The ins & outs of starting SEO from scratch

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. I'm brewing new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who cooks up a storm from the scratch. She has the flour, she has the water, she mixes it in, adds the sugar, puts in the oven, out comes great SEO pie, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. I do not make cakes from scratch. Let's just make that clear. I use the box. The box is the best way.

Mordy Oberstein:

That counts, by the way. That's scratch.

Crystal Carter:

I use the box. I always use the box. The boxes are good. Highly recommend.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you didn't buy it and you put it into the oven and you had to mix something, that's from scratch in my book.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay. I do make cornbread from scratch because I moved to England from America, and in America they have Jiffy Cornbread, comes in a box, get it from the box. Perfect. Gets every single time, right? Every time. In England, Jiffy doesn't exist. So I had to learn how to make it from scratch so that I do make from scratch. But cakes, generally speaking, Betty Crocker, she does a great job. So let's just give Betty her flowers and everybody can have a nice birthday. Throw some sprinkles on it. Let's go.

Mordy Oberstein:

I make toast from scratch.

Crystal Carter:

Are you out there? Are you like the little red hen? Did you grow the wheat and-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no. I just put it into the thing and out comes toast.

Crystal Carter:

Ta-daa.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ta-daa. I did it myself.

Crystal Carter:

Right. You tell your children, you're like, "You're welcome."

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids are actually way better cooks than I am. It's a whole-

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, they're good. They're good.

Crystal Carter:

All right. This is good.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's so great on the cleanup, but on the cooking part.

Crystal Carter:

You win some, you lose some.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by a Wix. You can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over Wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Got little slashes, but where you can also get started with your SEO by using the Wix SEO setup checklist, where you can connect to Google Search Console to single click with the add a bonus of having your homepage indexed by Google instantly. And who knows what else they'll find when they do. As this week we're talking about starting SEO from scratch, which now you know why there was a scratch joke about cooking in the beginning. It all makes sense, how your product and services and business models factor into SEO. How to craft a strategy and SEO plan from scratch. How to get your SEO to gain some momentum when you are starting from scratch.

And to help us stir the pot and add in some spice, musician songwriter and SEO extraordinary Gaetano DiNardi will join us just a few minutes. Or before you could say, "It's shake a bake and I helped." Plus, we'll explore what it means to cook up some brand messaging from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you this weekend. Who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So add three cups of flour, one cup of water, a teaspoon of yeast, let it sit, and then add 10 sticks of butter, some large, as much as you want, Crisco the entire can, teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt. And you mix it all up till your arms fall off. As episode number 77 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you start baking some SEO goodness from scratch. You smell that? Smells like SEO.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know what this recipe was for, but it was very greasy. Its like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, some say that SEO is snake oil. It's not really snake oil, it's just Crisco.

Crystal Carter:

It's Crisco. Crisco is magical. Shout out to Crisco my-

Mordy Oberstein:

My grandma used scoop Crisco. It was a disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was just nasty.

Crystal Carter:

No. You want to make cookies? Crisco.

Mordy Oberstein:

Crisco.

Crystal Carter:

Those are the best cookies, honestly, dry never. Forever moisturized.

Mordy Oberstein:

It looks disgusting. I feel like it's the... It's like you eat it and it immediately clogs your entire body.

Crystal Carter:

I don't care. The cookies are off the chain. The cookies are delicious.

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's delicious. Probably worth it.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

SEO from scratch. Starting from nothing is never easy. A lot of times when you come into SEO, it's in the middle of the process, but sometimes it's not in the middle of the process. Sometimes you're actually starting from literally nothing. And those are probably great moments because you're actually starting from when the business is getting going. You're there from day one. So that is very opportunistic for you as an SEO. But it's also hard, which gives me the pleasure of introducing today's guest. He's here in the flesh or the digital flesh, Gaetano DiNardi, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Guys, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction. And I got to say, I love the banter. I love the chemistry, I love the back and forth. This is the way. It almost feels like a talk radio show here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you. This is what I'm going for. I said this before, if I had to do my life over and I couldn't be what I am now, I had to do something different, I would like to be a talk radio show talking about sports in New York. That would be my dream.

Gaetano DiNardi:

That's what this feels like.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Thank you. It's the greatest comment anyone has ever given me.

Gaetano DiNardi:

It's so good, man. I love it. I love it. Being from... Well, I'll tell you, when I was growing up, I couldn't really sleep well as a kid. And I used to put on the AM New York Sports Talk radio it's all right through the night.

Mordy Oberstein:

I did the same thing. I would put the thing on sleep for 90 minutes. And you have... Steve was choosing from the fan talking about the rangers.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Exactly. How boring can that be. There's nothing better to put you to sleep.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right to sleep, right to sleep. Oh wait, who's that on line one? Is it Sal from Staten Island? I'm sorry.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Sal from Staten Island. Dude, it was some funny stuff though. I used to listen to Joe Benigno.

Mordy Oberstein:

Joe Benigno. You know he's still around?

Gaetano DiNardi:

He's still around. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's still around.

Gaetano DiNardi:

He's still around. Yeah. Joe Benigno at like 2:00 AM,

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Yeah. Yeah. Frank coming out as …

Mordy Oberstein:

Crazier than ever-

Gaetano DiNardi:

...because he's pissed. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like though, y'all could do an app for that. There's people who are using... I don't know. There's different apps for meditation. You could just have a like, "Hey, do you need to go to sleep? Here's some vintage."

Mordy Oberstein:

Vintage 1990s New York Sports Radio.

Crystal Carter:

Right. You could just pick one and choose yours today. You want Staten Island? You want Long Island? What do you want?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh man. I'll give you some good old Mike Francesa. I'll be out in three seconds.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Oh man, that guy.

Mordy Oberstein:

That guy is so boring.

Gaetano DiNardi:

That guy's so... Oh man.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, he's also... Look at these guys are all still around with the geezers. Anyway.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's talk SEO from scratch. Since we're starting from scratch. Where do you want to start?

Gaetano DiNardi:

All right, well look, since we're starting from scratch, I'll tell you guys why this topic is being talked about. Now, I had a very tough assignment three years ago. I went into a company as a full-time head of marketing. And the primary way we're going to grow this business was through search. And so the SEO assignment was, well, there's nothing. There's zero. And the primary category was identity theft. The company saw is identity theft protection. Side note, my identity got stolen. It's a horrible situation. And so I was motivated to really thrive and crush this role because I know the kinds of people out there who do that, they are scum. So we need to fight back against this horrible thing that is plaguing so many people. And it's not just affecting young people, people who are digitally savvy. It's mostly hitting people who have no idea.

And it's mostly hitting people who are in not great financial situations. So when it cracks them, it cracks hard because they're stuck with bills that they didn't accumulate, that they got to now pay for. Credit card accounts open in your name, the use of your social security number to steal your tax returns, all sorts of wacky stuff. So anyway, the company has a lot of products and they had a huge investment. So the one caveat to this is there was a lot of dough and I could spend. In fact, they kept saying to me, "Why don't you spend more? Can't you spend more? How much more can you spend?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a good problem to have.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Good problem to have. And of course, all my agency and consultants and link building friends are like, "He has a lot of resources, so let's get in there." So yeah, I did recruit in a lot of players to help me scale this, but this was the ultimate setup that we landed on. Me driving everything. Two content marketers with very strong SEO backgrounds and great editorial chops. 10 freelance writers, one in-house link building manager, plus like two, three external link builders. The result of that is approximately 20 articles a month and approximately a hundred links per month. And that was the pace we ran at from when I started building that program, which really kicked off in late 2021. The first article was published in November 2021. I personally wrote it actually.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, nice.

Gaetano DiNardi:

It was how to check if your identity has been stolen. It's still a top killer. It's still ranks-

Mordy Oberstein:

EEAT. E For experience.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Yeah. E for experience, baby. Yeah. I wrote it personally, built links to it personally through my own network. And it ranked pretty fast actually for a site with nothing. And so I guess I'll pause there before I keep ranting and riffing, but that's the initial setup. I know it's a lot to take in because most people do an SEO, it's way smaller scale than that. Nobody's doing 20 articles a month. Nobody's treating a SaaS SEO as a publisher almost would. And so anyway, I guess I'll pause there so we can just get your reactions. But that's how we launched it and that's the setup.

Crystal Carter:

I think one of the first things that stood out for me from that conversation, and you brought it back at the end, was when you were talking about the building it from scratch, you'd had the customer base in mind and you actually discussed that throughout your description of what you were going to do. You were saying, "I had my identity stolen. This is the experience that people were having. And I wrote the first article myself." And Mordy mentioned the experience in the EEAT. And I think that when people are thinking about getting going with SEO, having the customer experience and the customer focus, and like, "I get you, I get this, I get why this is an issue for you, and that's at the core of what we're doing." I feel like that is always a good recipe for success.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's exactly what stood out to me initially also is that when you're first starting out, you're really trying to think, "Okay, who is the audience? What are the needs? How do I align the needs? And how do I align SEO with what the business itself is actually trying to do?" So it's completely harmonious from the start.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Absolutely. So here's the next thing I realized. The company has a lot of products and services. Like identity theft protection is the flagship product, but it's sold as a bundle with a lot of other stuff. So there's financial fraud protection, there's password manager, there's VPN, there's antivirus and there's family safety, parental controls and stuff like that. Have you guys ever looked at how difficult VPN the category is? Have you ever seen how insane-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, actually.

Gaetano DiNardi:

...antiviruses? You know the kind of brands and players that are in those categories. It's pretty wild. So you can get overwhelmed really fast as an SEO with the company saying, "Hey, we got to get more subscribers into this. We got to grow our presence for that. We got to do this and that and this and that." And so you got to actually deflect a lot of that noise and say, "All right, the reality is we have no topical focus and no strength and no brand association with anything right now." So we've got to hammer one thing and go all in and say, "All right, that other stuff is going to have to come later." And so I made the decision to say, "All right, we're just going to build our identity theft and own that to start because we need to get something going somehow, somewhere."

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's a real strength because I think that a lot of people think that when my brand, I have to get my logo out there and this and that. And it's like when you're very much starting from a completely new business or a completely new website or a completely new product, for instance, the solution is the lead there. So when you're saying identity theft first, that's how people are going to find you. And I think that building that out and building the depth of information there is going to help you build trust with people so that when you introduce them to a new product, they're more likely to actually get involved with you because they trust you on that one thing that you show yourself to be very good at.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to read you an email that I sent to somebody who was asking about an SEO product that I'm working on with them. And I'm not going to go into the whole details around the whole thing, but I wrote, I generally recommend in these cases, putting your full energy behind one thing, seeing how it goes-

Gaetano DiNardi:

Thank You.

Mordy Oberstein:

...and then taking it from there.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed and all over the place. And what I feel like when you're starting from scratch, what you're trying to do is really getting... We spoke about this on the podcast, is getting momentum.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's both momentum internally in terms of your own process, getting things going, getting things moving. And also externally, getting some momentum in terms of creating a digital presence for yourself, building up those associations and getting Google to really see your light in that dark sky so that it's gravitated to it, like a moth kind of thing. And you can't do that if you're all over the place. You have to just pick one thing and just go all in.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Thank you so much for saying that. You just made me so happy because this is what I say too, the momentum piece in SEO is huge. It's such an underrated factor. But when you have momentum, think about it. You're publishing 10, 15, 20 articles a month, a hundred plus links a month. Now, I'll tell you guys how we sprinkled some more sauce on top of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it is like a deep dish pizza, you're putting the sauce on top.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Oh, this is crazy. So now when the company you're driving results for is backed by the former chairman of Walt Disney Corporation, you know there's some heavy hitters behind this project. So they went and sponsored the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA basketball team. So then the next part of this was, all right, this can't just be SEO, it's got to be fully surround sound.

Let's hit all the review sites as hard as we can. So we started doing surround sound search, hitting up every big site that reviews identity theft products and getting them to review us. We started getting included on all those X best top software lists for identity theft protection, working out affiliate deals with every single affiliate player out there. We started working with YouTube creators and influencers to mention our product in their scam stories. We did YouTube SEO, we mirrored our editorial strategy with a YouTube SEO playbook. It was literally just a dude who's well-spoken and credible, like a Mordy, I got to say. He's like your son.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. I don't have a credible part, but well-spoken I'll take.

Gaetano DiNardi:

To deliver on camera, very confident with good, clear delivery of speech and stuff. We basically took all the content briefs for our SEO pages and transformed them into scripts, and we started embedding all the YouTube videos into our SEO pages. But I guess where I was going with all this was it helped a lot to start seeing in branded search aura plus identity protection, aura identity theft. Now we're getting somewhere. Now it's like okay, we're getting a lot of links with those anchor texts. We're starting to rank for some really competitive terms, and we're branding ourselves real hard against LifeLock. So that was pick out the big nasty enemy in the room and just go attack. So ranking for stuff like that was key.

Crystal Carter:

And I think something that's interesting with that playbook that you just laid out, there is a lot of people... Some people will be listening to this and they'll go, "I'm a small business, how could I possibly do this?" But like, "Yo, you could sponsor the local 5K. You could sponsor your local little league team. You could sponsor the local football team at your high school, the high school near you. You can do that sort of thing. And then you can build on that. You can get links in local publications. You can talk to local influencers. You can literally talk to them because they're probably in your town. You can invite them to your restaurant. You could give them a free consultation at your law firm, whatever it may be." So there are definitely plays that you can make. And YouTube videos, you could make a YouTube video.

We have the tools, we have the technology. It doesn't have to cost you a million dollars. And certainly when you're getting started, it doesn't have to be a massive production in order to get going. So I think that there's lots of things that you can take from that, even if you have a small budget.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, nothing's actually different. Just the scale of it is different. What you actually want to do is the same thing. It's actually probably easier at a smaller scale than doing it at a massive scale. I am thinking of two particular projects in my mind. One was a very big massive project with a big massive budget, and one is not. And the strategy I did for... They're pretty much the same. Just the scale is different. So in one of them, they have a hundred thousand dollars budget for SEO. I'm like, okay, 20 grand for the first three months should be on social media, getting influencers to share your content, put it out there, get your brand known, get your content known, get people to link to it, put money there. On the smaller scale product, it was the same thing, but it wasn't $20,000, it was $200.

Crystal Carter:

And you could figure that out. You can beg, borrow, et cetera, for instance-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's much easier. If you're a smaller grassroots, then you could beg, borrow and steal people. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. You work at a big product and no one doing any favors.

Crystal Carter:

No. But if you have people that you know that you're like, "Hey." These people, you can get involved with them. And I think you mentioned, you said, "Oh, this person's related to Disney," et cetera, et cetera. That's a sign. Be aware of your networks, that's the other thing. Use your networks to grow as well. I think that's really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Think like a marketer.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Absolutely. So to the point of not needing a huge budget, I'll tell you, most of our ads were shot with iPhones. Most of our videos that we used for ads were shorts. We just got customers to put your iPhone in front of your face and just talk. And we would clip that up, shape that up. We would even take little clips of the news saying, "Austin, tonight, 10:00 PM news, this crazy identity theft story is out of control." And then we would have somebody talking about that same topic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, nice.

Gaetano DiNardi:

And we would collage stuff together. So we got creative and nifty with some of our advertising as well. And then remember what we said at the beginning, how I actually wrote the first post, and like it's really about understanding that customer deeply. I forgot to mention one of the most important things I did in this whole process, and it was just listening to calls, listening to sales calls. That's all I did for the first week actually. As I was doing keyword research, I was listening to calls. We used a call transcription software, and I would type in things like dark web and I would see that 35% of our calls mentioned dark web or I would type in little focus terms like that just to see what pops up.

And I would look at the surrounding texts near it and I would see, oh, dark web monitoring, dark web alerts. And I would form content strategy based on that. And then I would actually use mostly autosuggest to be honest with you, to find the super long tail stuff. Because what I realized was there's two things in somebody's mind who's worried about identity theft. It definitely has happened. I got hacked, I got scammed. Somebody took advantage of me somehow, some way, and I'm freaking out versus I think something weird is happening. Am I in that danger zone? I'm still very, very concerned, but I don't know if I should be out in full out panic mode yet. What should I do? And then there's actually another category of people that are just like, "Whatever, I don't care. I know that I use the same passwords across 80 different online accounts and I don't care. I'll be fine. This is all just marketing hype to try and get me to buy stuff."

And we countered a lot of those thoughts and feelings with our content. We actually realized that is X worth it? Should I get X is a great topic for this category. Is identity theft insurance worth it? Is identity theft protection worth it? And we took the narrative of we're going to be the only company out there that says something different than everyone else. If you go look at Norton, LifeLock and all those big brands, they all say, "Yes, you need it, you need it, you need it, you need it. If you don't, you're screwed." We were the only ones that said, "You actually don't really need this if you're comfortable with doing all this manual work." And the reality is, no one's comfortable doing all this manual work. Who do you know that goes to the credit score website and checks all their credit reports and credit scores manually? Who goes through the three-

Crystal Carter:

I do all the time. No, I'm kidding.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who do you know that... I mean, I do this because I'm a freak, but who logs in to all their credit card accounts and checks all the charges all the time, the debit card? Who's on top of that stuff like 24/7? You know what I mean? It's tough. So anyway, that's just some thoughts around the content strategy and how I came up with ideas and stuff.

Crystal Carter:

I think though, there's so many points to take from that. Again, this is something you do not need a gigantic budget for. You can look at your customer service information. You can see the reviews on your product. You can see the reviews on your business. You can talk to the people who are your customer service team. You can look in your Slack channels for the questions that are coming from that. I have an article that talks about user first content information. That is gold dust. That is gold dust. Going through those user calls is super, super useful. Does not cost the earth and like you said, gives you some keywords that you would not find in other places. The trending topics thing is really important, I think is particularly when you're working in SaaS or something that's where the technology is evolving and stuff because auto suggest updates quicker than you're going to see in historic keyword search volumes.

So that's super useful. And also differentiation, like you said, we don't want to sound like everybody else. That's huge as well. With all the AI stuff, for instance, a lot of people are going to be making a lot of content that sounds very similar to a lot of content that's also being published at the same time. And that's been the case for a while. But if you can cut through that noise, that is absolutely crucial. Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I feel like we've got a really good solid foundation about how to get started, how to think strategically, how to think about... How to get going from the very beginning, how to structure, know what you're going to need long term. We going to make a point that maybe we can consciousize a little bit, that's not a real word. Make conscious a little bit, you need to think about what the plan is not now, but also long-term, the resource that you're going to need and build yourself up in order to handle that. But if there's one last thing you wanted to focus on before time quickly runs out on us, what would it be?

Gaetano DiNardi:

I think I would in terms of just how to decide topics, because there's so many different kinds of topics you could create content about. It's like an endless sea of ideas. I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this framework. I'll just show it to you. It's this framework that prioritizes the business potential of a topic based on how commercially relevant it is. So there's a lot of rabbit holes with content. A lot of times even somebody at your company will bring up a really wacky idea like, "Hey, PPP loan fraud is exploding right now. Let's go cover this topic." That could potentially work. But the problem is there's very, very little connection with that trending topic to your solution. The other problem with it is that it's not really going to be much of an SEO play because think about who's covering the topic PPP loan fraud.

Every big news site out there is already covering it. So it doesn't really make sense for you as a smaller brand to try and out-cover what these big publishers are already going nuts over. So I like to go as close to the product as possible, and it doesn't have to be the classic X best software list. There's other ways to find that pain point. So for example, how to protect your child from identity theft. That would be the highest possible business potential because you pretty much need a solution to do that. There are other things you can do manually, but a solution is going to do that really, really well. The next level down is if your product is helpful, but it's not absolutely essential to solving the problem. So something like I got scammed on Facebook marketplace. That was a very, very common thing that we would see.

The solution can help you solve parts of that problem, but it can't guarantee 100% scam prevention. And we would say that pretty openly in all of our marketing material. Because a lot of people would get the impression that if you are a customer and you do get scammed on Facebook, we'll be able to help you recover a hundred percent of your lost assets or things like that. It's not always the case. The next level down is if the product can be mentioned sparingly or as part of the recovery process in the event of fraud or some kind of identity theft. So an example is like how do scammers steal credit card numbers? This is a very popular long-tail search, and we felt that explaining all the ways that scammers can steal your credit card number and then how to prevent that from happening is a great way to get in front of the audiences that matter.

The audiences who are thinking about this, they may be worried that their credit card number already has been stolen, but this may be what they're searching. So that's the framework for thinking about how close is this topic to how our product can solve that potential problem. And if too many ideas are coming to the table that are far away from the product, we probably need to reevaluate what we're doing because the reality is we're not getting judged based on how much traffic we generate to the site. We're getting judged on SERPs. And so the traffic is nice, it's a leading indicator. We can show that to leadership and say, "Hey, we have this much organic visibility," and they're going to be like, "That's great. That's a great positive sign." But if none of that traffic is really doing anything in terms of business results, they're going to start questioning the program.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. And we spoke about this on a recent podcast about emerging content versus evergreen content and bailing those two things out and going after, even for emerging content, if the big players are there, maybe not the best place for you to go. Being really strategic, especially at the very beginning about what topics you go after will be the difference maker between burning through resources that you don't really have or being effective with the limited resource that you have and making sure that you're actually building that momentum we spoke about before. With that, where can people find you?

Gaetano DiNardi:

You just go to my website, officialgaetano.com.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, nice. Social?

Gaetano DiNardi:

Social. Yeah, I'm all over that stuff. If you guys go to LinkedIn, that's where you'll primarily find me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, Cool. Okay. So not TikTok.

Gaetano DiNardi:

You just search Gaetano DiNardi. I'm not a tiktoker man. It's just not-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not our thing. Again, I've never said, "Yeah, SEO marketing. But yeah, TikTok is my thing." And then we talk about TikTok, it's marketing TikTok, of course, but then actually on TikTok.

Gaetano DiNardi:

I know. The thing is I'm a good writer and it's easier for me to just rant on X or put together a nice little LinkedIn post or something. It takes too much work to get on camera and start talking and doing video content. I don't know. I got to be in the mood for it.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I'm with you.

Crystal Carter:

Well, thank you very much for being in the mood for this today. We really appreciate all your insights and it's very clear that you've got very clear focus of where you want to take something from zero to hero, and that's amazing. So thank you very much for sharing today.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what to say. I feel pretty blessed and humbled to be a part of the Wix podcast. This is going to be a stamp on the-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, no.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Stamp on the old resume here.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go.

Gaetano DiNardi:

Checkbox, accomplishment done.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're happy we can make this happen for you. Thanks so much for coming by.

Gaetano DiNardi:

All right, sounds good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye. So building SEO from scratch is one thing, but to build brand messaging from scratch is a totally different thing, but not really because it overlap in a lot of ways. But let's pretend that they don't. Okay, let's not pretend that they don't, they do. What I'm saying is let's just focus on the brand messaging part and move beyond SEO, just so we bit as we get into brand messaging and building it from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu in a little segment we call The Great Beyond. So I, in case you don't know, I love brand building, I love brand messaging, I love brand positioning, I love brand marketing.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's bring a little bit of that into this. As we look at building messaging from scratch, which is really, really, really hard to do. Building brand from scratch, I take building a brand from scratch is harder than building SEO from scratch. And building SEO from scratch is incredibly difficult,.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Absolutely. And I think sometimes you have to decide which things to lean on. So I've seen people... I saw somebody on Dragon Stand, which is something like Shark Tank in America. It's like that sort of thing where you're presenting a business and they had this matcha tea brand and the guy asked him, "Why don't you have the name of your brand bigger on the can of tea?" It was like an iced tea kind of thing.

And he was like, "Because matcha as a concept is bigger at the moment than our brand name. So if somebody is looking for this particular product, they will recognize the word matcha sooner than they will recognize our brand name." And sometimes you have to think about that. Sometimes you have to think about that and that balance of which thing is actually going to lead the conversation and which thing is going to be more recognizable. And sometimes that's a little bit of a tough pill to swallow because people are like, "But I want to have this thing." It's like, but people don't know you yet.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's always a tough pill to swallow in my opinion. And brand messaging is swallowing that pill. People don't care about the product the way that you think that they actually do, the way that you do, and just swallowing that pill.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And you have to recognize where the value is and people will come with you because let's say on this matcha tea thing, I love matcha tea, by the way, but if I were to try-

Mordy Oberstein:

I wonder if you've had a bit before.

Crystal Carter:

It's fantastic. I drink matcha tea, I switched from coffee to matcha tea. I highly recommend it to anyone. Anyway-

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't do that. No, no, no. Slow down. Do not get off coffee people.

Crystal Carter:

Do it. Do it. It's the best thing that ever happened to you.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to have a sip of coffee.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that the thing that you can do with that is that it allows you to... Let's say if I'm the matcha tea person, I'm in this audience and I go, "Oh, matcha tea." Then I can experience the brand and I can go, "Oh, I like this. I want to find out more about this." And then I will check out the brand and if I've had a good brand experience, and then I'll say, "Hey, have you heard about that?" I'll tell other people about it. I'll let people know, say, "Hey, I found this great thing. It's really, really great." I'll be out and about. And I'll say, "Oh, I'll see that. That's what I want." And I think that sometimes you can lead with that, lead with the product and the actual USP of the product, the solution that you have until you get that brand equity as you're building from scratch.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a slow burn. I have so much to say about this, but let's actually get to what Diane Wiredu from Lion's Words, the founder of Lion Words has to say about building brand messaging from scratch. Here's Diane.

Diane Wiredu:

So the question is, how do you create brand messaging from scratch? Well, usually you're not really starting from scratch. You've probably been explaining what you do successfully somehow or somewhere to get your business to the state that it's at right now. So whether that's on your current website, on sales calls, chats, or prospect conversations, it could be in decks or proposals or even just on social media. So I'll start by saying that you've probably got a foundation. What you need to do is figure out if what you're saying about your product or service actually resonates with your market and buyers and how to better articulate the value that you deliver in a really clear, relevant and differentiated way. So for that, there are a few crucial steps. Step one is to document and evaluate your existing messaging. So I always do this with my clients.

I take a look at their current messaging and bring it into one place. So what's working, what's not? Where are the gaps or inconsistencies in the story that you're telling? You want to identify some points of friction, but also opportunities. What do you want to be saying? So starting with this step, this gives you a really good point of reference and a benchmark to evaluate against. Then step two, we want to find out what your customers are saying. So go out and perform voice of customer research to discover how your customers speak about your product or service and their experience with it. So I love to set up customer interviews where I can ask open-ended questions around the before, during, and after stage. So I'll ask questions that dig into customer struggles, the decision and buying process, what their needs and jobs to be done were, and of course the results and outcomes afterwards.

Step three is to go out and look at what competitors are saying. So our messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum. And aside from being clear, we also want to avoid drowning in the sea of sameness. So look at competitive alternatives and evaluate what they are and aren't saying as well. And then lastly, step four, you want to filter those findings and really narrow your messaging focus. So I like to create a messaging map, which is essentially a prioritized list of key themes, words, messages that came up in the research, and then map this against your initial evaluation and start drafting new messaging that better reflects your value as well as the customer's needs and point of view. A really important little copywriting tip is to really bring in and use those customer words as well. So this step is a bit tricky, but it's all about simplifying.

Remember that you can't be known for a hundred things as a company, so find your north star and really narrow down your focus. And lastly, I guess a bonus step, step five is to test because creating messaging might be done by you and/or your team, but it's really your prospects and customers who will tell you if it works and resonates or not. So validate your messaging through message testing or user testing and then iterate on it and optimize so that you can get the biggest ROI from it. So hopefully that will help you get started with your messaging.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Diane. Make sure you follow Diane on LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Just look for Diane Wiredu on LinkedIn, give Lion's Word a look, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. She's also an event and host organizer for the Marketing Meetup. So shout out to the Marketing Meetup. We love them. A lot of shout-outs. There's a lot of points to get to in this, and I'll say first off, one of the points people don't realize about messaging and something that she hit on is that I find that good messaging is the vertex of what your users need and who you are. And it's a convergence of those two things together. And I think what brands often don't get right is often they lean too into who they are or too far into who their audience is and what their audience needs, but don't connect that to who they are either.

And that's finding that sweet spot is what you really ultimately want because what you're trying to do when you're building a brand is really trying to create a connection. So it has to be part of you and part of your audience together in that, in order for there to be a conversation or there be a connection, it can just be one or the other one. And the last thing I wanted to say, or one of the last things, I have a million things to say, but the last thing I want to say before I hand it over to Crystal is messaging frameworks when you're getting started are great. And to what she's talking about there about refining that and doing focus groups and really understanding what people want and who you are. All that stuff is great. I do find though, as you start getting things rolling, and as your brand starts evolving, as you mature, as you get past the starting up phase from scratch, messaging framework can also become a crutch and it's something to watch out for.

Messaging frameworks are great for working at scale, especially in larger companies because you cannot talk to everybody all the time and all the different people all the time about what the USPS are, how you want to... You need to have some framework. What nearly happens though is as you use those frameworks to scale things, you lose touch with the actual user, the actual needs and the actual pain points and things can become a little bit templatized. So you need to find a good balance between scaling and actually being in tune and having your finger on the pulse, which you can't scale. There's no way to scale that in my personal opinion. So yes, frameworks are great, but as things start to evolve, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with the frameworks and relying on them as a crutch.

Crystal Carter:

She talked about refining testing and things, and I think that really ties in with what you're saying as well. These shouldn't be static. They should evolve with your brand because your brand will evolve. Your brand is a living, breathing thing and will evolve. And certainly with digital marketing, with SEO, you will be able to get actual feedback on that in real time, essentially. So if a new story breaks and people want to talk about your brand in a different way, then your brand positioning will evolve. So for instance, I mean with Wix, we had this last year, people started talking about AI and Wix was like, "No, actually we are big in the game on AI, and we have been for a long time and started putting that information more to the fore.

Another prime example is there's a drink called Lucozade, which exists in England, and it's a little bit like Gatorade. And back in the day it was marketed as the brand was medicinal. So it came in glass bottles and it had very medicinal packaging and stuff because it had electrolytes, it was the kind of thing that you would have after you'd been-

Mordy Oberstein:

Like coke, literally like Coke. Both the drink and the drug were medicinal.

Crystal Carter:

So yeah, so people thought of it as a medicinal thing. And then later on people started realizing that athletes were having it because it replaced electrolytes, and so they started marketing it as a sports drink, and that is people listening to how the audience is responding to their brand. And as she said, this is something you should see how users are responding to it, how your audience is responding to your brand. I also liked what she was saying about you're not really starting from scratch. You have input. You have data on how people respond to your brand from sales calls and from going to conferences and talking to people at expos and from talking about your brand, explaining what you do to your mom. Does your mom actually understand what you do? Can you summarize the brand of your company in a couple of words?

That's something that you refine and that's something that's really, really important. If you're able to do that really, really quickly, then that means you've really nailed the essence of your brand. And I think also what you were talking about, about the relationship between what can you do for me? That sort of thing. What can you do for me? Who are you? Do you understand who you are? And do I understand who you are and do you understand who I am? I think sometimes there's a thing, it's like it's not necessarily that I don't have confidence in you but sometimes it's like... Not you personally Mordy, but-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're completely right.

Crystal Carter:

...I do. But I think sometimes you have a situation, like I mentioned Dragons Den earlier, but something that happens on that show is they'll say, "Oh, I'm investing in you as a person," or whatever. And I think it's hard to understand what that means, but sometimes with the brand, it's a question of demonstrating that you have confidence in yourself, and if you don't have confidence in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to also have confidence in you? So it might be that you think this brand is great, but it doesn't seem like they think they're great, which makes you worry what they know that you don't know. So I think it's really important that you're confident, but maybe not necessarily overly so, but just confident in your capabilities and aware of your competitors and things like that. And I think that that's something that's really, really useful. Dan had some great points.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. One thing I'll say real quick before we have to move on, and never really when you're going to start thinking about messaging, you're going to bring up tone like what's our tone in our messaging going to be? I will say that the biggest mistake I see people make is the tone is simply a list of adjectives when really tone is actually a way of communicating with your audience in nonverbal ways or less like subtle, more sublime verbal ways. It's basically asking in what way and more importantly, on what emotional level do we want to communicate with our audience? And once you understand that's what tone actually is, you'll immediately realize that it's more than a few adjectives. Anyway, you know who's got a great tone? I always find this tone very fun, really fun, uplifting and exciting.

Crystal Carter:

I do too.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. It's Barry, Barry Schwartz, it's Barry Schwarz time on the SERP's Up podcast. When we get into the SEO news, I'm going to say, "Take it away, Barry," at this point.

Crystal Carter:

All right, go RustyBrick, go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Search Engine Roundtable. One from Search Engine Land. All three from Barry Schwartz, who clearly has a monopoly on the SEO news. First up from SEO Roundtable, Google Popular Opinion search carousel. What about the Google Popular Opinions search carousel? Let me help you, Barry. Google tests popular Opinion search carousel. As spotted by Brodie Clark was a great follow, follow him over an X. Brodie was searching for Sony XM4, which is a pair of headphones and underneath an Amazon listing, got a carousel that was called Popular Opinions, which presented a series of cards that were review articles of the headphones. Barry pointed out that he saw a similar test a year ago with a section on the cervical perspectives and opinions. What's interesting though is that back then the results Barry got back were from CNET and Gadget, CNN, big, big name sites.

In Brodie's case, the results seem a little bit more niche, which I think is interesting. What I think is happening here is Google looking for a way to put results up on the top of the SERP from more specifically topically specific websites that are not just the usual big names. There's been a lot of controversy around Google just defaulting to the big name websites and is that really healthy and are those results really good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I don't want to get into the controversy here right now, but what I do see is with a popular opinion is if the results are more niche and more topically specific than they used to be with the tests a year ago, that to me seems like Google is trying to find a way to implement a scenario where there are more topically focused websites that offer perhaps better content up at the top of the SERP.

So I like that one. Okay. Also from seoroundtable.com and also from Barry Schwartz because who else would it be? Well, I guess technically Glenn Gabe does write once in a while for SEO Roundtable. By the way, Barry, more Glenn on SEO Roundtable. I like that little diversity of authors there. Anyway, Barry writes Early Signs, Google search ranking update on February 28th and 29th. There's been a... Well, it looks like almost like massive increase in ring fluctuations, not just on the 20th and 29th, but a few days before that. Also, it looks to be like 25th. So a series of ring volatility. Glenn Gabe who will try to link to the show notes on this as well, walk through some cases you've seen of massive reversals and so forth. Sometimes these kind of things could be a precursor to an official algorithm update.

So who knows? As of the recording of this new section, it looks like things have calmed down a little bit. By the time when we release this episode, things could be spiking again. Who knows? It's a game of roulette. Onto searchengineland.com. But again, sticking with Barry Schwartz, new Google structured data carousels beta. What about them, Barry? Google announces new structured data carousels beta. Well, they didn't announce it, they added documentation. I digress. Google add in new documentation for a new beta carousel that basically looks when you have, let's say events or products or whatever it might be, but you have multiple iterations of them. So imagine a collection page or an event page with multiple events. If you want to show those multiple items, there's a new carousel that Google might implement, and you can use structurally in a markup to be eligible to appear in this little carousel that is attached to your result.

It's not a separate independent cert feature carousel, but imagine you see this often with, let's say, news aggregators where if you search for something related to, say, sports news, ESPN might have a carousel, like multiple stories there. It's like that. Where in your organic result, you'll have multiple swipeable carousel cards. Basically this item list structured data needs to be attached or combined with something that supports the items. So you need to have product markup on there if you have a series of multiple products, right? If you are a local business and your page has multiple, I don't know, vacation rentals listed on the page, so you have to have local business markup or a subtype for a vacation rental listed on there. So it's not like it's independent thing, it's a markup to show the items or the items of what. So there's going to be multiple markups on the page. And with that, I'm done. That is your Snappy news for this week. Thank you, Barry, for your contributions and for your great headlines. Well, that was always fun. Thank you, Barry and the other contributors to the SEO News world out there.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, thank you very much for keeping us up to date with everything that's going on. It's like, it's wild though here. There's a lot of SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lot of ins and outs, sort of what have yous. Different people involved. Speaking of people, speaking of people, that brings us to our follow of the week this week, which is the one, the only Lily Ugbaja who's over at Lily U-G-B-A-J-A over on X slash Twitter, whatever you want to call it. She's up first off contributor to the Wix SEO Hub.

Crystal Carter:

Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. She's fantastic. She also has a great TED Talk online as well. One of the things she talks about on the Wix SEO Hub is how she built up our website from scratch and built up all the traffic from scratch and built that up from zero. That's one of the reasons why she's the follow of the week, and she talks about a lot of different tactics there and competitors and pulling things through. And I think she talks about being a little bit scrappy in the marketing, and I think that that's something that's really important when you're trying to get a brand going. I think Glenn Gabe has said, when trying to recover from an algorithm update, throw the kitchen sink at it, do all of the things-

Mordy Oberstein:

This is welcome wisdom by the way. Just want to shout out to Glen.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so Glen, Lily, everybody, Lily Ugbaja. And I think that it's important to, when you're thinking about your brand, get in there, get stuck in and move things forward until you get to the place where you want to be. And Lily definitely takes that approach. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. And she takes a content first approach. I think people realize your content is your brand. That's you talking. Some random blog post about whatever, that's actually you communicating with your audience and they're looking how you're doing that. So watch your tone. As we said before, I don't like your tone young man. Listen to my children, never.

Crystal Carter:

I found a great blog. I don't know if we have time for another tangent.

Mordy Oberstein:

Always.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so I was looking at sheds and I found this great blog.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like wood sheds, like the store tool?

Crystal Carter:

Like a shed in your garden. I found this great blog, and my question was, should I build a shed by a wall? And the article that I found was the general thing you would find on a blog, like a marketing blog, but it was so well written, me and my kids, I read it aloud to my family because it was so-

Mordy Oberstein:

Like a bedtime story?

Crystal Carter:

It was just so well written. I was like, "Should I build a shed by a wall?" And it was like, "Do you want to build a shed by a wall? That's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that." But then the heading, so they gave all the reasons, and then the last heading was like, "But I still want to build my shed by a wall." And it was so well written. And after that thinking, speaking of tone from that, I get that these people are knowledgeable. They know what they're talking about because there was definitely knowledge in this blog, but they also have a sense of humor. And they also saw me coming. They know.

Mordy Oberstein:

They know.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

99.9% of all communication is nonverbal.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that there's definitely something in there, your tone of voice and what you're saying about your brand being... Your blog being your brand, your content being your brand. It's absolutely true.

Mordy Oberstein:

I only have one question for you.

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what's coming, right?

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you build a shed by the wall? Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

So I had a shed that was by a wall, and it's causing me problems, and I was trying to figure out a way to get around it, but apparently you can't. So basically note to anybody who's listening, if you have a shed, do not build it by a wall because it will cause damp and the shed will fall down. So don't do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Next question. Are you rebuilding the shed yourself?

Crystal Carter:

I do not have the skills. I have-

Mordy Oberstein:

I would like to see this.

Crystal Carter:

I do not have the skills. I mean, it would be like the House of Jack-

Mordy Oberstein:

Please. No, please do it and like live, like video blogging.

Crystal Carter:

No, no, I'm not doing that. But I have a professional person who is assisting me with this. He's a very nice man named James. Thanks, James.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is he your husband?

Crystal Carter:

No. We are artsy. We don't build things with tools. We don't do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We build knowledge.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, we read books and stuff, but not about sheds.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, apparently you do read books about...

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right. Well, I guess you got to do for us. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what you never knew about Local pacs. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/seo/learn. Looking into more about SEO, check it all the great content, webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guest, at Wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece of love and SEO.