Building your SEO team, the right way

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazingly fabulously, oh no, don't put pineapple on my pizza, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much and thank you for reminding the world that pineapple on pizza is literally the worst thing that's ever happened to pizza, and also to mankind. It's like it's a terrible thing that I don't know who decided that was something.

Mordy Oberstein:

The plague, pineapple on pizza.

Crystal Carter:

Pineapple on pizza. It's worse.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pineapple on pizza.

Crystal Carter:

It's worse. I think that, yeah, it's awful.

Mordy Oberstein:

We were recently together at the Wix offices and-

Crystal Carter:

We were.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, biyearly occurrence.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. It's something like that, and I wanted to bring you a can of pineapple so you can put it on your pizza.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that wouldn't happen. I would eat the pineapple separately. Pineapple's fine on its own, it's fine on its own.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pineapple's delicious.

Crystal Carter:

It's that the two don't need to go together. I don't know. Me and skateboard. I don't need to skateboard. It's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hot sauce.

Crystal Carter:

Hot sauce is good. I would even have hot sauce on pizza. I'll tell you that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hot sauce pizza's amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Right. This is good. I like broccoli on pizza. I don't mind-

Mordy Oberstein:

Also good.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know why? Because broccoli and cheese, that's a solid combination. You can have broccoli and cheese. That makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

Cheese goes with everything. Maybe peanut butter and cheese would be a little weird.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I can see that, but nobody puts pineapple in pasta.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, you could totally make a sauce that has pineapple and put it in your pasta. Pasta is like paper, it goes with everything.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, but with garlic and basil and pineapple, it wouldn't. It's not a thing. It's fine. No one's going to convince me. People are like, "Oh, I'll-" You will not. No one will convince me.

Mordy Oberstein:

My subjective reality is greater than your subjective reality.

Crystal Carter:

I'm just saying like, no one's going to convince me that pineapple on pizza is ever a good idea. It's not. It's just not. I tried it. It's not that I have a closed mind, it's that I have an informed opinion. These are different things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pineapple and yogurt. Would you eat pineapple and yogurt?

Crystal Carter:

I have. It wasn't an enjoyable flavor sensation.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. I'll throw one last curveball at you. I enjoy pineapple pie.

Crystal Carter:

Pineapple pie?

Mordy Oberstein:

Pie. Yes. I was a kid growing a combination pie. It was a third blueberry, a third cherry and a third pineapple. The best slice was the part where the pineapple was connected to the cherry half.

Crystal Carter:

This-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the New York thing.

Crystal Carter:

I'm not even sure if I know how to respond to that. It's-

Mordy Oberstein:

Blasphemous?

Crystal Carter:

It's something that I did not know existed, and so my brain is trying to take in a lot of new information right now.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have completely blown your mind with pineapple pie.

Crystal Carter:

Basically. I am literally speechless about this particular topic, which is perfect for a podcast to leave your co-host literally speechless.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that's a good point to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Let's just put it right out of that, where you can leave notes for your clients and even tag team members within the Wix blog. Nifty little feature not many know about, but if you have multiple hands, say optimizing a client's blog, it comes in handy, which is topical because today we're talking about how to build a strong SEO team with notes in your blog. That's how you do it.

Crystal Carter:

You can also bribe them with snacks that don't include pineapple pizza.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pineapple pie would be fine.

Crystal Carter:

Pineapple pie. It's really important to know your audience and to connect with your team in lots of different ways, including notes and including collaborative documents and other things.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right, because today we're talking about what you want to consider when constructing your own megazord of SEOs to unite in the form of an ultimate SEO team. Power Rangers reference. They all climbed together to make one big robot thing. If you're not a fan, which I wasn't, but that's where I went.

Crystal Carter:

Go, go, go Power Rangers. Not pirate Rangers, Power Rangers.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, pirate rangers. That's interesting. Anyway, we're diving into specialists or generalists, whom should you hire? Spoiler alert. It depends. Don't forget the softer side of soft skills. Why you should not undervalue the SEO who knows how to communicate well, and doers and thinkers, why a good SEO team has a balance of both. Plus a very special and most honorable guest from the depth of the internet will stop by to share his thoughts on the traits of a strong SEO team. That person, by the way, drum roll please, is John Mueller. John Mueller is here to take us through a metaphysical journey towards SEO team strength.

We'll also dive into Google's Looker to see how data centralization can help strengthen your SEO team. Of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Team up because episode number 31 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking you on a digital team retreat. We're going digital camping.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like, are we going to play some digital laser tag or do you some digital team building?

Mordy Oberstein:

We play laser tag at our little team. Who won?

Crystal Carter:

Who won?

Mordy Oberstein:

I won.

Crystal Carter:

What? No, I mean yes, that's true. I mean, okay. Basically to the people of the internet, let me just let you know that Mordy Oberstein essentially found himself a little spot and just like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Just snipering, lasering from a little corner.

Crystal Carter:

I realized that there were about five minutes left and went and sat down and had a nice drink. That's what I did.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fine. I guess George won because he was the most accurate, but I'm always a big believer that you miss all the shots you don't take.

Crystal Carter:

It's a prime example of one of the things that's really important when you're thinking about teams, is making sure you have complementary skills. There are ways that you can sort of, some person does one thing, another person does another thing, another person decides that that's enough now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

We've completed this task. I have team built and we're done. That's fine as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have strength in our team.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Laser tag is over.

Crystal Carter:

That's important. I think that these are things you got to think about when you're thinking about your team.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're just sorry you didn't win, that's all. Anyway. Getting a strong team together is very hard, which is why you need laser tag. I can very much tell you the struggle of finding the right people, finding quality people. In previous roles, it was a very focused pain point for me. It is very hard to find the right fit, the right person for the right job. It's almost impossible. I think we all know that problem. It's just really not easy to find talented people, and of course every niche has its own idiosyncrasies, and SEO is not different in any way, shape or form.

There are a variety of things you want to consider when you're building a team from what your focus area is, the types of SEO that you are doing or that you focus on, the various types of tasks that you have that come into focus for you, that has to be done either on your team as an agency or your in-house team. Of course, there are all sorts of, dare I say, financial considerations to think about, like your budget and what can cause a conflict when bringing up SEO teams when that goes into hiring. From a budgetary point of view. I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck by the way, between hiring an employee they feel fits a certain task or whether... Try that again, I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck between hiring the employee they feel they need to hire from a task or work point of view and the employee they feel they need to hire from financial point of view, which we'll get into later. That's a major problem for agencies in particular.

The point is building a strong SEO team is much more than a little bit complicated. It's a lot of complicated, and to me it hinges on those complexities and it's about bringing those complexities that we're going to talk about to the conscious level, which is literally what we're doing here. I feel like with this episode, I'm not saying anything novel. I'm just taking what's very latent and trying to bring it to the conscious level.

Crystal Carter:

I think also when we think about what an SEO team is, an SEO team can include people who work at the same company. Let's say you've got an in-house team for a brand, so the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the marketing executive for instance, they're part of the team. If you have an agency that helps you with your PPC or your SEO or your design or whatever, they are also part of your team and vice versa as well. Let's say you're a freelancer and you work with a few other freelancers on a regular basis, they're also part of your team. I think that how everyone works together and the tools that you use and the people that you choose to bring in the fold, these are all things, as you say, that you need to be conscious of. The more conscious you are of what you need from your team, the better you'll be able to perform.

Mordy Oberstein:

What makes that really hard though is that there are certain points where what you need and what you want and what you're able to do or able to hire are not the same thing. I don't have a good answer for that. This comes down, I think in SEO in particular, I think what made it hard is that SEO has become a little bit more specialized. That means that in theory, and that's what makes it hard for an in-house team or an agency, you would need to have more specialized people, which means more people on your team, which means more money going to salaries than in the past. Where you could hire a generalist back in the day when SEO, I'll say was in its infancy, but back in the day when SEO was a little bit more straightforward perhaps, for lack of a better word, you could have one person to do it all. That's not necessarily the case anymore, and now what do you do? Because now you need to hire two people, but you're not necessarily bringing in more money because of it. You're just doing better work.

Crystal Carter:

I think that this is something that comes down to, so I asked on Twitter, I asked, I got 113 votes about this sort of thing and I said, "What's the secret ingredient for a good SEO team?" 33% of people said complementary skills, like you're saying. You've got a technical SEO, you have a content SEO, you have an e-commerce SEO, you have a so-and-so. Another 33% said ability to manage change. Then the next option that I gave was clear leadership. Then 10% of people said other. I also had somebody sub-tweet me saying, "What about skills for the job?" I think a lot of people, I've heard a lot of agency teams and a lot of other people say that acumen is really important because a lot of times you can teach some of the more technical skills. You can teach someone how to optimize content. If somebody has a general grasp of how to work with language, you can teach them how to optimize content for search, that sort of thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

I guess as somebody who's hired many people over the course of my various careers at this point, the thing I was always looking for was not whether or not... I knew for the most part whether or not the person's skills were kind of in the ballpark of what I was looking for from the paper that I got from them. What I didn't know was their personality. Were they somebody who could fit into the team? Were they somebody who had that sort of it factor who I knew would work out well?

It's almost like, I'll give a bad sports analogy. In football, American football, there's a person called the quarterback and that person is the most important person. They hold the ball the most, they distribute the ball to the other people. They're the central figure on the team. There are many different types of quarterbacks. Some quarterbacks are really fast. Some quarterbacks can throw the ball really far. What the good teams do is they find someone who has a lot of talent, whether it be a good runner, whether it be somebody who's really smart, whether it be somebody who makes good decisions with that smartness. This example would be Tom Brady, that kind of quarterback. Whether somebody's got a huge arm/ they design the system around them.

They know, this person has a lot of good skills and a lot of things to offer, so let me build the system around them. I've always felt that. Find somebody who is a good, they're a team player, they're really intelligent, they're really adaptable, they have all those, I don't know what you want to call them, not personality skills, but persona skills I guess, and fit them into a place in your organization where they can thrive.

Crystal Carter:

Right. In the Twitter discussion, Jamar Ramos, who has managed an agency, who's managed teams, who works with developing SEOs, he said, "Critical thinking and a desire to grow are really important." He says, "Everything else can be taught." Similarly, Daniel K. Cheung said something similar. He said, "Mutual respect, overlapping work ethic and a similar hunger for learning." These are the things that you can build around, that you can, if you've got somebody who, let's say your team is really good at working on a particular CMS, you can say, "We're really good at this. We can build around that." Let's say your team is really good at content and and you're like, "We can make knockout content." You're like, "Ooh. What we really need though is some help with somebody who can get into back links, who can get us back links for this great content."

It's like, I'm throwing you the ball and you can catch it and you can take it someplace where we're going to win. I mean, I recently watched a documentary about, it's interesting you're talking about sports teams because when we were thinking about this, I was thinking about the Michael Jordan's Bulls. I was also thinking about the Showtime Lakers. I recently saw there's a TV show about the Showtime Lakers that's actually pretty good. Have you seen it? John C. Reilly?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

It's pretty good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Crazy show.

Crystal Carter:

I think Kareem and Magic are a classic example. They're very different players and they were both at very different points in their career when they were working together, but they complemented each other really well. Because Magic could get the ball anywhere, and Kareem had a shot that was undefendable. They worked really well together. I think that that's really useful in teams. It also means that you can learn from each other, and that was a prime example. There was one point where Magic took over from Kareem because Kareem was injured and they still won because they learned from each other. This is a really good thing that you see in teams and it builds trust in teams and it helps you do well. It means that you celebrate your wins, and that's fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love that point about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being very different kinds of players because you do need that on a team. You sometimes don't need the most brilliant strategist. Sometimes you need somebody who can organize things, take it and execute that really well. It's always good to have that really great strategy person we always kind of focus on, I feel like, but you also need that person who can do all of the things and execute all of the things. One is not better than the other one. You kind of need both. You need people who can really see the bigger picture, and then you need people who can do. Sometimes I feel like at agencies, or I maybe even broaden out, I think at companies we often don't value the doer to the extent that we should.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think that the implementation work can sometimes go to executives or juniors and stuff like that. I feel like I've had it before where I had a junior and they're like, "Oh, I'm just doing this thing over and over and over again." I'm like, "I did that." The work that you're doing is so valuable. It's so valuable and it's so important. I had an exec who was helping me with a bunch of reports or whatever and I was like, "Thank you, thank you so much." Also in that process of doing that thing 400 times or whatever it is, you learn so much about that process and you learn how to fine tune that process and you know how to be more efficient with that process. That can help the whole team.

The person who's doing the reports, for instance, who's doing 45 reports a month or something like that, they're going to look at that and they're going to go, "Oh my God, why aren't we automating this?" Then the team will go, "What do you mean?" They'll go, "We could use this and we could automate this and we can save ourselves four hours a month or something, and then we could use that doing more for our clients." That is brilliant.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's brilliant. I remember talking to Nick LeRoy about this. I don't know, a podcast I used to do or still do. He was saying, because Nick used to work at an agency and he was saying that one of the things that was hard for him at an agency was all the after hours stuff. He had a family, they lived far away, and he remembers valuing juniors who are new, let's say, and it wasn't their career. They would come at nine, they would leave at five, and that was just their thing. He remembers them not being valued by the particular agency where he was working, but to him as the top level strategist, he didn't need that person to feel like I got to be here at eight in the morning and be done at seven o'clock at night. He needed the person who didn't want it to be a career, who just wanted a job, who wanted to do and execute and write meta descriptions, update title. He needed somebody like that.

Just because it's somebody who may not see SEO as a career, they're just doing, we'll call it grunt work for a really lack of a better word, because I don't want to put that down at all. Because I'm trying to say the absolute opposite. You need somebody like that a lot of the times at an agency.

Crystal Carter:

I do a lot of that stuff and I'll tell you what, I think there's times when you're like, oh, good, I did all this planning, I did all this sorting out, and now I'm going to go hard on the copy and paste. I'm going to put on some music, and I'm just going to get all these things that I spent all this time writing and spent all these time strategizing and spent all this time, whatever. I'm going to put it in the computer, like we were saying before.

This is something that Joseph Silber was talking about this as well for things that he looks for in team members. An eagerness to test, learn, build, rinse, and repeat. Again, you test, you learn, you build, you do it again and that sort of thing. I think that also what you're talking about, somebody who's solid and stable and can deliver and will deliver the things that you need when you need them. Going back to the sports analogy, this is Steve Kerr in that one shot. Everybody's looking at Michael Jordan to be this, that and the other, and everybody knows Steve Kerr is like, he's a rock. He does what he does, but he's not super flashy. Michael Jordan's like, "I'm going to give you the ball." Steve's like, "I got you."

Mordy Oberstein:

He used to click his heels together when he shot. This weird little tick. Yeah, I only know that because I used to do the same thing. It's a weird thing that Steve Kerr did. Now we haven't even gotten into the soft skills side of what you need on SEO team because that is incredibly valuable, but we don't have to get to it because guess who's here?

Crystal Carter:

Who's here?

Mordy Oberstein:

Guess who's here?

Crystal Carter:

Who's here? Who's it, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

I already told you, John Mueller's here from the depths of the internet. We asked John what he thought goes into building a strong SEO team, and John sent back a prolific amount of information, which we're now going to explore together with John, but we're not actually together, but we're going to do it together. Here's John.

John Mueller:

Hey, it's me, John, coming to you from the depth of the internet. Hello. Is anyone listening? Oh, you are. Oops, sorry. Anyway, Crystal and Mordy asked me, what are the traits of a strong SEO team? I mean, they asked me and how should I know? I don't even have an SEO team per se. My team does do awesome things and the content does end up in search engines, and of course we kind of optimize one particular search engine. Does that count? I don't know. Anyway, apparently I should know because I once dropped a fun tweet on everyone saying, "Curiosity and persistence are the skills that SEO should have in 2023." I mean, it's a tweet. How serious can you take this? Anyway, I still kind of like that and I'll map this to a smaller team, which I guess isn't really realistic, but honestly, what is a team anyway?

Are we talking about a hundred person organization? Come on, Mordy and Crystal, give me something to work with. Persistence, the one I mentioned there, is all about waiting and all about those nitty-gritty details that you have to track and get right. You could say it's kind of a code name for technical SEO. If you want to get anything done with SEO, you need to stay on top of all of those technical details. You need to dot the I's and cross all the T's. You need to track all the URLs, all the structured data and make sure you get all of the details right. It's possible that Google or some tool will alert you if you get it wrong, but it's also possible that these tools don't even realize what you're trying to do and then they can't alert you.

You or your SEO team, if you will, you need to stay on top of all of these things. You need to find more details and track them. If you make changes, you need to be able to monitor them clearly over time without having to worry about unknown quirks thrown your way. Obviously in reality, nothing is ever so controlled. Especially with larger websites, there are a lot of dark corners which no frog has ever visited or documented, but still, the more you know, the more you can spot and the more you can check when you later see changes. Be persistent, be complete, have attention to detail, make your lists and check them twice. What also comes with this is kind of the willingness to dive deep into technical topics to figure out how things tick. One way to know what to be nitpicky about is to take things apart and see how they work. The cool part about SEO is that not everything is documented, but a lot of technical things can be worked out.

Mordy Oberstein:

I found it really interesting that the first thing that John wanted to talk about was the tech SEO side of it and how he did, when John put out that tweet that persistence is part of a building a strong SEO team, I did not take him to mean that they're diving into the technical part of the SEO side of things, but it does make sense where you're trying to dig in to see what's actually going on with the website and then testing things in order to understand what does or what doesn't move the needle. Persistence does make sense.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. I think he talked about different tools and tracking changes and things like that, and absolutely one of the things that is really important, particularly with tech SEO, is that you've got a lot of eyes on the ground when there are new rollouts and things like that. The tools that people use in order to facilitate technical SEO changes, track, monitor, optimize technical SEO changes, will dictate how good and how effective your team is. A lot of people will be using Slack. A lot of people might be using GitHub. There's ways where you can track changes, and in some of those sort of code to playing things as well. There's lots of ways where you can think... People add annotations into their code, specifically into the code. If you download something, there's a README that tells you things like that.

It's important to pay attention to which tools that you're using and make sure that they are enabling you in order to work well as a team, both technically and so that you've got a sort of paper trail. Because one of the things that happens a lot of times, particularly in tech stuff, is that your team might be, he talked about small teams and big teams. For instance, if there's a tech change on a website, a lot of times your team can be global, so your server team might be in another country on a different time zone. You might have people locally who are looking at things. You might have an SEO team who's doing something else. The tools that you have to communicate what you're doing is really important. If you can't communicate in real time, then that's the big challenge.

I know people who are using Slack and then they'll have a bot that comes into Slack and then people will have a discussion about what they've seen in that. I was in a discussion the other day with some teams from the Wix SEO team who were talking about how they can work better with ContentKing and Conductor to monitor changes and things like that. Yeah, those things are really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now I told you that John was going to talk about the soft skills side of SEO and I am not a liar. He will, so let's get back to John as we start to dive less so on the technical side of the team and more on the softer side of the team.

John Mueller:

What's the best form of pagination for your site? What are the options even? How does it have any effect? How can you test the effect? From there, what are the things that you need to watch out for versus the things that some tool currently flags? You can test a lot of this and sometimes with your own sites, sometimes with a test site, sometimes with a random blog that you happen to run on the side. I mean, who doesn't have that? There are a lot of these details and systematically testing can lead you to figuring out a little bit more. With all of these trials, you need to figure out how strong the individual effects are. It might be that linking from the top or the bottom of the page for pagination has an effect, but it might also be that the effect is so tiny that it's not worth considering.

This kind of leads into the whole discussion around prioritization. Then there's kind of the curiosity part from my tweet, which is more I'd say the creative part. Like I suggested, sometimes you need to take things apart to see how things work when it comes to SEO. This includes looking at old things that you newly discover and all of the new things that constantly pop up. How do they work? Do they work at all? Should I care about them? Should I care about them in the future at some point? All of these things aren't pieces of information that you can just look up when you need it. You kind of need to be curious and dig for it yourself.

Maybe there's a new Sitemaps extension that just came out. What does that actually mean for me? It might mean a lot of things to the SEO community out there, but you're working on one specific site or one specific set of sites, and you kind of want to know what does this is actually have as an effect for me?

There's also WebAssembly that came out a couple of years ago, and this is kind of in addition to JavaScript, a way to make an interactive website. I haven't seen any SEOs talk about WebAssembly. What does it mean for SEO? How can you figure this out? This is something that you can test, that you can try out.

The same goes for the more fad type things. Well, I don't know if they're a fad, we'll see. Things like ChatGPT, where you kind of have to look at it and think about, well, what could this actually mean for us? Is this something that we have to plan for? Is this something we have to do something urgently for, or is this something where maybe it's worthwhile to just wait and see? To see how things settle down and then try things out and see where that fits in. Without digging into any of these details, you'll never know. It's trivial to keep chasing squirrels all day without making a move. You kind of need to figure out what it is that makes a lot of sense for your site and then be able to focus on that a little bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, this is similar to what we were talking about before where you mentioned something that Jamar mentioned, Jamar Ramos, that you want somebody who's going to be persistent, who's going to be a critical thinker. All those sort of underlying skills or traits is kind of what you're looking for when constructing your team.

Crystal Carter:

I think, yeah. The curiosity element is really important. I've had someone intern for me, and she was completely new to doing SEO, to doing digital marketing and things like that, but she asked great questions. When somebody asks the question and you're like, yes, that is the question that you need to ask in order to do this well. I'm sorry I missed it, and I will come and I will explain to you in great detail because that is a fantastic question. I think that what he's talking about, that curiosity of trying to figure out if something works for you, trying to test it, trying to see what we can do, trying to explore, that's a really great tool for teams and a really great exercise for teams to be able to be creative together and to be able to try things together and to be able to understand new things together.

Because in the digital space, things are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools, there's constantly new techniques, there's constantly new information. If you have a team that's able to explore these new things, new social media platforms or new tools like ChatGPT or other things, then that means that you can grow together well and create new things. I mean, Wix for instance, is very innovation focused, and Dayful, for instance, is something that came out of something that Wix people were building and working on and things. They were able to create something new from that. Similarly, we have a logo maker that's very similar as well. Those things are really great for your team, for your bottom line, and for keeping your team vibrant and active.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now let's get back to John one last time as we go into the actual communication side of the SEO team.

John Mueller:

The other part when it comes to SEO, especially when I think about an SEO team, is you need to be able to engage a broad audience internally. On the one hand, obviously you need to be able to tweet in ways that drive a lot of engagement in ways that makes people face palm publicly so they're like, "Oh God, look what this person wrote and let me link to their tweets while I discuss it." I think the more important part is actually that you're able to engage internally.

It starts with maybe the marketing team who can give you a heads-up on what is about to happen or about the target audience, or just generally maybe they're the ones that tell you what to do actually. Then there's the developers who actually make the websites that you work on. This includes everyone from someone who's creating some HTML, who's maybe installing WordPress, who is configuring a CDN for the whole website. All of these technical aspects there, you need to be able to talk with them.

Then of course, there are the people who make the decisions, who decide when you get money or when you don't get money. All of the managers internally that kind of want to know what it is that you've been working on and they want to see kind of the effects that you've had on the website, or they want to know from you what are the trends, what is happening on the web that they should be watching out for. Maybe you want to go to them and say, "Well, actually we need to create a new VR based website, and this is why." All of these things are things that you need to be able to package up in a way that your management chain will be able to understand.

In short, I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing and manager talk.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. Thank you, John. If you're not following John Mueller on Twitter, you most definitely should be following John Mueller on Twitter. He is also on LinkedIn and Mastadon as well. Crystal's nodding her head, like don't forget that part, Mordy. I did not. On Twitter, it's @JohnMU. So @-J-O-H-N-M-U. Mastadon, I don't remember, I'll be honest. On LinkedIn, you just look for John Mueller, Google.

Crystal Carter:

On his Twitter, he tells you where his Mastadon is.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, there we go. Perfect. Of course, we'll link to all of John's profiles, his many profiles, in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I think we need to say, thank you, John, for putting up with the entire SEO industry and all that you do for the industry. You have an extreme amount of patience, insights, and virtue.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much, John, and thank you for those fantastic insights. Brilliant.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, speaking about building a strong SEO team and speaking about Google, because again, John is a search advocate at Google, there are a lot of tools that help your team collaborate and remain strong. You can call them SEO team building tools. One of these tools is Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio. Join us now for a special tool time as we have a look at Looker.

Looker, the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a very lovely tool if you would like to collaborate with data across your entire team. In fact, you can custom create all sorts of data and segments and reports to speak to various types of team members doing various different things, even beyond, dare I say, just SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's fantastic. The other thing that I think is great about Looker Studio is that it also allows you to collaborate with other people that you've never even met. Some of my favorite Data Studio, Looker Studio tools have actually come from other people. Christina [inaudible 00:32:50], she had a fantastic reporting tool that I've used regularly. Also the crux, there's a crux tool that allows you to sort of track, so like HTTP archive has their core vitals technology report that is publicly available and you can see core vitals report reports from all over the world, filtered down to all different things. It allows you to create collaborative documents that you can customize yourself and that you can share with others, and it helps the web overall.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's basically taking data that would be behind a wall and putting it out there for the public to see. The Crux data is a great example of that. You're showing core web vitals data, and everyone has the link to that dashboard, and now look at that. You can segment all sorts of things. It lets you manipulate the data. For example, you could take Google Search Console data and turn into trends data. If running through a whole table or a whole spreadsheet is not on your team's radar, or the person that you're sharing it with on your team, it's not their jam, you could turn a lot of that data into trends data.

Unless you manipulate data, unless you connect multiple sources, so you connect search console, Google Analytics, or even your SEMRush data, or any other million other source of data points into the reports. You can create internal reports, even external reports that speak to whoever it is that you're trying to target with the data. Again, another great point of it is that there's a lot of templates already out there that you don't have to do anything. People have created for you and you just plug in your data source.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. They have some templates that exist in the first space, or some templates that just exist that are already in the tool section. You can also, there are people who will share with you. I'm looking at, Lazarina Stoy has a fantastic Google search console URL inspection API dashboard. She has a few different dashboards on her website. She's a contributor to the Wix SEO hub. Shout out to Lazarina. Her dashboard that she made is really useful. I'm sure that lots of other SEOs share them as well.

Looking at how other people are configuring their dashboards can be really useful to help you understand both the kinds of data that you could be reporting, but also some of the functionalities of some the sort of data sets that we have. We have a lot. You get information from Google Search Console. You're getting information from GA4, you're getting information from other... From YouTube you can also connect really easily. If you're looking at other people's reports, it can help you make sense of that. I mentioned Christina earlier, and Christina had a really great GA4 dashboard that she shared. Having a look at her GA4 dashboard helped me to better understand GA4 because of the parameters that she was using.

Mordy Oberstein:

Literally same here on that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think she was showing page view or page path. She was showing page path, and I was like, oh, okay, so I understand that. That's the equivalent of this and that makes sense of that and da, da, da. These are really useful. It's also great for creating customer reports. If push comes to shove, if you've got some manual data that's in a data silo somewhere, and I don't know, how many people are walking through a door at your cafe or something like that. Let's say there's a little ticker and somebody has to go and look at the little thing and see what it says. If you've got something manual like that, you can connect it to Google Sheets for instance. You can still present it in a really accessible way via a Google Looker studio, but it can still work with your manual data.

Let's say you've had to export some data from something that doesn't exist anymore, like say Universal Analytics come this autumn. Let's say you've got some old data from somewhere, you can add that into a Google Sheet and you can use it as a benchmark and present it how you need to do it as well. It's a fantastic tool. It's amazing that it's free and it's really worth learning. It can be a little bit of a learning curve getting used to it, but as I say, there's a lot of templates that you can start with and all of the templates are fully customizable. If you're not using Looker Studio, I highly recommend that you start with something simple and build on it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Definitely dive into it. From what you heard here, sounds a little bit interesting, also a little bit confusing. We're basically telling you what a nutshell is. Dive into Google Looker. I'm calling it Data Studio, Google Looker, have a look around and see what's there. I would be remiss, by the way, if we didn't mention that Daniel Waisberg, also a search advocate over at Google, not as great as John, but another wonderful search advocate over at Google, has some really cool Google search console templates that he built. Scatter plots inside of Looker that you can access and plug in your own data for. We'll try to link to all of these different templates in the show notes. Now, if Google Looker was new to you, you know what else might be new to you?

Crystal Carter:

What might be new to you?

Mordy Oberstein:

Is this new? The actual news.

Crystal Carter:

The actual news.

Mordy Oberstein:

Who would've thought? Who would've thought it would've been new?

Crystal Carter:

There's so many surprises today.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like there's a Barry Schwartz reference in every single podcast episode that we do. As well there should be, by the way. As well there should be, considering, by the way, that most of the articles we cover in the news are from Barry Schwartz. Barry this week, who knows? As we get into the snappy news.

We're back, and before we go, we have one more little surprise for you. It's not a surprise, we do it every week. It's who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. This week, since we're going all Google all episode, we have Lizzi Sassman.

Crystal Carter:

Lizzi's fantastic. I met her at the Women in Tech SEO Festival in London, and also Cherry from her team as well. They're just fantastic. I'm a big fan of Lizzi on the Search Off The Record podcast as well, and also a big fan of her crochet skills. I had a great chat with her about crochet because I also do a little bit of crochet myself. I'm not as talented as Lizzi is, but it's great to have her on the team. If you're going to follow any other podcasts about search, it should absolutely be Search Off The Record. She's fantastic on it and shares some really great information in some new ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's one of these people who you can reach out to, have a conversation with out there on the social media space, whether it's Twitter or Mastadon. For example, Glenn Gabe and I were having a conversation about how Wix handles favicons and what Google's guidelines say, and what Wix does. Does it align, does it not align to the guidelines? Glen actually asked Lizzi what the story was and she clarified it and they even updated the documentation based upon what she updated Glenn about. It's real information, it's serious information, and it's official information.

Crystal Carter:

We've been talking about soft skills and we've been talking about team dynamics and things, and I think that the team at Google, they are very good at having a sort of spread of people, and they're all very much committed to making sure that people understand information. The way that Lizzi talks about it, she very much nurtures the sort of documentation space and making sure that people find the documentation really accessible. They created a document that explained exactly what, and I spoke to her about this and said how great it was, how much I really liked it, how they explained exactly what the things are called on the SERP. SEOs give lots of things lots of fun names, indented results, and like, oh, we saw this carousel thingy, and Lizzi did an update where she was like, "No, this is what it's actually called everyone. This is what we call it."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's less fun that way, to be honest. Little less fun that way.

Crystal Carter:

It's really useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll make sure to link to Lizzi's social profile in the show notes and make sure you give her a follow and that'll do it.

Crystal Carter:

That's it, team.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

All right. Go on three.

Mordy Oberstein:

One, two, three, go team.

Crystal Carter:

That was terrible.

Mordy Oberstein:

I thought it was good. Wow. Some team builder you are telling me it's terrible. I'm going to go sulk in a corner now. I though it was wonderful.

Crystal Carter:

Maybe we need another team building activity to re-

Mordy Oberstein:

How about laser tag again? No.

Crystal Carter:

How about pizza making without-

Mordy Oberstein:

Pizza making. I'll bring the pineapple.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into gates, paywalls and exclusive content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning of at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.