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Thomas Haynes is a digital marketer with 16 years’ experience in SEO and digital strategy. He is currently Director of Strategy at Optix Solutions in Exeter, Devon. Thomas Haynes Director of Strategy, Optix Solutions Thomas Haynes is a digital marketer with 16 years’ experience in SEO and digital strategy. He is currently Director of Strategy at Optix Solutions in Exeter, Devon. Resources Thomas Haynes SEO cheat sheet for web designers An SEO checklist to help web designers create with SEO in mind. 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

Looking to get started with your international SEO strategy? Then who better to tune into than the renowned Aleyda Solis. Wix’s Head of SEO Branding, Mordy Oberstein, and Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter, dive into the ins and outs of international SEO as the one and only Aleyda Solis guest hosts. Take your content strategy global as Giuseppe Caltabiano, VP of Marketing at Rock Content, offers his "Deep Thoughts" on global content marketing initiatives. Adaptability, strategies, and common mistakes in international SEO & content marketing are uncovered on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Get going with international SEO Looking to get started with your international SEO strategy? Then who better to tune into than the renowned Aleyda Solis. Wix’s Head of SEO Branding, Mordy Oberstein, and Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter, dive into the ins and outs of international SEO as the one and only Aleyda Solis guest hosts. Take your content strategy global as Giuseppe Caltabiano, VP of Marketing at Rock Content, offers his "Deep Thoughts" on global content marketing initiatives. Adaptability, strategies, and common mistakes in international SEO & content marketing are uncovered on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 40 | May 31, 2023 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 49:23 This week’s guests Aleyda Solis Aleyda Solis is an SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, speaker, and author. She shares the latest news and resources in SEO in the #SEOFOMO newsletter with +25K subscribers and Digital Marketing in #MarketingFOMO, SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called LearningSEO.io. Awarded as the European Search Personality of the Year in 2018 and included as one of the 10 Most Influential SEO Experts of 2022 by List Wire from USA Today, she's also co-founder of Remoters.net, a remote work hub, featuring a free remote job board, tools, guides, and more to empower remote work. Giuseppe Caltabiano Giuseppe is a senior global marketing, brand, and content executive with more than 20 years of experience. Today he leads marketing at Rock Content; he has worked for and advised brands in B2B and B2C and has designed global marketing strategies to successfully support growth of B2B SaaS businesses. Giuseppe is a marketing and storytelling instructor at business schools in London and Milan. He was recognised as one of the most influential European B2B marketers in 2018 and 2019. He has an MBA from Milan’s SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at the London Business School. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the very international woman of SEO, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, everyone around the world, in all of the different countries and all of the different languages. Bon Jour. Hello, everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Hint! Hint! Well, I didn't do the whole like, the amazing, fantastic ... I only did one. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. I think you've run out. I think that's it. I think we’re all done. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's interesting because when we first joined, people were saying congratulations and I said Thank you a million times and then I moved on to thank you in other languages as well, which is totally up for this podcast. Mordy Oberstein: It is. Crystal Carter: Because we're talking about international SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, spoiler, spoiler. Before we get to that, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can now subscribe to our new monthly newsletter, Searchlight, where you get full coverage of the SEO world with tips, updates, and links to great SEO content from the Wix SEO hub. The same Wix, by the way, that automatically adds HF link to your pages as part of a wider multilingual offering. Of course, you can add custom texts and to the head element as well. Why am I telling you this? Well, Crystal already told you. Because today we're talking about international SEO. Crystal Carter: Worldwide. Mordy Oberstein: Worldwide. Forget going mobile, today we're going global. Well, don't forget going mobile. We're diving into the ins and outs of international SEO with special guest host, a leader of all the SEOs herself. Aleyda Solis will stop by to share about how to get started, international SEO and what you need to know, what to focus on, what not to focus on, and common mistakes and miss from the world of international SEO. Plus, we have a special deep thought for you today as Rock Content's own Giuseppe Caltabiano shares his thoughts on building a global content strategy and of course with the snappies of SEO News for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So [foreign language 00:02:21] and welcome as episode number 40 of the SERP's Up podcast is here to help show you that an SEO, it's a small world after all. Crystal Carter: I wasn't really expecting that reference, but it was entirely worth it. Yes, we're super, super excited to have Aleyda here, Aleyda, the queen of SEO, of all SEO but particularly fantastic at international SEO. I remember using the tool that Aleyda had on her website for HF link back in the day. It's still awesome, so do check that out and it's incredibly useful. So amazingly pleased to have Aleyda here talking about this incredible, super useful, really valuable topic. Mordy Oberstein: So if you have a website and you're trying to grow your business beyond just the region where you exist now you're going to need international SEO, which is kind of complicated. Which is why, if aliens were to come to Earth and say to all the SEOs, take us to your leader, we would take them to Aleyda. With that, here's Aleyda. Hi Aleyda. Aleyda Solis: Hello Mordy. How are you? Hello, crystal. You're too kind and oh my God, Mordy, if this SEO thing goes ever to hell because of AI or whatever, you can definitely become a radio announcer because I am so, so very impressed. Mordy Oberstein: I've always wanted to be a baseball color commentator. That's like my dream job, outside of SEO. Aleyda Solis: You can tell. Mordy Oberstein: I’ll bring Glenn Gabe with me. We'll do it together. Aleyda Solis: You totally should, isn't it? I mean, why not? Mordy please and you can launch definitely- Mordy Oberstein: I already have too many podcasts going on. I don't know if I can handle another. Aleyda Solis: Please. And you can launch our Wix website too. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Really quickly. That's good point. Before we get going in this, we need to do some plugging. There's learning.io, there's the SEOFOMO newsletter, which I freaking love because I don't have time to scour the internet for good SEO resources. So you do it for me. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Aleyda Solis: Well, you're welcome. You're welcome. No, I'm so very happy that it's read, that it's useful. Learningseo.io, by the way, is getting a refresh look in the following weeks and I'm very excited about that. And yes, hopefully with this I help people to clarify the most... On one hand, the most common doubts about SEO, which I get asked all the time, so I just refer them to the website on one hand. And then on the other hand, with SEOFOMO, it's interesting because the other day, I think it was Cindy Crum, who did this poll over Twitter about why was the reason or main reasons why SEOs had imposter syndrome. Crystal Carter: Yes, I saw that. Aleyda Solis: And one of the top reasons that got most votes was like the fear of missing out. So I can definitely see the how SEO promo definitely address that particular problem, which I have to say I am totally there. That is the reason of why I launch it in the first place. And I can also definitely see how in recent months because of AI, this new launches and the race of search engine engines to trying to be the first ones and all of these updates that Google is right now launching and conflating many, many times. So important to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: And it's so hard. There's so many updates Crystal Carter: And I think particularly one of the things that can be a challenge for somebody who's working across international markets is not only do you have to keep up with it for the general SEO, but you also have to keep up with it for international SEO. And you also have to keep up with it for all the different versions of the same website that you might have and making sure that all of those things work all together. So yeah, it can be a big challenge and we are so appreciative to you for making the effort to help with that. It's incredibly valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Since we're talking about international SEO, what's the first thing you think our audience should know about international SEO before anything else? Aleyda Solis: Yes. Well, the number one thing probably, because I think that that is the main mistake or assumption that many people do when they want to go international, is that it's not only about hreflang annotations, I mean hreflang annotations is a method, is a mechanism. It's a configuration that is helpful to specify and inform Google that we have other versions of our website pages that can be in different languages or the same or different languages targeting other countries. However, is not the only way to specify that. There are many signals that will take into account and it is a must to align them all because at the end of the day, it's the consistency and alignment of all of the signals that will let go realize that, oh yes, this is not a duplication of product A page, but it's actually product A page targeted to the UK, while you have already your version for the US. So it is fundamental that we are all aware about this different signals and it's just not about just hreflang annotations and that's it. And I believe that all the potentially most common issue that I see, most common problem, that I have clients, even larger enterprises, that you will think that they have all of these resources in the world. But at the end of the day, there are always restrictions and always limits of what you can do in your time and where it makes sense to allocate resources to. It's this problem when they end up having too many international versions when you launch a lot because you want to target abroad. Somebody has told you that, oh, there's opportunity to grow, launch in Spanish, in Italian, launch to the UK in English, you already know the language. So you launched the UK to Australia, et cetera. And then you realize you cannot maintain, you cannot support all of these different websites and then all of a sudden it's like, oh yes, I understand that. Then they learn that they need to localize their... Even if it is in the same language, their version for the UK, because they may be sell sneakers in the US and all of a sudden they realize that they are not called sneakers in the UK, but they are called trainers for example, or runners or whatever. So they need to optimize the content accordingly, but they don't have the resources. So it is fundamental to well initially assess the different international markets that actually makes sense for your business. What is the search potential? What is the search demand? If it is worth it for you? The market will be able to generate at some point enough traffic for you to have successful conversions and a successful ROI? And from an investment standpoint, it's something also doable for you? If you have the capacity to localize the content, if you have the capacity to translate it, if it is a market that speak a completely different language, for example. And then be able to give the, let's say a good support for users coming from those countries too, because it's not only like a one-off type of investment too. So all of the things, I believe that these two areas of let's say misunderstanding and I'll say that these are the most to, let's say, think or understand or when starting. And based on that to be able to start with the proper process of yes audience research, keyword research, completion research, to then establish the best web structure to use to tackle the different markets. And start with those markets where there's a much higher potential with less competition, et cetera, et cetera. Crystal Carter: So you talked a lot about assessing whether or not the market's worth it, the ROI from a sort of a monetary point of view, but also the capacity within your team. In the past, I've used PPC as a sort of little bit of a litmus test there because you can sort of do a quick PPC test and see did we get any bites. And if not, then we'll turn the PPC off and come back. I don't know if there's other tools or other things you would recommend for testing a market. Aleyda Solis: 100%. I mean I believe with the most forward is assessing the search volume of the queries, of the top queries that are search of your relevant topic, to describe your product or your services or your content. And then you can do a topological market type of assessment and say, okay, if I end up even getting at some point in a year, like 10% of this potential search volume and traffic and with my current conversion rate, how many conversions and is this going to be ROI positive at that point? But the point of the PPC campaign, I think is very smart to do, especially when there are markets that might look to be very big. But again, it depends on the context and depends on your offering. Because the markets that, for example, like Brazil or India are huge or Indonesia, these are huge market. However, they also have a different type of, let's say capacity of an online investment or buying online their type of behavior and capacity to buying things because of how much they earned et cetera, it's different than in the US or in Europe. For example, I have clients that there might be getting more traffic from a few Latin American markets like Mexico, that is a big, big market. But because of the type of offering or product or sophistication and also price point, most of the conversions happen in Spain. In their case like 60% of the search potential or traffic, but the conversions and revenue is much higher. So it's not only a purely search potential, but also the behavior, the sophistication, the price point. So for that PPC is 100% a very small way to do it. Just launching your top products. Actually, this is also another misunderstanding, right? Thinking that you need to go all in. No, you can launch a pilot project with your homepage and your top three, top five products, those that you have identified that have a higher search potential in that market. And then, yeah, a PPC campaign landing page is well optimized to see what is the buying behavior, the buying journey, and the conversion rate that you get and if it's ROI positive or not, and it's aligned to your expectations or not. Crystal Carter: And I think there's so much there around the cultural understandings as well. So you talked about market capabilities and things like that. I either worked with a client who did a lot of stuff in the... It was a health test and they were working in the UK. They also wanted to do stuff in South Africa because it was a really good market for them. And they were like, we want to put a video on the page. And the team we were working with in South Africa was like, we have the most expensive mobile data in the world. Do not put a video on the page because no one will watch it, for instance. And so I think understanding some of those cultural machinations can be such a big, big player. Aleyda Solis: It's interesting that you mentioned that, because also it's not only about... And I think that in SEO, purely in SEO, we tend to think about how to maximize the signals to the Googlebot at the end and yes, the Googlebot tries to, let's say, simulate the experience of the user. But at the end of the day, depending on the location and depending on the context of what particular product or information or not, users will have their own, let's say, bias or cultural bias. So for example, I have this company right now in France and their offering has to do a lot about healthcare or fitness type of products. And because health, there's a universal search system in France, so they use the French users, visitors, people, they are very used to see whatever health information in with the .Fr ccTLD. So anything that is not in the .Fr ccTLD and it has to do about health, they double question it, if it is really for them and if it's really worthy and if it is really reliable, because they are so used that it is a national thing. So in their case, they were very well optimized, very well ranking already for their core terms, but their conversions and the click rate of the SERPs, you could tell that they were poorer, the ones that should be expected for those positions. So the solution here beyond and before they grow much further is to, okay, let's start doing a few tests with a .Fr ccTLD and if the tests are successful, we will need to migrate. And this is something crazy that for 99% of the cases or scenarios, I will say, are you crazy? Why are you going to migrate just because of this? Migration is the worst case scenario that some of the higher efforts type of actions in SEO. But this one of those edge cases that we can see that from a business standpoint, it actually will make a lot of sense for them in the future. So it is now or never pretty much to assess that. Mordy Oberstein: How do you get ahead of that as opposed to realizing after the fact? Do you have a process? How do you find whether it be something like culturally like that or it's like we don't call sneakers, sneakers, we call them runners, whatever it is. I'm from New York, so we call soda, soda, we're from Brooklyn, it's soda or whatever. If you're from Michigan, it's called pop. I know that because I'm from the US. But if you're coming from say England and you want to target the Michigan soda population, you better call it pop. How do you get ahead of that? Aleyda Solis: The best way to do it is with good old keyword research, competition research, analysis research. Also the more localized, the more granular it can be, the best it will be of course, because there might be variations in the different terms depending on the specific location. And many, many services or products are not launched at a national level either, even if we're targeting countries. So some things might make sense more than others and they change a lot based on the context or industry. It also depends a lot on the, let's say, on your particular business model too. So for example SaaS, you might think about all SaaS have... There are the same type of product, the same business models. So they will tend to have the same type of international targeting and it's not the case. So for example, if you are an accounting SaaS software, it does make sense for you and you can go and take a look at a lot of accounting softwares out there. They will tend to be country targeted. Not because you search necessarily about accounting software or accounting systems in different ways. In English for example, in across the different English-speaking countries, no, but because their offering actually changes for country because their tax solution or accounting solution is integrated with local banking and local taxing and different type of rules and conditions depending on the country taxing and accounting laws. However, if we go to other type of SaaS like productivity SaaS or product management SaaS, you can see that in this other type of offering, most of them are language targeted because most of project management tools are called in the same way, independently of the country. In English for example, you call project management software in the UK, in the US, in Australia. And they're offering, their personality won't change. It's changes is trivial. It's like the pricing and they can change that dynamically and it's not such a big change that is worth it to create different type of versions. So you can see that there's a very... From red it doesn't changes it all to green. It doesn't change to nothing or there's a midpoint that it changes just a bit, but it doesn't compensate to create country versions. And the best way to assess that is really to do very granular keyword competition research. See which are the websites ranking for your top queries in that particular location that you want to run for and see which are the terms that are actually used of those best ranking ones, see how they address and what is their offering, what is their web structure are their ccTLDs? Are they subdomains, subdirectories and how they are explaining, describing, wording the product or the service and take that as an input to assess further. Mordy Oberstein: And that's a really good point about laws, because I think it's multiple times where the laws of Pacific region around them say... I think one of the case I was looking at was car insurance. The laws in different countries around car insurance will create different needs within the market and totally different queries that are now relevant, that won't be relevant in other markets. Let me ask you another question though. What if you're targeting, let's say a country like Belgium, where it's not just, okay, they have different laws, let's say England. It's in the country itself, they speak different languages. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, 100%. It's the same with Canada, right? English and French too. And there are quite a few countries like that. Well, it depends on really the search volume and the search potential that each one of these languages have, right? In the case of Belgium for example, most of the searches are the most popular languages will be French and then also Flemish, which is very, very like Dutch. But again, it's like, okay, again, your capacity where most of the searches for your product are happening in French or in Flemish and based on that to prioritize accordingly. Because indeed, so for example, in Spain actually, you can take that to the very extreme and it might not necessarily be worthy. Spanish is the language that everybody knows internationally about Spain. But the original languages are very well used regionally too. So in Catalonia it's Catalan. I live in the Basque Country actually in Spain and the Basque language is completely different to anything else out there. And then the Galician language. So I mean you can go very granular if you want, but again, this is not about being let's say politically correct or being super granular because of course that will be the ideal work, whatever. But we don't have unlimited resources. What we really want is that this new versions generate money, generate sales, generate traffic, and these are ROI positives. So at the end of the day, just think about what are the languages that your audience in that country are actually searching for your products on services. And here, coincidentally again, speaking about car rentals, is one of those sectors or businesses where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain for your website because of the target market, the audience. These are a lot of international travelers, holiday makers, whatever, coming here, renting cars. So there is a non-trivial search volume about hiring cars in Barcelona, renting cars in Madrid. Actually that is another edge case where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain, in France, in non-speaking English countries, 100%. Crystal Carter: I think it can get very complicated, but I think it's worthwhile because I think it demonstrates trust. So we have a great article from Adriana Stein talking about translation versus localization. And I think that when people can see that... And again, it's worthwhile. So for instance, if you were a hyper-local business that was in the Basque Country and was serving people for traditional Basque Country activities or something like that, it would make sense for you to connect with them in that language. And if you're searching on the SERP and you see that that's written in that language and they know the terms that are related to the thing, then you go, okay, these people know what they're talking about, they actually know what's going on. This isn't somebody who just pressed a button to translate this. They actually know they actually care. And I think that that can be really useful. Aleyda Solis: 100%. I mean if you do really have the capacity and the resources and if it is an important market for you, you should totally go ahead. And if it is a minimum effort too, you should definitely go ahead and do the extra mile and personalize because that can make a complete difference for it. So for example, in my case, I was back in the day, I am originally from Nicaragua. When I was living still in Nicaragua and Nicaragua is such a small country, it's also a poor country. So we were so very used to get all of this marketing actions in TV even or in Billboard or whatever, that we're so obviously not targeted at Nicaragua because we actually speak, like the way that we word things in Spanish is like in Argentina, like with the dos. So we put an accent at the end of each, pretty much conjugation and the verbs. And we don't say two, we say dos. And we had a lot of these billboards and TV ads and whatever with the two and we were like, oh, this was just generic ads for all Latin American people, whatever is not for us. But then it made all, little by little you could tell that they were making more efforts toward things to change things. And it was a minimum thing really pretty much to change up a couple of wordings. The rest was exactly the same, but at least they took care and this is actually really for us. The engagement and I think the connection with the brand or the offering increase. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I've heard SEOs talk about some of the communities where you get sort of hybrid languages. So there was somebody who was from Mexico and she was from the north of Mexico. Ms. Marie White actually was talking about this and she's from the north of Mexico and she was like, we need Spanglish. And they were like, what? She was like, people on the border of the United States and Mexico, everybody speaks Spanglish. And so they started adding in some of that into some of their copy and they started to get a lot of good response from that because also people have phones where they're searching both in English and in Spanish. And this is going to happen in lots of places where there's people who speak multiple languages. I don't know if you have any tips or any examples from sort of hybrid searches and adapting for that. Aleyda Solis: So for example, again, it depends a lot on the industry, but the industry, that can be crazy. Speaking about car rental, car rental in Spanish, you can say in so many different ways. So this is one industry that if you are for in, it really needs to be very well localized, especially because also a lot of the queries are also with location, connected with location, with your current city or the city where you want to go. And you can call “carro”, “coche”, just three terms for the same thing, for car. And the same also where the property... I have had quite a lot of clients across different countries in the property market. And for apartment in Spanish you can call it [foreign language 00:24:35]. So three different ways again for the same thing. And well, it's the same in the UK and the US flats and apartment. But in Spanish I think that because there are so many different countries that have it as a native language, there's so many different correct ways to say it. So especially for this very localized services and products, car rental, property, it's very, very worthy to go very granular, double check and validate how they are the right way or the relevant way to call it in that particular market. Because it's definitely going to change not only the name of the locations or the countries, but the term too, very likely. Crystal Carter: Can I ask you one question about attending technical? So sometimes when I worked on the international SEO campaigns or international SEO projects. I've seen it where sometimes Google can't figure out which one is the main one, even when you canonicalize it. And I don't know if you've seen that and if you have any sort of recommendations for how to address that particular challenge. Aleyda Solis: Yes, thank you very much for asking that. Actually, I think that this scenarios happen when you have a very, very established powerful, popular original version that you had... Usually the US one, that then it perform a little bit also like the global one for a while. And then you have, let's say a UK version or an Indian version, they are also in the same language. However, well they target their own audience. And in those particular scenarios we may see that the copy might be very, very similar because it actually makes sense because in that particular context, the product, the service is actually searched with the same terms. And in general the behavior of the user connecting to them, it's very similar. And so it's harder for Google to understand which is the right version. Even if you implement hreflang, remember that hreflang is one of many signals. So for those particular scenarios, what I highly, highly recommend to do to help Google further, is to add the name of the country in the metadata, add the name of the country or the location or the offices in case you have offices or subsidiaries or partners within the copy. The information that you are targeting those particular markets, personalize the message. So whatever examples or testimonials or information, give additional signals that, oh, this is for India, this is for the UK. And also a typical mistake that I see websites doing all the time is that in the country picker that the menu, the global menu that you may have, many of these are JavaScript generated, they are not crawlable. The links are always going to the homepage of the alternate version. Know your product A page should cross-link to your product A page in India, to your product A page in the US, in the UK. So the product A page in the US that has millions of backlinks can pass that link popularity accordingly to the product page of other countries. Rather than product page in other countries never be able to rank or not showing enough popularity to rule and not ranking because of that, right? So I believe that good crosslinking is critical. Localizing everything, every single signal that you can give to Google. This is especially important when you are targeting different countries with the same language. As examples of indeed like how your product make the life easier for relevant audience within that country. All these additional signals also help a lot. And of course hreflang notations, correct canonicalization too, in each one of these pages, that is also important. And if you have the capacity to promote within the relevant country to attract backlinks of local specific websites that will point to that particular country web version, the best will be, because many, many times the US slash global version was the one that existed before. All of the backlinks from India are still pointing also only to the US and the UK point to the US one rather than the relevant version. So little by little like that, you are able to give the right signals for Google to run the relevant version of the website. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great way to put it. You're helping Google. It's really complicated. I think they have a really hard time as somebody who lives in a non-English speaking country, but only searches for the most part in English. I get all sorts of cross results all the time. Google really does sometimes have a really hard time figuring it out. I've worked on sites where they're showing the wrong page and it was completely on Google's end to understand what was what. Aleyda Solis: Google thinks that I am a British living in Spain. I am all the time shown ads. And in Google discover too, recommend reads for British in Spain because I guess that's because they identified that a lot of British expat here or live in Spain by the way, that since I am searching in English so much, I should be a British living in Spain. Mordy Oberstein: The opposite I have. I only search in English basically, and Google discover will show me stuff in Hebrew now. I never search, I don't know what I'm looking at. Don't show that to me. But I'm getting used to knowledge panels- Aleyda Solis: Opportunity for you to learn Hebrew. Mordy Oberstein: Nati, Head of SEO, he gives me a hard time about knowing Hebrew well enough. So I think it's him behind the scenes pushing Google to let me learn more Hebrew. Aleyda Solis: 100%. Mordy Oberstein: It's a conspiracy. Aleyda, thank you so much for coming on. Don't forget to follow Aleyda on Twitter, on LinkedIn. Aleyda Solis: If you're not following Aleyda Solis. Mordy Oberstein: If you're not already, it's @aleyda on Twitter. We'll link to your profile in the show notes. And of course it's learningseo.io and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to the SEOFOMO and now the marketing FOMO newsletters. Aleyda Solis: Just reached a thousand subscribers a week ago and I'm actually preparing it for this Wix edition too. I'm so very excited too. Because in SEO we are also sometimes too isolated focusing on it. And there's so much happening in other markets, in other channels of marketing by the way. And we can learn a lot from them and leverage, learn to leverage them and to, yeah... That's definitely interesting. Crystal Carter: As well as Crawling Mondays as well as remoters.net. Aleyda Solis: Oh right. Crystal Carter: As well as Remoters.net SEO. So yes. Mordy Oberstein: Aleyda, thank you for everything you do for the community. Aleyda Solis: No, thank you for the opportunity to share with you and everything what you do too. Really appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: So one of the things that Aleyda touched on, which as a content person and as an expat myself kind of irks me about international strategies, that sometimes you don't fully appreciate how hard it is to actually localize the content to best align, not with the GEO’s language, but with the cultural idiosyncrasies and so forth. So we thought we get a serious expert on content to share their thoughts on building an international content strategy so that Crystal and I could offer you a very, very special version of a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Except this time it's not a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Let's get into what Giuseppe had to say first. Take it away, Giuseppe. Giuseppe Caltabiano: Well thank you for having me first of all. That's a very good question. Now let me say, despite the pandemic, my passion for traveling has not changed. In a way, it has been a constant of my life, whether I was on road for business or pleasure. The reason why I'm saying this is that travel really fueled my passion for global marketing, specifically for global content marketing. My travels have given me a better understanding of the world. But the reality is, when I launched my first new global content marketing program for Schneider Electric, that was 10 years ago. I thought I knew the world, but when you have to develop content for different geographies, well it feels like you have never stepped outside your front door, while I've always covered international or global roles. I remember, my first global content marketing journey started 10 years ago, when my team and I began defining Schneider Electric IT division global content strategy. Our goals were two fold: Lead Gen, first of all, marketing opportunities and secondly, increased brand awareness. Now after defining our strategy, we spent eight months preparing for the global launch through multiple pilots. We learned an incredible amount from our success and mistakes. And then one year later I replicated the same model with global clients when I moved to NewsCred, which is now part of Optimizely, at the beginning of 2017 and then later in Contently in 2019. Now the issue I found in most of the cases is that content marketers just try to replicate at global level what they have done in some cases with some success at central or local level. Well that's a big mistake. The thing is that global content marketing is not just content marketing deployed across multiple countries. Enterprise will need to plan, find the right balance between global and local. They have to pilot and then scale at global level. If they fail at one of these steps, of course usually they may fail with the full program. I think there are three main steps global marketers need to follow in order to design a proper content marketing strategy. First of all, finding the optimal balance between central and local. Now in most of the regions, I mean take Asia or Europe for example, there are thousands of countries and languages. It's simply unrealistic to make the same content work for each individual market. For this reason, creating content centrally and allowing countries to fill the gaps may represent a good solution. I've been working with both organizations, centralized and decentralized. Some organization have a very unclear understanding of local markets, which is the reason why involvement of countries or regions in content planning is really key. The role of central teams may shift of course as the program progress. In the early stages of the program, the flow of information is very outwards with the central team leading content production and strategy. And then as global content program flourish and progress, the emphasis on the central team shift to providing guidance and building local content skills and competencies. The second step is establishing local editorial board. While of course the central editorial team will generate content, a global level local editorial board have to be placed. And I mean this is really a key. In each country or on geography to manage proper planning and distribution, the local editorial board will agree with the central team on target personas. They lead the decision for distribution, content distribution, they contract local vendors and so on and so forth. The third and final point is piloting your content market strategy. The thing is piloting means starting small. Large enterprises are running pilot programs across geographies. It's a common practice, great ideas often receive resistance. You need to start small, test if your strategy is working, get results, and then finally create a proper business case, in order to allow a global content marketing program. In a global content marketing model, you ideally need to set up the pilot program as a test in one of two countries and usually no more than two different languages if possible. And then you run the pilot program with a full integration with the existing marketing technologies. And finally, of course if it's successful, you may roll out your program to the other geographies. I realize that this is probably super simplification, but it may give you a good overview of what to do in order to create a global content marketing program. Mordy Oberstein: So I don't know where to start with it, because Giuseppe makes a bunch of really, really, really, really good points. But I guess let's talk about a point that I feel I personally probably gloss over all the time in talking about global content strategies, is that the fact that you have to balance the global with the local. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, entirely. It's something that is really, really important. And I think that it applies to lots of elements of international SEO and even regional SEO. Even if you think about the United States for instance, there's different laws in different states, there's different realities. February in Florida is very different from February in New Hampshire for instance. So there are definitely things to consider about which products to put out, which content to put out, what makes sense, where all of these things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: The same thing with local SEO also. You might have a local presence, you might also have a more international presence or a national presence. So balancing this out is really, really important. Because you don't want to go all in on the global and then ignore the fact you also have a local presence or cannibalize a local presence with your global presence. You really have to think about what pages should exist. It's really about planning. What pages should exist, where do they exist on the domain, what are they trying to do? Where are they trying to target? And how do we keep what they're trying to do somewhat separate from each other. Crystal Carter: There's a section where he discussed planning and some of the work that's gone into planning. He was saying they spent eight months planning a particular campaign and that can take a lot of time. So these things should be well thought out and should take all of the things into account. Because of course it's important to have a global presence. If you think of a company like IKEA for instance, IKEA has global things and actually IKEA's approach to marketing tends to be fairly universal worldwide. But that's a distinct strategy that they've taken, which is really very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: It works for them. Crystal Carter: It works for them. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure it works for others. Crystal Carter: Exactly. But they will understand that. Even I know that... We recently had an IKEA open near us and they ran a specific hyper-local campaign launching the store. And I know that they have general activities there, but the global brand will impact the local brand and vice versa. So it's really important to make sure that they line up. But that also that if part of your brand is making sure that you care about your customers, making sure that it's very clear that you are respectful of your customers, then respecting the local cultural elements is really, really important. And localizing appropriately will help you to demonstrate that. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to what Aleyda was saying about the advertisement she would see growing up and really speaks to what Giuseppe was talking about, and just another amazing point, in that there's really no way around having a local expert. Giuseppe was talking about they have a board and that local board offers feedback on the overall global camp. How much do you want to automate, especially in the world of AI and ChatGPT. But in general, how much do you want to try to automate or try to template from the global strategy into the local areas, you can't. You have to have somebody who understands what that region's all about, what works, what doesn't work, the interest, the way of talking, all the idiosyncrasies of that region. There's no way around knowing that other than you having some actual integration into that community, which means you need a local expert Crystal Carter: Indeed. And there's idioms that will make people feel more warmly towards your brand. There are particular celebrations or particular things that are important milestones. So for instance, in the Mediterranean you see a lot of these things with the blue eye for instance. That's something that means good luck or prosperity and things like that. If you have the same symbol and somewhere else it would be less recognized. And there are things that visually, for instance, would be really, really recognizable. And that's something to think about as well. And these are things like you said, that you can't get from a bot necessarily. You have to have humans there. Adriana Stein is someone who has worked with us on some localizing projects and she wrote an article on translation versus localization. And she gets into a lot of these details. She talks about the direct translation from English to German of beating around the bush for instance, which... He did the direct translation, it doesn't convey the same sentiment as if you do a localized translation of their idiom for that same sort of thing. And what you want is the sentiment. You want the sentiment of that statement rather than the direct translation because it's an idiom. Mordy Oberstein: And you have cultural biases and there's no way around them. I'll give you a great example. I think I might have talked about it in the podcast at one point, but growing up every day, I used to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I moved to Israel, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at work one day and someone's like, what's that? I'm like, peanut butter and jelly. And they're like, what is that? They do not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Blew my mind, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. It is the go-to sandwich in America. To this day, I still eat them, because they're so delicious. Crystal Carter: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are suitable for every meal. Mordy Oberstein: Every meal and in between meals, all meals. Crystal Carter: Anytime you eat- Mordy Oberstein: You can live on them. Crystal Carter: You can live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They're quality, quality. Mordy Oberstein: We do not eat them where I currently live. And if you were talking about them, it would be like you if you're trying to target that or if you're using it as a reference and whatever it is, it would be lost because it is not the same thing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. And I think these are things that you have to get. And I think that it takes... One of the reasons why it takes so long to plan for a sort of global SEO or marketing campaign, is that you have to take those things into account. You have to make sure that you have good experts for wherever you're based. Wix is, we work in 17 different languages and we work in lots of different spaces. Someone that we work with in Japan is someone called Titone. He's fantastic, he's amazing, he's incredible. And we worked with the team at Faber as well to do some SEO webinars. We didn't think like, oh, we should swat in and do the SEO webinar ourselves. From a remote team, we got local experts to help us with that and to help us engage in, because for instance, with search in Japan, for instance, the way that the web is structured is slightly different because they have different kinds of writing. So this is really important to think about. And so there's going to be people who have more experience in that and more experience of the way that the people use the web and the different search engines that they use and the different things that will come up first for that particular audience. And you have to think about the people on your team who are genuine experts and you have to make sure that you build up those relationships. And that takes time. And also I think it's important, particularly from a content point of view, to think about how you get traction an at what point, how much of a foothold you need to have in a market in order to get some traction in a market. Especially if your team isn't specifically based there, but you're trying to connect with an audience in a different place. You have to sort of figure out how much content do we need? What investment do we need? And Aleyda talked about this as well, what investment do you need in order to be able to serve those customers well? And I think that these can take time, but hopefully it's worth it, if that's a market that's good for you. Mordy Oberstein: Now speaking of time, do you know what time it is? Crystal Carter: What time is it? What time is it? Mordy Oberstein: Snappy News. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's here. I mean, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, but oh my God, it's here. Google has opened its Search Generative Experience, SGE. Two select folks on the wait list, yours truly, not among them. I can't even get on the wait list? Something about it not being open to my account, I don't know. Personal grumblings aside, we got our first look at what Google's Search Generative Experience is going to look like. Follow me here for a second. Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land covered Barry Schwartz and his covering of his initial experience with the SGE. Barry got access to the SGE or the Search Generative Experience, but had to go offline for a few days. So Danny covered Barry covering the SGE. We'll link to the article in the show notes, because there're already heap of examples and you should definitely look at them. Just looking at it myself, I just want to say, don't panic. It looks like there are plenty of organic link placements all throughout the experience. Mike King from iPullRank, who did a whole webinar with us on AI and SEO, he said quote, "it's basically an interactive feature snippet, but it doesn't feel as threatening to organic search traffic as the original demos made it feel." Good news. All right, who wants some more big news? Yeah, Google held its marketing live event and friend of the show who join us talking about SCOM PPC over at Cypress North, Greg Finn did an amazing job covering all of the updates that Google announced to its ad platform and beyond. Check that out in the show notes as well over at Search Engine Land. Some takeaways, they're personal. When I took a look at the keynote, one of the things I took away was a Google talks about how people search and how it's changing, how they're looking at longer queries and how they're more conversational, what they're looking for, and they're looking for more specific things than ever before. People are being far more specific when they search. Some might say not new. Old, not new. I agree it's not new, but I feel like now this is an official part of the conversation that we as SEOs, the content marketers, the content creators need to get on board with. Also ads will be in the Search Generative Experience, the SGE or as I'm just going to call it the AI box. When Google announced the SGE or the AI box at Google I/O 2023, it made it seem the ads would be above the box itself, not part of the actual Search Generative Experience. But at Marketing Live, they show that yes, it's going to be right there in that whole SGE ecosystem. Also, say goodbye to Google Merchant Center and say hello to Google Merchant Center NEXT. It's next level because it will take a lot of the techier parts of connecting to Google Merchant Center out of the equation by pulling information straight from your site into the Merchant Center feed. Next, well, nothing is next because that's this week's snappy news. And well, that was the news. How newsy was it? So Newsy. Always so newsy. Which brings us to our follow of the week as the episode ebbs away and this week our follow of the week as we're going international SEO is none other than Veruska Anconitano. Crystal Carter: Veruska is fantastic. She's a member of Women in Tech SEO. She's an amazing international SEO- Mordy Oberstein: Contributor to the hub. Crystal Carter: What's this? Mordy Oberstein: Contributor to the hub. Crystal Carter: A contributor to the hub, which I was just going to get to. Yeah, she's a- Mordy Oberstein: Sorry for jumping the gun. Crystal Carter: She's multilingual. And yeah, she wrote an article called Why Cultural Relevance is Key to International SEO Success, and it's absolutely fantastic. So yeah, she speaks many languages and she talks a lot about the different elements that come into play when you're thinking about engaging with international markets that are not just some of the technical SEO elements that can be easy to implement, relatively speaking. But some of the cultural elements in, we're thinking about cultural identity and how that impacts search and what people search for and how people search. It's a great article. She's a great follow. She's also an expert on Rome, so I knew someone who was going to Rome and I tagged her and she was like, oh, let me tell you all of the places that you should eat. Mordy Oberstein: And her Twitter account is really informative. She had a post on skyscraper content the other day that kind of made me laugh. There's a lot of really good content in her feed. It's not just one of these accounts where you're going to file but not really getting SEO value out of it. It's a definite value in the SEO knowledge itself. So it's @LaCuochina on Twitter. We'll link to Veruska's profile in the show notes. But definitely give her a follow. Which means our episode is now over. Crystal Carter: Finito. Mordy Oberstein: Finito. Ooh, very good. Crystal Carter: Finn. Mordy Oberstein: Finn. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, hasta la vista. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know how to say the end in any other language. Crystal Carter: S ayonara! Mordy Oberstein: Sure. Adios. That's really goodbye, not the end. Anyway, thanks for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us, not to worry, we're back next week with the brand new episodes. We dive into how to build a content strategy SEO and beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on 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: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Aleyda Solis Giuseppe Caltabiano Veruska Anconitano Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Aleyda Solis International SEO Consultant Orainti SEO Learning SEO SEO FOMO Newsletter Rock Content Guide to International SEO Culture Relevance & International SEO How to approach SEO localization and SEO website translations News: Hands-on with Google’s new Search Generative Experience Google Marketing Live 2023: Everything you need to know Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Aleyda Solis Giuseppe Caltabiano Veruska Anconitano Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Aleyda Solis International SEO Consultant Orainti SEO Learning SEO SEO FOMO Newsletter Rock Content Guide to International SEO Culture Relevance & International SEO How to approach SEO localization and SEO website translations News: Hands-on with Google’s new Search Generative Experience Google Marketing Live 2023: Everything you need to know Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the very international woman of SEO, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, everyone around the world, in all of the different countries and all of the different languages. Bon Jour. Hello, everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Hint! Hint! Well, I didn't do the whole like, the amazing, fantastic ... I only did one. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. I think you've run out. I think that's it. I think we’re all done. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's interesting because when we first joined, people were saying congratulations and I said Thank you a million times and then I moved on to thank you in other languages as well, which is totally up for this podcast. Mordy Oberstein: It is. Crystal Carter: Because we're talking about international SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, spoiler, spoiler. Before we get to that, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can now subscribe to our new monthly newsletter, Searchlight, where you get full coverage of the SEO world with tips, updates, and links to great SEO content from the Wix SEO hub. The same Wix, by the way, that automatically adds HF link to your pages as part of a wider multilingual offering. Of course, you can add custom texts and to the head element as well. Why am I telling you this? Well, Crystal already told you. Because today we're talking about international SEO. Crystal Carter: Worldwide. Mordy Oberstein: Worldwide. Forget going mobile, today we're going global. Well, don't forget going mobile. We're diving into the ins and outs of international SEO with special guest host, a leader of all the SEOs herself. Aleyda Solis will stop by to share about how to get started, international SEO and what you need to know, what to focus on, what not to focus on, and common mistakes and miss from the world of international SEO. Plus, we have a special deep thought for you today as Rock Content's own Giuseppe Caltabiano shares his thoughts on building a global content strategy and of course with the snappies of SEO News for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So [foreign language 00:02:21] and welcome as episode number 40 of the SERP's Up podcast is here to help show you that an SEO, it's a small world after all. Crystal Carter: I wasn't really expecting that reference, but it was entirely worth it. Yes, we're super, super excited to have Aleyda here, Aleyda, the queen of SEO, of all SEO but particularly fantastic at international SEO. I remember using the tool that Aleyda had on her website for HF link back in the day. It's still awesome, so do check that out and it's incredibly useful. So amazingly pleased to have Aleyda here talking about this incredible, super useful, really valuable topic. Mordy Oberstein: So if you have a website and you're trying to grow your business beyond just the region where you exist now you're going to need international SEO, which is kind of complicated. Which is why, if aliens were to come to Earth and say to all the SEOs, take us to your leader, we would take them to Aleyda. With that, here's Aleyda. Hi Aleyda. Aleyda Solis: Hello Mordy. How are you? Hello, crystal. You're too kind and oh my God, Mordy, if this SEO thing goes ever to hell because of AI or whatever, you can definitely become a radio announcer because I am so, so very impressed. Mordy Oberstein: I've always wanted to be a baseball color commentator. That's like my dream job, outside of SEO. Aleyda Solis: You can tell. Mordy Oberstein: I’ll bring Glenn Gabe with me. We'll do it together. Aleyda Solis: You totally should, isn't it? I mean, why not? Mordy please and you can launch definitely- Mordy Oberstein: I already have too many podcasts going on. I don't know if I can handle another. Aleyda Solis: Please. And you can launch our Wix website too. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Really quickly. That's good point. Before we get going in this, we need to do some plugging. There's learning.io, there's the SEOFOMO newsletter, which I freaking love because I don't have time to scour the internet for good SEO resources. So you do it for me. Crystal Carter: It's amazing. Aleyda Solis: Well, you're welcome. You're welcome. No, I'm so very happy that it's read, that it's useful. Learningseo.io, by the way, is getting a refresh look in the following weeks and I'm very excited about that. And yes, hopefully with this I help people to clarify the most... On one hand, the most common doubts about SEO, which I get asked all the time, so I just refer them to the website on one hand. And then on the other hand, with SEOFOMO, it's interesting because the other day, I think it was Cindy Crum, who did this poll over Twitter about why was the reason or main reasons why SEOs had imposter syndrome. Crystal Carter: Yes, I saw that. Aleyda Solis: And one of the top reasons that got most votes was like the fear of missing out. So I can definitely see the how SEO promo definitely address that particular problem, which I have to say I am totally there. That is the reason of why I launch it in the first place. And I can also definitely see how in recent months because of AI, this new launches and the race of search engine engines to trying to be the first ones and all of these updates that Google is right now launching and conflating many, many times. So important to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: And it's so hard. There's so many updates Crystal Carter: And I think particularly one of the things that can be a challenge for somebody who's working across international markets is not only do you have to keep up with it for the general SEO, but you also have to keep up with it for international SEO. And you also have to keep up with it for all the different versions of the same website that you might have and making sure that all of those things work all together. So yeah, it can be a big challenge and we are so appreciative to you for making the effort to help with that. It's incredibly valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Since we're talking about international SEO, what's the first thing you think our audience should know about international SEO before anything else? Aleyda Solis: Yes. Well, the number one thing probably, because I think that that is the main mistake or assumption that many people do when they want to go international, is that it's not only about hreflang annotations, I mean hreflang annotations is a method, is a mechanism. It's a configuration that is helpful to specify and inform Google that we have other versions of our website pages that can be in different languages or the same or different languages targeting other countries. However, is not the only way to specify that. There are many signals that will take into account and it is a must to align them all because at the end of the day, it's the consistency and alignment of all of the signals that will let go realize that, oh yes, this is not a duplication of product A page, but it's actually product A page targeted to the UK, while you have already your version for the US. So it is fundamental that we are all aware about this different signals and it's just not about just hreflang annotations and that's it. And I believe that all the potentially most common issue that I see, most common problem, that I have clients, even larger enterprises, that you will think that they have all of these resources in the world. But at the end of the day, there are always restrictions and always limits of what you can do in your time and where it makes sense to allocate resources to. It's this problem when they end up having too many international versions when you launch a lot because you want to target abroad. Somebody has told you that, oh, there's opportunity to grow, launch in Spanish, in Italian, launch to the UK in English, you already know the language. So you launched the UK to Australia, et cetera. And then you realize you cannot maintain, you cannot support all of these different websites and then all of a sudden it's like, oh yes, I understand that. Then they learn that they need to localize their... Even if it is in the same language, their version for the UK, because they may be sell sneakers in the US and all of a sudden they realize that they are not called sneakers in the UK, but they are called trainers for example, or runners or whatever. So they need to optimize the content accordingly, but they don't have the resources. So it is fundamental to well initially assess the different international markets that actually makes sense for your business. What is the search potential? What is the search demand? If it is worth it for you? The market will be able to generate at some point enough traffic for you to have successful conversions and a successful ROI? And from an investment standpoint, it's something also doable for you? If you have the capacity to localize the content, if you have the capacity to translate it, if it is a market that speak a completely different language, for example. And then be able to give the, let's say a good support for users coming from those countries too, because it's not only like a one-off type of investment too. So all of the things, I believe that these two areas of let's say misunderstanding and I'll say that these are the most to, let's say, think or understand or when starting. And based on that to be able to start with the proper process of yes audience research, keyword research, completion research, to then establish the best web structure to use to tackle the different markets. And start with those markets where there's a much higher potential with less competition, et cetera, et cetera. Crystal Carter: So you talked a lot about assessing whether or not the market's worth it, the ROI from a sort of a monetary point of view, but also the capacity within your team. In the past, I've used PPC as a sort of little bit of a litmus test there because you can sort of do a quick PPC test and see did we get any bites. And if not, then we'll turn the PPC off and come back. I don't know if there's other tools or other things you would recommend for testing a market. Aleyda Solis: 100%. I mean I believe with the most forward is assessing the search volume of the queries, of the top queries that are search of your relevant topic, to describe your product or your services or your content. And then you can do a topological market type of assessment and say, okay, if I end up even getting at some point in a year, like 10% of this potential search volume and traffic and with my current conversion rate, how many conversions and is this going to be ROI positive at that point? But the point of the PPC campaign, I think is very smart to do, especially when there are markets that might look to be very big. But again, it depends on the context and depends on your offering. Because the markets that, for example, like Brazil or India are huge or Indonesia, these are huge market. However, they also have a different type of, let's say capacity of an online investment or buying online their type of behavior and capacity to buying things because of how much they earned et cetera, it's different than in the US or in Europe. For example, I have clients that there might be getting more traffic from a few Latin American markets like Mexico, that is a big, big market. But because of the type of offering or product or sophistication and also price point, most of the conversions happen in Spain. In their case like 60% of the search potential or traffic, but the conversions and revenue is much higher. So it's not only a purely search potential, but also the behavior, the sophistication, the price point. So for that PPC is 100% a very small way to do it. Just launching your top products. Actually, this is also another misunderstanding, right? Thinking that you need to go all in. No, you can launch a pilot project with your homepage and your top three, top five products, those that you have identified that have a higher search potential in that market. And then, yeah, a PPC campaign landing page is well optimized to see what is the buying behavior, the buying journey, and the conversion rate that you get and if it's ROI positive or not, and it's aligned to your expectations or not. Crystal Carter: And I think there's so much there around the cultural understandings as well. So you talked about market capabilities and things like that. I either worked with a client who did a lot of stuff in the... It was a health test and they were working in the UK. They also wanted to do stuff in South Africa because it was a really good market for them. And they were like, we want to put a video on the page. And the team we were working with in South Africa was like, we have the most expensive mobile data in the world. Do not put a video on the page because no one will watch it, for instance. And so I think understanding some of those cultural machinations can be such a big, big player. Aleyda Solis: It's interesting that you mentioned that, because also it's not only about... And I think that in SEO, purely in SEO, we tend to think about how to maximize the signals to the Googlebot at the end and yes, the Googlebot tries to, let's say, simulate the experience of the user. But at the end of the day, depending on the location and depending on the context of what particular product or information or not, users will have their own, let's say, bias or cultural bias. So for example, I have this company right now in France and their offering has to do a lot about healthcare or fitness type of products. And because health, there's a universal search system in France, so they use the French users, visitors, people, they are very used to see whatever health information in with the .Fr ccTLD. So anything that is not in the .Fr ccTLD and it has to do about health, they double question it, if it is really for them and if it's really worthy and if it is really reliable, because they are so used that it is a national thing. So in their case, they were very well optimized, very well ranking already for their core terms, but their conversions and the click rate of the SERPs, you could tell that they were poorer, the ones that should be expected for those positions. So the solution here beyond and before they grow much further is to, okay, let's start doing a few tests with a .Fr ccTLD and if the tests are successful, we will need to migrate. And this is something crazy that for 99% of the cases or scenarios, I will say, are you crazy? Why are you going to migrate just because of this? Migration is the worst case scenario that some of the higher efforts type of actions in SEO. But this one of those edge cases that we can see that from a business standpoint, it actually will make a lot of sense for them in the future. So it is now or never pretty much to assess that. Mordy Oberstein: How do you get ahead of that as opposed to realizing after the fact? Do you have a process? How do you find whether it be something like culturally like that or it's like we don't call sneakers, sneakers, we call them runners, whatever it is. I'm from New York, so we call soda, soda, we're from Brooklyn, it's soda or whatever. If you're from Michigan, it's called pop. I know that because I'm from the US. But if you're coming from say England and you want to target the Michigan soda population, you better call it pop. How do you get ahead of that? Aleyda Solis: The best way to do it is with good old keyword research, competition research, analysis research. Also the more localized, the more granular it can be, the best it will be of course, because there might be variations in the different terms depending on the specific location. And many, many services or products are not launched at a national level either, even if we're targeting countries. So some things might make sense more than others and they change a lot based on the context or industry. It also depends a lot on the, let's say, on your particular business model too. So for example SaaS, you might think about all SaaS have... There are the same type of product, the same business models. So they will tend to have the same type of international targeting and it's not the case. So for example, if you are an accounting SaaS software, it does make sense for you and you can go and take a look at a lot of accounting softwares out there. They will tend to be country targeted. Not because you search necessarily about accounting software or accounting systems in different ways. In English for example, in across the different English-speaking countries, no, but because their offering actually changes for country because their tax solution or accounting solution is integrated with local banking and local taxing and different type of rules and conditions depending on the country taxing and accounting laws. However, if we go to other type of SaaS like productivity SaaS or product management SaaS, you can see that in this other type of offering, most of them are language targeted because most of project management tools are called in the same way, independently of the country. In English for example, you call project management software in the UK, in the US, in Australia. And they're offering, their personality won't change. It's changes is trivial. It's like the pricing and they can change that dynamically and it's not such a big change that is worth it to create different type of versions. So you can see that there's a very... From red it doesn't changes it all to green. It doesn't change to nothing or there's a midpoint that it changes just a bit, but it doesn't compensate to create country versions. And the best way to assess that is really to do very granular keyword competition research. See which are the websites ranking for your top queries in that particular location that you want to run for and see which are the terms that are actually used of those best ranking ones, see how they address and what is their offering, what is their web structure are their ccTLDs? Are they subdomains, subdirectories and how they are explaining, describing, wording the product or the service and take that as an input to assess further. Mordy Oberstein: And that's a really good point about laws, because I think it's multiple times where the laws of Pacific region around them say... I think one of the case I was looking at was car insurance. The laws in different countries around car insurance will create different needs within the market and totally different queries that are now relevant, that won't be relevant in other markets. Let me ask you another question though. What if you're targeting, let's say a country like Belgium, where it's not just, okay, they have different laws, let's say England. It's in the country itself, they speak different languages. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, 100%. It's the same with Canada, right? English and French too. And there are quite a few countries like that. Well, it depends on really the search volume and the search potential that each one of these languages have, right? In the case of Belgium for example, most of the searches are the most popular languages will be French and then also Flemish, which is very, very like Dutch. But again, it's like, okay, again, your capacity where most of the searches for your product are happening in French or in Flemish and based on that to prioritize accordingly. Because indeed, so for example, in Spain actually, you can take that to the very extreme and it might not necessarily be worthy. Spanish is the language that everybody knows internationally about Spain. But the original languages are very well used regionally too. So in Catalonia it's Catalan. I live in the Basque Country actually in Spain and the Basque language is completely different to anything else out there. And then the Galician language. So I mean you can go very granular if you want, but again, this is not about being let's say politically correct or being super granular because of course that will be the ideal work, whatever. But we don't have unlimited resources. What we really want is that this new versions generate money, generate sales, generate traffic, and these are ROI positives. So at the end of the day, just think about what are the languages that your audience in that country are actually searching for your products on services. And here, coincidentally again, speaking about car rentals, is one of those sectors or businesses where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain for your website because of the target market, the audience. These are a lot of international travelers, holiday makers, whatever, coming here, renting cars. So there is a non-trivial search volume about hiring cars in Barcelona, renting cars in Madrid. Actually that is another edge case where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain, in France, in non-speaking English countries, 100%. Crystal Carter: I think it can get very complicated, but I think it's worthwhile because I think it demonstrates trust. So we have a great article from Adriana Stein talking about translation versus localization. And I think that when people can see that... And again, it's worthwhile. So for instance, if you were a hyper-local business that was in the Basque Country and was serving people for traditional Basque Country activities or something like that, it would make sense for you to connect with them in that language. And if you're searching on the SERP and you see that that's written in that language and they know the terms that are related to the thing, then you go, okay, these people know what they're talking about, they actually know what's going on. This isn't somebody who just pressed a button to translate this. They actually know they actually care. And I think that that can be really useful. Aleyda Solis: 100%. I mean if you do really have the capacity and the resources and if it is an important market for you, you should totally go ahead. And if it is a minimum effort too, you should definitely go ahead and do the extra mile and personalize because that can make a complete difference for it. So for example, in my case, I was back in the day, I am originally from Nicaragua. When I was living still in Nicaragua and Nicaragua is such a small country, it's also a poor country. So we were so very used to get all of this marketing actions in TV even or in Billboard or whatever, that we're so obviously not targeted at Nicaragua because we actually speak, like the way that we word things in Spanish is like in Argentina, like with the dos. So we put an accent at the end of each, pretty much conjugation and the verbs. And we don't say two, we say dos. And we had a lot of these billboards and TV ads and whatever with the two and we were like, oh, this was just generic ads for all Latin American people, whatever is not for us. But then it made all, little by little you could tell that they were making more efforts toward things to change things. And it was a minimum thing really pretty much to change up a couple of wordings. The rest was exactly the same, but at least they took care and this is actually really for us. The engagement and I think the connection with the brand or the offering increase. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I've heard SEOs talk about some of the communities where you get sort of hybrid languages. So there was somebody who was from Mexico and she was from the north of Mexico. Ms. Marie White actually was talking about this and she's from the north of Mexico and she was like, we need Spanglish. And they were like, what? She was like, people on the border of the United States and Mexico, everybody speaks Spanglish. And so they started adding in some of that into some of their copy and they started to get a lot of good response from that because also people have phones where they're searching both in English and in Spanish. And this is going to happen in lots of places where there's people who speak multiple languages. I don't know if you have any tips or any examples from sort of hybrid searches and adapting for that. Aleyda Solis: So for example, again, it depends a lot on the industry, but the industry, that can be crazy. Speaking about car rental, car rental in Spanish, you can say in so many different ways. So this is one industry that if you are for in, it really needs to be very well localized, especially because also a lot of the queries are also with location, connected with location, with your current city or the city where you want to go. And you can call “carro”, “coche”, just three terms for the same thing, for car. And the same also where the property... I have had quite a lot of clients across different countries in the property market. And for apartment in Spanish you can call it [foreign language 00:24:35]. So three different ways again for the same thing. And well, it's the same in the UK and the US flats and apartment. But in Spanish I think that because there are so many different countries that have it as a native language, there's so many different correct ways to say it. So especially for this very localized services and products, car rental, property, it's very, very worthy to go very granular, double check and validate how they are the right way or the relevant way to call it in that particular market. Because it's definitely going to change not only the name of the locations or the countries, but the term too, very likely. Crystal Carter: Can I ask you one question about attending technical? So sometimes when I worked on the international SEO campaigns or international SEO projects. I've seen it where sometimes Google can't figure out which one is the main one, even when you canonicalize it. And I don't know if you've seen that and if you have any sort of recommendations for how to address that particular challenge. Aleyda Solis: Yes, thank you very much for asking that. Actually, I think that this scenarios happen when you have a very, very established powerful, popular original version that you had... Usually the US one, that then it perform a little bit also like the global one for a while. And then you have, let's say a UK version or an Indian version, they are also in the same language. However, well they target their own audience. And in those particular scenarios we may see that the copy might be very, very similar because it actually makes sense because in that particular context, the product, the service is actually searched with the same terms. And in general the behavior of the user connecting to them, it's very similar. And so it's harder for Google to understand which is the right version. Even if you implement hreflang, remember that hreflang is one of many signals. So for those particular scenarios, what I highly, highly recommend to do to help Google further, is to add the name of the country in the metadata, add the name of the country or the location or the offices in case you have offices or subsidiaries or partners within the copy. The information that you are targeting those particular markets, personalize the message. So whatever examples or testimonials or information, give additional signals that, oh, this is for India, this is for the UK. And also a typical mistake that I see websites doing all the time is that in the country picker that the menu, the global menu that you may have, many of these are JavaScript generated, they are not crawlable. The links are always going to the homepage of the alternate version. Know your product A page should cross-link to your product A page in India, to your product A page in the US, in the UK. So the product A page in the US that has millions of backlinks can pass that link popularity accordingly to the product page of other countries. Rather than product page in other countries never be able to rank or not showing enough popularity to rule and not ranking because of that, right? So I believe that good crosslinking is critical. Localizing everything, every single signal that you can give to Google. This is especially important when you are targeting different countries with the same language. As examples of indeed like how your product make the life easier for relevant audience within that country. All these additional signals also help a lot. And of course hreflang notations, correct canonicalization too, in each one of these pages, that is also important. And if you have the capacity to promote within the relevant country to attract backlinks of local specific websites that will point to that particular country web version, the best will be, because many, many times the US slash global version was the one that existed before. All of the backlinks from India are still pointing also only to the US and the UK point to the US one rather than the relevant version. So little by little like that, you are able to give the right signals for Google to run the relevant version of the website. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great way to put it. You're helping Google. It's really complicated. I think they have a really hard time as somebody who lives in a non-English speaking country, but only searches for the most part in English. I get all sorts of cross results all the time. Google really does sometimes have a really hard time figuring it out. I've worked on sites where they're showing the wrong page and it was completely on Google's end to understand what was what. Aleyda Solis: Google thinks that I am a British living in Spain. I am all the time shown ads. And in Google discover too, recommend reads for British in Spain because I guess that's because they identified that a lot of British expat here or live in Spain by the way, that since I am searching in English so much, I should be a British living in Spain. Mordy Oberstein: The opposite I have. I only search in English basically, and Google discover will show me stuff in Hebrew now. I never search, I don't know what I'm looking at. Don't show that to me. But I'm getting used to knowledge panels- Aleyda Solis: Opportunity for you to learn Hebrew. Mordy Oberstein: Nati, Head of SEO, he gives me a hard time about knowing Hebrew well enough. So I think it's him behind the scenes pushing Google to let me learn more Hebrew. Aleyda Solis: 100%. Mordy Oberstein: It's a conspiracy. Aleyda, thank you so much for coming on. Don't forget to follow Aleyda on Twitter, on LinkedIn. Aleyda Solis: If you're not following Aleyda Solis. Mordy Oberstein: If you're not already, it's @aleyda on Twitter. We'll link to your profile in the show notes. And of course it's learningseo.io and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to the SEOFOMO and now the marketing FOMO newsletters. Aleyda Solis: Just reached a thousand subscribers a week ago and I'm actually preparing it for this Wix edition too. I'm so very excited too. Because in SEO we are also sometimes too isolated focusing on it. And there's so much happening in other markets, in other channels of marketing by the way. And we can learn a lot from them and leverage, learn to leverage them and to, yeah... That's definitely interesting. Crystal Carter: As well as Crawling Mondays as well as remoters.net. Aleyda Solis: Oh right. Crystal Carter: As well as Remoters.net SEO. So yes. Mordy Oberstein: Aleyda, thank you for everything you do for the community. Aleyda Solis: No, thank you for the opportunity to share with you and everything what you do too. Really appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: So one of the things that Aleyda touched on, which as a content person and as an expat myself kind of irks me about international strategies, that sometimes you don't fully appreciate how hard it is to actually localize the content to best align, not with the GEO’s language, but with the cultural idiosyncrasies and so forth. So we thought we get a serious expert on content to share their thoughts on building an international content strategy so that Crystal and I could offer you a very, very special version of a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Except this time it's not a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Let's get into what Giuseppe had to say first. Take it away, Giuseppe. Giuseppe Caltabiano: Well thank you for having me first of all. That's a very good question. Now let me say, despite the pandemic, my passion for traveling has not changed. In a way, it has been a constant of my life, whether I was on road for business or pleasure. The reason why I'm saying this is that travel really fueled my passion for global marketing, specifically for global content marketing. My travels have given me a better understanding of the world. But the reality is, when I launched my first new global content marketing program for Schneider Electric, that was 10 years ago. I thought I knew the world, but when you have to develop content for different geographies, well it feels like you have never stepped outside your front door, while I've always covered international or global roles. I remember, my first global content marketing journey started 10 years ago, when my team and I began defining Schneider Electric IT division global content strategy. Our goals were two fold: Lead Gen, first of all, marketing opportunities and secondly, increased brand awareness. Now after defining our strategy, we spent eight months preparing for the global launch through multiple pilots. We learned an incredible amount from our success and mistakes. And then one year later I replicated the same model with global clients when I moved to NewsCred, which is now part of Optimizely, at the beginning of 2017 and then later in Contently in 2019. Now the issue I found in most of the cases is that content marketers just try to replicate at global level what they have done in some cases with some success at central or local level. Well that's a big mistake. The thing is that global content marketing is not just content marketing deployed across multiple countries. Enterprise will need to plan, find the right balance between global and local. They have to pilot and then scale at global level. If they fail at one of these steps, of course usually they may fail with the full program. I think there are three main steps global marketers need to follow in order to design a proper content marketing strategy. First of all, finding the optimal balance between central and local. Now in most of the regions, I mean take Asia or Europe for example, there are thousands of countries and languages. It's simply unrealistic to make the same content work for each individual market. For this reason, creating content centrally and allowing countries to fill the gaps may represent a good solution. I've been working with both organizations, centralized and decentralized. Some organization have a very unclear understanding of local markets, which is the reason why involvement of countries or regions in content planning is really key. The role of central teams may shift of course as the program progress. In the early stages of the program, the flow of information is very outwards with the central team leading content production and strategy. And then as global content program flourish and progress, the emphasis on the central team shift to providing guidance and building local content skills and competencies. The second step is establishing local editorial board. While of course the central editorial team will generate content, a global level local editorial board have to be placed. And I mean this is really a key. In each country or on geography to manage proper planning and distribution, the local editorial board will agree with the central team on target personas. They lead the decision for distribution, content distribution, they contract local vendors and so on and so forth. The third and final point is piloting your content market strategy. The thing is piloting means starting small. Large enterprises are running pilot programs across geographies. It's a common practice, great ideas often receive resistance. You need to start small, test if your strategy is working, get results, and then finally create a proper business case, in order to allow a global content marketing program. In a global content marketing model, you ideally need to set up the pilot program as a test in one of two countries and usually no more than two different languages if possible. And then you run the pilot program with a full integration with the existing marketing technologies. And finally, of course if it's successful, you may roll out your program to the other geographies. I realize that this is probably super simplification, but it may give you a good overview of what to do in order to create a global content marketing program. Mordy Oberstein: So I don't know where to start with it, because Giuseppe makes a bunch of really, really, really, really good points. But I guess let's talk about a point that I feel I personally probably gloss over all the time in talking about global content strategies, is that the fact that you have to balance the global with the local. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, entirely. It's something that is really, really important. And I think that it applies to lots of elements of international SEO and even regional SEO. Even if you think about the United States for instance, there's different laws in different states, there's different realities. February in Florida is very different from February in New Hampshire for instance. So there are definitely things to consider about which products to put out, which content to put out, what makes sense, where all of these things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: The same thing with local SEO also. You might have a local presence, you might also have a more international presence or a national presence. So balancing this out is really, really important. Because you don't want to go all in on the global and then ignore the fact you also have a local presence or cannibalize a local presence with your global presence. You really have to think about what pages should exist. It's really about planning. What pages should exist, where do they exist on the domain, what are they trying to do? Where are they trying to target? And how do we keep what they're trying to do somewhat separate from each other. Crystal Carter: There's a section where he discussed planning and some of the work that's gone into planning. He was saying they spent eight months planning a particular campaign and that can take a lot of time. So these things should be well thought out and should take all of the things into account. Because of course it's important to have a global presence. If you think of a company like IKEA for instance, IKEA has global things and actually IKEA's approach to marketing tends to be fairly universal worldwide. But that's a distinct strategy that they've taken, which is really very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: It works for them. Crystal Carter: It works for them. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not sure it works for others. Crystal Carter: Exactly. But they will understand that. Even I know that... We recently had an IKEA open near us and they ran a specific hyper-local campaign launching the store. And I know that they have general activities there, but the global brand will impact the local brand and vice versa. So it's really important to make sure that they line up. But that also that if part of your brand is making sure that you care about your customers, making sure that it's very clear that you are respectful of your customers, then respecting the local cultural elements is really, really important. And localizing appropriately will help you to demonstrate that. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to what Aleyda was saying about the advertisement she would see growing up and really speaks to what Giuseppe was talking about, and just another amazing point, in that there's really no way around having a local expert. Giuseppe was talking about they have a board and that local board offers feedback on the overall global camp. How much do you want to automate, especially in the world of AI and ChatGPT. But in general, how much do you want to try to automate or try to template from the global strategy into the local areas, you can't. You have to have somebody who understands what that region's all about, what works, what doesn't work, the interest, the way of talking, all the idiosyncrasies of that region. There's no way around knowing that other than you having some actual integration into that community, which means you need a local expert Crystal Carter: Indeed. And there's idioms that will make people feel more warmly towards your brand. There are particular celebrations or particular things that are important milestones. So for instance, in the Mediterranean you see a lot of these things with the blue eye for instance. That's something that means good luck or prosperity and things like that. If you have the same symbol and somewhere else it would be less recognized. And there are things that visually, for instance, would be really, really recognizable. And that's something to think about as well. And these are things like you said, that you can't get from a bot necessarily. You have to have humans there. Adriana Stein is someone who has worked with us on some localizing projects and she wrote an article on translation versus localization. And she gets into a lot of these details. She talks about the direct translation from English to German of beating around the bush for instance, which... He did the direct translation, it doesn't convey the same sentiment as if you do a localized translation of their idiom for that same sort of thing. And what you want is the sentiment. You want the sentiment of that statement rather than the direct translation because it's an idiom. Mordy Oberstein: And you have cultural biases and there's no way around them. I'll give you a great example. I think I might have talked about it in the podcast at one point, but growing up every day, I used to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I moved to Israel, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at work one day and someone's like, what's that? I'm like, peanut butter and jelly. And they're like, what is that? They do not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Blew my mind, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. It is the go-to sandwich in America. To this day, I still eat them, because they're so delicious. Crystal Carter: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are suitable for every meal. Mordy Oberstein: Every meal and in between meals, all meals. Crystal Carter: Anytime you eat- Mordy Oberstein: You can live on them. Crystal Carter: You can live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They're quality, quality. Mordy Oberstein: We do not eat them where I currently live. And if you were talking about them, it would be like you if you're trying to target that or if you're using it as a reference and whatever it is, it would be lost because it is not the same thing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. And I think these are things that you have to get. And I think that it takes... One of the reasons why it takes so long to plan for a sort of global SEO or marketing campaign, is that you have to take those things into account. You have to make sure that you have good experts for wherever you're based. Wix is, we work in 17 different languages and we work in lots of different spaces. Someone that we work with in Japan is someone called Titone. He's fantastic, he's amazing, he's incredible. And we worked with the team at Faber as well to do some SEO webinars. We didn't think like, oh, we should swat in and do the SEO webinar ourselves. From a remote team, we got local experts to help us with that and to help us engage in, because for instance, with search in Japan, for instance, the way that the web is structured is slightly different because they have different kinds of writing. So this is really important to think about. And so there's going to be people who have more experience in that and more experience of the way that the people use the web and the different search engines that they use and the different things that will come up first for that particular audience. And you have to think about the people on your team who are genuine experts and you have to make sure that you build up those relationships. And that takes time. And also I think it's important, particularly from a content point of view, to think about how you get traction an at what point, how much of a foothold you need to have in a market in order to get some traction in a market. Especially if your team isn't specifically based there, but you're trying to connect with an audience in a different place. You have to sort of figure out how much content do we need? What investment do we need? And Aleyda talked about this as well, what investment do you need in order to be able to serve those customers well? And I think that these can take time, but hopefully it's worth it, if that's a market that's good for you. Mordy Oberstein: Now speaking of time, do you know what time it is? Crystal Carter: What time is it? What time is it? Mordy Oberstein: Snappy News. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's here. I mean, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, but oh my God, it's here. Google has opened its Search Generative Experience, SGE. Two select folks on the wait list, yours truly, not among them. I can't even get on the wait list? Something about it not being open to my account, I don't know. Personal grumblings aside, we got our first look at what Google's Search Generative Experience is going to look like. Follow me here for a second. Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land covered Barry Schwartz and his covering of his initial experience with the SGE. Barry got access to the SGE or the Search Generative Experience, but had to go offline for a few days. So Danny covered Barry covering the SGE. We'll link to the article in the show notes, because there're already heap of examples and you should definitely look at them. Just looking at it myself, I just want to say, don't panic. It looks like there are plenty of organic link placements all throughout the experience. Mike King from iPullRank, who did a whole webinar with us on AI and SEO, he said quote, "it's basically an interactive feature snippet, but it doesn't feel as threatening to organic search traffic as the original demos made it feel." Good news. All right, who wants some more big news? Yeah, Google held its marketing live event and friend of the show who join us talking about SCOM PPC over at Cypress North, Greg Finn did an amazing job covering all of the updates that Google announced to its ad platform and beyond. Check that out in the show notes as well over at Search Engine Land. Some takeaways, they're personal. When I took a look at the keynote, one of the things I took away was a Google talks about how people search and how it's changing, how they're looking at longer queries and how they're more conversational, what they're looking for, and they're looking for more specific things than ever before. People are being far more specific when they search. Some might say not new. Old, not new. I agree it's not new, but I feel like now this is an official part of the conversation that we as SEOs, the content marketers, the content creators need to get on board with. Also ads will be in the Search Generative Experience, the SGE or as I'm just going to call it the AI box. When Google announced the SGE or the AI box at Google I/O 2023, it made it seem the ads would be above the box itself, not part of the actual Search Generative Experience. But at Marketing Live, they show that yes, it's going to be right there in that whole SGE ecosystem. Also, say goodbye to Google Merchant Center and say hello to Google Merchant Center NEXT. It's next level because it will take a lot of the techier parts of connecting to Google Merchant Center out of the equation by pulling information straight from your site into the Merchant Center feed. Next, well, nothing is next because that's this week's snappy news. And well, that was the news. How newsy was it? So Newsy. Always so newsy. Which brings us to our follow of the week as the episode ebbs away and this week our follow of the week as we're going international SEO is none other than Veruska Anconitano. Crystal Carter: Veruska is fantastic. She's a member of Women in Tech SEO. She's an amazing international SEO- Mordy Oberstein: Contributor to the hub. Crystal Carter: What's this? Mordy Oberstein: Contributor to the hub. Crystal Carter: A contributor to the hub, which I was just going to get to. Yeah, she's a- Mordy Oberstein: Sorry for jumping the gun. Crystal Carter: She's multilingual. And yeah, she wrote an article called Why Cultural Relevance is Key to International SEO Success, and it's absolutely fantastic. So yeah, she speaks many languages and she talks a lot about the different elements that come into play when you're thinking about engaging with international markets that are not just some of the technical SEO elements that can be easy to implement, relatively speaking. But some of the cultural elements in, we're thinking about cultural identity and how that impacts search and what people search for and how people search. It's a great article. She's a great follow. She's also an expert on Rome, so I knew someone who was going to Rome and I tagged her and she was like, oh, let me tell you all of the places that you should eat. Mordy Oberstein: And her Twitter account is really informative. She had a post on skyscraper content the other day that kind of made me laugh. There's a lot of really good content in her feed. It's not just one of these accounts where you're going to file but not really getting SEO value out of it. It's a definite value in the SEO knowledge itself. So it's @LaCuochina on Twitter. We'll link to Veruska's profile in the show notes. But definitely give her a follow. Which means our episode is now over. Crystal Carter: Finito. Mordy Oberstein: Finito. Ooh, very good. Crystal Carter: Finn. Mordy Oberstein: Finn. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, hasta la vista. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know how to say the end in any other language. Crystal Carter: S ayonara! Mordy Oberstein: Sure. Adios. That's really goodbye, not the end. Anyway, thanks for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us, not to worry, we're back next week with the brand new episodes. We dive into how to build a content strategy SEO and beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . 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Back Yearly client goal planner Monitor the progress you make with clients and highlight achievements that can help you further your own career. 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 planner to: Help you outline and plan your career goals for the year Identify useful benchmarks for success across your client portfolio Highlight achievements that can help you in your career Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Crystal Carter is an SEO & digital marketing professional whose previous clients include Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. She hosts SEO webinars and podcasts and her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush, and more. More about this topic Read this article on setting and tracking SMART goals on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Yana Raduzky is an SEO expert at Wix, setting up a robust SEO infrastructure and built-in solutions. Previously, she led organic growth for eCommerce, media tech companies and educated teams on SEO best practices. Yana enjoys long walks, furniture assembly and SEO audits. Yana Arad Raduzky Senior SEO expert, Wix Yana Raduzky is an SEO expert at Wix, setting up a robust SEO infrastructure and built-in solutions. Previously, she led organic growth for eCommerce, media & tech companies and educated teams on SEO best practices. Yana enjoys long walks, furniture assembly and SEO audits. Articles & Resources 28 Mar 2023 Effective SEO strategies for cybersecurity companies 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 Wix Blog and Bookings drive consistent business through organic search "Wix gave us the infrastructure to turn SEO into our most reliable growth engine." 1,381% Increase in organic traffic 202% Increase in blog conversions 1,066% Increase in bookings When Lana Zevnik first launched her Amsterdam beauty clinic, Lana Skyn , she relied almost entirely on paid ads to drive bookings. But with rising costs and limited scalability, she knew she needed a more sustainable approach. Switching from Squarespace to Wix helped her clinic achieve nearly a 1,400% increase in organic traffic and transform SEO into her primary growth driver. The business Zevnik's beauty clinic specializes in advanced aesthetic treatments in a competitive market. The clinic needs to stand out through both the quality of their services and through strategic visibility. “Lana informed us that she had a high spend on social media ads, and we believed that part of this budget could be shifted to a more sustainable, long-term channel,” says Giomero Brand , founder and CEO of Unnamed Project, a global marketing agency based in the Netherlands, who led this project. Giomero Brand (right) with colleague Jamie van der Velden (left) Zevnik agreed that she needed a long-term solution that could deliver consistent bookings without the ongoing ad spend—and she was willing to take a chance on a new approach. The SEO challenge Beyond the traffic challenge, the business faced a measurement problem. Lana Skyn’s booking system lived outside of the website, making it nearly impossible to track the full customer journey from blog post to consultation to conversion. Without clear data on what was working, optimizing for growth felt like guesswork. The solution Zevnik partnered with unnamedproject.nl to rebuild the Lana Skyn website on Wix. Wix offered exactly what she needed: intuitive SEO tools , seamless content publishing, and integrated bookings functionality that could tie everything together. Wix Blogs served multiple purposes: the Lana Skyn team shared educational posts with clients during consultations to build trust and answer common questions. They also used the Wix SEO Assistant to optimize blogs for search. “The valuable, easy-to-understand, educational content made it very clear to Google and LLMs that the business had real expertise in its services, which strongly supported rankings,” Brand says. "The blog function became one of our biggest strategic advantages," Brand adds. " Its seamless SEO integration allowed us to publish quickly and effectively, while also helping us build trust early on. Lana could clearly see the process, the intent behind each piece of content, and how SEO would translate into real bookings, not just traffic.” Brand credits this seamless collaboration with the client for part of their success. “Having a client closely involved in the SEO trajectory significantly improves collaboration and has a very positive impact on SEO when done correctly,” he says. “When certain blogs required Zevnik’s review, she could easily access them in draft mode.” From there, “we could quickly tweak design and content to align with Google’s newest preferences or to run A/B tests.” The real turning point came when Zevnik implemented Wix Bookings in April 2025 to replace her external booking system. That way, she could track the complete user journey from blog post to service page to confirmed appointment. "Wix Bookings removed the last barrier between clicks and conversions," Brand says. "It gave us clean data and a fully measurable user journey that proved the true impact of organic search. By July, our first fully integrated month, total orders had increased sharply. The new booking flow removed friction, improved user experience, and directly boosted conversions." The results Within 18 months, Zevnik’s Wix website delivered results that exceeded her most optimistic projections: Organic traffic grew from 135 to over 2,000 visitors per month Monthly bookings increased from 3 to 35 Paid ads now account for less than 10% of total traffic Blog CTA clicks jumped from 232 to 702 "Wix unified the entire ecosystem," Brand says. "Content, bookings, tracking, and on-site behavior all lived in one place, making it possible for a small-budget campaign to operate with the precision and efficiency of a much larger one." The results were so convincing that Zevnik progressively increased her SEO budget—first doubling it, then tripling it. What began as a leap of faith became the foundation of her clinic's growth strategy. Today, SEO replaced paid ads as her primary customer acquisition channel. On top of that, Unnamed Project also won an industry award for "integrating SEO into both content and clinical practice to drive strong traffic, conversions, and client trust," according to the Global Search Awards . "Wix gave us the infrastructure to turn SEO into our most reliable growth engine,” Brand says. “It's not just about rankings anymore—it's about sustainable, measurable business growth." Learn more about how Wix's integrated SEO tools and booking features can help grow your business, and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . 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Andrew is an SEO consultant and trainer at his company, Optimisey. He's one of the specialist instructors on the Wix Studio SEO learning course and loves dreadful puns and rambling analogies. Andrew Cock-Starkey SEO Consultant at Optimisey Andrew is an SEO consultant and trainer at his company, Optimisey . He's one of the specialist instructors on the Wix Studio SEO learning course and loves dreadful puns and rambling analogies. Articles & Resources 26 Mar 2025 Google Search Console for keyword research: Go beyond data limits & filter for actionable insights 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

Explore expert SEO insights and resources from Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Discover articles on AI, keyword research, SEO tools and more. Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix and the author of the Wix SEO Guide . Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education hosting webinars and podcasts ., Mordy is one of the organizers of #SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Articles & Resources 21 Jan 2025 Does brand support SEO or does SEO support brand? 6 Aug 2024 What is the Google algorithm? 11 Jun 2024 What are Google algorithm updates? 29 May 2024 GA4 lessons and tactics one year later 15 May 2024 The rise of situational content: Lessons from Google’s March 2024 core update 24 Apr 2024 Wix Studio: Top 5 features for SEOs & digital marketers 4 Jan 2024 The future of web content: Where AI, user preferences, and SEO meet 21 Aug 2023 Analyze your SEO competitors with the SE Ranking app on Wix 26 Jun 2023 Wix’s on-page SEO audit tool: The SEO Assistant 9 Mar 2023 What AI content generators mean for the future of search 9 Feb 2023 Wix’s SEO Dashboard makes GSC data available at a glance 9 Feb 2023 Monitor organic performance with GSC data in Wix Analytics Resources Mordy Oberstein Podcast planning template From guest scheduling to SEO, keep everything that goes into publishing a podcast on track with this 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

Rejoice has worked in SEO as a content specialist and account manager. Her passion for diversity in the workplace inspired her to co-found the B-DigitalUK network for Black marketers. As an award-winning diversity and inclusion advocate, she is a frequent speaker about all things D&I, as well as SEO content. Rejoice Ojiaku Co-founder at B-DigitalUK Rejoice has worked in SEO as a content specialist and account manager. Her passion for diversity in the workplace inspired her to co-found the B-DigitalUK network for Black marketers . As an award-winning diversity and inclusion advocate, she is a frequent speaker about all things D&I, as well as SEO content. Articles & Resources 25 Jul 2023 Website accessibility and SEO: How they’re related and why it matters Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

SEO in 2022 is basically one messy map of meeting multiple needs of multiple users at multiple stages. Mordy and George guide you through the twists and turns of SEO across multiple user intents. The pathway of users is non-linear. These people are all over the map. So how should SEOs understand the nature of the user, as much as Google does? Know your audience, know your subject matter, and now the SERP. Google isn’t the only place these people wander. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, Spotify, Reddit, we have to map all of them: Meeting these users where they want to meet you, how they want to meet you, is the name of the game. And each new platform has a special tool we can leverage: Search. Back More intents more problems: SEO for multiple user intents SEO in 2022 is basically one messy map of meeting multiple needs of multiple users at multiple stages. Mordy and George guide you through the twists and turns of SEO across multiple user intents. The pathway of users is non-linear. These people are all over the map. So how should SEOs understand the nature of the user, as much as Google does? Know your audience, know your subject matter, and now the SERP. Google isn’t the only place these people wander. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, Spotify, Reddit, we have to map all of them: Meeting these users where they want to meet you, how they want to meet you, is the name of the game. And each new platform has a special tool we can leverage: Search. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 07 | October 5, 2022 | 38 MIN 00:00 / 37:52 This week’s guests Rejoice Ojaiku Rejoice is a Content Strategist at Rise At Seven, she also co-founded B-DigitalUK which is a community aimed at the Black demographic to educate, inspire and empower Black Talent to learn and be visible within the industry. She is also an Award Winning Diversity & Inclusion Advocate as she is very passionate about tackling how ensuring Black voices are heard and the Black experience is understood. 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, putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding at Wix, and filling in for our head of SEO communications Crystal Carter is Wix's own head of SEO editorial, George Nguyen. George Nguyen: Hey, how's it going? It's good to be back. Mordy Oberstein: How's it going, George? George Nguyen: Excellent, I always get jazz when I watch you do the SERP's Up thing, and you can't see this because it's not on video, but Mordy does this whole baseball pitch thing with his arm as he winds up for this SERP's UP. Mordy Oberstein: Winding up, I'm winding up. George Nguyen: Yeah, it's really good, and it just gets me in the mood. Mordy Oberstein: It's Robin Williams in Good morning Vietnam, that's my inspiration. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we now pull in Google's search console's URL inspection API to automatically show you the status of your pages on your site without you having to specify the URLs, because we do that for you. It's the Wix site inspection dashboard inside of Wix's SEO tool set. All right, we've got a really interesting one on this, so we're going deep into the wonderful world of user intent, Google intent, search intent. However you want to frame it, there's multiple ways to frame it, we're going to get into it. Anyway, it's the one thing about people and if there's one thing about people, it's that they are complicated. Yet, so much to the content on the web is either monolithic or overly broad and it's not very helpful, at least in my opinion. Although Google, if you look online, John Muller on Twitter every once in a while and make a statement like that, anyway. [00:01:51] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? That's right, we're talking about when you can and can't target multiple audiences and intent with the same piece of content on your site. Learn when you can tackle multiple audiences with one page of content and rank well and when, well, you can't. It's everything you ever wanted to know about intent, SEO and multiple audience targeting, or maybe it's the one really important thing you really wanted to know about that and nothing else. Get it, see what I did there. SEO joke, right? I dived in which intent do you really want? [George’s drum sounds ] target getting multiple intents. Oh, man, off the rails. Anyway, plus we're going to see what we can learn about SEO from cats eating cilantro. This is George... If you don't like this one, I blame George, blame George. George Nguyen: I love cats. Mordy Oberstein: I know you do, I love cilantro. Anyway, just wait and see as we explore some fun and People Also Ask results and of course get some snappy SEO news and learn who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness this week, let's roll. Users, consumers, potential customers or clients, for everyone referred to the people that support or potentially could support your business, they are not linear, they don't have one need but multiple needs at multiple times in multiple places. So, it takes an example, it's boring and mundane and annoying, I know it's annoying because I just renewed it, car insurance or buying car insurance. Folks need to know not only what policy you have available, but they also need to know how to decide what's best for them. They might even need to know how to decide what insurance policy is best for them. But guess what? Folks who need to know how to buy car insurance and folks that are ready to buy car insurance, they might actually be searching for the same thing on Google, buy car insurance. So, you need to be ready to meet the multiple messy needs of multiple users at multiple stages of their consumer journey, and that can be complicated. [00:03:50] Focus Topic of the Week: Mixed Search Intent Do you write one master blog post about how to go about picking an insurance policy and compare the reviews and policies in one post? Do you create two different posts? When is it okay to target multiple intents, multiple user needs at one time? Can you even cater to multiple audiences all at once? If so, how? Welcome to the episode all about the messy mania that is multiple user intents and SEO. It's messy, George. George Nguyen: We're talking about mixed search intent, which is great because I feel like as a user, I kind of run into this all the time, maybe just says something about myself as a buyer. But let's talk about an easy example of mixed intent content, because we're seeing two different concepts that we have to reconcile here. There's the mixed intent content, which is what's on the website or what you or yourself might create. Then there's the mixed intent search engine results page, which we're just going to call SERP from this point onward. So, talking about the first one, some e-commerce sites, I'm just saying e-commerce because this is an easy example, they like to make their category pages very informative. Kind of straddles align between that informational intent, and then also since it's category page, the transactional intent or maybe the commercial intent there. It sort of depends on what brand you're talking about. You can see a thin light example at Bikes Online, which is a domain that sells mountain bikes and such. But their category pages, if you just go to mountain bike, will have descriptions. Here we kind of see a mix here, they'll organize the content usually by features or classifications. In the case of the example I'm speaking about, you'll see dual suspension mountain bikes and a description for that. Then the front suspension mountain bikes and those actually kind of double as filters, so you see this format in a way that kind of appeals to both. There's informational text to educate visitors, but also there's that, hey, if you want to buy now, we'll get you right down this funnel, we'll convert. I consider this mix intent commercial and informational. Mordy, I really struggled here to find an example that wasn't necessarily e-commerce, because it's just so much of the internet is e-commerce. But do you have an example to pitch in here that might not be the same thing? Maybe for our listeners that don't run e-commerce sites? Mordy Oberstein: I have a bunch of examples and I'm just going to use one later on, it's all e-commerce. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the thing, so this is a huge deal for anybody in e-commerce, because whoever is on your site potentially looking to buy, also is looking to know and understand. Let's talk about the other side of it though, there's the mixed intent SERP, this is kind of what Bing, Google, whatever search engine you use, the results they put together when they don't clearly signal an intent here. Usually, you can kind of tell what an intent is in the search term itself, question words indicate generally informational, if it's just a brand name, it might be navigational, so on and so forth. But this refers to a search engine results page that doesn't conform to what we would typically see in any of those four traditional intents, informational, commercial, navigational, transactional. Even that model has a lot of challenges nowadays, we'll talk about a few. So, products or brands, sometimes they'll share names with other things and this can really create for a mix intents SERP. So, the example I want to go with here is for the term Air Force, so if you just go into Google type in Air Force, I'm in the United States just for reference. So, for that query, Google shows ads for Nike Air Force 1 shoes, as well as ads for joining the United States Air Force, which are two very different things. There's also information about joining the Air Force and then there's even kind of a local intent, because there's a local pack with Air Force recruitment centers. So, there you have e-commerce, and you have informational, it's a whole smorgasbord here. Mordy Oberstein: There's so many cases like that, so many ways that Google sort does this. You type in Badgers and you get things about the animal badgers or the Wisconsin Badgers college football team. George Nguyen: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: But even on very, very, you would think to be commercial or transactional queries, again, buy car insurance is a great example. I did a study about a long time ago, you would think just be a bunch of websites where you could buy car insurance or buy whatever, but this was back like 2018, something around 40% of the results are informational. Meaning, Google thinks and takes the implication from your query that you're not searching for an actual product to buy, but you actually want information before you buy it about how to buy it. So, there's so many mixed intents and so many ways Google splices... It can offer you media formats, it gives you a video, not a blog post or a podcast, not a video. George Nguyen: The results are becoming more and more interesting, they evolve all the time. Informational intent, the straight up transactional, like peanut butter, a peanut butter jelly and mustard sandwich, right Mordy? That's Mordy's favorite, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, no joke, because if you search for peanut butter sandwich or peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the US where it's very, very popular. I used to eat one every day as a kid and now I live in Israel and people don't eat them. You get different results, because it's a different intent, but users have different needs in different markets. So, what's very straightforward to you in one market is totally different in another market. George Nguyen: Totally very, very granular, very impressive that the search engines, especially Google, have been able to develop. So, we were talking about all these intents and the thing about talking about intents is that they're traditionally seen as aligning with the sales funnel. The thing about the sales funnel is it's a linear concept. Yeah, people can drop out of your sales funnel, but when we talk about it in terms of strategy, we never plan for anybody to move up the sales funnel out of a phase, going into a previous phase. But for myself personally, I feel like there's so much information, the granularity with which I'm shopping for things. For example, I'm thinking about getting a rooftop tent for my car, but you have to worry about mounting, the bracket system, the weight structure. There's so much learning that I keep going back to transactional queries and maybe getting closer, and then I'm like, "There's another consideration," so I moved backwards here. Mordy Oberstein: That's where we're focusing today is more on the content side, so that you can show up, and again, Google might show various intents and various types of websites, various types of results for the queries that you're targeting with your content. But we're talking about you creating content and addressing the multiple intents, like in George's case, the various things he needs about the rooftop carrier or whatever is you're trying to order, I don't know what exactly what it is. Navigating between buying that and learning about that, and you're right, people think the funnel's really simple. There's awareness or the awareness stage, but people... When was the last time you actually yourself walked through the funnel, all the steps of being aware to being ready to buy, to actually buying? You're in and out, it's really messy. I feel I need to learn more now, I have new questions. I thought I was ready to buy, I was this close. I'm like, "Wait, wait, I'm out. I need to go way back, I totally misunderstood this whole product. I'm starting all over again," all the time. George Nguyen: Yeah, absolutely. If you line up the sales funnel stages, so let's think about this in our mind's eye here, on the left side we're going to have a sales funnel where it's awareness, research, and transaction is how I'm going to simplify this. Then on the right side, you have your search intents and to line up with that, you generally have the research, the informational intent, and then navigational, and then commercial, and then transactional at the bottom of that funnel. Does navigational really feel like it fits there? It feels like it goes everywhere in the funnel, depending on what kind of searcher you are. Mordy Oberstein: We should put it in the show us, I know Google has a poll post from a couple years ago how messy the funnel actually is and how it doesn't really work in this linear way, even though everyone presents it like that. George Nguyen: Every time you hear Google IO or Google Marketing Live or anytime you go to a conference, guarantee you someone's going to step on stage and be like, "The funnel is messy," like this is the first time someone's ever said that. They always have this graphic that is so convoluted, and that's one of the things here is we understand, most marketers can see that the funnel is messy. The thing is, there is no other model that is as prevalent to explain customer behavior, and so while we know that there are flaws, we just haven't developed anything better. Mordy Oberstein: So, let's jump into this actually and figure out how you can create what you can do with your content to address multiple intents and when you can or can't use one piece of content to do that, and when maybe you should use one piece of content to do that. Because it's tricky, again, it's someone like George trying to buy something and get information. Can you have information? Can you have transaction content on the same page? Does that work? Sometimes, usually not, you kind of need separate pieces to do that. But sometimes you do need both, and in a lot of ways, let the SERP be your guide is my best advice. How do you know when you can use one piece of content to address multiple intents, or multiple topics, multiple subtopics, or even topics of different intents or subtopics of different intents? One great way to do that is go to the Google results page, I've seen this before where during a Google update, a bunch of ultimate guides fell off page one. So, that kind of told me, you know what the intent of the user here is? They want something very specific, they don't want to full ultimate guide to whatever. They want the particular answer to the particular question that they're searching for, that's the intent here. So, that should help reverse engineer that, so I'm writing content about that, Google and their data, their machine learning, is basically telling me what they're seeing from users and what users want. That's probably what my users want, I'm not going to create an ultimate guide in this situation. By the way, when you're doing this, when you're going to the results page, they'll just go to page one and see what's on page one. Go to page two and three and see what's not on page one. So, if you see all the ultimate guides, these comprehensive long documents are on page two and three, and they're not on page one, that kind of tells you something. George Nguyen: I mean, if you ever see a page one that's totally different from a page two in terms of the makeup of the results, send us that screenshot. Let us know what that query is, because I would love for things to be so cut and dry. Mordy Oberstein: I've seen when we covered it on the podcast, it had to do with one of the earlier episodes about logo making, a bunch of ultimate guides got pushed to page two. George Nguyen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, that's good. Mordy Oberstein: I see a bunch of health queries also, see, I have real cases behind on my madness. George Nguyen: With regard to like that, we should get that printed on a shirt like, "The SERP is my guide," because really when it comes to mixed intent stuff, I cannot overstate that the results page will tell you so much about what Google thinks about the query, and thus, what your competition is. That is where I go to start making my decisions generally, and let me tell you also- Mordy Oberstein: media formats, if you see a bunch- George Nguyen: Media formats, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... of images on the results page, Google showing images everywhere, that kind of tells you there's an intent embedded in the query for visual assets that you should probably have on your page. George Nguyen: Exactly, so I go to the SERP to identify opportunities, competitors, know what you're getting into before you start planning, that's a huge deal. There's not going to be a foolproof framework that Mordy and I can offer you, because every business is so different. Also, fundamentally, I break this down into three key considerations, the first one is know your audience, second one is know your subject matter or your industry, and the third one is know the SERP for the desired keywords. That's already what you had touched on, Mordy. Your audience is the one that gets to decide whether you should be creating multiple content pieces across different intents or just one piece of content with all the intents. You're not going to have all the intents, but... Sure, for the case of my example, I don't mean that that audience actually gets to decide, but that you should know your audience well enough to predict what's likely to work. What does your audience know your brand for? If the query is dark roast coffee and you're Amazon, users are likely not expecting for you to be in the search results page with informational content, like a buying guide, they're expecting a product page, straight up. So, who are you to really break that user experience? So, if you thinking about going for new opportunities, see if anyone else has done it, see if there are users that are in your reviews or giving you feedback that they actually want this information. Know your audience, that's a huge thing. You mentioned, Mordy, health topics, so that's what I kind of meant when I said know your subject matter or your industry. So, for your money or your life content, that YMYL content, Google heavily scrutinizes expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, EAT. If you're in a YMYL industry, like medical advice, evaluate your content to see whether it's serving users or it's just a thinly veiled attempt to serve your own business. This is something that we saw earlier with the Medic update and subsequent updates after. Sites that were maybe saying like, "We're holistic medicine," air quotes. In the content, they'd have answers to queries, but they'd also have affiliate links for essential oils, which caused Google to look at them sideways. I felt like a lot of brands for their lack of transparency there, they really suffered. Also, there's mixed intent here, and the integrity of the informational intent is so important in that vertical. So, that's why I say know your subject matter or your industry, lives are literally on the line in health, not so much in photography. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you never know, but for the most part. No, but it's a good point, and the truth is let's say a health page or a finance page, and I've seen this play out in the algorithm, while let's say a landing page for whatever for, I don't know, for buying a new camera, we'll go with the photo thing, does it need to have a lot of informational content there? You're assuming that users already got that information, now that you're here to buy? Not that I would say taking out a business loan, on the page where they're actually buying something, people want to know exactly what it is they're buying before they buy, it's super important to have that information there. So, understand the nature of the client and the user, Google does. If the demand for informational content exists to help you contextualize the purchase, then add it there. It's okay to mix intents, we're not saying it's not okay. In fact, in general, I would say as a framework, because again you're right, you can't offer particular advice. But as a framework, it's always okay to add on accentual informational content, like an FAQ to a product page. In fact, many times Google actually prefers on a landing page that you have some kind of a bit of informational content. I've seen that there for some software products where it's not just click here, buy here, name of the product, short one or two lines. It's how do you use the product, FAQ about the product, why you need the product, so there's an infusion of informational content there and that supports the commercial aspect of the page. So, mix intents, informational content can support the commercial side of it also, don't be afraid to mix things up a little bit and to accent commercial transactional content with a bit of information. I don't think you can really go wrong there. Obviously, don't go overboard, it's not that kind of vertical. George, wrap this up? George Nguyen: This is the last piece of advice and it seems like we're talking to e-commerce sites specifically, even though this can apply more broadly to other sites. But since you're talking about product pages, while this is tangentially related to mixed intents and you're thinking about your product descriptions, you have to know... This goes back to knowing your business and your industry, what do people use your site for? If you're selling fewer goods, maybe your own brand or a relatively obscure brand, then you're going to need to provide more information, because customers aren't going to be able to get that anywhere else. So, naturally, you're going to look like a more informative product page. But if you're like a Best Buy, where people might literally just come to do the transaction, because they know they can return in store and that's easy for them, maybe that content's not as important, because they've already probably learned it everywhere else, so know your position here as the brand or as the seller. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, last point, go with your gut. Build an intuition about what's out there in the ecosystem, what kind of content is out there, understanding your users, what is appropriate, what is it not appropriate, when do you need to segment topics, subtopics or different types of content, or when can you combine it all on one page, trust yourself and build up that intuition. [00:19:36] Focus Topic Guest: Rejoice Ojaiku Speaking about different intents and content for different intents, search, although we love search, is not the only medium out there. What about different intents and different ecosystems? What about long versus short content, and different platforms, and different ecosystems? To help you with that, we have a content strategist over at the Rise at Seven, SEO and content agency, Rejoice Ojaiku, to help you out. Rejoice Ojaiku: So the question I'm going to be answering is how do you speak to multiple types of users and intents on other channels such as social media? When I'm thinking about this question and thinking about the most appropriate way to sort answer it, let's start off with. Users, multiple types of users. Now, I think as a brand, you need to look at the different types of users that you have on all your channels. So whether that is website, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, I think you need to understand the type of origins that you mostly get. So for example, on TikTok, you might find that you are mostly getting a lot of people within the Gen Z category, and that's the audience you have there. And on websites you might find that people who are on there. Of a certain demographic or a certain location. So you have all these datas that provides you an insight into the different types of audiences you're getting, and therefore, you then will understand what type of content or what type of formats it interacts with the most. Now, TikTok only presents itself. With mostly videos, a loss of point of view type content, a lot of user generator type content, and that can then give you the idea of the content format that is most suitable for that platform. Whereas you wouldn't always necessarily use videos on Twitter compared to TikTok, for example. Sometimes Twitter can provide a great realm for more thoughts provoking information. People just want to read, and you do that in the form of threads. Whereas TikTok, again, is more snappy, more quick-witted type of content, so you have more shorter videos, same as Instagram with the rules and all these things and your website. I think website has a better chance of infographics and a better chance of long-form blog content. When you are looking at creating different sort of content to target different users and different intents, it is about understanding what content or what type of content that these audiences are interacting with, And there are things that you could utilize to sort of find this information. One of the best way to do is utilizing the search function within these platforms and seeing what type of content is coming up. Understand how search works on this platform. I think people get confused. That search sometimes works exactly the same way as Google on the website when you try to expand it in all forms of platforms, and that's not the case. Search doesn't have to always be quite linear. It is very much evolving and very much different when you are presented with the different types of channels. So maybe you do want to serve the same topic across all channels and to all audiences, but doesn't mean the format of that topic has to be completely the same. So we can talk about travel. For every single audience that we have identified. But how are we communicating that now? This is where you have to be creative. So I think that is how you speak to multiple types of users. Understand the topic. Understand what content formats they are interacting with, Understanding the tone of voice that they're used to as well. Are things abbreviated or shortened when it comes to these platforms? Does the search actually fully typed out or query, or is a query shortened? There's so many different abbreviations of search crews in general. So understanding the tone of voice that the audiences receive quite well, and also understanding how to repurpose and understanding what is the intent that these people are actually interacting with. More so, and by all means, always playing ahead. Always have a pool of search queries. And trust me, if you're going to go onto platforms such as social media, then you absolutely need to consider hashtags. You absolutely need to consider. What hashtags are relevant to this content, what hashtags are popular, doing quite well, and then Do your competitor's research to see what other people are creating with this hashtag, and I think that's the best way to sort of meet your audience and meet your readers exactly where you want them to. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for Rejoice, totally great point. Something we didn't discuss, George, but thinking about it also for search is the type of content in terms of its length, I don't mean I'm not worried about how long a post should be, is it 200 word or 2000 words, but do they want a real quick snippet of information? Do they want a quick video? Google does show shorts on the SERP, so a great point to consider by Rejoice across all platforms. George Nguyen: I think one of the things that holds us back from thinking more broadly in SEO is the question of reporting. Sometimes reporting isn't always clear on things or when we're working across channels, that it's a little bit harder to do. So, I feel like SEOs inherently just want to do what they know, but thinking more broadly, definitely has advantages, because your customers don't care, they prefer what they prefer, that's how it's going to be. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. George Nguyen: All right, before we move on, I did want to give a shout out. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out time. George Nguyen: I wanted shout out Luke Carthy, who is writing an excellent piece on product description optimization, we'll be publishing it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub soon. Some of that advice earlier that I mentioned about thinking about your business in terms of how mature it is and what you sell comes from Luke Carthy. So, if that's published, then we'll put up the URL, if not, we'll add it later. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and we'll add Luke's Twitter handle to the show notes, so you can follow him, because he's a great SEO to follow, but he's not the follow of the week, but it's a bonus follow up the week. [00:25:51] Fun with People Also Ask Anyway, it's time for my favorite segment. It is literally my favorite segment, it is so off the rails and I love it, it's fun with People Also Ask. So, the People Also Ask presents you with typically four questions that are related to the search you just ran. So, if you search for, I don't know, how to buy car insurance, why is that my favorite query? It's so boring, it'll show you four questions about buying car insurance. Each question is attached to an expandable tab, which when expanded, it gives you the answer to the question along the URL where the answer is sourced from. Fun part, by the way, is when you expand one question, Google dynamically and immediately loads more questions. So, PAA boxes are a great resource of information, which is exactly why we're doing this. This fun little way to learn about how Google thinks about things. Anyway, today I'm grilling George to see if he really knows about cats, because George loves cats, loves cats. Every meeting with George we have to, "Look at the cat, everybody, here's my cat." Anyway, we're looking at the four initial PAA, People Also Ask questions that Google shows for the keyword, can cats eat cilantro, to see if George is smarter than a search engine and get some glimpses about what Google's thinking along the way. You ready, George? George Nguyen: I am. Mordy Oberstein: Can cats eat cilantro? How do we even come up with this? Okay, first question, George, what does cilantro do to cats? George Nguyen: I have no idea from experience, but I'm going to say that, generally speaking, cats don't show too much affinity for plants, in general. Sometimes they'll eat house plants, but usually not, and some of them are poisonous except for cat grass and stuff. So, it'll probably mess with them or they'll throw up, I'm going to say they throw up, final answer. Mordy Oberstein: Final answer, you want to phone a friend, cilantro, the cilantro plant can cause gastrointestinal irritation and cardiac arrhythmia in your pet, yikes. George Nguyen: That is much worse than throwing up. Mordy Oberstein: That's much worse than throwing up, which by the way, look at the intent there, speaking of intent, the query was can cats eat cilantro? The first question Google has and the People Also Ask box is what does cilantro do to cats? Meaning Google's looking at the intent of your query and thinking okay, you want to know the impact of cilantro on the cat, and that's why that's that first question. Second question, is cilantro pet friendly? George Nguyen: No, no way, it's too spicy. Mordy Oberstein: Well- George Nguyen: I don't know if spicy's the right word. Mordy Oberstein: First off, before we get to the answer, again, point about Google because it's fun, but it's also we're learning about Google, you see that Google went wider and it went off of cats and went to a larger genus or species, genus, whatever. I know science, and is cilantro pet friendly, as opposed to was it cat friendly? So, sometimes Google will do that in the PAA box, it'll zoom out, in this case, George, cilantro actually is healthy for your dog to eat, it may actually help your dog's upset stomach. By the way, see the bias of Google search results that it went to dog, even though the question was is it pet friendly? So, sometimes the question that Google asks and the answers don't match up. So, if you're doing research, look at the question, but in this case, ignore the answer, because that's doesn't make sense. George Nguyen: I've seen this happen a few times where the answer is... It is the answer to a different question, while related, it's not quite what's labeled there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so it's interesting that great question, but the answer's probably not what you're looking for. All right, next one, question number three, are any herbs toxic to cats? George Nguyen: There's got to be. Mordy Oberstein: Clock is ticking, George. George Nguyen: I don't know if they are off the top... There's so many herbs, there's so many herbs, like coriander, I don't know, they can't all be safe. Mordy Oberstein: English ivy's toxins cause vomiting and stomach pain, poinsettia is only mildly toxic, affecting some cats with a temporary bout of vomiting. George Nguyen: That's important, because that's something you could have in your house. Mordy Oberstein: Quick point here, check out what Google did here, both in the previous question, is cilantro pet-friendly Google, zoomed out and went to all pets. Here it's taking cilantro now and zooming out and going to all herbs. So, cool way of getting to how Google is thinking, George Nguyen: Just switching Out. The object here. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it knows which one to switch. George Nguyen: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I thought you were commenting on what I was saying. Yeah, and it knows to switch. George Nguyen: I am, it's switching the subject in a sense, because it knows that doing this in this minor way causes enough of a meaningful difference but adds enough value that it's worth putting in a PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and then it switches to the next thing, goes from the animal to the plant and zooms out that way. Anyway, I interrupted you. George Nguyen: The question really is, are cats safe for cilantro? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what that means. What herbs are cats allowed to eat? George Nguyen: Cat grass. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, it's a list- George Nguyen: And not cilantro. Mordy Oberstein: Cat thyme, camomile, licorice root, cats claw, dandelion root and golden seal. Sure, I don't know what any of that stuff means. But again, interesting you're taking the original query of can cats eat cilantro and now it's going to what herbs are cats allowed to eat? Meaning it's again zooming out, going wider with the intent saying, "Okay, if you're interested in knowing if the cat can eat cilantro, maybe your next question is going to be, "Well, if they can eat cilantro, then what can they eat?" So, Google's trying to predict the intent and the next question of the user with the PAA questions, which is why it's such a great keyword research tool. George Nguyen: And you never have to leave the search results, which is kind of not so great for brands. But also, I mean, this is this is search in 2020. Mordy Oberstein: Well, different question, different time. Different question, George, different time. Not kidding, I'm not stepping on that landmine in this episode. You know what I am stepping on? George Nguyen: That's the one landmine you're not going to step on in this episode. Mordy Oberstein: That's the one, that's it. George Nguyen: That's the hill you're not going to die on today. Okay, understood. Mordy Oberstein: We all have to have our- George Nguyen: Boundaries, nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, boundaries are important, George. Two things are important here, one, you are not smarter than a search engine. Two, although the truth is, those are very broad and that's hard to answer in all fairness to George. But we're not being fair to George, and two is are you ready for some Snappy News? George Nguyen: 100%. Snap it off. [00:31:49] Snappy News Mordy Oberstein: Okay, then it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, big news this week as Google held its Search On event and made a heap of announcements. Some were not entirely new, some are cool, but I don't think are a huge deal for search. For example, when translating with Google Lens, which by the way is amazingly cool. If you haven't tried it, you can translate an image text via Google Lens. So, Google said they're going to do a better job of keeping the quality of the original image up, very cool, not a big deal for search. There are things like a new search refinement aide they'll be rolling out. Essentially, you start typing a query, and Google offers a word in various blocks, and as you click on a block, you build a query that way. It's cool, I think it says more about what Google can do with predictive content more than anything. There are indeed some things that are significant for search, for example, coming on the e-com side, buying guides for products on the SERP. There are page insight via the Google app, which when you're on a product page, for example, they'll pull up other content related to that page or product, so you get a more holistic understanding of the page or the product. There's a whole lot coming around personalization and shopping, so if you engage, for example, the filter to see just kids clothes on the SERP, or let's say you only want to see certain kind of brands, Google will let you personalize the SERP that way, so you get very specific shopping results, very cool. There are a few good articles covering all the updates, Barry Schwartz has one at Search Engine Roundtable covering everything, all the announcements. He's got another one at Search Engine Land covering the big stuff, Brooke from Search Engine Journal has a piece covering all the shopping features. We're going to link to all of those in the show notes, have a look, explore everything that Google did. For me, my big takeaway, forget all the bells and whistles, forget all the updates and the features, if you watched the event, Google kept coming back to this theme of making search more fun and more natural and more intuitive, over and over and over again. If they're doing that, I don't think we should ignore them. So, to me, that focus is more important than any particular update, Google sees, in my honest opinion, the SERP as you and I know it as being a bit obsolete. It wants to get more layered, more immersive, offering a deeper experience that fosters real exploration. I wrote a whole post on this a while back for Semrush, I'll link through that in the show notes as well. Because there are a heap of implications and it's too much to get into right here, right now, because we need to keep things snappy. With that, that is this week's Snappy News. Well, that was news-delicious, hey George? George Nguyen: Man, every time you try to think of one of those ways to segue after a segment, I'm just like, "Here it comes." Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm making them up on the spot, so I don't plan out the segments, let me rephrase! I plan out the segments, I don't plan out the pivots. George Nguyen: This is the fourth podcast you're doing concurrently, so I had expectations. Mordy Oberstein: The answer to that is don't, don't have expectations. [00:34:59] Follow of the Week But if you are going to have expectations, if you're going to follow Glenn Gabe, our follow of the week, and I just ruined it's Glenn Gabe, then you can expect awesome Twitter SEO content. How's that for a pivot, George? In all seriousness, Glenn Gabe is a fantastic follow on Twitter, and it's @glenngabe, that's G-L-E-N-N, two Ns in Glenn and Gabe, G-A-B-E, Glenn Gabe on Twitter. Fantastic, fantastic follow. George, you know him, you follow him. George Nguyen: Yeah, I do. So, I would say that in the Twitter SEO realm, there's the people who live in Breathe SEO and talk nothing but that, and there's the people who kind of mix in their day to day lives. If you're more into the former group, that's Glenn Gabe, he shares things about how the search results work and how features work, that I'm like, "Wow, almost no marketing use case for this whatsoever, just super interesting to know." He gets granular and his writing is topnotch, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: Totally topnotch. Totally topnotch, so check out GSQI, where Glenn runs a blog. It's absolutely great, as George mentioned, on things like Google updates and well beyond. He's super active on Twitter, breaking you all sorts of digital marketing news and commentary on that news, along with some great examples of what's happening in the rankings and on the SERP. Glenn is a super follow, a must follow, Glenn Gabe. George Nguyen: I wish I could emulate the way he thought about search, that's definitely something that strikes me is the way he thinks about search is very Glenn Gabe. Mordy Oberstein: And he's a Yankees fan, which is, hey, for me, it's a total edited bonus. Anyway, you don't care about that, George. Sports ball. George Nguyen: Go sports team, go local sports team. There are no professional sports teams in Rhode Island, where I live. Mordy Oberstein: Which is neither a road nor an island. Discuss. And with that, 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, diving into all new SEO goodness. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the SEO Learning Hub over at Wix, at wix.com/SEO/learn. If you like what you had to hear, don't forget to give us a positive review over on iTunes or a rating over in Spotify. Again, if you're looking for more SEO information, check out all the great content, all the great webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. George? George Nguyen: I am always glad to be here, Mordy, I run the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Mordy Oberstein: You do. George Nguyen: Had some love. Mordy Oberstein: That's true, how did we not say that. You do run the Hub. Well, until next time then, peace, love, and SEO. George Nguyen: And cats. Mordy Oberstein: And cilantro. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein George Nguyen Rejoice Ojiaku Rise at Seven SEO Agency Luke Carthy Glenn Gabe Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The power of keyword intent for organic success G-Squared Interactive Why Google’s 10 Blue Links Will Have to Go (Eventually) News: All The Google Announcements From Search On 2022 10 biggest announcements from Google Search On 22 Search On 22: Google Debuts 9 New Shopping Features Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein George Nguyen Rejoice Ojiaku Rise at Seven SEO Agency Luke Carthy Glenn Gabe Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The power of keyword intent for organic success G-Squared Interactive Why Google’s 10 Blue Links Will Have to Go (Eventually) News: All The Google Announcements From Search On 2022 10 biggest announcements from Google Search On 22 Search On 22: Google Debuts 9 New Shopping Features 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, putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding at Wix, and filling in for our head of SEO communications Crystal Carter is Wix's own head of SEO editorial, George Nguyen. George Nguyen: Hey, how's it going? It's good to be back. Mordy Oberstein: How's it going, George? George Nguyen: Excellent, I always get jazz when I watch you do the SERP's Up thing, and you can't see this because it's not on video, but Mordy does this whole baseball pitch thing with his arm as he winds up for this SERP's UP. Mordy Oberstein: Winding up, I'm winding up. George Nguyen: Yeah, it's really good, and it just gets me in the mood. Mordy Oberstein: It's Robin Williams in Good morning Vietnam, that's my inspiration. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we now pull in Google's search console's URL inspection API to automatically show you the status of your pages on your site without you having to specify the URLs, because we do that for you. It's the Wix site inspection dashboard inside of Wix's SEO tool set. All right, we've got a really interesting one on this, so we're going deep into the wonderful world of user intent, Google intent, search intent. However you want to frame it, there's multiple ways to frame it, we're going to get into it. Anyway, it's the one thing about people and if there's one thing about people, it's that they are complicated. Yet, so much to the content on the web is either monolithic or overly broad and it's not very helpful, at least in my opinion. Although Google, if you look online, John Muller on Twitter every once in a while and make a statement like that, anyway. [00:01:51] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? That's right, we're talking about when you can and can't target multiple audiences and intent with the same piece of content on your site. Learn when you can tackle multiple audiences with one page of content and rank well and when, well, you can't. It's everything you ever wanted to know about intent, SEO and multiple audience targeting, or maybe it's the one really important thing you really wanted to know about that and nothing else. Get it, see what I did there. SEO joke, right? I dived in which intent do you really want? [George’s drum sounds ] target getting multiple intents. Oh, man, off the rails. Anyway, plus we're going to see what we can learn about SEO from cats eating cilantro. This is George... If you don't like this one, I blame George, blame George. George Nguyen: I love cats. Mordy Oberstein: I know you do, I love cilantro. Anyway, just wait and see as we explore some fun and People Also Ask results and of course get some snappy SEO news and learn who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness this week, let's roll. Users, consumers, potential customers or clients, for everyone referred to the people that support or potentially could support your business, they are not linear, they don't have one need but multiple needs at multiple times in multiple places. So, it takes an example, it's boring and mundane and annoying, I know it's annoying because I just renewed it, car insurance or buying car insurance. Folks need to know not only what policy you have available, but they also need to know how to decide what's best for them. They might even need to know how to decide what insurance policy is best for them. But guess what? Folks who need to know how to buy car insurance and folks that are ready to buy car insurance, they might actually be searching for the same thing on Google, buy car insurance. So, you need to be ready to meet the multiple messy needs of multiple users at multiple stages of their consumer journey, and that can be complicated. [00:03:50] Focus Topic of the Week: Mixed Search Intent Do you write one master blog post about how to go about picking an insurance policy and compare the reviews and policies in one post? Do you create two different posts? When is it okay to target multiple intents, multiple user needs at one time? Can you even cater to multiple audiences all at once? If so, how? Welcome to the episode all about the messy mania that is multiple user intents and SEO. It's messy, George. George Nguyen: We're talking about mixed search intent, which is great because I feel like as a user, I kind of run into this all the time, maybe just says something about myself as a buyer. But let's talk about an easy example of mixed intent content, because we're seeing two different concepts that we have to reconcile here. There's the mixed intent content, which is what's on the website or what you or yourself might create. Then there's the mixed intent search engine results page, which we're just going to call SERP from this point onward. So, talking about the first one, some e-commerce sites, I'm just saying e-commerce because this is an easy example, they like to make their category pages very informative. Kind of straddles align between that informational intent, and then also since it's category page, the transactional intent or maybe the commercial intent there. It sort of depends on what brand you're talking about. You can see a thin light example at Bikes Online, which is a domain that sells mountain bikes and such. But their category pages, if you just go to mountain bike, will have descriptions. Here we kind of see a mix here, they'll organize the content usually by features or classifications. In the case of the example I'm speaking about, you'll see dual suspension mountain bikes and a description for that. Then the front suspension mountain bikes and those actually kind of double as filters, so you see this format in a way that kind of appeals to both. There's informational text to educate visitors, but also there's that, hey, if you want to buy now, we'll get you right down this funnel, we'll convert. I consider this mix intent commercial and informational. Mordy, I really struggled here to find an example that wasn't necessarily e-commerce, because it's just so much of the internet is e-commerce. But do you have an example to pitch in here that might not be the same thing? Maybe for our listeners that don't run e-commerce sites? Mordy Oberstein: I have a bunch of examples and I'm just going to use one later on, it's all e-commerce. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the thing, so this is a huge deal for anybody in e-commerce, because whoever is on your site potentially looking to buy, also is looking to know and understand. Let's talk about the other side of it though, there's the mixed intent SERP, this is kind of what Bing, Google, whatever search engine you use, the results they put together when they don't clearly signal an intent here. Usually, you can kind of tell what an intent is in the search term itself, question words indicate generally informational, if it's just a brand name, it might be navigational, so on and so forth. But this refers to a search engine results page that doesn't conform to what we would typically see in any of those four traditional intents, informational, commercial, navigational, transactional. Even that model has a lot of challenges nowadays, we'll talk about a few. So, products or brands, sometimes they'll share names with other things and this can really create for a mix intents SERP. So, the example I want to go with here is for the term Air Force, so if you just go into Google type in Air Force, I'm in the United States just for reference. So, for that query, Google shows ads for Nike Air Force 1 shoes, as well as ads for joining the United States Air Force, which are two very different things. There's also information about joining the Air Force and then there's even kind of a local intent, because there's a local pack with Air Force recruitment centers. So, there you have e-commerce, and you have informational, it's a whole smorgasbord here. Mordy Oberstein: There's so many cases like that, so many ways that Google sort does this. You type in Badgers and you get things about the animal badgers or the Wisconsin Badgers college football team. George Nguyen: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: But even on very, very, you would think to be commercial or transactional queries, again, buy car insurance is a great example. I did a study about a long time ago, you would think just be a bunch of websites where you could buy car insurance or buy whatever, but this was back like 2018, something around 40% of the results are informational. Meaning, Google thinks and takes the implication from your query that you're not searching for an actual product to buy, but you actually want information before you buy it about how to buy it. So, there's so many mixed intents and so many ways Google splices... It can offer you media formats, it gives you a video, not a blog post or a podcast, not a video. George Nguyen: The results are becoming more and more interesting, they evolve all the time. Informational intent, the straight up transactional, like peanut butter, a peanut butter jelly and mustard sandwich, right Mordy? That's Mordy's favorite, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, no joke, because if you search for peanut butter sandwich or peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the US where it's very, very popular. I used to eat one every day as a kid and now I live in Israel and people don't eat them. You get different results, because it's a different intent, but users have different needs in different markets. So, what's very straightforward to you in one market is totally different in another market. George Nguyen: Totally very, very granular, very impressive that the search engines, especially Google, have been able to develop. So, we were talking about all these intents and the thing about talking about intents is that they're traditionally seen as aligning with the sales funnel. The thing about the sales funnel is it's a linear concept. Yeah, people can drop out of your sales funnel, but when we talk about it in terms of strategy, we never plan for anybody to move up the sales funnel out of a phase, going into a previous phase. But for myself personally, I feel like there's so much information, the granularity with which I'm shopping for things. For example, I'm thinking about getting a rooftop tent for my car, but you have to worry about mounting, the bracket system, the weight structure. There's so much learning that I keep going back to transactional queries and maybe getting closer, and then I'm like, "There's another consideration," so I moved backwards here. Mordy Oberstein: That's where we're focusing today is more on the content side, so that you can show up, and again, Google might show various intents and various types of websites, various types of results for the queries that you're targeting with your content. But we're talking about you creating content and addressing the multiple intents, like in George's case, the various things he needs about the rooftop carrier or whatever is you're trying to order, I don't know what exactly what it is. Navigating between buying that and learning about that, and you're right, people think the funnel's really simple. There's awareness or the awareness stage, but people... When was the last time you actually yourself walked through the funnel, all the steps of being aware to being ready to buy, to actually buying? You're in and out, it's really messy. I feel I need to learn more now, I have new questions. I thought I was ready to buy, I was this close. I'm like, "Wait, wait, I'm out. I need to go way back, I totally misunderstood this whole product. I'm starting all over again," all the time. George Nguyen: Yeah, absolutely. If you line up the sales funnel stages, so let's think about this in our mind's eye here, on the left side we're going to have a sales funnel where it's awareness, research, and transaction is how I'm going to simplify this. Then on the right side, you have your search intents and to line up with that, you generally have the research, the informational intent, and then navigational, and then commercial, and then transactional at the bottom of that funnel. Does navigational really feel like it fits there? It feels like it goes everywhere in the funnel, depending on what kind of searcher you are. Mordy Oberstein: We should put it in the show us, I know Google has a poll post from a couple years ago how messy the funnel actually is and how it doesn't really work in this linear way, even though everyone presents it like that. George Nguyen: Every time you hear Google IO or Google Marketing Live or anytime you go to a conference, guarantee you someone's going to step on stage and be like, "The funnel is messy," like this is the first time someone's ever said that. They always have this graphic that is so convoluted, and that's one of the things here is we understand, most marketers can see that the funnel is messy. The thing is, there is no other model that is as prevalent to explain customer behavior, and so while we know that there are flaws, we just haven't developed anything better. Mordy Oberstein: So, let's jump into this actually and figure out how you can create what you can do with your content to address multiple intents and when you can or can't use one piece of content to do that, and when maybe you should use one piece of content to do that. Because it's tricky, again, it's someone like George trying to buy something and get information. Can you have information? Can you have transaction content on the same page? Does that work? Sometimes, usually not, you kind of need separate pieces to do that. But sometimes you do need both, and in a lot of ways, let the SERP be your guide is my best advice. How do you know when you can use one piece of content to address multiple intents, or multiple topics, multiple subtopics, or even topics of different intents or subtopics of different intents? One great way to do that is go to the Google results page, I've seen this before where during a Google update, a bunch of ultimate guides fell off page one. So, that kind of told me, you know what the intent of the user here is? They want something very specific, they don't want to full ultimate guide to whatever. They want the particular answer to the particular question that they're searching for, that's the intent here. So, that should help reverse engineer that, so I'm writing content about that, Google and their data, their machine learning, is basically telling me what they're seeing from users and what users want. That's probably what my users want, I'm not going to create an ultimate guide in this situation. By the way, when you're doing this, when you're going to the results page, they'll just go to page one and see what's on page one. Go to page two and three and see what's not on page one. So, if you see all the ultimate guides, these comprehensive long documents are on page two and three, and they're not on page one, that kind of tells you something. George Nguyen: I mean, if you ever see a page one that's totally different from a page two in terms of the makeup of the results, send us that screenshot. Let us know what that query is, because I would love for things to be so cut and dry. Mordy Oberstein: I've seen when we covered it on the podcast, it had to do with one of the earlier episodes about logo making, a bunch of ultimate guides got pushed to page two. George Nguyen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, that's good. Mordy Oberstein: I see a bunch of health queries also, see, I have real cases behind on my madness. George Nguyen: With regard to like that, we should get that printed on a shirt like, "The SERP is my guide," because really when it comes to mixed intent stuff, I cannot overstate that the results page will tell you so much about what Google thinks about the query, and thus, what your competition is. That is where I go to start making my decisions generally, and let me tell you also- Mordy Oberstein: media formats, if you see a bunch- George Nguyen: Media formats, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: ... of images on the results page, Google showing images everywhere, that kind of tells you there's an intent embedded in the query for visual assets that you should probably have on your page. George Nguyen: Exactly, so I go to the SERP to identify opportunities, competitors, know what you're getting into before you start planning, that's a huge deal. There's not going to be a foolproof framework that Mordy and I can offer you, because every business is so different. Also, fundamentally, I break this down into three key considerations, the first one is know your audience, second one is know your subject matter or your industry, and the third one is know the SERP for the desired keywords. That's already what you had touched on, Mordy. Your audience is the one that gets to decide whether you should be creating multiple content pieces across different intents or just one piece of content with all the intents. You're not going to have all the intents, but... Sure, for the case of my example, I don't mean that that audience actually gets to decide, but that you should know your audience well enough to predict what's likely to work. What does your audience know your brand for? If the query is dark roast coffee and you're Amazon, users are likely not expecting for you to be in the search results page with informational content, like a buying guide, they're expecting a product page, straight up. So, who are you to really break that user experience? So, if you thinking about going for new opportunities, see if anyone else has done it, see if there are users that are in your reviews or giving you feedback that they actually want this information. Know your audience, that's a huge thing. You mentioned, Mordy, health topics, so that's what I kind of meant when I said know your subject matter or your industry. So, for your money or your life content, that YMYL content, Google heavily scrutinizes expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, EAT. If you're in a YMYL industry, like medical advice, evaluate your content to see whether it's serving users or it's just a thinly veiled attempt to serve your own business. This is something that we saw earlier with the Medic update and subsequent updates after. Sites that were maybe saying like, "We're holistic medicine," air quotes. In the content, they'd have answers to queries, but they'd also have affiliate links for essential oils, which caused Google to look at them sideways. I felt like a lot of brands for their lack of transparency there, they really suffered. Also, there's mixed intent here, and the integrity of the informational intent is so important in that vertical. So, that's why I say know your subject matter or your industry, lives are literally on the line in health, not so much in photography. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you never know, but for the most part. No, but it's a good point, and the truth is let's say a health page or a finance page, and I've seen this play out in the algorithm, while let's say a landing page for whatever for, I don't know, for buying a new camera, we'll go with the photo thing, does it need to have a lot of informational content there? You're assuming that users already got that information, now that you're here to buy? Not that I would say taking out a business loan, on the page where they're actually buying something, people want to know exactly what it is they're buying before they buy, it's super important to have that information there. So, understand the nature of the client and the user, Google does. If the demand for informational content exists to help you contextualize the purchase, then add it there. It's okay to mix intents, we're not saying it's not okay. In fact, in general, I would say as a framework, because again you're right, you can't offer particular advice. But as a framework, it's always okay to add on accentual informational content, like an FAQ to a product page. In fact, many times Google actually prefers on a landing page that you have some kind of a bit of informational content. I've seen that there for some software products where it's not just click here, buy here, name of the product, short one or two lines. It's how do you use the product, FAQ about the product, why you need the product, so there's an infusion of informational content there and that supports the commercial aspect of the page. So, mix intents, informational content can support the commercial side of it also, don't be afraid to mix things up a little bit and to accent commercial transactional content with a bit of information. I don't think you can really go wrong there. Obviously, don't go overboard, it's not that kind of vertical. George, wrap this up? George Nguyen: This is the last piece of advice and it seems like we're talking to e-commerce sites specifically, even though this can apply more broadly to other sites. But since you're talking about product pages, while this is tangentially related to mixed intents and you're thinking about your product descriptions, you have to know... This goes back to knowing your business and your industry, what do people use your site for? If you're selling fewer goods, maybe your own brand or a relatively obscure brand, then you're going to need to provide more information, because customers aren't going to be able to get that anywhere else. So, naturally, you're going to look like a more informative product page. But if you're like a Best Buy, where people might literally just come to do the transaction, because they know they can return in store and that's easy for them, maybe that content's not as important, because they've already probably learned it everywhere else, so know your position here as the brand or as the seller. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, last point, go with your gut. Build an intuition about what's out there in the ecosystem, what kind of content is out there, understanding your users, what is appropriate, what is it not appropriate, when do you need to segment topics, subtopics or different types of content, or when can you combine it all on one page, trust yourself and build up that intuition. [00:19:36] Focus Topic Guest: Rejoice Ojaiku Speaking about different intents and content for different intents, search, although we love search, is not the only medium out there. What about different intents and different ecosystems? What about long versus short content, and different platforms, and different ecosystems? To help you with that, we have a content strategist over at the Rise at Seven, SEO and content agency, Rejoice Ojaiku, to help you out. Rejoice Ojaiku: So the question I'm going to be answering is how do you speak to multiple types of users and intents on other channels such as social media? When I'm thinking about this question and thinking about the most appropriate way to sort answer it, let's start off with. Users, multiple types of users. Now, I think as a brand, you need to look at the different types of users that you have on all your channels. So whether that is website, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, I think you need to understand the type of origins that you mostly get. So for example, on TikTok, you might find that you are mostly getting a lot of people within the Gen Z category, and that's the audience you have there. And on websites you might find that people who are on there. Of a certain demographic or a certain location. So you have all these datas that provides you an insight into the different types of audiences you're getting, and therefore, you then will understand what type of content or what type of formats it interacts with the most. Now, TikTok only presents itself. With mostly videos, a loss of point of view type content, a lot of user generator type content, and that can then give you the idea of the content format that is most suitable for that platform. Whereas you wouldn't always necessarily use videos on Twitter compared to TikTok, for example. Sometimes Twitter can provide a great realm for more thoughts provoking information. People just want to read, and you do that in the form of threads. Whereas TikTok, again, is more snappy, more quick-witted type of content, so you have more shorter videos, same as Instagram with the rules and all these things and your website. I think website has a better chance of infographics and a better chance of long-form blog content. When you are looking at creating different sort of content to target different users and different intents, it is about understanding what content or what type of content that these audiences are interacting with, And there are things that you could utilize to sort of find this information. One of the best way to do is utilizing the search function within these platforms and seeing what type of content is coming up. Understand how search works on this platform. I think people get confused. That search sometimes works exactly the same way as Google on the website when you try to expand it in all forms of platforms, and that's not the case. Search doesn't have to always be quite linear. It is very much evolving and very much different when you are presented with the different types of channels. So maybe you do want to serve the same topic across all channels and to all audiences, but doesn't mean the format of that topic has to be completely the same. So we can talk about travel. For every single audience that we have identified. But how are we communicating that now? This is where you have to be creative. So I think that is how you speak to multiple types of users. Understand the topic. Understand what content formats they are interacting with, Understanding the tone of voice that they're used to as well. Are things abbreviated or shortened when it comes to these platforms? Does the search actually fully typed out or query, or is a query shortened? There's so many different abbreviations of search crews in general. So understanding the tone of voice that the audiences receive quite well, and also understanding how to repurpose and understanding what is the intent that these people are actually interacting with. More so, and by all means, always playing ahead. Always have a pool of search queries. And trust me, if you're going to go onto platforms such as social media, then you absolutely need to consider hashtags. You absolutely need to consider. What hashtags are relevant to this content, what hashtags are popular, doing quite well, and then Do your competitor's research to see what other people are creating with this hashtag, and I think that's the best way to sort of meet your audience and meet your readers exactly where you want them to. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for Rejoice, totally great point. Something we didn't discuss, George, but thinking about it also for search is the type of content in terms of its length, I don't mean I'm not worried about how long a post should be, is it 200 word or 2000 words, but do they want a real quick snippet of information? Do they want a quick video? Google does show shorts on the SERP, so a great point to consider by Rejoice across all platforms. George Nguyen: I think one of the things that holds us back from thinking more broadly in SEO is the question of reporting. Sometimes reporting isn't always clear on things or when we're working across channels, that it's a little bit harder to do. So, I feel like SEOs inherently just want to do what they know, but thinking more broadly, definitely has advantages, because your customers don't care, they prefer what they prefer, that's how it's going to be. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. George Nguyen: All right, before we move on, I did want to give a shout out. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out time. George Nguyen: I wanted shout out Luke Carthy, who is writing an excellent piece on product description optimization, we'll be publishing it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub soon. Some of that advice earlier that I mentioned about thinking about your business in terms of how mature it is and what you sell comes from Luke Carthy. So, if that's published, then we'll put up the URL, if not, we'll add it later. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and we'll add Luke's Twitter handle to the show notes, so you can follow him, because he's a great SEO to follow, but he's not the follow of the week, but it's a bonus follow up the week. [00:25:51] Fun with People Also Ask Anyway, it's time for my favorite segment. It is literally my favorite segment, it is so off the rails and I love it, it's fun with People Also Ask. So, the People Also Ask presents you with typically four questions that are related to the search you just ran. So, if you search for, I don't know, how to buy car insurance, why is that my favorite query? It's so boring, it'll show you four questions about buying car insurance. Each question is attached to an expandable tab, which when expanded, it gives you the answer to the question along the URL where the answer is sourced from. Fun part, by the way, is when you expand one question, Google dynamically and immediately loads more questions. So, PAA boxes are a great resource of information, which is exactly why we're doing this. This fun little way to learn about how Google thinks about things. Anyway, today I'm grilling George to see if he really knows about cats, because George loves cats, loves cats. Every meeting with George we have to, "Look at the cat, everybody, here's my cat." Anyway, we're looking at the four initial PAA, People Also Ask questions that Google shows for the keyword, can cats eat cilantro, to see if George is smarter than a search engine and get some glimpses about what Google's thinking along the way. You ready, George? George Nguyen: I am. Mordy Oberstein: Can cats eat cilantro? How do we even come up with this? Okay, first question, George, what does cilantro do to cats? George Nguyen: I have no idea from experience, but I'm going to say that, generally speaking, cats don't show too much affinity for plants, in general. Sometimes they'll eat house plants, but usually not, and some of them are poisonous except for cat grass and stuff. So, it'll probably mess with them or they'll throw up, I'm going to say they throw up, final answer. Mordy Oberstein: Final answer, you want to phone a friend, cilantro, the cilantro plant can cause gastrointestinal irritation and cardiac arrhythmia in your pet, yikes. George Nguyen: That is much worse than throwing up. Mordy Oberstein: That's much worse than throwing up, which by the way, look at the intent there, speaking of intent, the query was can cats eat cilantro? The first question Google has and the People Also Ask box is what does cilantro do to cats? Meaning Google's looking at the intent of your query and thinking okay, you want to know the impact of cilantro on the cat, and that's why that's that first question. Second question, is cilantro pet friendly? George Nguyen: No, no way, it's too spicy. Mordy Oberstein: Well- George Nguyen: I don't know if spicy's the right word. Mordy Oberstein: First off, before we get to the answer, again, point about Google because it's fun, but it's also we're learning about Google, you see that Google went wider and it went off of cats and went to a larger genus or species, genus, whatever. I know science, and is cilantro pet friendly, as opposed to was it cat friendly? So, sometimes Google will do that in the PAA box, it'll zoom out, in this case, George, cilantro actually is healthy for your dog to eat, it may actually help your dog's upset stomach. By the way, see the bias of Google search results that it went to dog, even though the question was is it pet friendly? So, sometimes the question that Google asks and the answers don't match up. So, if you're doing research, look at the question, but in this case, ignore the answer, because that's doesn't make sense. George Nguyen: I've seen this happen a few times where the answer is... It is the answer to a different question, while related, it's not quite what's labeled there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so it's interesting that great question, but the answer's probably not what you're looking for. All right, next one, question number three, are any herbs toxic to cats? George Nguyen: There's got to be. Mordy Oberstein: Clock is ticking, George. George Nguyen: I don't know if they are off the top... There's so many herbs, there's so many herbs, like coriander, I don't know, they can't all be safe. Mordy Oberstein: English ivy's toxins cause vomiting and stomach pain, poinsettia is only mildly toxic, affecting some cats with a temporary bout of vomiting. George Nguyen: That's important, because that's something you could have in your house. Mordy Oberstein: Quick point here, check out what Google did here, both in the previous question, is cilantro pet-friendly Google, zoomed out and went to all pets. Here it's taking cilantro now and zooming out and going to all herbs. So, cool way of getting to how Google is thinking, George Nguyen: Just switching Out. The object here. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it knows which one to switch. George Nguyen: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I thought you were commenting on what I was saying. Yeah, and it knows to switch. George Nguyen: I am, it's switching the subject in a sense, because it knows that doing this in this minor way causes enough of a meaningful difference but adds enough value that it's worth putting in a PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and then it switches to the next thing, goes from the animal to the plant and zooms out that way. Anyway, I interrupted you. George Nguyen: The question really is, are cats safe for cilantro? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what that means. What herbs are cats allowed to eat? George Nguyen: Cat grass. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, it's a list- George Nguyen: And not cilantro. Mordy Oberstein: Cat thyme, camomile, licorice root, cats claw, dandelion root and golden seal. Sure, I don't know what any of that stuff means. But again, interesting you're taking the original query of can cats eat cilantro and now it's going to what herbs are cats allowed to eat? Meaning it's again zooming out, going wider with the intent saying, "Okay, if you're interested in knowing if the cat can eat cilantro, maybe your next question is going to be, "Well, if they can eat cilantro, then what can they eat?" So, Google's trying to predict the intent and the next question of the user with the PAA questions, which is why it's such a great keyword research tool. George Nguyen: And you never have to leave the search results, which is kind of not so great for brands. But also, I mean, this is this is search in 2020. Mordy Oberstein: Well, different question, different time. Different question, George, different time. Not kidding, I'm not stepping on that landmine in this episode. You know what I am stepping on? George Nguyen: That's the one landmine you're not going to step on in this episode. Mordy Oberstein: That's the one, that's it. George Nguyen: That's the hill you're not going to die on today. Okay, understood. Mordy Oberstein: We all have to have our- George Nguyen: Boundaries, nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, boundaries are important, George. Two things are important here, one, you are not smarter than a search engine. Two, although the truth is, those are very broad and that's hard to answer in all fairness to George. But we're not being fair to George, and two is are you ready for some Snappy News? George Nguyen: 100%. Snap it off. [00:31:49] Snappy News Mordy Oberstein: Okay, then it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, big news this week as Google held its Search On event and made a heap of announcements. Some were not entirely new, some are cool, but I don't think are a huge deal for search. For example, when translating with Google Lens, which by the way is amazingly cool. If you haven't tried it, you can translate an image text via Google Lens. So, Google said they're going to do a better job of keeping the quality of the original image up, very cool, not a big deal for search. There are things like a new search refinement aide they'll be rolling out. Essentially, you start typing a query, and Google offers a word in various blocks, and as you click on a block, you build a query that way. It's cool, I think it says more about what Google can do with predictive content more than anything. There are indeed some things that are significant for search, for example, coming on the e-com side, buying guides for products on the SERP. There are page insight via the Google app, which when you're on a product page, for example, they'll pull up other content related to that page or product, so you get a more holistic understanding of the page or the product. There's a whole lot coming around personalization and shopping, so if you engage, for example, the filter to see just kids clothes on the SERP, or let's say you only want to see certain kind of brands, Google will let you personalize the SERP that way, so you get very specific shopping results, very cool. There are a few good articles covering all the updates, Barry Schwartz has one at Search Engine Roundtable covering everything, all the announcements. He's got another one at Search Engine Land covering the big stuff, Brooke from Search Engine Journal has a piece covering all the shopping features. We're going to link to all of those in the show notes, have a look, explore everything that Google did. For me, my big takeaway, forget all the bells and whistles, forget all the updates and the features, if you watched the event, Google kept coming back to this theme of making search more fun and more natural and more intuitive, over and over and over again. If they're doing that, I don't think we should ignore them. So, to me, that focus is more important than any particular update, Google sees, in my honest opinion, the SERP as you and I know it as being a bit obsolete. It wants to get more layered, more immersive, offering a deeper experience that fosters real exploration. I wrote a whole post on this a while back for Semrush, I'll link through that in the show notes as well. Because there are a heap of implications and it's too much to get into right here, right now, because we need to keep things snappy. With that, that is this week's Snappy News. Well, that was news-delicious, hey George? George Nguyen: Man, every time you try to think of one of those ways to segue after a segment, I'm just like, "Here it comes." Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm making them up on the spot, so I don't plan out the segments, let me rephrase! I plan out the segments, I don't plan out the pivots. George Nguyen: This is the fourth podcast you're doing concurrently, so I had expectations. Mordy Oberstein: The answer to that is don't, don't have expectations. [00:34:59] Follow of the Week But if you are going to have expectations, if you're going to follow Glenn Gabe, our follow of the week, and I just ruined it's Glenn Gabe, then you can expect awesome Twitter SEO content. How's that for a pivot, George? In all seriousness, Glenn Gabe is a fantastic follow on Twitter, and it's @glenngabe, that's G-L-E-N-N, two Ns in Glenn and Gabe, G-A-B-E, Glenn Gabe on Twitter. Fantastic, fantastic follow. George, you know him, you follow him. George Nguyen: Yeah, I do. So, I would say that in the Twitter SEO realm, there's the people who live in Breathe SEO and talk nothing but that, and there's the people who kind of mix in their day to day lives. If you're more into the former group, that's Glenn Gabe, he shares things about how the search results work and how features work, that I'm like, "Wow, almost no marketing use case for this whatsoever, just super interesting to know." He gets granular and his writing is topnotch, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: Totally topnotch. Totally topnotch, so check out GSQI, where Glenn runs a blog. It's absolutely great, as George mentioned, on things like Google updates and well beyond. He's super active on Twitter, breaking you all sorts of digital marketing news and commentary on that news, along with some great examples of what's happening in the rankings and on the SERP. Glenn is a super follow, a must follow, Glenn Gabe. George Nguyen: I wish I could emulate the way he thought about search, that's definitely something that strikes me is the way he thinks about search is very Glenn Gabe. Mordy Oberstein: And he's a Yankees fan, which is, hey, for me, it's a total edited bonus. Anyway, you don't care about that, George. Sports ball. George Nguyen: Go sports team, go local sports team. There are no professional sports teams in Rhode Island, where I live. Mordy Oberstein: Which is neither a road nor an island. Discuss. And with that, 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, diving into all new SEO goodness. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the SEO Learning Hub over at Wix, at wix.com/SEO/learn. If you like what you had to hear, don't forget to give us a positive review over on iTunes or a rating over in Spotify. Again, if you're looking for more SEO information, check out all the great content, all the great webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. George? George Nguyen: I am always glad to be here, Mordy, I run the Wix SEO Learning Hub. Mordy Oberstein: You do. George Nguyen: Had some love. Mordy Oberstein: That's true, how did we not say that. You do run the Hub. Well, until next time then, peace, love, and SEO. George Nguyen: And cats. Mordy Oberstein: And cilantro. 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 makes SEO for capturing leads so unique? What should you consider when using SEO to capture more leads? What challenges come with SEO for lead generation and how can you overcome them? Join Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they help you better leverage SEO for lead generation. Plus, content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones, joins the podcast to share how you can best leverage content marketing for even more lead generation. It’s all things SEO and lead generation on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast. Back Harnessing SEO for lead generation What makes SEO for capturing leads so unique? What should you consider when using SEO to capture more leads? What challenges come with SEO for lead generation and how can you overcome them? Join Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they help you better leverage SEO for lead generation. Plus, content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones, joins the podcast to share how you can best leverage content marketing for even more lead generation. It’s all things SEO and lead generation on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 37 | May 10, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 37:03 This week’s guests Kelsey Jones Kelsey Jones is a content strategist and digital marketing consultant with expertise in driving engagement and traffic through content-driven strategies. She is also the host of the StoryShout podcast, where she discusses the importance of embracing failure and destigmatizing it. With over a decade of experience in the industry, Kelsey has worked with top brands like Yelp, Salesforce, and Microsoft to develop successful marketing and content strategies. She has also taught courses on website optimization, SEO, and content strategy for prestigious institutions such as Digital Marketing Institute and Columbia Business School. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. And I'm joined by the astonishing, the astounding, the awe-inspiring, fabulous, fantastic, implausible, improbable, incredible, miraculous, phenomenal, remarkable, singular, spectacular, strange, stunning, unbelievable, unusual, wonderful wondrous head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I just had a micro machines flashback. My goodness there, Mr. Oberstein, that's quite a lot of adjectives. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know what strange is doing in there as a synonym for marvelous. Crystal Carter: I didn't know, is that what ... What did ChatGPT telling you to say? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm just looking at thesaurus.com. I put in marvelous, and I just read them off. And strange, did you know it was a synonym for marvelous? I did not know that. Crystal Carter: If something fills you with ... that want to marvel at, it might be strange. It might be good strange, like, "Oh, this is a-" Mordy Oberstein: Like me. Crystal Carter: ... yeah, if I walked into my house and there was a 300 bouquets of roses, that would be strange. It would be good strange, as long as I don't have to clean up the roses when they're all dead. But it would still be strange. Mordy Oberstein: That's marvelous. Crystal Carter: It would be marvelous as well. Mordy Oberstein: Marvelous. Yes, marvelous. You know what else is marvelous? The fact that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the leads, well we don't have the leads, but we have a tools to help you capture the leads, like all sorts of light box templates and options, chat interfaces, and a heap of analytics to help you see trends about your people such as leads per source analytics support, and much more. Capture, manage your leads with Wix, which leads us to what we're talking about on this episode, which in case you have in guess is leads and SEO. Crystal Carter: Leads. Mordy Oberstein: Not like the place in England. Leeds, Live at Leeds, L-E-A-D-S, leads. Yes. Leads in SEO. How you can capture and bring in those coveted leads with SEO. We're talking things like the challenges of trying to capture leads via SEO. What makes SEO for lead generation different from all other forms of SEO, the mindset that makes for good SEO.In trying to capture leads and more. We're going to then kick it up a notch as content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones shares how to use content marketing to effectively drive leads. Plus we'll explore a little old SERP feature that drives leads, that has undergone some significant changes. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social. Grab your sheep as we shepherd you and lead you to the Promised Land on episode number 37 of the SERP's Up podcast where we talk about leads. Crystal Carter: We talk about leads and sheeps and- Mordy Oberstein: And sheep. Crystal Carter: ... and sheep. I must give a shout out to Jon Payne who is an SEO at an agency called Noisy Little Monkey, and who before being an SEO was actually a shepherd. Mordy Oberstein: No way. Crystal Carter: That was his actual, literal job was a shepherd. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I just sitting around thinking it seems like the job for that would be a shepherd. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I feel like the sheep aren't going to give you a lot of back chat. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: You can just sit and contemplate and ... although I think the weather can be tricky, I looked at some throwback shepherd outfits. They used to have these giant felt coat things that you could sit in and it was kind of like a tent and a coat and things. If you go on Pinterest, they're amazing. Anyway, we have led ourselves astray. We are going to come back to our lead gen conversation. So yes, today we're talking about lead gen SEO, which if anyone has ever worked in B2B SEO, this is very often the general ethos behind what you're doing. This is slightly different from e-commerce SEO where very often, you have someone where you're like, "Hey, we have a product that we sell." They come to the website, they click on the product, they buy the product, they get the product delivered to them. The hey, bang, presto. Fairly straightforward with regards to attribution, with regards to figuring out the ROI of your SEO activity and things like that. Lead gen SEO on the other hand can mean lots and lots of things and it can mean that you're trying to get an email, you're trying to get a signup, you're trying to get a phone call, you're trying to get general engagement. You're trying to get something that gets you to get a relationship with a potential user so that you can follow up with further activity with your SEO and your other marketing information. One of the things that can be tricky about lead gen SEO is that particularly if you're thinking about content marketing, sometimes you need to have the content that works for the top of the funnel. You need to have that informational, engaging sort of content. But some of that stuff can be a little bit undirect, or indirect is the word. So, for instance, if you were trying to market two shepherds when you were trying to think of what shall I do with all this time sat on a mountaintop for instance, you might want some content that's a bit more conversational about the life of a shepherd and what that entails and things like that. But if you are trying to sell them at some point to subscribe to your shepherd fitness thing, or whatever it may be, then ... I've gone off on this train of thought, I'm sorry, I'm just going to keep going… Mordy Oberstein: And they have a staff holding course, like how do you hold this shepherd staff? Crystal Carter: Yes. Let's say you have a staff holding course and let's say you need to convince them that that's something that they need to be into. Then you might not want to lead straight in with a buy this, buy this right now. So, it's more of nurturing a relationship. But sometimes that means you have to invent opportunities for conversion and sometimes they need to be a little bit less direct. So for instance, it might be that your conversion on the page is a softer conversion. So, rather than somebody buying something, maybe it's that they scrolled to a certain part of the page. Maybe it's that they played a video, maybe it's that they used a tool. So, Ross Simmons was saying one thing that's a really good lead gen thing is calculators for instance. So, let's say you want to calculate the maximum time that your sheep should be on a mountain. Let's say you've got a shepherd calculator on your website, that might be a really good tool for that particular audience. And then let's say you've also got a downloadable resource, that might also be a really good tool. We talked about some of that before. And what can happen with that is if it's part of your marketing funnel and your overall marketing strategy, these tools can often lead you to opportunities to have more direct marketing. So, for instance, if they've played a video, then you can take that information and you can advertise to the folks who have played that video maybe in another video space. So that your lead gen tool is part of a wider, wider marketing funnel that includes a less direct marketing, SEO content and also a more focused ad campaign. And the challenges of this can be tricky because if you've got all of these different wheels within wheels, if you have your information on top of the funnel content and then you have your ad strategy that comes in after users have engaged with that content, then that leads to attribution challenges. So, I had a conversation with Kevin Indig about this a while back and he was asking what's the hardest part about B2B SEO? And my response was showing ROI on the deals that can take months. Months. So, people can come to your website once, they can come back two months later, they can download something here, they can click on something there. And the attribution challenges of that can be very, very complex. And these are much more likely to show up in lead type businesses. For instance, like for lawyers, for instance, if somebody thinks they might need a lawyer, they might read a blog on your website, they might read another blog, they might go around and look at a few other things. There might be a few different touchpoints. So, how do you know which part of the funnel was the thing that sealed the deal for that particular client? So, that attribution thing can be really tricky. One of the people that seems to have touched on that significantly is Amy Bishop who covers it really, really well in an article. It's an old article actually, but it's an oldie but a goody. Mordy Oberstein: Oldie but a goody. Crystal Carter: An evergreen, as it were. So Amy Bishop covered this when she was talking about choosing an attribution model on search engine land and she covers lots of different ones there. I think a lot of SEOs will rely on first touch, or last touch, or first conversion, or assisted conversion, but sometimes there can be more touchpoints than that. And it's important to understand the full marketing journey in order to be able to demonstrate ROI, demonstrate the value, and to be able to get maximum value out of your lead gen SEO. Mordy Oberstein: It is so interesting because it demands that as an SEO, you start thinking a little bit like a marketer. We talked about this in a recent pod, last week's podcast. It all comes full circle because you need to start figuring out, okay, what are the assets that are going to drive the leads? How do I do the SEO on those assets? For example, webinars, most people do webinars as a form of lead gen. We at Wix do not, by the way, at least on the SEO side. Not to say that that's a bad thing to do. Let me rephrase that. If you do do that, it's a great way to get leads. But you need to think about what kind of audience is going to be attracted by that, how they're going to use that, and then how they're going to then go further down the funnel because of that one webinar. You really need to think about the challenges of once I have them, I need to make sure that the next asset also performs well. Crystal Carter: And also, you need to make sure that the leads that you're generating add value to the business and are not wasting the lead management team's time. So, for instance, let's say if you are doing a webinar and let's say you're doing a webinar and it's off-topic for your brand, it might be very, very popular to everyone who's showing up, might be very, very popular. But the leads that you get from that might not necessarily be valuable to the team. This happens a lot with competitions. So for instance, if you're doing a partnership and you're saying, "Oh hey, we're going to do a competition, we're going to give away something for free." Sometimes if the thing that you sell is very expensive, then you might get 200 people sign up to the competition, 2,000 people sign up to the competition and your sales team, who are used to closing deals which are worth a few thousand pounds or something, doesn't have time to call back or touch base with 200, 2,000 people who are very unlikely to purchase because they were looking for something free and the thing that you sell is more premium. So, it's very important to understand how that plays into it and double check the value of your leads when you're doing SEO. Super, super useful. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost like the same thing as grabbing irregardless traffic, there's no point in doing that. It's a waste of time. But in this case, you're actually doing harm because you have other teams working on this trying to grab those leads and convert them, when there's never a chance to begin with. And no one knows that except for you because you knew that webinar wasn't really on target. Right, Right. My point, that you always had to be thinking about ... The North compass should be like where the brand is going, what the brand is trying to do. To the point a second ago, just want to double back on that because the funnel is messy. So, you may have done a great job with the SEO and the webinar page and you've got them, and you signed them up and whatever it is, and now have their emails. What's really going to drive them now is now, they went to your webinar, they saw how wonderful a brand you are and the wonderful content you're putting out. They have a vague idea of what you do at this point, very, very vague. And the next time that they see you is they're doing a search for a product related to what you do or service that you do. If you don't rank there, you've missed out because what might grab them is not the fact that you've sent them an email after the webinar trying to sell them something. They may have not even opened that email now. What will grab them is they went to the webinar, they've done a search for the product that you sell and they say, "Hey, wait a second, that's the same ... Those are the same people that did the webinar. I'm going to buy it from them." But if you don't rank there, the second stage of that very messy funnel, what worth was the webinar? Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's very important to understand that it's all part of a full funnel, as well as making sure that you're covering those products. Make sure that you're covering those ideas as well. So, let's say you're inspiring people to do, I don't know, whatever particular idea it is that you're talking about at the webinar, you also need to cover those terms as well. So, think about where you're engaging people so that it makes sense. And I think also, it's worth double checking, in my experience, it's worth double checking with your teams where the leads are going. Mordy Oberstein: You want to make sure that what you're doing is actually working. Follow up with them like, "Are these leads good?" Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Are these leads good? Because my metrics are showing that everybody went to the webinar, they all went to this blog, they all went to this, they all did this great stuff. My metrics are showing that we had this many signups for this, or this, or this. Is that coming through. Mordy Oberstein: Right, because the data can only take you so far. You don't actually know what you have to qualify the data. The only way to qualify that data is actually talking to the people on the sales team who were actually working with the lead. So, I had a company I used to work with, that was something we did a lot of. There was a lot of conversation between what we were doing with say, our blog and what we were doing on sales and was it actually the people we were targeting? Was it actually working? Let me ask you a totally separate topic question. Well, not totally separate because we're on the same topic of leads, but you're doing something like you're getting the lead, a downloadable asset, a webinar, whatever it is. Often, do you find that the content on those pages are a challenge, or the content strategy from an SEO point of view is a challenge? Because those pages don't tend to be overly rich with content. Crystal Carter: Yeah, a lot of those pages will be CRO optimized for instance. And I think that it's important to make sure that you have consistency of voice across whatever it is you're doing. So, I think that even if the word count is low or whatever, you can still maintain consistency of voice. So, it shouldn't be where you go from a like a, "Hey everyone, let's all just learn and grow and stretch together." Let's say you've that's your webinar vibe. Let's say it's a wellness webinar, I don't know. And let's say you have that and then they get to- Mordy Oberstein: Wellness for shepherds. Crystal Carter: Wellness for shepherds, yes. So, let's say it's a wellness for shepherds, yoginar. Yoginar? Yoginar? Mordy Oberstein: I love that. That's a webinar about yoga. It's a yoginar. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh, me too, yoga- Mordy Oberstein: Or a Yogi Berra, which could also be a yoginar. Crystal Carter: So, let's say you're doing a webinar, and it's wellness stuff and it's all very friendly and it's all very ... and then they get to the downloadable thing and it's just a completely different vibe. And suddenly, it's like, not only do we want your email address, but we also want your date of birth and your this and your that and we're going to call you. And then the email that they get is another tone of voice or the salespeople, that whole funnel thing, if it's not cohesive, it's going to lose you customers. So, I think from an SEO point of view, I think you need to think about how you manage that. It might not be that you even have those pages indexed necessarily, but think about the user experience and that there's a consistent user voice all the way through your lead gen funnel. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes back to what we were saying before that when you deal with this kind of content, it's the larger picture that's important. Because as you say, you might not have that page indexed. You might have the blog post funnel them through so that the blog post is what ranks and brings them in and then you funnel them to the downloadable, or the whatever it is. And I think that's where, when it comes to these kind of assets, or these kind of pages, it's your larger SEO strategy and how you'll say, for example, the strength of the domain overall as it relates to the topic. Those kind of things come into focus because it's usually not the on-page content for the webinar page that's driving your ranking. It's usually the fact that yeah, you're a super authority on that particular topic, or you have other ... whatever it is that's driving the rankings for that page. Because if it's just a per page basis, pretty much everybody has the same content. "Sign up for our webinar, enjoy webinars about blah blah, blah. You'll get great insights about blah, blah, blah from the webinar." It's like the uniqueness is not from the content on the webinar page. Let's be honest. Crystal Carter: When you're thinking about your lead gen, that's important to consider, is how to differentiate and how to make it clear that you're adding value and what value you're adding. I think that also with lead gen audiences, is absolutely key because you are nurturing ... it's part of a nurturing activity. So, you're expecting, particularly for B2B engagement, you're expecting that this will not be your only touchpoint with this particular user. They are going to see multiple pieces of content across your website, hopefully. They're potentially going to have some emails back and forth from your team, hopefully. They may even have a phone call from your team. So, this is not going to be the only touchpoint. So, it should be good quality and it should give them a feel that this is going to be something that adds value to them overall. So, I think that that's really important to think about as you go forward with lead gen. And so, if you don't have a clear idea of who your audience is, then it's difficult to add that cohesion in order to have a good quality SEO all the way through. And it also makes it very difficult to support it with wider marketing activity. So, for instance, if you have the lead gen activity and let's say the webinar's over and you put the webinar video up on the webpage and now that page is ranking generally. Your lead gen funnel will include people who come to the webpage, so that's an audience. And then people who watch the video, that's another audience. If that audience is very random and difficult to attribute, it's going to be more difficult and more expensive for you to do PPC or paid advertising for that audience. If that audience spends a lot of time on multiple different social media platforms and things like that, it's going to be difficult for you to focus your social media advertising on those particular things. If this audience reads lots of different publications and things, it's going to be difficult for you to target your campaigns and things like that. So, have a clear idea of your audience when you're doing lead gen and who you are trying to get leads from. It also helps your sales team to understand who they're talking to. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what you want. You don't want ... You want the system to have a qualified understanding of what the heck they're dealing with. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And very often to potentially get the audience idea from the sales team. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Now, speaking of your wider marketing efforts and leads, we have content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones, here to help us understand how you can effectively use content marketing to grab leads. Take it away, Kelsey. Kelsey Jones: Content marketing is really effective for grabbing leads because you're able to meet the audience at the exact moment where they're looking for information and also possibly looking to buy or become a client somewhere. So, my strategy when it comes to content marketing for lead generation is to think about all the angles of content that a potential customer may be looking for, and then also the stages of the sales or conversion funnel that they may be in. So, that really depends on if you're B2B or B2C obviously, but thinking of it as a moral, holistic approach and how you can generate leads at every step of the funnel, instead of just right before they're about to make a purchase, really does make a difference. So, for instance, I've joined email lists and newsletters for brands that maybe I'm not ready to purchase from them yet, but I really like their content and I really like the value they provide. So, by being able to connect with them ongoing when I am ready to make a purchase, then they're the first ones I think of. And so, that's a really holistic approach for content marketing that I think a lot of people forget, especially the execs team and the sales team, they want the leads right now. And as we in SEO and content marketing know, it's not always the case. And that doesn't always come easily, especially if your sales cycle is pretty long. I've worked with companies where their B2B sales cycle is up to 18 months. So, that's a long process and you want to be able to provide content to a potential client or a customer throughout that entire process. So, you're not only thinking of yourself as a potential business engagement for them, or a product they can purchase, but also as a source of education and truth. And so, that's why I always try to think of what content can we create where we're providing value to the customer or our target audience and showing them more about the industry, more about terms or norms in the industry that maybe they didn't know about, or new technology, or processes, and just helping them feel more competent in the industry and more educated. And I think the more often we do that, the more our target audience is able to trust us. So, thank you so much for letting me participate. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Kelsey. You can follow Kelsey @wonderwall7 on Twitter, W-O-N-D-E-R-W-A-L-L seven on Twitter, link that in the show notes. And she's incredibly on target in my opinion. Again, talking about it's a wider strategy, it's not an immediate thing. You have to think three steps before. If you're an SEO for example, who's very much ... and this is fine, that's who you are, who's very much within the exact strict confines of SEO, and you need a more holistic view of how the funnel might work, the pain points of the user, whatever, so speak with your content marketing team. They might be a great resource for you. They might be a great, first off, they'll be a great ally for you in dealing with let's say clients or internal stakeholders, say, "Hey, where are the leads? We them now." That team gets it. So, they will be an ally with you to say, "Hey, yes, we're with you. We're going to get these leads. Here's the process. Here's how long it's going to take. Patience, please. Patience is a virtue." But also, if you are on the more technical side of SEO and you want to get a wider, more holistic understanding of how the user's going to walk through this funnel, then the content marketing thing might be a great resource for you to help you expand out of your comfort zone. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's great to compare notes because if you're doing technical SEO, you're going to have a lot of information from a technical point of view about devices and different technical metrics that you can see from different bots that are being crawled and lots of different ways that people are accessing the site and lots of different things that people ... where people are getting errors, where people having touchpoint issues, things like that. So, I think it's important to compare notes and to build good relationships with the different parts of your team so that you're reducing friction across your funnel, so that you're building that trust that she's talking about. Because if people are coming up against technical impediments, technical challenges across your site, that's going to diminish trust. And some teams will be able to see that, some teams will be able to see other things. So, it's important to have good conversations with everyone all the way along. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of leads, one of the ways that some local service businesses, people like lawyers have been getting leads from the Google SERP are called local service ads. It's a special, high quality ad where Google has screened and vouched for the business and even to a certain extent, can provide financial guarantees designed to make the user feel safe, which is amazing in its own right that Google does that. But okay, leaving that little point of sigh for a moment, there have been some significant changes to these ads in, I'll say the relatively recent past, which leads us ... so sorry for that, leads us to a segment we call, is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Speaker 5: Is this new? Mordy Oberstein: No, and most things that we cover on this segment it is not- Crystal Carter: It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: ... it's not going to be new. It's not new. It's new-ish. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a used car. It's like five months old. Is it a new car? No. Is it an old car? Also no. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, I mean, it was owned by this lady. She just drove it back and forth to the supermarket. It's never been on the highway. It's totally fine, you'll love it, it's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, turns out the transmission's totally shot. She completely destroyed the car and now you're stuck with a lemon. Crystal Carter: It's totally fine. Mordy Oberstein: Let's just be honest here. So if you were to Google something like lawyer New York City, and if you were in the US, you might see a little sponsored label that says, "Google screened." And it's a series of little cards that show the picture of the lawyer, Mr. Morgan and Morgan, and their ratings. And it says how long they've been in service and you get a phone number and you click on it and you get more information and you call them up and folks pay to be featured there. They have to be screened to be featured there and they pay money for what essentially leads from the Google SERP. Now, Google in the relatively recent past in the early March, expanded the types of businesses that this feature is relevant for. So, now for example, beauty school establishments, or driving instructors, or childcare people, or funeral homes, that's morbid, can now apply for this special Google screening, Google guaranteed local service ad. The problem is at the same time, there's been a lot of fake reviews and spammy practices. Novel. In the local space, there's spam. I'm sorry, I broke the ... is that new? No, that is not new. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was somebody who was talking about this with garage door lending, that they were saying that there was someone who was abusing this particular system. I think it was- Mordy Oberstein: What often shows up in these kind of spaces, is they're not actual garage door providers per se. They're like call centers that farm you out different garages. I've spent time doing ... I have no life, googling things like New York City plumber and then calling up the phone numbers and then realizing that this is not an actual plumber. What they're doing is, they're a call center that plumbers pay for the leads. So, they farm you out to a plumber who's paying them to get the lead. So, it's like a lead within a lead and it's mind numbingly abusive, and these are the kind of things that plague these kind of spaces in local, which you wouldn't think would be happening because Google's supposedly screening and guaranteeing. Crystal Carter: So, I mean, this is something that the app Liaison has been working to manage and things. And I think that one of the things that's tricky for some of the local stuff is that there's so many players and there's so many players of different, with different tech stacks, and with different tech abilities, and with different marketing things. So, within the local space, you're going to get a lot of new entrepreneurs and new smaller businesses, who maybe aren't as familiar with some of these tactics. So, I think it's a very difficult job to wrangle all of this on behalf of Google. But I think this is also one of the reasons why it's useful to get a little bit of guidance if you're looking to get involved with local search ads, to get a little bit of support if you're looking to get involved with local search ads. I would be remiss if we didn't bring up the local search ranking factors, which was also recently released from the team at White Spark. It's a fantastic report that talks all about different local search things and within it, they have a section that's all about LSA ranking factors. And one of the top ranking factors from the folks who were contributing to the report was a number of reviews, which is very, very interesting. So, I think that we are going to link to a few show notes of some of the examples of some of the local search ads, but you'll see that some of the ones who are on the top have a lot of reviews and it's something that's really valuable. So, the number of reviews is really valuable. The responsiveness to leads is ... also seems to be a ranking factor with regards to local search ads and hours of operation set on listing. And the report gives a total of 14 different factors. And it's worth thinking about that if you're getting involved in local search ads. Which if you are in any of the verticals in which it is, it is allowed, it's worth considering. Mordy Oberstein: They show at the top of the SERP, most visual thing there, if you're again, searching for a lawyer or whatever city, it's going to be the most noticeable thing there. Google gives you this check, a Google guarantee. So, you really feel like, all right. It's not like a regular ad where you have that real commercial transactional intent to click on it. This doesn't apply. Google's renaming or redefining the game with this by saying, "We guarantee this. We've screened these people." Even if you're not way, way, way bottom of the funnel, this is where you want to go. And it's something to keep up with because for example, the point about reviews is a great one because by the way, we've seen reports now from Jason Brown for example, that people are using ChatGPT to fluff up reviews, which didn't see that coming before that on the news, and I believe it was a couple weeks ago. But one of the more recent developments within the local service ads, LSAs, has been that you can now report some of the reviews being left in them. So, now if you see people ... so your competitors are leaving bad reviews on purpose, you can now theoretically flag some of these reviews and do something about it. So, if you are in this space, it's a space that's always changing. It's worthwhile to keep up with what's happening in there. Have a look what your ads ... Go to the SERP, see how your ads are appearing, sitting different ads that are appearing, see what features are now available there because new things are popping up all the time. Again, it's in the last month or so, there's been three or four new developments around local service ads, is why we're covering it here. So again, keep up with it. It's one of those things that it's like ... I don't know, there are things that you can leave and look at once a year and it'll be fine. There are things that you should be looking at, I don't know, once, twice a month, see what's going on. This is one of those. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I would say that it's worth getting a little bit of guidance on your local SEO, if it's something that's important to you. And whether you engage a consultant or agency, that's one consideration. I know that's not financially feasible for everyone, but we're going to do our follows later on and we'll follow someone who works in this space. But I would also say it's worth following some reliable local SEOs as well. So, Darren Shaw is a fantastic follow in this space. And also- Mordy Oberstein: Roy Hawkins is a great follow. Crystal Carter: Roy Hawkins is a fantastic follow in this space, they both speak about this a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Jason Brown, Greg Gifford, there's endless number of amazing local SEOs. Elizabeth Rule. Crystal Carter: Emily Fuller's also talked about this as well. So yeah, do keep an eye out on this. It's something that's worth looking up. But yeah, if you go to Twitter and type in LSA and SEO, you should get some folks who are worth looking at and we'll be able to point you to some really good resources around this and will help you bulk up some of your local SEO knowledge. And also, we should give a shout out to Crystal Tank from our recent Wix SEO webinar who also knows all of the things about local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, perhaps there's been some latest developments that we have not covered around local service ads that perhaps are in this week's news. Perhaps not. We don't know because we haven't done the news yet. Crystal Carter: We haven't done the news yet. Are you going to do it now? Mordy Oberstein: We're going to do it right now. Get ready, get set. Here's this week's version of the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Two in the bag for you today with one from a non-typical source. Sorry Barry, they can't all be your articles. Up first from The Wall Street Journal. Google plans to make search more personal with AI chat and video clips. So, it seems Google will be making some big announcements around its new search engine, Magi, Magi, Magi, I don't know how to pronounce it. M-A-G-I. No, no one knows how to pronounce it at its Google IO event. The Wall Street Journal says a new changes would quote, "Nudge the service further away from a traditional format known in informally as the 10 blue links. Google plans to make its search engine more visual, snackable, personal and human, with a focus on serving young people globally according to the documents." The documents being referred to there, I guess the leaks they got that have spread these rumors to them. I have very strong thoughts on this. I will not share them here, but we do plan on doing a special episode of the SERP's Up Podcast after Google IO, so maybe I'll share them there. After the actual event and the actual announcements. Okay, by the way, hat tip to Glen Gay for finding this article, sharing the article, follow Glen on Twitter. He shares a lot of great articles on Twitter. Okay, it's Barry time, cue MC Hammer music. Per Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, "Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content." Oh, my. In a nutshell, he did ... by the way, the oh my was me. Barry did not add that to the title. In a nutshell, Google says, "Hey, don't want folks syndicating your content to outrank you? Well, the canonical tag is not the solution for you. Just have them no-index the content because that's what all people who are paying for this indication want to pay for the content and not to rank." I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, to the point where if I were a dolphin, I wouldn't be Flipper, I'd be flippant. Barry asked at the end of the article, "Can you force them?" Meaning the people syndicating your content, "... to block the content from Google? I doubt it." The answer by the way, is yes, you can. You have it in the contract that they have to no-index the content. Some creators today try to force this with a canonical in the contract, but now that doesn't help anymore. So, all right, whatever. But you theoretically could do the same thing by asking for a no-index in the contract. Good luck to you with that. These complications are why you need to decide if, when you decide to syndicate your content or not to syndicate your content, if you really want to go through with it or not, because you may very well not rank above the syndication itself. It's why some big publishers have actually stopped syndication in the past. People actually do decide to or not to syndicate based upon the traffic implications to their website because of this. So, theoretically, you could ask for the no-index. Good luck asking a big news organization to add a no-index tag to their content. They won't get any of the traffic. They're actually paying for the content and syndicating the content so they get traffic. So, it's complicated. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. So much news, so much help. So much newsieness, it's all news, all the time. Love the news. Crystal Carter: News. Mordy Oberstein: What's new? Crystal Carter: It's what's new in the news. Mordy Oberstein: In the news. You know what would be new in the news? If we didn't cover an article from Barry Schwartz one week? Not that I want that. I love covering Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: I mean, he writes so many articles about the SEO things. Yeah, you're right Mordy Oberstein: It's be unfortunate new- Crystal Carter: It would be- Mordy Oberstein: ... bad new. Not all new is good new. Some new is bad new. Crystal Carter: Good strange, bad new. Mordy Oberstein: Marvelous, marvelous. Well, let's just shepherd this all along as we get into who you should be following for more social awesomeness around SEO. And this week's follow is Crystal Horton. Crystal Carter: Yes, Crystal Horton is a fantastic local SEO and she's worked on some of these LSA ads. She works a lot with new businesses, helping them get involved in local SEO. She's also fantastically smart and clever and warm and very engaging online. And she's also very competitive. I did a Twitter space with her and I was like, "So what's your general goal with SEO?" And she was like, "Destroy the competition." I was like, "Okay, all right." Mordy Oberstein: Nice. No mercy, take no prisoners. Crystal Carter: I know. And I think that when you're working on an SEO campaign, are you working with someone who's SEO, if they've got that instinct that's going to work well for you. So, a big follow to you, Crystal Horton, you're fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Another Crystal, two Crystals for the price of one on this episode. There's so many Crystals in SEO, it's amazing. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: It's marvelous. So, you can follow Crystal Horton @imcrystal, that's not I am, it's I-M the letter. It's not, I am as in I-A-M. I-M Crystal with a C, H-O-R-T-O-N, I'll link to that in the show notes, so you don't have to rely on my botched spelling. Crystal Carter: It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's fine. Crystal Horton on Twitter, you'll find her. Crystal Carter: Woo. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, I think we've shepherded this episode and we have led it to its natural conclusion. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we found our way back. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that was so bad. Crystal Carter: But you might have some other puns. Mordy Oberstein: There's always room from war puns. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: But instead of doing that, we'll spare you. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episodes. We dive into building SEO momentum for growth. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Glenn Gabe Kelsey Jones Jason Brown Greg Gifford Joy Hawkins Elizabeth Rule Krystal Taing Darren Shaw Amalia Fowler Crystal Horton Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google Local Service Ads Gains More Service Type Google Local Service Ads Seeing A Lot Of Fake Reviews You Can Now Report Some Reviews On Google Local Service Ads: News: Google Plans to Make Search More ‘Personal’ with AI Chat and Video Clips Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Glenn Gabe Kelsey Jones Jason Brown Greg Gifford Joy Hawkins Elizabeth Rule Krystal Taing Darren Shaw Amalia Fowler Crystal Horton Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google Local Service Ads Gains More Service Type Google Local Service Ads Seeing A Lot Of Fake Reviews You Can Now Report Some Reviews On Google Local Service Ads: News: Google Plans to Make Search More ‘Personal’ with AI Chat and Video Clips Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. And I'm joined by the astonishing, the astounding, the awe-inspiring, fabulous, fantastic, implausible, improbable, incredible, miraculous, phenomenal, remarkable, singular, spectacular, strange, stunning, unbelievable, unusual, wonderful wondrous head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I just had a micro machines flashback. My goodness there, Mr. Oberstein, that's quite a lot of adjectives. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know what strange is doing in there as a synonym for marvelous. Crystal Carter: I didn't know, is that what ... What did ChatGPT telling you to say? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm just looking at thesaurus.com. I put in marvelous, and I just read them off. And strange, did you know it was a synonym for marvelous? I did not know that. Crystal Carter: If something fills you with ... that want to marvel at, it might be strange. It might be good strange, like, "Oh, this is a-" Mordy Oberstein: Like me. Crystal Carter: ... yeah, if I walked into my house and there was a 300 bouquets of roses, that would be strange. It would be good strange, as long as I don't have to clean up the roses when they're all dead. But it would still be strange. Mordy Oberstein: That's marvelous. Crystal Carter: It would be marvelous as well. Mordy Oberstein: Marvelous. Yes, marvelous. You know what else is marvelous? The fact that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the leads, well we don't have the leads, but we have a tools to help you capture the leads, like all sorts of light box templates and options, chat interfaces, and a heap of analytics to help you see trends about your people such as leads per source analytics support, and much more. Capture, manage your leads with Wix, which leads us to what we're talking about on this episode, which in case you have in guess is leads and SEO. Crystal Carter: Leads. Mordy Oberstein: Not like the place in England. Leeds, Live at Leeds, L-E-A-D-S, leads. Yes. Leads in SEO. How you can capture and bring in those coveted leads with SEO. We're talking things like the challenges of trying to capture leads via SEO. What makes SEO for lead generation different from all other forms of SEO, the mindset that makes for good SEO.In trying to capture leads and more. We're going to then kick it up a notch as content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones shares how to use content marketing to effectively drive leads. Plus we'll explore a little old SERP feature that drives leads, that has undergone some significant changes. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social. Grab your sheep as we shepherd you and lead you to the Promised Land on episode number 37 of the SERP's Up podcast where we talk about leads. Crystal Carter: We talk about leads and sheeps and- Mordy Oberstein: And sheep. Crystal Carter: ... and sheep. I must give a shout out to Jon Payne who is an SEO at an agency called Noisy Little Monkey, and who before being an SEO was actually a shepherd. Mordy Oberstein: No way. Crystal Carter: That was his actual, literal job was a shepherd. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I just sitting around thinking it seems like the job for that would be a shepherd. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I feel like the sheep aren't going to give you a lot of back chat. Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: You can just sit and contemplate and ... although I think the weather can be tricky, I looked at some throwback shepherd outfits. They used to have these giant felt coat things that you could sit in and it was kind of like a tent and a coat and things. If you go on Pinterest, they're amazing. Anyway, we have led ourselves astray. We are going to come back to our lead gen conversation. So yes, today we're talking about lead gen SEO, which if anyone has ever worked in B2B SEO, this is very often the general ethos behind what you're doing. This is slightly different from e-commerce SEO where very often, you have someone where you're like, "Hey, we have a product that we sell." They come to the website, they click on the product, they buy the product, they get the product delivered to them. The hey, bang, presto. Fairly straightforward with regards to attribution, with regards to figuring out the ROI of your SEO activity and things like that. Lead gen SEO on the other hand can mean lots and lots of things and it can mean that you're trying to get an email, you're trying to get a signup, you're trying to get a phone call, you're trying to get general engagement. You're trying to get something that gets you to get a relationship with a potential user so that you can follow up with further activity with your SEO and your other marketing information. One of the things that can be tricky about lead gen SEO is that particularly if you're thinking about content marketing, sometimes you need to have the content that works for the top of the funnel. You need to have that informational, engaging sort of content. But some of that stuff can be a little bit undirect, or indirect is the word. So, for instance, if you were trying to market two shepherds when you were trying to think of what shall I do with all this time sat on a mountaintop for instance, you might want some content that's a bit more conversational about the life of a shepherd and what that entails and things like that. But if you are trying to sell them at some point to subscribe to your shepherd fitness thing, or whatever it may be, then ... I've gone off on this train of thought, I'm sorry, I'm just going to keep going… Mordy Oberstein: And they have a staff holding course, like how do you hold this shepherd staff? Crystal Carter: Yes. Let's say you have a staff holding course and let's say you need to convince them that that's something that they need to be into. Then you might not want to lead straight in with a buy this, buy this right now. So, it's more of nurturing a relationship. But sometimes that means you have to invent opportunities for conversion and sometimes they need to be a little bit less direct. So for instance, it might be that your conversion on the page is a softer conversion. So, rather than somebody buying something, maybe it's that they scrolled to a certain part of the page. Maybe it's that they played a video, maybe it's that they used a tool. So, Ross Simmons was saying one thing that's a really good lead gen thing is calculators for instance. So, let's say you want to calculate the maximum time that your sheep should be on a mountain. Let's say you've got a shepherd calculator on your website, that might be a really good tool for that particular audience. And then let's say you've also got a downloadable resource, that might also be a really good tool. We talked about some of that before. And what can happen with that is if it's part of your marketing funnel and your overall marketing strategy, these tools can often lead you to opportunities to have more direct marketing. So, for instance, if they've played a video, then you can take that information and you can advertise to the folks who have played that video maybe in another video space. So that your lead gen tool is part of a wider, wider marketing funnel that includes a less direct marketing, SEO content and also a more focused ad campaign. And the challenges of this can be tricky because if you've got all of these different wheels within wheels, if you have your information on top of the funnel content and then you have your ad strategy that comes in after users have engaged with that content, then that leads to attribution challenges. So, I had a conversation with Kevin Indig about this a while back and he was asking what's the hardest part about B2B SEO? And my response was showing ROI on the deals that can take months. Months. So, people can come to your website once, they can come back two months later, they can download something here, they can click on something there. And the attribution challenges of that can be very, very complex. And these are much more likely to show up in lead type businesses. For instance, like for lawyers, for instance, if somebody thinks they might need a lawyer, they might read a blog on your website, they might read another blog, they might go around and look at a few other things. There might be a few different touchpoints. So, how do you know which part of the funnel was the thing that sealed the deal for that particular client? So, that attribution thing can be really tricky. One of the people that seems to have touched on that significantly is Amy Bishop who covers it really, really well in an article. It's an old article actually, but it's an oldie but a goody. Mordy Oberstein: Oldie but a goody. Crystal Carter: An evergreen, as it were. So Amy Bishop covered this when she was talking about choosing an attribution model on search engine land and she covers lots of different ones there. I think a lot of SEOs will rely on first touch, or last touch, or first conversion, or assisted conversion, but sometimes there can be more touchpoints than that. And it's important to understand the full marketing journey in order to be able to demonstrate ROI, demonstrate the value, and to be able to get maximum value out of your lead gen SEO. Mordy Oberstein: It is so interesting because it demands that as an SEO, you start thinking a little bit like a marketer. We talked about this in a recent pod, last week's podcast. It all comes full circle because you need to start figuring out, okay, what are the assets that are going to drive the leads? How do I do the SEO on those assets? For example, webinars, most people do webinars as a form of lead gen. We at Wix do not, by the way, at least on the SEO side. Not to say that that's a bad thing to do. Let me rephrase that. If you do do that, it's a great way to get leads. But you need to think about what kind of audience is going to be attracted by that, how they're going to use that, and then how they're going to then go further down the funnel because of that one webinar. You really need to think about the challenges of once I have them, I need to make sure that the next asset also performs well. Crystal Carter: And also, you need to make sure that the leads that you're generating add value to the business and are not wasting the lead management team's time. So, for instance, let's say if you are doing a webinar and let's say you're doing a webinar and it's off-topic for your brand, it might be very, very popular to everyone who's showing up, might be very, very popular. But the leads that you get from that might not necessarily be valuable to the team. This happens a lot with competitions. So for instance, if you're doing a partnership and you're saying, "Oh hey, we're going to do a competition, we're going to give away something for free." Sometimes if the thing that you sell is very expensive, then you might get 200 people sign up to the competition, 2,000 people sign up to the competition and your sales team, who are used to closing deals which are worth a few thousand pounds or something, doesn't have time to call back or touch base with 200, 2,000 people who are very unlikely to purchase because they were looking for something free and the thing that you sell is more premium. So, it's very important to understand how that plays into it and double check the value of your leads when you're doing SEO. Super, super useful. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost like the same thing as grabbing irregardless traffic, there's no point in doing that. It's a waste of time. But in this case, you're actually doing harm because you have other teams working on this trying to grab those leads and convert them, when there's never a chance to begin with. And no one knows that except for you because you knew that webinar wasn't really on target. Right, Right. My point, that you always had to be thinking about ... The North compass should be like where the brand is going, what the brand is trying to do. To the point a second ago, just want to double back on that because the funnel is messy. So, you may have done a great job with the SEO and the webinar page and you've got them, and you signed them up and whatever it is, and now have their emails. What's really going to drive them now is now, they went to your webinar, they saw how wonderful a brand you are and the wonderful content you're putting out. They have a vague idea of what you do at this point, very, very vague. And the next time that they see you is they're doing a search for a product related to what you do or service that you do. If you don't rank there, you've missed out because what might grab them is not the fact that you've sent them an email after the webinar trying to sell them something. They may have not even opened that email now. What will grab them is they went to the webinar, they've done a search for the product that you sell and they say, "Hey, wait a second, that's the same ... Those are the same people that did the webinar. I'm going to buy it from them." But if you don't rank there, the second stage of that very messy funnel, what worth was the webinar? Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's very important to understand that it's all part of a full funnel, as well as making sure that you're covering those products. Make sure that you're covering those ideas as well. So, let's say you're inspiring people to do, I don't know, whatever particular idea it is that you're talking about at the webinar, you also need to cover those terms as well. So, think about where you're engaging people so that it makes sense. And I think also, it's worth double checking, in my experience, it's worth double checking with your teams where the leads are going. Mordy Oberstein: You want to make sure that what you're doing is actually working. Follow up with them like, "Are these leads good?" Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Are these leads good? Because my metrics are showing that everybody went to the webinar, they all went to this blog, they all went to this, they all did this great stuff. My metrics are showing that we had this many signups for this, or this, or this. Is that coming through. Mordy Oberstein: Right, because the data can only take you so far. You don't actually know what you have to qualify the data. The only way to qualify that data is actually talking to the people on the sales team who were actually working with the lead. So, I had a company I used to work with, that was something we did a lot of. There was a lot of conversation between what we were doing with say, our blog and what we were doing on sales and was it actually the people we were targeting? Was it actually working? Let me ask you a totally separate topic question. Well, not totally separate because we're on the same topic of leads, but you're doing something like you're getting the lead, a downloadable asset, a webinar, whatever it is. Often, do you find that the content on those pages are a challenge, or the content strategy from an SEO point of view is a challenge? Because those pages don't tend to be overly rich with content. Crystal Carter: Yeah, a lot of those pages will be CRO optimized for instance. And I think that it's important to make sure that you have consistency of voice across whatever it is you're doing. So, I think that even if the word count is low or whatever, you can still maintain consistency of voice. So, it shouldn't be where you go from a like a, "Hey everyone, let's all just learn and grow and stretch together." Let's say you've that's your webinar vibe. Let's say it's a wellness webinar, I don't know. And let's say you have that and then they get to- Mordy Oberstein: Wellness for shepherds. Crystal Carter: Wellness for shepherds, yes. So, let's say it's a wellness for shepherds, yoginar. Yoginar? Yoginar? Mordy Oberstein: I love that. That's a webinar about yoga. It's a yoginar. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh, me too, yoga- Mordy Oberstein: Or a Yogi Berra, which could also be a yoginar. Crystal Carter: So, let's say you're doing a webinar, and it's wellness stuff and it's all very friendly and it's all very ... and then they get to the downloadable thing and it's just a completely different vibe. And suddenly, it's like, not only do we want your email address, but we also want your date of birth and your this and your that and we're going to call you. And then the email that they get is another tone of voice or the salespeople, that whole funnel thing, if it's not cohesive, it's going to lose you customers. So, I think from an SEO point of view, I think you need to think about how you manage that. It might not be that you even have those pages indexed necessarily, but think about the user experience and that there's a consistent user voice all the way through your lead gen funnel. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes back to what we were saying before that when you deal with this kind of content, it's the larger picture that's important. Because as you say, you might not have that page indexed. You might have the blog post funnel them through so that the blog post is what ranks and brings them in and then you funnel them to the downloadable, or the whatever it is. And I think that's where, when it comes to these kind of assets, or these kind of pages, it's your larger SEO strategy and how you'll say, for example, the strength of the domain overall as it relates to the topic. Those kind of things come into focus because it's usually not the on-page content for the webinar page that's driving your ranking. It's usually the fact that yeah, you're a super authority on that particular topic, or you have other ... whatever it is that's driving the rankings for that page. Because if it's just a per page basis, pretty much everybody has the same content. "Sign up for our webinar, enjoy webinars about blah blah, blah. You'll get great insights about blah, blah, blah from the webinar." It's like the uniqueness is not from the content on the webinar page. Let's be honest. Crystal Carter: When you're thinking about your lead gen, that's important to consider, is how to differentiate and how to make it clear that you're adding value and what value you're adding. I think that also with lead gen audiences, is absolutely key because you are nurturing ... it's part of a nurturing activity. So, you're expecting, particularly for B2B engagement, you're expecting that this will not be your only touchpoint with this particular user. They are going to see multiple pieces of content across your website, hopefully. They're potentially going to have some emails back and forth from your team, hopefully. They may even have a phone call from your team. So, this is not going to be the only touchpoint. So, it should be good quality and it should give them a feel that this is going to be something that adds value to them overall. So, I think that that's really important to think about as you go forward with lead gen. And so, if you don't have a clear idea of who your audience is, then it's difficult to add that cohesion in order to have a good quality SEO all the way through. And it also makes it very difficult to support it with wider marketing activity. So, for instance, if you have the lead gen activity and let's say the webinar's over and you put the webinar video up on the webpage and now that page is ranking generally. Your lead gen funnel will include people who come to the webpage, so that's an audience. And then people who watch the video, that's another audience. If that audience is very random and difficult to attribute, it's going to be more difficult and more expensive for you to do PPC or paid advertising for that audience. If that audience spends a lot of time on multiple different social media platforms and things like that, it's going to be difficult for you to focus your social media advertising on those particular things. If this audience reads lots of different publications and things, it's going to be difficult for you to target your campaigns and things like that. So, have a clear idea of your audience when you're doing lead gen and who you are trying to get leads from. It also helps your sales team to understand who they're talking to. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what you want. You don't want ... You want the system to have a qualified understanding of what the heck they're dealing with. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And very often to potentially get the audience idea from the sales team. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Now, speaking of your wider marketing efforts and leads, we have content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones, here to help us understand how you can effectively use content marketing to grab leads. Take it away, Kelsey. Kelsey Jones: Content marketing is really effective for grabbing leads because you're able to meet the audience at the exact moment where they're looking for information and also possibly looking to buy or become a client somewhere. So, my strategy when it comes to content marketing for lead generation is to think about all the angles of content that a potential customer may be looking for, and then also the stages of the sales or conversion funnel that they may be in. So, that really depends on if you're B2B or B2C obviously, but thinking of it as a moral, holistic approach and how you can generate leads at every step of the funnel, instead of just right before they're about to make a purchase, really does make a difference. So, for instance, I've joined email lists and newsletters for brands that maybe I'm not ready to purchase from them yet, but I really like their content and I really like the value they provide. So, by being able to connect with them ongoing when I am ready to make a purchase, then they're the first ones I think of. And so, that's a really holistic approach for content marketing that I think a lot of people forget, especially the execs team and the sales team, they want the leads right now. And as we in SEO and content marketing know, it's not always the case. And that doesn't always come easily, especially if your sales cycle is pretty long. I've worked with companies where their B2B sales cycle is up to 18 months. So, that's a long process and you want to be able to provide content to a potential client or a customer throughout that entire process. So, you're not only thinking of yourself as a potential business engagement for them, or a product they can purchase, but also as a source of education and truth. And so, that's why I always try to think of what content can we create where we're providing value to the customer or our target audience and showing them more about the industry, more about terms or norms in the industry that maybe they didn't know about, or new technology, or processes, and just helping them feel more competent in the industry and more educated. And I think the more often we do that, the more our target audience is able to trust us. So, thank you so much for letting me participate. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Kelsey. You can follow Kelsey @wonderwall7 on Twitter, W-O-N-D-E-R-W-A-L-L seven on Twitter, link that in the show notes. And she's incredibly on target in my opinion. Again, talking about it's a wider strategy, it's not an immediate thing. You have to think three steps before. If you're an SEO for example, who's very much ... and this is fine, that's who you are, who's very much within the exact strict confines of SEO, and you need a more holistic view of how the funnel might work, the pain points of the user, whatever, so speak with your content marketing team. They might be a great resource for you. They might be a great, first off, they'll be a great ally for you in dealing with let's say clients or internal stakeholders, say, "Hey, where are the leads? We them now." That team gets it. So, they will be an ally with you to say, "Hey, yes, we're with you. We're going to get these leads. Here's the process. Here's how long it's going to take. Patience, please. Patience is a virtue." But also, if you are on the more technical side of SEO and you want to get a wider, more holistic understanding of how the user's going to walk through this funnel, then the content marketing thing might be a great resource for you to help you expand out of your comfort zone. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's great to compare notes because if you're doing technical SEO, you're going to have a lot of information from a technical point of view about devices and different technical metrics that you can see from different bots that are being crawled and lots of different ways that people are accessing the site and lots of different things that people ... where people are getting errors, where people having touchpoint issues, things like that. So, I think it's important to compare notes and to build good relationships with the different parts of your team so that you're reducing friction across your funnel, so that you're building that trust that she's talking about. Because if people are coming up against technical impediments, technical challenges across your site, that's going to diminish trust. And some teams will be able to see that, some teams will be able to see other things. So, it's important to have good conversations with everyone all the way along. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of leads, one of the ways that some local service businesses, people like lawyers have been getting leads from the Google SERP are called local service ads. It's a special, high quality ad where Google has screened and vouched for the business and even to a certain extent, can provide financial guarantees designed to make the user feel safe, which is amazing in its own right that Google does that. But okay, leaving that little point of sigh for a moment, there have been some significant changes to these ads in, I'll say the relatively recent past, which leads us ... so sorry for that, leads us to a segment we call, is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Speaker 5: Is this new? Mordy Oberstein: No, and most things that we cover on this segment it is not- Crystal Carter: It's not new. Mordy Oberstein: ... it's not going to be new. It's not new. It's new-ish. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a used car. It's like five months old. Is it a new car? No. Is it an old car? Also no. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, I mean, it was owned by this lady. She just drove it back and forth to the supermarket. It's never been on the highway. It's totally fine, you'll love it, it's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, turns out the transmission's totally shot. She completely destroyed the car and now you're stuck with a lemon. Crystal Carter: It's totally fine. Mordy Oberstein: Let's just be honest here. So if you were to Google something like lawyer New York City, and if you were in the US, you might see a little sponsored label that says, "Google screened." And it's a series of little cards that show the picture of the lawyer, Mr. Morgan and Morgan, and their ratings. And it says how long they've been in service and you get a phone number and you click on it and you get more information and you call them up and folks pay to be featured there. They have to be screened to be featured there and they pay money for what essentially leads from the Google SERP. Now, Google in the relatively recent past in the early March, expanded the types of businesses that this feature is relevant for. So, now for example, beauty school establishments, or driving instructors, or childcare people, or funeral homes, that's morbid, can now apply for this special Google screening, Google guaranteed local service ad. The problem is at the same time, there's been a lot of fake reviews and spammy practices. Novel. In the local space, there's spam. I'm sorry, I broke the ... is that new? No, that is not new. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was somebody who was talking about this with garage door lending, that they were saying that there was someone who was abusing this particular system. I think it was- Mordy Oberstein: What often shows up in these kind of spaces, is they're not actual garage door providers per se. They're like call centers that farm you out different garages. I've spent time doing ... I have no life, googling things like New York City plumber and then calling up the phone numbers and then realizing that this is not an actual plumber. What they're doing is, they're a call center that plumbers pay for the leads. So, they farm you out to a plumber who's paying them to get the lead. So, it's like a lead within a lead and it's mind numbingly abusive, and these are the kind of things that plague these kind of spaces in local, which you wouldn't think would be happening because Google's supposedly screening and guaranteeing. Crystal Carter: So, I mean, this is something that the app Liaison has been working to manage and things. And I think that one of the things that's tricky for some of the local stuff is that there's so many players and there's so many players of different, with different tech stacks, and with different tech abilities, and with different marketing things. So, within the local space, you're going to get a lot of new entrepreneurs and new smaller businesses, who maybe aren't as familiar with some of these tactics. So, I think it's a very difficult job to wrangle all of this on behalf of Google. But I think this is also one of the reasons why it's useful to get a little bit of guidance if you're looking to get involved with local search ads, to get a little bit of support if you're looking to get involved with local search ads. I would be remiss if we didn't bring up the local search ranking factors, which was also recently released from the team at White Spark. It's a fantastic report that talks all about different local search things and within it, they have a section that's all about LSA ranking factors. And one of the top ranking factors from the folks who were contributing to the report was a number of reviews, which is very, very interesting. So, I think that we are going to link to a few show notes of some of the examples of some of the local search ads, but you'll see that some of the ones who are on the top have a lot of reviews and it's something that's really valuable. So, the number of reviews is really valuable. The responsiveness to leads is ... also seems to be a ranking factor with regards to local search ads and hours of operation set on listing. And the report gives a total of 14 different factors. And it's worth thinking about that if you're getting involved in local search ads. Which if you are in any of the verticals in which it is, it is allowed, it's worth considering. Mordy Oberstein: They show at the top of the SERP, most visual thing there, if you're again, searching for a lawyer or whatever city, it's going to be the most noticeable thing there. Google gives you this check, a Google guarantee. So, you really feel like, all right. It's not like a regular ad where you have that real commercial transactional intent to click on it. This doesn't apply. Google's renaming or redefining the game with this by saying, "We guarantee this. We've screened these people." Even if you're not way, way, way bottom of the funnel, this is where you want to go. And it's something to keep up with because for example, the point about reviews is a great one because by the way, we've seen reports now from Jason Brown for example, that people are using ChatGPT to fluff up reviews, which didn't see that coming before that on the news, and I believe it was a couple weeks ago. But one of the more recent developments within the local service ads, LSAs, has been that you can now report some of the reviews being left in them. So, now if you see people ... so your competitors are leaving bad reviews on purpose, you can now theoretically flag some of these reviews and do something about it. So, if you are in this space, it's a space that's always changing. It's worthwhile to keep up with what's happening in there. Have a look what your ads ... Go to the SERP, see how your ads are appearing, sitting different ads that are appearing, see what features are now available there because new things are popping up all the time. Again, it's in the last month or so, there's been three or four new developments around local service ads, is why we're covering it here. So again, keep up with it. It's one of those things that it's like ... I don't know, there are things that you can leave and look at once a year and it'll be fine. There are things that you should be looking at, I don't know, once, twice a month, see what's going on. This is one of those. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I would say that it's worth getting a little bit of guidance on your local SEO, if it's something that's important to you. And whether you engage a consultant or agency, that's one consideration. I know that's not financially feasible for everyone, but we're going to do our follows later on and we'll follow someone who works in this space. But I would also say it's worth following some reliable local SEOs as well. So, Darren Shaw is a fantastic follow in this space. And also- Mordy Oberstein: Roy Hawkins is a great follow. Crystal Carter: Roy Hawkins is a fantastic follow in this space, they both speak about this a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Jason Brown, Greg Gifford, there's endless number of amazing local SEOs. Elizabeth Rule. Crystal Carter: Emily Fuller's also talked about this as well. So yeah, do keep an eye out on this. It's something that's worth looking up. But yeah, if you go to Twitter and type in LSA and SEO, you should get some folks who are worth looking at and we'll be able to point you to some really good resources around this and will help you bulk up some of your local SEO knowledge. And also, we should give a shout out to Crystal Tank from our recent Wix SEO webinar who also knows all of the things about local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: So with that, perhaps there's been some latest developments that we have not covered around local service ads that perhaps are in this week's news. Perhaps not. We don't know because we haven't done the news yet. Crystal Carter: We haven't done the news yet. Are you going to do it now? Mordy Oberstein: We're going to do it right now. Get ready, get set. Here's this week's version of the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Two in the bag for you today with one from a non-typical source. Sorry Barry, they can't all be your articles. Up first from The Wall Street Journal. Google plans to make search more personal with AI chat and video clips. So, it seems Google will be making some big announcements around its new search engine, Magi, Magi, Magi, I don't know how to pronounce it. M-A-G-I. No, no one knows how to pronounce it at its Google IO event. The Wall Street Journal says a new changes would quote, "Nudge the service further away from a traditional format known in informally as the 10 blue links. Google plans to make its search engine more visual, snackable, personal and human, with a focus on serving young people globally according to the documents." The documents being referred to there, I guess the leaks they got that have spread these rumors to them. I have very strong thoughts on this. I will not share them here, but we do plan on doing a special episode of the SERP's Up Podcast after Google IO, so maybe I'll share them there. After the actual event and the actual announcements. Okay, by the way, hat tip to Glen Gay for finding this article, sharing the article, follow Glen on Twitter. He shares a lot of great articles on Twitter. Okay, it's Barry time, cue MC Hammer music. Per Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, "Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content." Oh, my. In a nutshell, he did ... by the way, the oh my was me. Barry did not add that to the title. In a nutshell, Google says, "Hey, don't want folks syndicating your content to outrank you? Well, the canonical tag is not the solution for you. Just have them no-index the content because that's what all people who are paying for this indication want to pay for the content and not to rank." I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, to the point where if I were a dolphin, I wouldn't be Flipper, I'd be flippant. Barry asked at the end of the article, "Can you force them?" Meaning the people syndicating your content, "... to block the content from Google? I doubt it." The answer by the way, is yes, you can. You have it in the contract that they have to no-index the content. Some creators today try to force this with a canonical in the contract, but now that doesn't help anymore. So, all right, whatever. But you theoretically could do the same thing by asking for a no-index in the contract. Good luck to you with that. These complications are why you need to decide if, when you decide to syndicate your content or not to syndicate your content, if you really want to go through with it or not, because you may very well not rank above the syndication itself. It's why some big publishers have actually stopped syndication in the past. People actually do decide to or not to syndicate based upon the traffic implications to their website because of this. So, theoretically, you could ask for the no-index. Good luck asking a big news organization to add a no-index tag to their content. They won't get any of the traffic. They're actually paying for the content and syndicating the content so they get traffic. So, it's complicated. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. So much news, so much help. So much newsieness, it's all news, all the time. Love the news. Crystal Carter: News. Mordy Oberstein: What's new? Crystal Carter: It's what's new in the news. Mordy Oberstein: In the news. You know what would be new in the news? If we didn't cover an article from Barry Schwartz one week? Not that I want that. I love covering Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: I mean, he writes so many articles about the SEO things. Yeah, you're right Mordy Oberstein: It's be unfortunate new- Crystal Carter: It would be- Mordy Oberstein: ... bad new. Not all new is good new. Some new is bad new. Crystal Carter: Good strange, bad new. Mordy Oberstein: Marvelous, marvelous. Well, let's just shepherd this all along as we get into who you should be following for more social awesomeness around SEO. And this week's follow is Crystal Horton. Crystal Carter: Yes, Crystal Horton is a fantastic local SEO and she's worked on some of these LSA ads. She works a lot with new businesses, helping them get involved in local SEO. She's also fantastically smart and clever and warm and very engaging online. And she's also very competitive. I did a Twitter space with her and I was like, "So what's your general goal with SEO?" And she was like, "Destroy the competition." I was like, "Okay, all right." Mordy Oberstein: Nice. No mercy, take no prisoners. Crystal Carter: I know. And I think that when you're working on an SEO campaign, are you working with someone who's SEO, if they've got that instinct that's going to work well for you. So, a big follow to you, Crystal Horton, you're fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Another Crystal, two Crystals for the price of one on this episode. There's so many Crystals in SEO, it's amazing. Crystal Carter: I know. Mordy Oberstein: It's marvelous. So, you can follow Crystal Horton @imcrystal, that's not I am, it's I-M the letter. It's not, I am as in I-A-M. I-M Crystal with a C, H-O-R-T-O-N, I'll link to that in the show notes, so you don't have to rely on my botched spelling. Crystal Carter: It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: It's fine. Crystal Horton on Twitter, you'll find her. Crystal Carter: Woo. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, I think we've shepherded this episode and we have led it to its natural conclusion. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we found our way back. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that was so bad. Crystal Carter: But you might have some other puns. Mordy Oberstein: There's always room from war puns. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: But instead of doing that, we'll spare you. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episodes. We dive into building SEO momentum for growth. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What is “entity SEO” and how can entities play a practical role when doing SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter break down the role that entities have in foundational SEO. The duo shares actual cases where understanding how Google deals with entities plays a major role in doing good SEO. Indeed’s SEO Product Manager, Gus Pelogia, joins the conversation to show you how to create targeted entity associations on your website. Plus, we explore YouTube’s contextual approach to entities. Don’t forget your name tag, as this week; we present the significance behind entities and SEO on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Why entity SEO matters so much! What is “entity SEO” and how can entities play a practical role when doing SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter break down the role that entities have in foundational SEO. The duo shares actual cases where understanding how Google deals with entities plays a major role in doing good SEO. Indeed’s SEO Product Manager, Gus Pelogia, joins the conversation to show you how to create targeted entity associations on your website. Plus, we explore YouTube’s contextual approach to entities. Don’t forget your name tag, as this week; we present the significance behind entities and SEO on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 79 | March 20, 2024 | 46 MIN 00:00 / 45:38 This week’s guests Gus Pelogia Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, incredible, the unequivocal, the always awesome head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello to everyone who is in a place doing a thing with a person and/or being. Mordy Oberstein: Or to people who are not with anybody and not doing anything. Crystal Carter: Not doing anything who are just existing in the world. Mordy Oberstein: Or my heroes really. Crystal Carter: But maybe are distinct individual. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you're doing. Crystal Carter: Do you see? Mordy Oberstein: I see what you're doing. Wow. Okay. That's a novel concept, which is also an example of what you're doing. And the audience has no idea what we're doing. But the audience is also another example of what we're talking about themselves. Crystal Carter: Exactly. The concept and idea- Mordy Oberstein: Some places, things. Crystal Carter: Something that's distinct and maybe has a geolocation. Maybe people have lots of knowledge about it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, oh. Maybe we should break a panel about this. Crystal Carter: Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Mordy Oberstein: We could show a graph. Crystal Carter: Right. We could make a graph. People could claim the panel. Maybe that can be a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I'll claim to it. Me. It's my panel. Mordy Oberstein: I have no claims to anything. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by enigmas everywhere. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter where you can download checklists, cheat sheets, one-pagers and more at our resource center. And where you can also integrate your clients' sites with Microsoft Clarity, with our native app built with the Microsoft Team. It's CRO for all. All as in all the people, all the places, all the things, all the concept, which is also a thing. All the entities from this world and beyond as this week, we're chatting the practical value of understanding entities for SEO, which now our jokes from beforehand make sense, I think. Jokes are also an entity. We're looking at how entities play a role in SEO, how far-reaching entities are when thinking about SEO, and actual cases where entities factor into practical SEO decisions. And Indeed's own Gus Pelogia chimes in on how to decide what entities to target on your clients' sites. Plus, we take a look at some entity understanding as seen on YouTube and what that might mean for SEO. And of course, we have your snap piece of SEO news. So, you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, join us as we help you get your things in order on this the 79th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Okay, so entities. Entities, one of the more complicated areas of SEO, certainly one of the more abstract ones once you start thinking about it. And when you start thinking about it, it's one of the more important areas of SEO. So, let's break this down into its simpler parts. Google wants to have a semantic understanding of things and wants to know how all of the things are connected and the relationships that one thing have with another thing, how they impact other things. Context. It's called context. And context helps us understand things in a non-linear way. For example, as a teacher, when I taught in the fourth grade, one of the ways you build vocabulary is something called the context clues. You say, "Hey, here's a sentence with a hard word." What does the context teach you about what this word might mean? So, it's super important for understanding things and it's super important for getting even basic facts right. Context is super important to Google. It wants to understand how things relate to one another. And it's been a major focus of Google since circa 2012. Why? Because I can search for something like Yankee Stadium and Google can take that quite literally and give me info just on the stadium. But if Google understood its context and connections, it might be able to offer me information about the stadium as being a landmark in New York or as a revolutionary example of early stadium construction as I probably meant it. It can give me something in connection to the actual team that plays in the stadium. When I search for Yankee Stadium, I don't care. But yeah, when it was built, I care about it in connection to the team, which the only way to understand that is through contextual connections. To do this, Google created something called the Knowledge Graph. Insert audio awesomeness. So, some kind of ominous sound of knowledge. Yeah, thank you. It's basically a collection of data points or objects and how closely they sit to each other. Sounds abstract? Sort of. Eighty percent of all mentions of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." I don't know if that's actually true, but I'm making that. Let's just say that 80% of all mention of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." Google can say, "Okay, we have two entities here, two objects, a table and a chair," and they are related because we see them being connected so often in content out there. So, they'll say... well, Google will say, "There's a strong connection between a table and," get this, "chairs." Amazing. With that however, with that collection of information, Google can do a lot of things with that association. You can understand how closely a table and chair are connected. And those are things that might be easy for us to understand, but for a bot, that's not, and that rhymes I'm Dr. Seuss, which he says- Crystal Carter: A different entity. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Google can store these objects and relationships in a database, which again, we call the Knowledge Graph. Cue sound effect. And then, show us all sorts of cool stuff. So, for example, let's actually get into this, if I search for Michael Jordan, not only do I get a knowledge graph that shows me a link to his stats and his age. By the way, he's 60, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Oh, man. I feel that. Mordy Oberstein: We are so old. Crystal Carter: I want to be like Mike, maybe I guess. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Just seeing that he's 60 makes my knees hurt. Crystal Carter: That's ouch. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, it also gives me an option to look at the movies he's in like Space Jam because Google knows a big part of Michael Jordan's identity is that particular movie. It also shows me a list of Bulls coaches. Bulls being the team he played on in case you don't know. Because Michael Jordan and the coach he played for, Phil Jackson, are a big part of the Michael Jordan narrative. So, this knowledge graph or this knowledge panel makes that connection between Michael Jordan and the coach because it knows that they are very closely related. But there are far more implications but beyond cool stuff that Google can show you on the result page itself. Entities are here, entities are there, entities are everywhere. For example, concepts are entities. So, for example, contextualizing concepts on a page can help Google understand if your content hits the mark. So, let's say you're running about your kids' first trip to the doctor's office. There are all sorts of different concepts that you can go into within your content from having your kids feel comfortable on their first doctor trip to questions about insurance, to when to first take the kid for their first doctor appointment. And ensuring you have all these topics or concepts and that they're addressed on the page can, A, help Google to better understand that your content, it semantically relates to the topic and they can help it build confidence that you address the core topic well. It can also mean, for example, that you can pretty much naturally focus on phraseology. Not a particular keyword because Google semantically understands that they're all kind of related to each other so you don't have the keyword over and over and over again. You can use interchangeably related similar phraseology and terms that are all semantically related because Google gets that all of these terms are the same concept or the same entity. So, that's where I think there are a lot of SEO implications that can help you factor into your day-to-day SEO decisions because entities are concepts and concepts are reflected in language, and Google is semantically looking at language. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that there's so many things to unpack there. The biographical entity about using the example of Michael Jordan, that one's really interesting because Google has lots of things to go on. And with a biographical entity, there's very often a Wikipedia page, there's an individual person page. You have things like even for people who are less famous than Michael Jordan. You'll have things like your LinkedIn and there'll be... a person will have a digital trail and digital things that they've done. They went to college, or they worked at a job, or they did this, that or the other. And all of those entities, if you went to a certain college, then that college will also have an entity online. So, they can connect that. A good example that Barry Adams often shows is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he's somebody who's interesting because as an entity, he was the world's strongest man sort of thing. He was a bodybuilder for ages. He was also a governor. He was also an action star. Mordy Oberstein: Of California. Crystal Carter: Governor of California. He's also an action star. His biographical entity includes Maria Shriver, but it also kind of includes JFK because she's related to JFK. It also includes other people who are in the bodybuilding space, that sort of thing. So, that's really interesting. And you also talked about Google making lots of connections, but Google also does a lot of disambiguation with that context that you were talking about. So, if I said Chicago or Asia or Texas, those are all places. Those are also all bands. So, if I said- Mordy Oberstein: I like what you did there. Crystal Carter: Right. So, if I said Chicago latest album, they wouldn't give me information about the city and that they'd probably be confused about Chicago's latest album because I don't think they've made an album in ages. But for instance, Google will disambiguate. So, for sometimes if you just enter the word "Chicago" for instance, it'll say, "Do you mean the city or do you mean the band?" And they understand that those two things are different entities. And there's context around the different words that will help them to do that. You also mentioned how you don't always need certain keywords. A really good example of this is I put a... there's a great tool I've referenced a lot called TextRazor, which pulls out entities and helps you understand how machines understand entities. And I put in the description for the Barbie movie and it says, "Barbie and Ken go on an adventure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It never says anything about Barbie being a toy. It doesn't even say anything about Mattel in the description for the movie. But when I put it into this tool that was pulling out of the entities, it was like, yes, this is Barbie. She's a fashion doll made by Mattel, et cetera, et cetera. And it understands that those things are related. Why? Because it's not just the word "Barbie," but it's also Barbie and Ken. So, the proximity of the word "Barbie" to the word "Ken" makes it very clear that that is that entity rather than just a person whose name Barbie because there are other people called Barbie. So, I think that the context is really important as well. And I think that entities, it can seems very complex as a thing. But a good way to get an idea of entities is to start digging around in Wikipedia. That's a really good place to get an idea of what things are entities and how things are related there. Carl, he has a great tool about the knowledge panel as well that you can look up. And also another one is in photos, for instance, Google Photos can pull out entities from your photos. And you talked about some of the concepts. So, in your photos, they can pull out dog, they can pull out cat for instance, but they can also pull out things that are a bit more ephemeral like sunsets or fog or mountains or outside, things like that. So, you can see the kinds of entities that they can do there. But it's a really fascinating space. And it seems a little bit complex, but actually, it's Google trying to make sense of the actual world. Another good example is, in England, there's something called a ladybird. And in America, they refer to that as a ladybug. If I am looking for information on ladybirds, a really good question is why are ladybirds different colors? Because if you've ever been to Ohio, they have orange ladybugs and they bite you and they're not very nice. They come out in autumn and there's a swarm of them. Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I'm never going back to Cleveland. Crystal Carter: So, if you're wondering why are they different colors, there's a reason why they're different colors and it has something to do with something else. But if I looked up why are ladybirds different colors, if the best information is an article about ladybugs, then Google will give me that because they understand that those two things are the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: So, basically, when you're talking about it, it's complicated, but it's not complicated. If you look at... there's basically two ways I think about entities. One is there's how you parse out the entity. So, for example, if I search for SEO, in the knowledge panel, I get tabs that say techniques, examples, basic requirements. So, Google's able to parse out topics and you can see that in the results themselves. Sometimes you'll see results for what is SEO or you might see results for SEO services. So, Google's looking at that entity of SEO and possibly meaning is it services, is it an area of understanding, and relating to it differently. And you see that very clearly sometimes. If you're in the US and you search for bears, you're going to get the Chicago Bears. If you search for dolphins, you're going to get the Miami Dolphins because it realizes that people don't care about animals as much as they do about sports teams. Crystal Carter: But what if they're looking for flippers, flipper on the dolphins these days? No? Mordy Oberstein: No. No one cares about flipper. No one cares about the lion. People care about the Lions. Crystal Carter: Okay. Here's my question. Do they have lions in the Detroit Zoo? Does Detroit have a zoo with lions? Mordy Oberstein: The zoo is the football field and the lions are the players. Crystal Carter: Do the Detroit Lions sponsor the lions at the Detroit Zoo? Because I feel like if they're not, they should. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Is there a Detroit Zoo? There has to be, right? Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I feel like there should, and I feel like they should have lions. Mordy Oberstein: I hope they would sponsor the lions. Maybe the lions should sponsor the team. The lions should actually get together. The animals get together and say, "Hey, you know what? We're having an image problem here. The football team is outshining us. We should sponsor them to outshine them in their own platform." Own the narrative kind of thing. Crystal Carter: See, here's the other thing about that is that sometimes, that can be a real challenge if there's an entity that is the same- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, that's a real problem, but that's an actual example. If you're talking about lions, you need to realize the only place you're showing up here is in the image box. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And if you were the Detroit Zoo and you had lions- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, big problem. Crystal Carter: Another great example is Taylor Swift and the Jets. So, Taylor Swift jets, she went to the Jets game, and I think Brittany Miller was talking about this online. She's like, "Is this her working the entity that people have been talking about Taylor Swift jets and that whole situation?" And also that's another idea. News items can become entities. So, if there's been an occurrence or something and there's lots of information about it and lots of things related to that, that can essentially become an entity. So, essentially, there's a theory that she went to Jets games so that people could stop talking about Taylor Swift's private jets that she has. Mordy Oberstein: If she did, that's like three-dimensional chess. We're all just playing checkers here, and Taylor Swift, three-dimensional chess. There's two ways to really relate to entities. One is disambiguating between multiple entities. If you Google Rangers, there's a Rangers hockey team, there's a Rangers baseball team. I think there's a soccer team in England, which you all call football. So, disambiguate, which one do you mean? And if you're searching in New York, you're going to get the New York Rangers hockey team. If you're searching in Texas, you'll probably get the baseball team and so forth. And then, there's breaking down concepts. So, if I'm talking about hiking, what is included within the concept of hiking? And I think that's where a lot of your content-based SEO work really comes in, and to see how Google is advancing and how it's able to break down those concepts and parse them out so that you can align to those concepts and include them in your own content or your own website. Now, I will say that disambiguating entities is far more specific than, oh, bears. So, I mean the animal or the Chicago Bears. And ironically, it's the reason we're doing this podcast because one of our own listeners brought a question to us about this. The case was, I think they talk about drug names in a blog post. And there's multiple names for the drug. Now, Google's dealt with this in the past. They've actually used an algorithm or a machine learning-based property called MUM to disambiguate COVID vaccine names early on in the COVID pandemic because the Pfizer vaccine was called all sorts of names all over the world. They're like, "Which vaccine is it?" Whatever random name you're using in whatever random country, is that the Pfizer vaccine? Is it the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? And they had to disambiguate that. And the question that this person had was, which drug name do I use? And the answer is, it depends. In that case, I recommended they go to Google and Google the drug name and see if both names show up, if Google uses them interchangeably. Crystal Carter: And I think also in a situation like that, sometimes I think of entity is very similar to scientific taxonomy. If you think about the scientific name for, I think it's Quercus × hispanica is the scientific name for the London plane. People who are into trees, please correct me if I'm wrong. But for instance, that's the Latin name for a London plane tree. And I might call it a London plane here. Some people might call it something else in another place. People might call it other things, but at the root of it, it's not. So, for instance, if you were talking about a particular thing, let's say you were talking about paracetamol and that is the chemical name for that, for instance, then I would say use that. Don't use necessarily the brand names that are associated with that, but make sure that somewhere in the blog, you declare the formal scientific name. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. And I think you can take advantage of this. For example, I think Google understands that eggplant, and what do you all call it in England? Aubergine? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. They call it aubergine here. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, whatever. It is the same thing because it's such a common association. I think Google would understand if you're in the US and you searched aubergine, you would get eggplant results. And if you're in the UK, it might send you something UK results to be used, that aubergine word, whatever. But I think Google fundamentally gets it. In the case we were talking about with a drug name, it kind of all depends. If it's a newer drug, it's not very well associated yet, there might be gaps in the knowledge graph. So, it might not understand that they're interchangeable. But you could also bank on the fact, theoretically, that Google will at some point understand they're interchangeable and create content in mind for that scenario. So, you could be the first one to ring for that kind of stuff. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think this also goes back to where information from the knowledge graph comes from. So, for instance, if you were developing a new product, a new drug, whichever, whichever, and Google did not know that you existed as a thing because it was new, for instance, there are going to be some of the things, some of the component parts that you can bank on so that some of the entities that are related to some of the component parts, for instance. You can also think about your link building. So, for instance, if you know that there are entities that are ranking well for some of the things that you're doing or that are related to some of the things that you're doing, that's where you should concentrate your link building efforts. Not just with regards to domain authority or things like that, but with regards to their proximity to the entity for instance. So, for instance, if I was writing about the Detroit Lions, for instance, me getting a link on the food network isn't necessarily going to help me. I might get some traffic or whatever. I guess it won't hurt, but it's not necessarily going to make it clear that my content is about the Detroit Lions football team. However, if I got a link from ESPN, which is something who regularly writes about football, then Google knows, okay, these two things are related to the Detroit Lions, et cetera, et cetera. That's in the same ballpark area. So, think about elements like blogs and websites and digital entities that are related to your content so that you can draw those things on the knowledge graph. And also, think about people who are already on the knowledge graph. If there's somebody who is an expert who has a knowledge panel, then that's somebody that's worth getting involved in your project to advocate for your product, that sort of thing. So, think about that as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Look, I think fundamentally, just to sort of sum up here before we head over to Gus, when you start thinking about entity like you're talking about here with links, when you start thinking about entities, you start thinking about SEO far more conceptually. And I think that's a great place to be and it's a great mindset. It's a great way to approach SEO from an entity-based perspective because it's just a much more conceptual way of approaching SEO overall, which I just love anyway. Because we're talking about entities and because we're talking about how it plays a role in the content you're producing, we asked Indeed's own SEO product manager. So, here's Gus Pelogia on how do you create a targeted entity association on your website. Gus Pelogia: Hi, everyone. I'm Gus Pelogia, SEO product manager at Indeed. And I'm here to talk to you on how do you choose the entities for your website. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about how to get a knowledge panel for your name or for your brand. And entities are quite essential part of this because on something like this, you want to transform your name into an entity, your personal name or your company name. And you can do this by having an About Us page or an alter page where you explain who you are. And you also use structured data to validate the elements that exist on the page. So, things like, of course, you're going to have your name, but as part of that, you should have your social media channels linked on your structured data, let's say using same as, or you have a picture of yourself that is also used on different websites, where you studied, different areas of knowledge that you may have. They should exist both on your page and on your structured data. And I think for a case like this, it's ideal to have a lot of the same information on different websites as well. So, let's say if you write for a lot of websites, Google will try to find some consistency on all that information. If you are just saying yourself, "I'm a doctor and I know about this," that's not really enough for Google to understand you as an attorney. And I think a lot of people just get this as, "Oh, let's just create a bunch of fake profiles." But you need to expand those profiles across different websites. So, Google will look for that same name and those same credentials on different places in order to actually build that entity and say, "Okay, this is a real person. This knowledge is real. I can see validation across a lot of different places about it." But of course, your own about page or your own alter page is the starting point of that. But as any other marketing activity, you need to promote and develop yourself beyond just you on your own page, say how great you are. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you so much, Gus. Make sure you give Gus a follow over at Pelogia, P-E-L-O-G-I-A on X, Twitter or whatever, and always check out Gus. He's always speaking at BrightonSEO. So, if you're at BrightonSEO, make sure you attend Gus's sessions. I think he's speaking in April also in the UK. So, check that out. And he's right, by the way, about entities. So, you want to make sure you're creating consistency across all of the platforms. And it could be for your own personal name or personal branding or for your business at the same time. Same rules. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I think also he mentioned structured data. Structured data is really important for helping Google to understand what's going on with the knowledge graph and for helping to connect things. So, one of the things that's really important, particularly for about pages and for personal about pages and profile pages, which are now on Google Search Console, do check those out. I love those. You can have your section that's the same as, which helps Google to connect some of the dots. So, you can say, same as this LinkedIn page, same as this Facebook page, same as this X page, same as this, et cetera. And it really, really helps. So, yeah, structured data is absolutely key to your entity approach. Mordy Oberstein: So, again, give Gus a follow. Tell him that we sent you and make sure you check out Gus's article on the SEO Learning Hub, all about entities in SEO. Okay. Let me tell you a story. I was stumbling around YouTube, which I tend to do, watching basically useless sports videos and Billy Joel music. And yeah, I stumbled on a new little feature that it was new by the way at the time, but it's no longer new because that was a while ago. But it is still really interesting. It's still really interesting to talk about because it relates to how Google understands entities. So, we're going to pretend like it's new so that we can put it under the label of our fun little segment that we call Is It New? So, here's an Is It New version of useless YouTube watching impacting how we understand entities. Is it new? Take it away. Dixon Jones: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So, I was stumbling around YouTube and looking at useless videos by the NFL, and there was a little bit of a scandal back in the day. When I say back in the day, back in the smack in the middle of the NFL season, which is a while ago at this point, where a NFL coach referenced 9/11. He thought it was a good idea to reference 9/11 in a speech he was giving to his team to rile them up. Not a good idea. And it became a hot topic for the talking heads to talk about sports to talk about... that was stupid. And when I was watching a video about this thing, YouTube, which is Google, showed me a little box within the YouTube result that said a context and it gave me information about 9/11 itself. Google said, "Hey, it's really important that you understand what you're talking about here or the topic here because we're talking about something serious like 9/11." "So, we're going to give you some context right here, right now about that so that you can make sure that these talking heads are steering you the right way." And I thought it was fascinating. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And this is something that's around YouTube in a couple of different ways. So, for instance, this is an example I use a lot because I used to have a client in this space. But for instance, if you were to look up AIDS test, HIV test, for instance, on YouTube, you get a big box in blue and it says context from the CDC. Here's more information. The HIV virus affects the human body's immune system, et cetera, et cetera. So, it tells you things about that. So, this is something that it falls into that category of YMYL, and this is something that... and if people aren't familiar with that, I'm sure we've covered this before. There's definitely an article on the Wix SEO Hub written by George Nguyen, which talks about YMYL content, which is your money, your life content. And this essentially is Google explaining that this is a delicate topic. This is something that people should consider with a bit of care because there can be... and it's also a good sign that there's probably a lot of disinformation about that topic, for instance. So, if you see one of these, I think it's a signal to sort of take what you're seeing online with a little bit of a pinch of salt, or at least give it more vetting than you would, say, I don't know, some information about Beyonce's latest country music album. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So, looking at this from a purely SEO point of view. If I'm watching this YouTube video about some useless sports thing and I happen to have a client that talks about 9/11 for whatever reason or something like that, something YMYL, something really important, if it's not directly related to that topic, I'm going to go back to that content and I'm going to contextualize it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think also this is a sign. So, I think I had a client who was once working with... they were doing something with people who had babies and they were generally talking about people who had babies. And the product that they sold was nothing to do with it, but they decided to have an article about car seats on their estate. And I was like, "You all don't sell car seats?" And they were like, "Yeah, but for SEO." And I was like, "I don't think this is good for your SEO because this is a delicate topic with safety requirements, et cetera, et cetera." So, if you're finding that you're straying into something that isn't actually your forte, then back away is what I would recommend. So, for instance, if this thing is showing up with this thing about 9/11 or whatever it may be, that's a sign that, hey, you've gone off piece there. That's not really something that you are in your camp and that Google expects you to have very, very robust information about that before you start speaking on that, which is fine. I think there's plenty of people who do have that information. But I think that, I don't know, I'm not sure if that goes as far as to say stay in your lane. But I think if you want to go into a new lane, I think that you need to make sure that you're very qualified for it and that you have the chops, I guess I would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, look, looking at things... look, the knowledge graph, Google has integrated into YouTube a lot over the past couple of years as people also search for kind of stuff inside of YouTube. And you can get an idea of how Google's relating to the entity, not just by looking at the Google SERP, but by looking at what Google's doing on YouTube. If you look up on musical artists on YouTube, there's going to be a carousel of their albums right underneath it. So, there's that strong association from an audio point of view that you can leverage with your own content for the SERP. There's a lot of things you can do. Don't just look at the Google SERP, look at all of the Google properties to understand how Google is understanding things because we care about Google. We don't care about the result page per se when it comes to entities. I think it's a hot take, but I'm going to go with that. Crystal Carter: I think also in terms of those contextual things, we're starting to see that on other properties as well. So, for instance, within Twitter, you're starting to see people flagging like, "This has been seen as disinformation or this topic has been... this video has been seen as not authentic" or something like that. So, I think that the idea of having feedback on the content that people are creating is also something that we should be thinking about going forward, that Google is managing these entities to a certain extent and that some other properties are managing these as well. And I think if you're not speaking correctly about them, then you may very well get called up on it. So, I think it's worth actually doing due diligence on anything that you're writing for lots of reasons, not just because of getting called by Google. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, last point on this, this is a great way to actually use things like Gemini, in my opinion, from an SEO point of view. You Google... you'd prompt in what are entities related to the NFL, you're going to get teams, players, league officials come up, very high coaches and staff. It's under league officials. Why? By the way, I'll tell you why. Because a big part of the narrative this year from the NFL has been how bad the officiating has been. So, you can see how Google is relating to entities in terms of prominence and in terms of the related entities by using Gemini. Why not? Crystal Carter: And I think that these are important because I think that also, for instance, if you're in an ambiguous entity, if you're working in a space where there's lots of... for instance, let's say you're Chicago the band. And you need to make sure that it's very clear that everybody knows that you are Chicago the band and not Chicago the place or whatever it may be. Then, going through that exercise, what are the things... what entities are associated with Chicago the band, for instance, would be important for you to do, and making sure that you're hitting those, not necessarily in a keyword sort of way, but more in a topical sort of way across your website, on your homepage, on your about page, on things like that. Mordy Oberstein: 100%. You know what's an entity that's really related to SEO? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is an entity related to SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think the Latin name is Rustius Brickius. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, yes. The Rustius Brickius is what they call him in England, right? Like an aubergine. Crystal Carter: You've said that word so many ways. Mordy Oberstein: For the life of me. Crystal Carter: You know Gene Wilder? O Er Gene. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Right. Good enough. By the way, when you go to Gemini and you put in entities related to Barry Schwartz, SEO, he's the founder of RustyBrick, you get an image of a different Barry Schwartz, which I think is for the better, really. Search Engine Roundtable. He's an author and speaker, websites and publications, similar. Search Engine Land. Makes sense. Industry figures, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan. Search engine algorithms is an entity related to Barry because Barry controls them. And SEO techniques and strategies like link building is related to Barry. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: It's earning back links from websites, other websites, to improve a website's authority and ranking, a practice Barry Schwartz analyzes and advises on. Boy, does AI hallucinate sometimes? Crystal Carter: What does it say about berry and butter sandwiches? Mordy Oberstein: I don't think it knows. I think that's just for people. Crystal Carter: Just for people? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's for people. But it says, overall, Barry Schwartz is the highly respected figure in the SEO industry, known for his insightful analysis, commentary and contributions to the field. That's correct. Crystal Carter: And butter sandwiches. Mordy Oberstein: And butter sandwiches. AI's not going to get it all right. You have to have a human touch, and for that you have butter sandwichness. That's human touch all the way. Crystal Carter: It's also my understanding that he's got a pretty good sports card collection. Mordy Oberstein: He does like Michael Jordan cards. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Which again, you wouldn't know from the AI. You'd have to actually watch Barry's vlog and suffer through that. Crystal Carter: Is this going to be on his entity now? Will we finally get butter sandwiches on his entity? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying. That'd be my next... I have a website that ranks for Barry Schwartz, SEO. It's called BarrySEOmemes.com. The next best thing would be to have in his knowledge graph butter sandwiches. For those of you who are not familiar with all these inside jokes about Barry and SEO, let's get right to the news. Here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News got some vital information for you about Core Web Vitals. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google Search Console adds INP metric in Core Web Vitals report. That's because INP, Interaction to Next Paint, has officially as of March 12th replaced FID, first input delay, as being one of the three Core Web Vitals. So, now, INP, CLS and LCP, but not FID, are part of CWV. OMG. You got all of that. This is why Matt's saying you're going to now see the INP metric being reported in the Search Console Core Web Vitals report because INP replaced FID. Very, very general difference between FID and INP. FID, like the name says, first input delays, measuring that first interaction. INP is a more holistic measurement of interactions on the page. And if there's any delay, so for example, someone clicks on something, a button or open up a carousel or open up an accordion or something like that, is there a delay or how wide is the delay across all of the interactions on the page, not just the first one? George Nguyen has a great article about what INP is and what it means for SEO on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. And we'll link to that in the show note. So, INP is in, FID is out. And the confusion reigns supreme as Barry Schwartz reports on Search Engine Roundtable, Google clarifies page experience and Core Web Vitals related to search rankings. There was a bit of a back and forth, I'm terrible with time, I'm going to say a year or so ago. We actually did a podcast episode about this where Google kind of scaled this language back about whether or not Core Web Vitals was an official ranking factor or a system or whatever. Basically saying it's not. Well, if it was out, it's back in. Google clarified or redid its documentation, saying, "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with search and to ensure a great user experience." Generally, keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or third party tools doesn't guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of the Google search results. There's more to great page experience than Core Web Vitals scores alone. These scores are meant to help you to improve your site for your users overall. And trying, listen to this, and trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time. I would take out the word "may" and I would say are not the best use of your time. That's my personal opinion again, but Google's John Mueller took the LinkedIn where he basically said that. He's wrote that Core Web Vitals, "It's not going to make your site's rankings jump up. That's not what they're for." I think it's a tiebreaker scenario kind of thing. In general, I wouldn't get too lost as Barry talks about in this article and as Barry talks about in many articles. Barry does talk about things in many, many articles, but he has talked about in many articles the idea that don't obsess over Core Web Vitals. That's not what this is all about, and that's not the type of ranking factor that it is now that it's back in as a ranking factor. I still look at performance in Core Web Vitals as a user first metric so that you don't have users bouncing or abandoning their cards and that sort of thing. However, it is officially back in. Now, this does go to a lot of confusion. As I mentioned earlier, Barry writes, "There has been a lot of flipping back and forth on this messaging from Google." Google said in February, "We don't confirm any of these things," meaning page experiential Core Web Vitals as a direct ranking factor. Barry continues to write, "Now, they confirm Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. This goes back to the confusion, which is still there, despite Google not wanting to believe it," says Barry. That's not my words. That's Barry's words around how the changes to get helpful content guidance and page experience documentation from a year or so ago. Okay, so I was right. It was a year ago. Barry continues to write, "Google shortly, after that confusion, told us page experience is a ranking signal, but not a ranking system and so forth and so forth and so forth." Barry then says, "Anyway, now Google added more clarification around these signals or systems or not systems." I see what you did there, Barry, being a little bit salty. I like that. So, the point is Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor officially again, I guess, but I would not get obsessed over them. As John Mueller himself said on LinkedIn, if you are a Wix user and you're wondering, where do you stand with INP? If you're in the US on mobile, 92% of Wix size pass INP. So, you are in good hands. And that is this week's snappy news. By the way, just an Allstate's slogan, "You're in good hands." Anyway, I didn't mean to do that. Anyway, that's this week's snappy news. Crystal Carter: Things were new. New things happened. Some old things evolved. Mordy Oberstein: A lot of things announced. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And there were some new entities and some other things. Mordy Oberstein: I hope we made some new entity connections for Barry while we were doing this. Crystal Carter: There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Now, when we're talking about entities and people who are experts in entities, I definitely think of one person. I think of multiple people, but I think of Dixon Jones, who is the founder of InLinks. He used to be over at Majestic. He's @Dixon_Jones on X, and that person, that entity knows all about entities. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Dixon is a great resource on this. He's been working in this space for a very long time. He is speaking at BrightonSEO, and he speaks at lots of events and has a great tool for helping people to understand entities and how they all work. So, yeah, big shout out to Dixon. Mordy Oberstein: He literally wrote a book about it called Entity SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's one of the dudes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, if you're looking to understand more about entities and SEO, start with Dixon. That's a great place to start. We'll link to his Twitter... X, sorry, I can't stop, profile in the show notes. And make sure you check out InLinks as well. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. And check out Entity SEO: Moving from Strings to Things over on Amazon. You can get on your Kindle for $0. Read for free. What's wrong with that? I don't like reading on Kindles, by the way. I buy the book for $14. Crystal Carter: I like a Kindle sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: I am an old-school person on this. I need pages when I read. Crystal Carter: The thing is my eyesight has deteriorated and I've recently started wearing glasses, but I still don't admit that I need glasses. And on the Kindle, I can pretend I don't need them and just expand the- Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't have that problem. I can't see squat. I don't know. If someone put on an SEO magazine, I would subscribe and read that over, let's say, a blog. I am so old school. I like pages. I have to feel the pages when I turn them, and I feel like I've accomplished something. Let me ask you, okay. When you scroll down an article, do you feel like, "Yeah, look how many pages I... look how many scrolls I've read?" No. Crystal Carter: I like the internet, Mordy. I don't know if you've noticed. Mordy Oberstein: I like the internet too, but I want to read a book. I want to feel like, "Hey, look at all these pages I read." Hold on. Crystal Carter: Where are we going? Mordy Oberstein: Can you see my screen? Can you see me on the camera right now? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You see this book? You see how thick it is? Crystal Carter: A big book. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. When you finish that, you're like, "Yeah, look at all that book I read." Crystal Carter: Yeah. You remember lugging around those books at school? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's the worst. Crystal Carter: You remember the backache? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, I'm not saying it's good for school. It's good for my ego. Crystal Carter: Okay. I can see. I know people who are like, "I like the trophy." I get that. But also I don't like the backache and I also like that it picks up where you started reading, and you don't have to find the page. Mordy Oberstein: It was called a bookmark. You just fold the corner down. That's not complicated. Crystal Carter: Fold the corner? Mordy Oberstein: Come on. If I told you that I read Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to after the Boss and there was an article, it was a blog post or whatever, you'd be like, "All right." If I told you I read this book about the New York Yankees and you looked at the thickness of the number of pages, you'd be like, "Wow, that guy knows a lot about the Yankees." Crystal Carter: Yeah, but I'd also question why you want to know that much about. Mordy Oberstein: I don't like you and my wife. This book is 650 pages and it's one of many books I've read about the New York Yankees. Crystal Carter: I feel like that's a lot of time that could have been spent doing other things. Mordy Oberstein: Doing what? Watching Netflix. Yeah, that's true- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: ... on Netflix. No, you're right. Crystal Carter: Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You were commiserating with my wife. "What? Another book about the Yankees?" Crystal Carter: Well, people know what to get you for your birthday. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Books about the Yankees and scotch. I'm a pretty easy shot for my birthday. Crystal Carter: On that note. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, sorry. On that note, we have digressed way too long. 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 the new episodes we dive into, Does Google rank AI content? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gus Pelogia Dixon Jones Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gus Pelogia Dixon Jones Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, incredible, the unequivocal, the always awesome head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello to everyone who is in a place doing a thing with a person and/or being. Mordy Oberstein: Or to people who are not with anybody and not doing anything. Crystal Carter: Not doing anything who are just existing in the world. Mordy Oberstein: Or my heroes really. Crystal Carter: But maybe are distinct individual. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you're doing. Crystal Carter: Do you see? Mordy Oberstein: I see what you're doing. Wow. Okay. That's a novel concept, which is also an example of what you're doing. And the audience has no idea what we're doing. But the audience is also another example of what we're talking about themselves. Crystal Carter: Exactly. The concept and idea- Mordy Oberstein: Some places, things. Crystal Carter: Something that's distinct and maybe has a geolocation. Maybe people have lots of knowledge about it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, oh. Maybe we should break a panel about this. Crystal Carter: Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Mordy Oberstein: We could show a graph. Crystal Carter: Right. We could make a graph. People could claim the panel. Maybe that can be a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I'll claim to it. Me. It's my panel. Mordy Oberstein: I have no claims to anything. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by enigmas everywhere. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter where you can download checklists, cheat sheets, one-pagers and more at our resource center. And where you can also integrate your clients' sites with Microsoft Clarity, with our native app built with the Microsoft Team. It's CRO for all. All as in all the people, all the places, all the things, all the concept, which is also a thing. All the entities from this world and beyond as this week, we're chatting the practical value of understanding entities for SEO, which now our jokes from beforehand make sense, I think. Jokes are also an entity. We're looking at how entities play a role in SEO, how far-reaching entities are when thinking about SEO, and actual cases where entities factor into practical SEO decisions. And Indeed's own Gus Pelogia chimes in on how to decide what entities to target on your clients' sites. Plus, we take a look at some entity understanding as seen on YouTube and what that might mean for SEO. And of course, we have your snap piece of SEO news. So, you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, join us as we help you get your things in order on this the 79th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Okay, so entities. Entities, one of the more complicated areas of SEO, certainly one of the more abstract ones once you start thinking about it. And when you start thinking about it, it's one of the more important areas of SEO. So, let's break this down into its simpler parts. Google wants to have a semantic understanding of things and wants to know how all of the things are connected and the relationships that one thing have with another thing, how they impact other things. Context. It's called context. And context helps us understand things in a non-linear way. For example, as a teacher, when I taught in the fourth grade, one of the ways you build vocabulary is something called the context clues. You say, "Hey, here's a sentence with a hard word." What does the context teach you about what this word might mean? So, it's super important for understanding things and it's super important for getting even basic facts right. Context is super important to Google. It wants to understand how things relate to one another. And it's been a major focus of Google since circa 2012. Why? Because I can search for something like Yankee Stadium and Google can take that quite literally and give me info just on the stadium. But if Google understood its context and connections, it might be able to offer me information about the stadium as being a landmark in New York or as a revolutionary example of early stadium construction as I probably meant it. It can give me something in connection to the actual team that plays in the stadium. When I search for Yankee Stadium, I don't care. But yeah, when it was built, I care about it in connection to the team, which the only way to understand that is through contextual connections. To do this, Google created something called the Knowledge Graph. Insert audio awesomeness. So, some kind of ominous sound of knowledge. Yeah, thank you. It's basically a collection of data points or objects and how closely they sit to each other. Sounds abstract? Sort of. Eighty percent of all mentions of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." I don't know if that's actually true, but I'm making that. Let's just say that 80% of all mention of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." Google can say, "Okay, we have two entities here, two objects, a table and a chair," and they are related because we see them being connected so often in content out there. So, they'll say... well, Google will say, "There's a strong connection between a table and," get this, "chairs." Amazing. With that however, with that collection of information, Google can do a lot of things with that association. You can understand how closely a table and chair are connected. And those are things that might be easy for us to understand, but for a bot, that's not, and that rhymes I'm Dr. Seuss, which he says- Crystal Carter: A different entity. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Google can store these objects and relationships in a database, which again, we call the Knowledge Graph. Cue sound effect. And then, show us all sorts of cool stuff. So, for example, let's actually get into this, if I search for Michael Jordan, not only do I get a knowledge graph that shows me a link to his stats and his age. By the way, he's 60, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Oh, man. I feel that. Mordy Oberstein: We are so old. Crystal Carter: I want to be like Mike, maybe I guess. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Just seeing that he's 60 makes my knees hurt. Crystal Carter: That's ouch. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, it also gives me an option to look at the movies he's in like Space Jam because Google knows a big part of Michael Jordan's identity is that particular movie. It also shows me a list of Bulls coaches. Bulls being the team he played on in case you don't know. Because Michael Jordan and the coach he played for, Phil Jackson, are a big part of the Michael Jordan narrative. So, this knowledge graph or this knowledge panel makes that connection between Michael Jordan and the coach because it knows that they are very closely related. But there are far more implications but beyond cool stuff that Google can show you on the result page itself. Entities are here, entities are there, entities are everywhere. For example, concepts are entities. So, for example, contextualizing concepts on a page can help Google understand if your content hits the mark. So, let's say you're running about your kids' first trip to the doctor's office. There are all sorts of different concepts that you can go into within your content from having your kids feel comfortable on their first doctor trip to questions about insurance, to when to first take the kid for their first doctor appointment. And ensuring you have all these topics or concepts and that they're addressed on the page can, A, help Google to better understand that your content, it semantically relates to the topic and they can help it build confidence that you address the core topic well. It can also mean, for example, that you can pretty much naturally focus on phraseology. Not a particular keyword because Google semantically understands that they're all kind of related to each other so you don't have the keyword over and over and over again. You can use interchangeably related similar phraseology and terms that are all semantically related because Google gets that all of these terms are the same concept or the same entity. So, that's where I think there are a lot of SEO implications that can help you factor into your day-to-day SEO decisions because entities are concepts and concepts are reflected in language, and Google is semantically looking at language. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that there's so many things to unpack there. The biographical entity about using the example of Michael Jordan, that one's really interesting because Google has lots of things to go on. And with a biographical entity, there's very often a Wikipedia page, there's an individual person page. You have things like even for people who are less famous than Michael Jordan. You'll have things like your LinkedIn and there'll be... a person will have a digital trail and digital things that they've done. They went to college, or they worked at a job, or they did this, that or the other. And all of those entities, if you went to a certain college, then that college will also have an entity online. So, they can connect that. A good example that Barry Adams often shows is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he's somebody who's interesting because as an entity, he was the world's strongest man sort of thing. He was a bodybuilder for ages. He was also a governor. He was also an action star. Mordy Oberstein: Of California. Crystal Carter: Governor of California. He's also an action star. His biographical entity includes Maria Shriver, but it also kind of includes JFK because she's related to JFK. It also includes other people who are in the bodybuilding space, that sort of thing. So, that's really interesting. And you also talked about Google making lots of connections, but Google also does a lot of disambiguation with that context that you were talking about. So, if I said Chicago or Asia or Texas, those are all places. Those are also all bands. So, if I said- Mordy Oberstein: I like what you did there. Crystal Carter: Right. So, if I said Chicago latest album, they wouldn't give me information about the city and that they'd probably be confused about Chicago's latest album because I don't think they've made an album in ages. But for instance, Google will disambiguate. So, for sometimes if you just enter the word "Chicago" for instance, it'll say, "Do you mean the city or do you mean the band?" And they understand that those two things are different entities. And there's context around the different words that will help them to do that. You also mentioned how you don't always need certain keywords. A really good example of this is I put a... there's a great tool I've referenced a lot called TextRazor, which pulls out entities and helps you understand how machines understand entities. And I put in the description for the Barbie movie and it says, "Barbie and Ken go on an adventure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It never says anything about Barbie being a toy. It doesn't even say anything about Mattel in the description for the movie. But when I put it into this tool that was pulling out of the entities, it was like, yes, this is Barbie. She's a fashion doll made by Mattel, et cetera, et cetera. And it understands that those things are related. Why? Because it's not just the word "Barbie," but it's also Barbie and Ken. So, the proximity of the word "Barbie" to the word "Ken" makes it very clear that that is that entity rather than just a person whose name Barbie because there are other people called Barbie. So, I think that the context is really important as well. And I think that entities, it can seems very complex as a thing. But a good way to get an idea of entities is to start digging around in Wikipedia. That's a really good place to get an idea of what things are entities and how things are related there. Carl, he has a great tool about the knowledge panel as well that you can look up. And also another one is in photos, for instance, Google Photos can pull out entities from your photos. And you talked about some of the concepts. So, in your photos, they can pull out dog, they can pull out cat for instance, but they can also pull out things that are a bit more ephemeral like sunsets or fog or mountains or outside, things like that. So, you can see the kinds of entities that they can do there. But it's a really fascinating space. And it seems a little bit complex, but actually, it's Google trying to make sense of the actual world. Another good example is, in England, there's something called a ladybird. And in America, they refer to that as a ladybug. If I am looking for information on ladybirds, a really good question is why are ladybirds different colors? Because if you've ever been to Ohio, they have orange ladybugs and they bite you and they're not very nice. They come out in autumn and there's a swarm of them. Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I'm never going back to Cleveland. Crystal Carter: So, if you're wondering why are they different colors, there's a reason why they're different colors and it has something to do with something else. But if I looked up why are ladybirds different colors, if the best information is an article about ladybugs, then Google will give me that because they understand that those two things are the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: So, basically, when you're talking about it, it's complicated, but it's not complicated. If you look at... there's basically two ways I think about entities. One is there's how you parse out the entity. So, for example, if I search for SEO, in the knowledge panel, I get tabs that say techniques, examples, basic requirements. So, Google's able to parse out topics and you can see that in the results themselves. Sometimes you'll see results for what is SEO or you might see results for SEO services. So, Google's looking at that entity of SEO and possibly meaning is it services, is it an area of understanding, and relating to it differently. And you see that very clearly sometimes. If you're in the US and you search for bears, you're going to get the Chicago Bears. If you search for dolphins, you're going to get the Miami Dolphins because it realizes that people don't care about animals as much as they do about sports teams. Crystal Carter: But what if they're looking for flippers, flipper on the dolphins these days? No? Mordy Oberstein: No. No one cares about flipper. No one cares about the lion. People care about the Lions. Crystal Carter: Okay. Here's my question. Do they have lions in the Detroit Zoo? Does Detroit have a zoo with lions? Mordy Oberstein: The zoo is the football field and the lions are the players. Crystal Carter: Do the Detroit Lions sponsor the lions at the Detroit Zoo? Because I feel like if they're not, they should. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Is there a Detroit Zoo? There has to be, right? Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I feel like there should, and I feel like they should have lions. Mordy Oberstein: I hope they would sponsor the lions. Maybe the lions should sponsor the team. The lions should actually get together. The animals get together and say, "Hey, you know what? We're having an image problem here. The football team is outshining us. We should sponsor them to outshine them in their own platform." Own the narrative kind of thing. Crystal Carter: See, here's the other thing about that is that sometimes, that can be a real challenge if there's an entity that is the same- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, that's a real problem, but that's an actual example. If you're talking about lions, you need to realize the only place you're showing up here is in the image box. Crystal Carter: Right, right. And if you were the Detroit Zoo and you had lions- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, big problem. Crystal Carter: Another great example is Taylor Swift and the Jets. So, Taylor Swift jets, she went to the Jets game, and I think Brittany Miller was talking about this online. She's like, "Is this her working the entity that people have been talking about Taylor Swift jets and that whole situation?" And also that's another idea. News items can become entities. So, if there's been an occurrence or something and there's lots of information about it and lots of things related to that, that can essentially become an entity. So, essentially, there's a theory that she went to Jets games so that people could stop talking about Taylor Swift's private jets that she has. Mordy Oberstein: If she did, that's like three-dimensional chess. We're all just playing checkers here, and Taylor Swift, three-dimensional chess. There's two ways to really relate to entities. One is disambiguating between multiple entities. If you Google Rangers, there's a Rangers hockey team, there's a Rangers baseball team. I think there's a soccer team in England, which you all call football. So, disambiguate, which one do you mean? And if you're searching in New York, you're going to get the New York Rangers hockey team. If you're searching in Texas, you'll probably get the baseball team and so forth. And then, there's breaking down concepts. So, if I'm talking about hiking, what is included within the concept of hiking? And I think that's where a lot of your content-based SEO work really comes in, and to see how Google is advancing and how it's able to break down those concepts and parse them out so that you can align to those concepts and include them in your own content or your own website. Now, I will say that disambiguating entities is far more specific than, oh, bears. So, I mean the animal or the Chicago Bears. And ironically, it's the reason we're doing this podcast because one of our own listeners brought a question to us about this. The case was, I think they talk about drug names in a blog post. And there's multiple names for the drug. Now, Google's dealt with this in the past. They've actually used an algorithm or a machine learning-based property called MUM to disambiguate COVID vaccine names early on in the COVID pandemic because the Pfizer vaccine was called all sorts of names all over the world. They're like, "Which vaccine is it?" Whatever random name you're using in whatever random country, is that the Pfizer vaccine? Is it the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? And they had to disambiguate that. And the question that this person had was, which drug name do I use? And the answer is, it depends. In that case, I recommended they go to Google and Google the drug name and see if both names show up, if Google uses them interchangeably. Crystal Carter: And I think also in a situation like that, sometimes I think of entity is very similar to scientific taxonomy. If you think about the scientific name for, I think it's Quercus × hispanica is the scientific name for the London plane. People who are into trees, please correct me if I'm wrong. But for instance, that's the Latin name for a London plane tree. And I might call it a London plane here. Some people might call it something else in another place. People might call it other things, but at the root of it, it's not. So, for instance, if you were talking about a particular thing, let's say you were talking about paracetamol and that is the chemical name for that, for instance, then I would say use that. Don't use necessarily the brand names that are associated with that, but make sure that somewhere in the blog, you declare the formal scientific name. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. And I think you can take advantage of this. For example, I think Google understands that eggplant, and what do you all call it in England? Aubergine? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. They call it aubergine here. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, whatever. It is the same thing because it's such a common association. I think Google would understand if you're in the US and you searched aubergine, you would get eggplant results. And if you're in the UK, it might send you something UK results to be used, that aubergine word, whatever. But I think Google fundamentally gets it. In the case we were talking about with a drug name, it kind of all depends. If it's a newer drug, it's not very well associated yet, there might be gaps in the knowledge graph. So, it might not understand that they're interchangeable. But you could also bank on the fact, theoretically, that Google will at some point understand they're interchangeable and create content in mind for that scenario. So, you could be the first one to ring for that kind of stuff. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think this also goes back to where information from the knowledge graph comes from. So, for instance, if you were developing a new product, a new drug, whichever, whichever, and Google did not know that you existed as a thing because it was new, for instance, there are going to be some of the things, some of the component parts that you can bank on so that some of the entities that are related to some of the component parts, for instance. You can also think about your link building. So, for instance, if you know that there are entities that are ranking well for some of the things that you're doing or that are related to some of the things that you're doing, that's where you should concentrate your link building efforts. Not just with regards to domain authority or things like that, but with regards to their proximity to the entity for instance. So, for instance, if I was writing about the Detroit Lions, for instance, me getting a link on the food network isn't necessarily going to help me. I might get some traffic or whatever. I guess it won't hurt, but it's not necessarily going to make it clear that my content is about the Detroit Lions football team. However, if I got a link from ESPN, which is something who regularly writes about football, then Google knows, okay, these two things are related to the Detroit Lions, et cetera, et cetera. That's in the same ballpark area. So, think about elements like blogs and websites and digital entities that are related to your content so that you can draw those things on the knowledge graph. And also, think about people who are already on the knowledge graph. If there's somebody who is an expert who has a knowledge panel, then that's somebody that's worth getting involved in your project to advocate for your product, that sort of thing. So, think about that as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Look, I think fundamentally, just to sort of sum up here before we head over to Gus, when you start thinking about entity like you're talking about here with links, when you start thinking about entities, you start thinking about SEO far more conceptually. And I think that's a great place to be and it's a great mindset. It's a great way to approach SEO from an entity-based perspective because it's just a much more conceptual way of approaching SEO overall, which I just love anyway. Because we're talking about entities and because we're talking about how it plays a role in the content you're producing, we asked Indeed's own SEO product manager. So, here's Gus Pelogia on how do you create a targeted entity association on your website. Gus Pelogia: Hi, everyone. I'm Gus Pelogia, SEO product manager at Indeed. And I'm here to talk to you on how do you choose the entities for your website. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about how to get a knowledge panel for your name or for your brand. And entities are quite essential part of this because on something like this, you want to transform your name into an entity, your personal name or your company name. And you can do this by having an About Us page or an alter page where you explain who you are. And you also use structured data to validate the elements that exist on the page. So, things like, of course, you're going to have your name, but as part of that, you should have your social media channels linked on your structured data, let's say using same as, or you have a picture of yourself that is also used on different websites, where you studied, different areas of knowledge that you may have. They should exist both on your page and on your structured data. And I think for a case like this, it's ideal to have a lot of the same information on different websites as well. So, let's say if you write for a lot of websites, Google will try to find some consistency on all that information. If you are just saying yourself, "I'm a doctor and I know about this," that's not really enough for Google to understand you as an attorney. And I think a lot of people just get this as, "Oh, let's just create a bunch of fake profiles." But you need to expand those profiles across different websites. So, Google will look for that same name and those same credentials on different places in order to actually build that entity and say, "Okay, this is a real person. This knowledge is real. I can see validation across a lot of different places about it." But of course, your own about page or your own alter page is the starting point of that. But as any other marketing activity, you need to promote and develop yourself beyond just you on your own page, say how great you are. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you so much, Gus. Make sure you give Gus a follow over at Pelogia, P-E-L-O-G-I-A on X, Twitter or whatever, and always check out Gus. He's always speaking at BrightonSEO. So, if you're at BrightonSEO, make sure you attend Gus's sessions. I think he's speaking in April also in the UK. So, check that out. And he's right, by the way, about entities. So, you want to make sure you're creating consistency across all of the platforms. And it could be for your own personal name or personal branding or for your business at the same time. Same rules. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I think also he mentioned structured data. Structured data is really important for helping Google to understand what's going on with the knowledge graph and for helping to connect things. So, one of the things that's really important, particularly for about pages and for personal about pages and profile pages, which are now on Google Search Console, do check those out. I love those. You can have your section that's the same as, which helps Google to connect some of the dots. So, you can say, same as this LinkedIn page, same as this Facebook page, same as this X page, same as this, et cetera. And it really, really helps. So, yeah, structured data is absolutely key to your entity approach. Mordy Oberstein: So, again, give Gus a follow. Tell him that we sent you and make sure you check out Gus's article on the SEO Learning Hub, all about entities in SEO. Okay. Let me tell you a story. I was stumbling around YouTube, which I tend to do, watching basically useless sports videos and Billy Joel music. And yeah, I stumbled on a new little feature that it was new by the way at the time, but it's no longer new because that was a while ago. But it is still really interesting. It's still really interesting to talk about because it relates to how Google understands entities. So, we're going to pretend like it's new so that we can put it under the label of our fun little segment that we call Is It New? So, here's an Is It New version of useless YouTube watching impacting how we understand entities. Is it new? Take it away. Dixon Jones: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So, I was stumbling around YouTube and looking at useless videos by the NFL, and there was a little bit of a scandal back in the day. When I say back in the day, back in the smack in the middle of the NFL season, which is a while ago at this point, where a NFL coach referenced 9/11. He thought it was a good idea to reference 9/11 in a speech he was giving to his team to rile them up. Not a good idea. And it became a hot topic for the talking heads to talk about sports to talk about... that was stupid. And when I was watching a video about this thing, YouTube, which is Google, showed me a little box within the YouTube result that said a context and it gave me information about 9/11 itself. Google said, "Hey, it's really important that you understand what you're talking about here or the topic here because we're talking about something serious like 9/11." "So, we're going to give you some context right here, right now about that so that you can make sure that these talking heads are steering you the right way." And I thought it was fascinating. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And this is something that's around YouTube in a couple of different ways. So, for instance, this is an example I use a lot because I used to have a client in this space. But for instance, if you were to look up AIDS test, HIV test, for instance, on YouTube, you get a big box in blue and it says context from the CDC. Here's more information. The HIV virus affects the human body's immune system, et cetera, et cetera. So, it tells you things about that. So, this is something that it falls into that category of YMYL, and this is something that... and if people aren't familiar with that, I'm sure we've covered this before. There's definitely an article on the Wix SEO Hub written by George Nguyen, which talks about YMYL content, which is your money, your life content. And this essentially is Google explaining that this is a delicate topic. This is something that people should consider with a bit of care because there can be... and it's also a good sign that there's probably a lot of disinformation about that topic, for instance. So, if you see one of these, I think it's a signal to sort of take what you're seeing online with a little bit of a pinch of salt, or at least give it more vetting than you would, say, I don't know, some information about Beyonce's latest country music album. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. So, looking at this from a purely SEO point of view. If I'm watching this YouTube video about some useless sports thing and I happen to have a client that talks about 9/11 for whatever reason or something like that, something YMYL, something really important, if it's not directly related to that topic, I'm going to go back to that content and I'm going to contextualize it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think also this is a sign. So, I think I had a client who was once working with... they were doing something with people who had babies and they were generally talking about people who had babies. And the product that they sold was nothing to do with it, but they decided to have an article about car seats on their estate. And I was like, "You all don't sell car seats?" And they were like, "Yeah, but for SEO." And I was like, "I don't think this is good for your SEO because this is a delicate topic with safety requirements, et cetera, et cetera." So, if you're finding that you're straying into something that isn't actually your forte, then back away is what I would recommend. So, for instance, if this thing is showing up with this thing about 9/11 or whatever it may be, that's a sign that, hey, you've gone off piece there. That's not really something that you are in your camp and that Google expects you to have very, very robust information about that before you start speaking on that, which is fine. I think there's plenty of people who do have that information. But I think that, I don't know, I'm not sure if that goes as far as to say stay in your lane. But I think if you want to go into a new lane, I think that you need to make sure that you're very qualified for it and that you have the chops, I guess I would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, look, looking at things... look, the knowledge graph, Google has integrated into YouTube a lot over the past couple of years as people also search for kind of stuff inside of YouTube. And you can get an idea of how Google's relating to the entity, not just by looking at the Google SERP, but by looking at what Google's doing on YouTube. If you look up on musical artists on YouTube, there's going to be a carousel of their albums right underneath it. So, there's that strong association from an audio point of view that you can leverage with your own content for the SERP. There's a lot of things you can do. Don't just look at the Google SERP, look at all of the Google properties to understand how Google is understanding things because we care about Google. We don't care about the result page per se when it comes to entities. I think it's a hot take, but I'm going to go with that. Crystal Carter: I think also in terms of those contextual things, we're starting to see that on other properties as well. So, for instance, within Twitter, you're starting to see people flagging like, "This has been seen as disinformation or this topic has been... this video has been seen as not authentic" or something like that. So, I think that the idea of having feedback on the content that people are creating is also something that we should be thinking about going forward, that Google is managing these entities to a certain extent and that some other properties are managing these as well. And I think if you're not speaking correctly about them, then you may very well get called up on it. So, I think it's worth actually doing due diligence on anything that you're writing for lots of reasons, not just because of getting called by Google. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, last point on this, this is a great way to actually use things like Gemini, in my opinion, from an SEO point of view. You Google... you'd prompt in what are entities related to the NFL, you're going to get teams, players, league officials come up, very high coaches and staff. It's under league officials. Why? By the way, I'll tell you why. Because a big part of the narrative this year from the NFL has been how bad the officiating has been. So, you can see how Google is relating to entities in terms of prominence and in terms of the related entities by using Gemini. Why not? Crystal Carter: And I think that these are important because I think that also, for instance, if you're in an ambiguous entity, if you're working in a space where there's lots of... for instance, let's say you're Chicago the band. And you need to make sure that it's very clear that everybody knows that you are Chicago the band and not Chicago the place or whatever it may be. Then, going through that exercise, what are the things... what entities are associated with Chicago the band, for instance, would be important for you to do, and making sure that you're hitting those, not necessarily in a keyword sort of way, but more in a topical sort of way across your website, on your homepage, on your about page, on things like that. Mordy Oberstein: 100%. You know what's an entity that's really related to SEO? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz is an entity related to SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think the Latin name is Rustius Brickius. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, yes. The Rustius Brickius is what they call him in England, right? Like an aubergine. Crystal Carter: You've said that word so many ways. Mordy Oberstein: For the life of me. Crystal Carter: You know Gene Wilder? O Er Gene. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Right. Good enough. By the way, when you go to Gemini and you put in entities related to Barry Schwartz, SEO, he's the founder of RustyBrick, you get an image of a different Barry Schwartz, which I think is for the better, really. Search Engine Roundtable. He's an author and speaker, websites and publications, similar. Search Engine Land. Makes sense. Industry figures, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan. Search engine algorithms is an entity related to Barry because Barry controls them. And SEO techniques and strategies like link building is related to Barry. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: It's earning back links from websites, other websites, to improve a website's authority and ranking, a practice Barry Schwartz analyzes and advises on. Boy, does AI hallucinate sometimes? Crystal Carter: What does it say about berry and butter sandwiches? Mordy Oberstein: I don't think it knows. I think that's just for people. Crystal Carter: Just for people? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's for people. But it says, overall, Barry Schwartz is the highly respected figure in the SEO industry, known for his insightful analysis, commentary and contributions to the field. That's correct. Crystal Carter: And butter sandwiches. Mordy Oberstein: And butter sandwiches. AI's not going to get it all right. You have to have a human touch, and for that you have butter sandwichness. That's human touch all the way. Crystal Carter: It's also my understanding that he's got a pretty good sports card collection. Mordy Oberstein: He does like Michael Jordan cards. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Which again, you wouldn't know from the AI. You'd have to actually watch Barry's vlog and suffer through that. Crystal Carter: Is this going to be on his entity now? Will we finally get butter sandwiches on his entity? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying. That'd be my next... I have a website that ranks for Barry Schwartz, SEO. It's called BarrySEOmemes.com. The next best thing would be to have in his knowledge graph butter sandwiches. For those of you who are not familiar with all these inside jokes about Barry and SEO, let's get right to the news. Here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News got some vital information for you about Core Web Vitals. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google Search Console adds INP metric in Core Web Vitals report. That's because INP, Interaction to Next Paint, has officially as of March 12th replaced FID, first input delay, as being one of the three Core Web Vitals. So, now, INP, CLS and LCP, but not FID, are part of CWV. OMG. You got all of that. This is why Matt's saying you're going to now see the INP metric being reported in the Search Console Core Web Vitals report because INP replaced FID. Very, very general difference between FID and INP. FID, like the name says, first input delays, measuring that first interaction. INP is a more holistic measurement of interactions on the page. And if there's any delay, so for example, someone clicks on something, a button or open up a carousel or open up an accordion or something like that, is there a delay or how wide is the delay across all of the interactions on the page, not just the first one? George Nguyen has a great article about what INP is and what it means for SEO on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. And we'll link to that in the show note. So, INP is in, FID is out. And the confusion reigns supreme as Barry Schwartz reports on Search Engine Roundtable, Google clarifies page experience and Core Web Vitals related to search rankings. There was a bit of a back and forth, I'm terrible with time, I'm going to say a year or so ago. We actually did a podcast episode about this where Google kind of scaled this language back about whether or not Core Web Vitals was an official ranking factor or a system or whatever. Basically saying it's not. Well, if it was out, it's back in. Google clarified or redid its documentation, saying, "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with search and to ensure a great user experience." Generally, keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or third party tools doesn't guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of the Google search results. There's more to great page experience than Core Web Vitals scores alone. These scores are meant to help you to improve your site for your users overall. And trying, listen to this, and trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time. I would take out the word "may" and I would say are not the best use of your time. That's my personal opinion again, but Google's John Mueller took the LinkedIn where he basically said that. He's wrote that Core Web Vitals, "It's not going to make your site's rankings jump up. That's not what they're for." I think it's a tiebreaker scenario kind of thing. In general, I wouldn't get too lost as Barry talks about in this article and as Barry talks about in many articles. Barry does talk about things in many, many articles, but he has talked about in many articles the idea that don't obsess over Core Web Vitals. That's not what this is all about, and that's not the type of ranking factor that it is now that it's back in as a ranking factor. I still look at performance in Core Web Vitals as a user first metric so that you don't have users bouncing or abandoning their cards and that sort of thing. However, it is officially back in. Now, this does go to a lot of confusion. As I mentioned earlier, Barry writes, "There has been a lot of flipping back and forth on this messaging from Google." Google said in February, "We don't confirm any of these things," meaning page experiential Core Web Vitals as a direct ranking factor. Barry continues to write, "Now, they confirm Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. This goes back to the confusion, which is still there, despite Google not wanting to believe it," says Barry. That's not my words. That's Barry's words around how the changes to get helpful content guidance and page experience documentation from a year or so ago. Okay, so I was right. It was a year ago. Barry continues to write, "Google shortly, after that confusion, told us page experience is a ranking signal, but not a ranking system and so forth and so forth and so forth." Barry then says, "Anyway, now Google added more clarification around these signals or systems or not systems." I see what you did there, Barry, being a little bit salty. I like that. So, the point is Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor officially again, I guess, but I would not get obsessed over them. As John Mueller himself said on LinkedIn, if you are a Wix user and you're wondering, where do you stand with INP? If you're in the US on mobile, 92% of Wix size pass INP. So, you are in good hands. And that is this week's snappy news. By the way, just an Allstate's slogan, "You're in good hands." Anyway, I didn't mean to do that. Anyway, that's this week's snappy news. Crystal Carter: Things were new. New things happened. Some old things evolved. Mordy Oberstein: A lot of things announced. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And there were some new entities and some other things. Mordy Oberstein: I hope we made some new entity connections for Barry while we were doing this. Crystal Carter: There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Now, when we're talking about entities and people who are experts in entities, I definitely think of one person. I think of multiple people, but I think of Dixon Jones, who is the founder of InLinks. He used to be over at Majestic. He's @Dixon_Jones on X, and that person, that entity knows all about entities. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Dixon is a great resource on this. He's been working in this space for a very long time. He is speaking at BrightonSEO, and he speaks at lots of events and has a great tool for helping people to understand entities and how they all work. So, yeah, big shout out to Dixon. Mordy Oberstein: He literally wrote a book about it called Entity SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's one of the dudes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So, if you're looking to understand more about entities and SEO, start with Dixon. That's a great place to start. We'll link to his Twitter... X, sorry, I can't stop, profile in the show notes. And make sure you check out InLinks as well. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. And check out Entity SEO: Moving from Strings to Things over on Amazon. You can get on your Kindle for $0. Read for free. What's wrong with that? I don't like reading on Kindles, by the way. I buy the book for $14. Crystal Carter: I like a Kindle sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: I am an old-school person on this. I need pages when I read. Crystal Carter: The thing is my eyesight has deteriorated and I've recently started wearing glasses, but I still don't admit that I need glasses. And on the Kindle, I can pretend I don't need them and just expand the- Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't have that problem. I can't see squat. I don't know. If someone put on an SEO magazine, I would subscribe and read that over, let's say, a blog. I am so old school. I like pages. I have to feel the pages when I turn them, and I feel like I've accomplished something. Let me ask you, okay. When you scroll down an article, do you feel like, "Yeah, look how many pages I... look how many scrolls I've read?" No. Crystal Carter: I like the internet, Mordy. I don't know if you've noticed. Mordy Oberstein: I like the internet too, but I want to read a book. I want to feel like, "Hey, look at all these pages I read." Hold on. Crystal Carter: Where are we going? Mordy Oberstein: Can you see my screen? Can you see me on the camera right now? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You see this book? You see how thick it is? Crystal Carter: A big book. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. When you finish that, you're like, "Yeah, look at all that book I read." Crystal Carter: Yeah. You remember lugging around those books at school? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's the worst. Crystal Carter: You remember the backache? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, I'm not saying it's good for school. It's good for my ego. Crystal Carter: Okay. I can see. I know people who are like, "I like the trophy." I get that. But also I don't like the backache and I also like that it picks up where you started reading, and you don't have to find the page. Mordy Oberstein: It was called a bookmark. You just fold the corner down. That's not complicated. Crystal Carter: Fold the corner? Mordy Oberstein: Come on. If I told you that I read Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to after the Boss and there was an article, it was a blog post or whatever, you'd be like, "All right." If I told you I read this book about the New York Yankees and you looked at the thickness of the number of pages, you'd be like, "Wow, that guy knows a lot about the Yankees." Crystal Carter: Yeah, but I'd also question why you want to know that much about. Mordy Oberstein: I don't like you and my wife. This book is 650 pages and it's one of many books I've read about the New York Yankees. Crystal Carter: I feel like that's a lot of time that could have been spent doing other things. Mordy Oberstein: Doing what? Watching Netflix. Yeah, that's true- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: ... on Netflix. No, you're right. Crystal Carter: Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You were commiserating with my wife. "What? Another book about the Yankees?" Crystal Carter: Well, people know what to get you for your birthday. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Books about the Yankees and scotch. I'm a pretty easy shot for my birthday. Crystal Carter: On that note. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, sorry. On that note, we have digressed way too long. 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 the new episodes we dive into, Does Google rank AI content? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. 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Maeva is the founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing, an SEO and content agency driving growth with a holistic, revenue-based SEO approach for B2B SaaS companies in HR tech, martech, and salestech. Maeva is also a fractional CMO, marketing advisor, and certified confidence coach. Maeva Cifuentes CEO & Founder, Flying Cat Maeva is the founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing , an SEO and content agency driving growth with a holistic, revenue-based SEO approach for B2B SaaS companies in HR tech, martech, and salestech. Maeva is also a fractional CMO, marketing advisor, and certified confidence coach. Articles & Resources 11 Feb 2025 SEO forecasting for agencies: Close deals and get buy-in 25 Jul 2024 Topical authority 101: When it’s important and who needs it for better SEO Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO