. And I'll just take the opportunity again to say I always try to thank Barry for his 20 years of service, 2003 to 2023, at least from the Google Analytics data here, for covering the SEO industry as well as he does, and as consistently he does. As JR says in the article, Barry is like a robot. He just covers everything all the time. So thank you Barry, and that is this week's snappy news. Always so snappy, always so newsy, and you're welcome for the links. Crystal Carter: You're welcome. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's all we're going to say. Now, speaking of that, I have no actual natural connection to this, but a follow up week, you thought there was going to be because I'm always so good at it, but I have nothing. I am out. Nada. No smart pivot. Crystal Carter: No smart pivot, just- Mordy Oberstein: No smart pivot. Crystal Carter: ... Just a straight pivot. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a smart SEO for you. There's a pivot. And I do have a smart SEO for you. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Which you should be following on Twitter, and/or whatever social media platform he's on, such as Threads, is now the new hot one. He's there also. He is local SEO legend Greg Gifford. Crystal Carter: Greg to the Gifford. The Gifford, the amazing Greg Gifford. Mordy Oberstein: The Giffster. Crystal Carter: He is the absolutely... He is absolutely a local SEO legend, and such a nice guy and such a fond of knowledge. Mordy Oberstein: Super nice guy. Crystal Carter: And he's full of energy and full of warmth and so kind, and you see him on lots of things. He's done the Semrush Introduction to SEO course as well. So, he's the guy with the glasses and the beard that you've seen on lots of things. And he seems really warm and friendly, and then you meet him in person and he's really warm and friendly. Mordy Oberstein: He's really warm and friendly, and he's got an amazing knowledge of pop culture. It's like- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Savant level knowledge of pop culture. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. He's so bubbly and friendly, but if you ask him specifically about SEO stuff, he goes straight into nerd mode. Mordy Oberstein: And it's just like, oh, epic decks. He's always a pop culture thing for all of his decks. He speaks all over the place. By the way, he works for some great people over at SearchLab, that's Mark Belan's Company out of Chicago. Greg puts on some great content local search Tuesdays, where he is giving you tips about local SEO, so we'll link to that in the show notes as well. He's an absolute legend, an absolute great follow. So please, give a follow over to Greg. Learn something about local SEO as you follow @Greg Gifford over on Twitter. And that's it. I don't have another pivots. I'm pivot-less today. Crystal Carter: Pivot near me. Mordy Oberstein: Pivot near me? Oh, I see. Perhaps I should next time scale all of my pivots so that I have a whole series to pick from. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pivot Chicago, pivot New York, pivot Los Angeles, pivot... Mordy Oberstein: Why did I pivot as a Michelin star? Because I didn't have any, that's why. Crystal Carter: Because it it moved to Montana? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I would love to move to Montana. Crystal Carter: Have you heard about the TV show Yellowstone? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's over. Crystal Carter: I know, you've been telling me about Yellowstone for months. Mordy Oberstein: Over. Kevin Costner's not coming back. It's over. It's a sore point for me. Crystal Carter: I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Are you looking for Yellowstone? You're not going to find it, but are you looking for the Serves Up podcast? If you're going to miss us, don't worry. We're back next week with new episodes as we dive into the role quality plays, and the people also ask Box. Look forward to wherever you can consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. 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Back Site keyword mapping worksheet Optimize your content strategy and ensure effective keyword utilization with this detailed keyword mapping worksheet. 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 worksheet to: Plan redirects Determine page content hierarchy Identify content gaps Reduce keyword cannibalization Build content clusters Chris Green Senior SEO Consultant, Torque Partnership LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Chris Green is an SEO consultant and trainer of over 10 years. A lover of all things digital and uses spreadsheets for more of his life than he really needs to, Chris specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training and standing up new processes for teams. More about this topic Read this post on the elements of advanced site migrations for SEO , or this article about keyword mapping 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