Is the c-suite any place for an SEO?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some group new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous and not AI writer, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

How do you know I'm not AI?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm looking at you right now. You don't look like AI to me.

Crystal Carter:

But I could be like auto-generated video, and then with the sound. I've seen those things on the internet. I saw a video where they made Snoop Dogg speak a completely different language. He did a Just Eat advert, but in another language that he didn't originally speak.

Mordy Oberstein:

Can I go full nerd on you?

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a Star Trek Picard episode where he dies and he becomes an Android and his consciousness gets transferred from his body to this Android. So now Captain Picard is actually an Android in reality.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, this happened. By the way, if you're listening to this and you like Star Trek, I have just spoiled the Picard series? Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

This is ridiculous. I haven't seen season two. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

You clearly haven't seen season one, it happened in season one.

Crystal Carter:

No it didn't.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, it did.

Crystal Carter:

Did it?

Mordy Oberstein:

He becomes the Android in the end.

Crystal Carter:

Then I watched it and didn't understand.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was very confusing. Season 2 was way better.

Crystal Carter:

I just remember Data with long hair being like all Zen and stuff. And also, it's just good to see old Riker. Riker's like-

Mordy Oberstein:

I love Riker. They're all coming back for three, all the old cast.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. The other thing that's great about Riker is like, have you ever seen the Rikering video? He never sits down in a chair.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. He always sits backwards on it.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And after you see it, you never unsee it. It's very important.

Mordy Oberstein:

True. He's so tall. That's why.

Crystal Carter:

So tall.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's so tall.

This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the data, Google Search Console data. Google Search Console Data Insights in our new SEO home dashboard, and a heap of filterable GSC data inside of Wix Analytics. No red checks needed. So you can show off your prowess, your organization's C level folk, which I mentioned because this week we're diving into C-suite, and is it really a place for SEO? Yes, episode done. It is a place for... SEO belongs in the C-suite. We've solved that problem. We finished the episode in one second.

Crystal Carter:

You're not wrong. It's really important and I think that it's one of those things where there are some discussions that should be had before they filter down further into the organization that only an SEO can have in our very important, very special way. So yeah, I think it's really important and I'm really glad that we're talking about this because it's something I'm very passionate about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is why we're diving into how would you bring SEO up to the board? How valuable is SEO to top level decision makers and why C level should be a concern for any SEO agency? Plus very, very honorable and very, very special guests. C level guest has Craig Dunham, the CEO of Lumar, joins us to talk about what actually goes into communicating and helping C level folk understand SEO. Plus, we're going to go into why C level optimizing themselves for search is an actual SEO strategy, kind of sort of you'll have to see. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. This is the executive version of the SERP's Up podcast. Episode number 27 is on, or let's buy stock in episode number 27. So many C level things to say.

Crystal Carter:

So many C level things to say. I agree, I concur. I second that motion.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, I always thought as a kid, it was I second that motion and that I second that emotion.

Crystal Carter:

The song?

Mordy Oberstein:

The song, yeah. I don't know why I thought that as a kid.

Crystal Carter:

So you took out the play on words that they put in?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I was like 10. Don't blame me. Okay. I'm a 10-year-old still.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. That's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let's get into it. So you have a large organization, you work with a large organization, you work in a large organization and you need to get buy-in around your SEO. So clearly, getting SEO is relevant to you and you need to be relevant to C-level folk because those are the people who are going to be making the decision about let's say your budget and all of that good stuff. So getting C-level folk associated with SEO or SEO in front of them applies to everyone. It applies if you're in-house, obviously. It applies if you're in an agency because the POC that you're working with your client, your POC at the company at some point inevitably, it's going to get passed up the chain to C level. So you need to make them look good. That's your job. You're an agency, so you need to consider about C level. And C level is tricky because C level brings in the soft skills of SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I know that many times SEOs will scoff at the soft skills side of SEO, but that's usually because those SEOs don't have them.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what? I think one of the things that's tricky about it is that it's very difficult to optimize for soft skills. It's very difficult to quantify for soft skills. But those skills, building trust, being able to communicate well, being able to relate to your client, being able to relate to the C-suite, being able to have empathy for business struggles and challenges that they might be having, those can make the difference because lots of people are smart, but not everyone can communicate in a way that their client understands or that the business owner understands or that the board or the trustees or whoever understand. Those things can make the difference between making sure that you have a profitable and a good relationship overall.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it all comes down to fundamentally, like everything significant in life, you have to know your audience, from your kids to your clients to your C-level folk. And for example, I don't bribe my kids with episodes of Perfect Strangers. I bribe them with Pokemon, cousin Larry. Or Batman, they like Batman now, they're into Batman. You need to speak to your C-levels, not about SEO audits, not interested in how many broken back links you have. You need to speak about growth, about the brand and about revenue. Don't forget the brand part by the way, because CMOs are not dumb. CMOs know, especially at big companies, they know that money comes from brands. So if you only talk about SEO spitting up revenue, you're missing half of their considerations, by the way. So point of order around that.

But yeah, you need to understand who your audience is to be talking to C-level and that's the tricky part of it. So let's take a step back and let's first ask, is C-level even pertinent to SEO? I think we've already answered that obviously, but only partially by saying that yes, SEO was a big part of brand awareness and we need to zoom out and discuss search as a channel because the importance of search as a channel is going to be what gets you into the boardroom. If 53% of all web traffic, which I saw once that say comes from organic search, then that's going to be the starting point with talking to C-level because it's going to be an inherent part of their success.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. And I think that it can affect lots and lots of decisions across the board about how people are deciding to move forward with different business challenges. So we talked a bit about budget there. C-level suites, they'll decide, well, we need to buy a new piece of technology because of this, that or the other. We're having this challenge, like we're having a challenge hiring, for instance. You might be having a challenge hiring because you're not optimized for search, for instance, when people are looking for jobs. I've sat in C-level discussions and I was like, the site isn't optimized for job hires. People can't see that you have jobs to hire. So you're making a decision to allocate budget for recruiters or for this or for that and you haven't got this easy win that we could do with a few strokes of a code, we could sort that.

And so with search, sometimes you're able to find solutions at help people to move forward in a business positive way. And you talked about remembering what the business objectives are, what people are trying to move forward through. Organizations that have boards of directors like trustees and things like that, and even smaller organizations, a lot of agencies might have a board of directors that they have to refer to. They're guiding principles, they'll have their objectives, they'll have vision statements, all of these things. And you can fine tune the way that you focus your SEO objectives and your SEO projects to align with those things. And that can help you get a lot closer to the things that you want to do on the site and the things that you think are going to be valuable to them. And the soft skills as well is a great point.

This is something that Eli Schwartz talks a lot about. He speaks a lot in the enterprise SEO and in C-suites and speaking to folks about that. He says that it's really, really important to make friends with everyone. And this is important as well because different teams report to boards at different times. So if you are speaking with different teams and they understand the value of SEO and they understand the value of what you're doing, then when they speak to the C-suite, they will also speak your praises. That's really, really important. And also, if they come to you and they ask you for stats, they ask you for evidence that the SEO that you did brought on a business benefit, then if you're able to provide that, again, gets you in front of that. Even if you're not at the actual meeting necessarily, it allows people in the C-suite to keep the fact that SEO is valuable in their minds.

And that's really important. And again, I think that Eli Schwartz in his article, which we have on the SEO hub, will link it in the show notes. He also talks about talking to them in words that they understand. So business terms, like you said, Mordy, they're not stupid. People who don't understand SEO jargon are not stupid. They understand their business and they understand what makes their business work and they remember their customers and they understand their customers. Talk to them about their customers, about how you're helping them to get more downloads, get more registrations, get more leads, get more sales and how SEO plays into that equation. That's really, really important. And I think that in a boardroom, people will have discussions. So give them things to talk about and understand that you can have a conversation about what this is.

And I think that we sometimes think of a board level room as being like, oh, like a big giant, huge ginormous company. And sometimes they are, of course. But there are also, I've worked at agencies that had a board of directors and a board of directors can be a few people sometimes, but they need to be able to make a decision in a short span of time and they need to have the key points of what that is. And also, what generally happens at a board meeting is that you'll get the papers beforehand. So make sure that you're outlining your case in your documents explicitly and clearly and well before it goes to the boardroom because people will read those papers before they get to the meeting. And then there will be a short discussion at the meeting and then they will decide. And that's what happens.

And if you're not able to make your case and paper very clearly, it's going to be trickier to get that budget approval, it's going to be trickier to get that project approval and all of that sort of stuff. So keep that in mind when you're talking to C-Suite folks.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to go all the way back to the first point you made.

Crystal Carter:

All the way back. All the way back.

Mordy Oberstein:

All the way back, back in time. 88 miles an hour. So when you talk about, let's say the jobs thing, they have a website, they need to bring in new clients, obviously need to bring in new clients. But you need to bring in new talent and the website is not built to do that. That's why SEO should be included in C-suite... I can't speak. SEO should be included in C-suite decisions because that can impact the health of the business. And the problem is that you need to get the buy-in to do that. That's not going to happen. They're not going to say, "You know what? We really like organic search. We need to make sure we're including that." Like you mentioned, you need to show the value and you need to do it in a way that resonates with them.

And that means understanding who the people on the board are because they're going to be very, very, very, very different people. And I'm going to give you an example from our own SEO advisory boards. Do we have an SEO advisory board, we meet monthly, we go through the Wix product. We try to make it even better than it already is and we have so many different kinds of people on the board. We have people who work on very heavy on the Wix side and they're a Wix partner, let's say, like Mark Preston. We have somebody who's a very, very broad thinker about search in Kevin Indig. We have somebody's on the e-comm side, like Luke Carthy, somebody from the traditional SEO technical side, Niki Mosier. There's so many different kinds of people and it's on purpose.

And it's the same thing with a regular board or a company board. There's different kinds of people for different reasons and you need to make sure that you address all of them actually. So if we're talking about the SEO tools in Wix, I need to make sure if I'm going to be addressing them to Luke Carthy, that I bring it from an e-comm point of view. Otherwise, I'm not going to be speaking his language. If they don't talk about the overall strategy and growth possibilities with the tool, it's not going to speak to Kevin Indig the same way. So you need to be able to speak to multiple audiences at one time, which as an SEO, you should be pretty good at doing. Right?

Crystal Carter:

Right. And to be honest, this applies for the C-suite. It also applies if you're an agency or if you're a marketing manager and you're doing SEO and people want to know your report or something, like what happened last month? How did that SEO campaign go? Remember that you need to have a space so that somebody who's the business owner can understand what you're talking about and you can drill down later on. Normally, if you're reporting to a board as an SEO, you'll have the top level so that they can understand exactly what's going on and then there'll be an appendix so that if somebody wants to dig into the details, they can. But make sure that you lead with a TLDR that makes sense, right? With something that makes sense, it's easily accessible, like sales are up. Don't bury that news. Lead with the fact that sales are up. Lead with the fact that rankings are up, lead with that. Detail it later on as well, but lead with the main thing. That's really important because that's going to be important to everybody and that's going to be useful for everybody.

And going back to what you were saying about the C-suite and the business decisions, so there's a lot of change happening in search right now. As you're an SEO, you know that that's happening. We know that that's coming down the pipe. However, sometimes the business owners don't, the C-suite doesn't. They don't know necessarily that there are big changes coming in certain things. So for instance, like the jobs one for instance, when that came in, that completely changed how people are applying for jobs. And if you think about it's like sometimes Google will give us big announcements that we are building this new thing and it's happening and you're going to need to deal with it.

So for instance, GA4, right? GA4 is coming in and it's changing stuff. If you're not in the weeds like an SEO, then you don't know that that's happening. And so the C-suite are going to need to know that the way we track our marketing and the way that we understand our sales and the way that we track what happens online is going to change and we have to change and we need to get buy-in for them to make a decision on what we need to do.

So you can be the canary in the coal mine here for some of the things that rule have big impact. And when people don't respond to some of those changes, for instance, I remember when e-comm hit a sort of big peak and there was a bit of a slow change where some businesses were online and some businesses weren't selling online. Well, the people who got in there early, because they had leadership that was able to connect with people who are on the ground and could say, "Hey, this e-comm a big deal, we should get in there early, we should do more," those people who are able to talk all the way through the business, they will be an advantage to people who are not.

So we need to make sure that you're able to tell them and to have a communication with your leadership about changes in search, changes in tech that are going to affect them. And that's really, really valuable. And it's something that people that are not in the details of search and information retrieval and all that sort of stuff aren't going to know. And that's really important for you to be able to have those conversations and to make sure that those lines of communications are open.

Mordy Oberstein:

To that point, you might be great at SEO, may be great at SEO strategy, you might not be the best communicator. And I think it's important to take a step back and check the ego, I am not the best communicator. Let me bring somebody in who is. And I think that's really the epitome of a good leader. A good leader is not threatened by other good people. They bring in better people than themselves. And that's what makes you a good leader. And if there's somebody better at you in communicating to the C-level, then bring them with you. Let's use a biblical reference. Bring Aaron. If you're Moses, bring Aaron with you.

Crystal Carter:

These are my tablets, Aaron explain them.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Yeah, yeah. Here's what we did. Aaron, go ahead. Junior, go ahead, explain it and do that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And it's useful because you can have all the stats. So if somebody wants to know the big picture, like what's most important about the points, great. And if somebody wants to know, but what happened on the 3rd of June in 2022 or something, you can be like, "Well actually, it was up 17% and down 3%," and all that sort of stuff. So you can have the details and you can know all of those things. But yeah, if you need somebody to lead on the pitch or on the discussion, absolutely do that.

And I think that with these meetings it's really important to be focused on achieving your goal and remember what's most effective for helping you achieve that goal. And remember that it's sometimes very important that you are able to have those conversations for businesses because sometimes they don't know that there's a helpful content coming up or a helpful content update, for instance coming up, and that maybe we should have a think about the way we've been thinking about content for instance, or there's plenty of other things that happen and they don't want to be broadsided and you can help them, and remember that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And also, if you bring somebody in to help you and to talk for you, you look well important like, "Ah yes, let me. Steven, go ahead, explain it to them."

Crystal Carter:

While you sip your coffee in the corner.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, yes, yes. Now who is well important, the CEO of Lumar, which is one of the leading enterprise SEO platforms, who by the way has a wonderful integration with Wix, formally notice Deepcrawl, by the way. So if you're looking in the Wix at markets under Deepcrawl, not Lumar. But now it's Lumar, not Deepcrawl. Craig Dunham is here to share his insights of an actual C-level person and somebody who literally helps so many SEOs speak the C-level folk. He should to help you understand how SEOs add value to board level decisions. Take it away. Craig,

Craig Dunham:

Thanks for having me. This is a really great question. I'll open with It is absolutely essential, right for leaders to understand how their budget decisions are supporting larger business goals. And so SEOs are generally giving credit for brand discoverability awareness, but there's often a lack of knowledge at the board and leadership level around the particulars of SEO and website health more generally. And so let's be honest, right? If you're in a board meeting, you might lose some people or eyes may glaze over a bit if they're unfamiliar with the more technical concepts and terms that are being presented to them. Even if SEO is discussed or maybe some data is provided to leadership, if you start diving deep into discussions about URL redirects or no index rules, you're not going to keep this audience's attention for very long. And so you need to speak to be understood. And SEOs have to start to think about educating leadership on the value of their work, but in language that the board is familiar with.

And so what that translates to is keeping the focus on how do the particular website efforts contribute to broader business outcomes like customer acquisition and connecting the technical aspects of SEO with specific commercial goals, right? Understanding the impact, tying it to revenue. Even if it's via traffic and conversion metrics, you ultimately need to make that connection to revenue or some other identified core business objective. Now, we've tried to make this easier for SEOs by introducing data visualizations and reporting options that are built to help with this, call it cross team collaboration, like the organic traffic funnel, something that we use which connects specific aspects of a website's technical health, for example, crawlability or indexability. And it connects it with the larger picture around brand discoverability. And so you'll find many leaders, especially those with a marketing background, are already familiar with this concept of funnels. And so organizing your data in a way that connects the technical aspects of SEO to frameworks that they understand creates this common ground of understanding.

I think it's also worth noting that as we start 2023, there's this talk of potential recession in the business news and it's all over the place and it's a really important time for SEOs to make the case, I think for website optimization. And this means more directly that leaders are probably looking at how do we lower the cost of acquiring customers? And with the ongoing decline of third-party cookies, this over-reliance on more costly paid channels like digital ads, this is not sustainable, it won't offer the most cost-effective path forward. And so I suspect that many businesses are revisiting and reworking sort of this balance between paid and organic marketing. And as boards start to take a fresh look at organic marketing channels and their potential to reduce this cost of acquiring new customers, feels like a great time for SEOs to make the case for SEO and driving website health more broadly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you Craig. That was incredibly crisp. The best way I could describe. It's a great point about contextualizing your SEO average. We talked about it earlier a few minutes ago. But you were talking about SEO being rolling for brand discovery and you're zooming out. As an SEO, you're often so narrowly focused on what you do, but the board, the CMO is not. He's very broadly focused, she's very broadly focused. And if you don't speak in that context or you don't contextualize SEO say in brand discovery and branding and in acquisition itself, obviously, then you're going to lose them because they're not narrowly focused the way you might be.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think the one phrase that stood out for that was speak to be understood. He also talked about people's eyes glazing over when you get into the details of some of the SEO stuff. I've definitely been in meetings when I've been like, "Oh, this is really important," and been very excited about it and people are like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know." And so speaking to be understood is so important. And he also talked about the timeliness with regards to economic situations and yeah, this is the time when everybody's coming to the board, asking for money, asking for resources and all of that sort of stuff. So you need to make sure that you can speak to be understood, and you need to make sure that you have a clear outline of how what you do can benefit the business currently and in the future.

I think that's the other thing that's great about search and the thing that I love about search is discovering opportunities. There's almost always untapped opportunities within SEO and within a website, within a digital presence. There's almost always you can, a good SEO can look at it and they can say, "Hey, actually we're not using this completely free channel." For instance, we have a Google business profile or we have 17 Google business profiles and we're not using them to the full extent of what we could. It's free. We could do that right now and that would help improve our business outcomes and that would help us do more.

Then they'll say, "Well, what do you need?" And it's like, "Well, we need one more person," or something. And it's like, "Well, what's the ROI on that? Well, we would expect to see this, this, and this." And then they can say, "Yeah, we can approve that and we can get that done. We can move that forward." And I think that remembering your role across the business. And I think he also talked about charts. Charts are useful. Everybody likes a chart. You want up and to the right green, that sort of thing. And charts are useful from having those conversations. And yeah, that's a great insights from Craig there.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what else is useful? And speaking of CEOs, did you know that CEOs optimizing themselves for SEO was perhaps good for SEO?

Crystal Carter:

Really?

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's true. Yeah. CEOs optimizing themselves for search can play a role in organic success as we introduce to you a brand new segment on the SERP's Up podcast. And it is an ode to a baseball phrase, so I love it for two reasons because we're calling it Going, Going, Google.

Speaker 4:

And it's going, going, Google, it's out of here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to the first ever Going, Going, Google. I have to do a baseball announcer voice when I say it. Going, Going, Google. The crowd goes wild. Where we're going to look at where Google is heading so that you can update your focus in SEO strategy. And this case, we're talking about CEOs and beyond. Not just CEOs, but prominent members of your company and the optimization and the knowledge panels and all of that stuff. So let's get going with Going, Going, Google.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so Going, Going, Google is essentially talking about the way that things are going on Google, like general trends that we're seeing around Google. And one of the trends that I thought was particularly interesting was essentially talking about biographical entities. Lily Ray, who we featured on the podcast previously, is somebody who's known for talking about E-A-T. Marie Haynes is another person who's known for talking about E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. They've added another E recently.

Mordy Oberstein:

Another E, it's EE.

Crystal Carter:

E-E-A-T. So the other E is experience. And one of the things that you'll find, like if you look up a big corporation, so for instance, if you look up something like Microsoft, you might see a knowledge panel for that company. And when you look that up, they will list the people that are in that company. They will often list the founders. For instance, they will also list the chairperson for that company. So for instance, if you look up Microsoft, you will see that the chairperson is Satya Nadella. And then when you click on that, that person has a full sort of knowledge panel, or not a knowledge panel, I'm not sure what they're calling this at the moment, but it's SERP feature that includes pictures, biographical information, information about their education, information about their videos, all of this sort of stuff. Why? Because Google has a very good understanding of the biographical entity around that person.

And what that means is that Google can also understand that that person is associated with that business. And so there's a lot of push for AI, which is an interesting why we're talking about Microsoft. But there's a lot of push for AI at the moment. But Google is also making a big push for making sure that they're very clear on who the people are behind different companies, different websites, different digital assets. And this is something that's part of that. And I think that the fact that they're giving this kind of treatment to not just people like Beyonce, not just people who are literal rock stars, but also to people who are on boards of directors, people who are professionals, is really, really important. And it shows the emphasis that they are putting on understanding biographical entities so that they can make better decisions and make better, not necessarily ranking decisions I guess I would say, but better insights around the E-A-T that's associated with a particular business or website.

Mordy Oberstein:

And what I think works you, take a company like Wix, right? So you search for Wix, you get our founders, you get the CEO, it's all great and it's all well. I think Google could contextualize Wix without that. They understand who we are because we such a big presence without that. But if you're a smaller company and you have a CEO or a founder or somebody, a C-level person of significance in the company, who has biographical, we'll say recognition, that part of the knowledge graph, that could, in many ways, affect how Google understands your business and where your business is relevant. You can piggyback, whereas with Microsoft, let's say, or Amazon, the particular people who work for the company might be benefiting from Amazon's authority. If you work for a smaller mid-size company, that company might piggyback its authority off the people who work for it.

And that's where it comes into play. So if that person, for example, the CEO is writing a blog post, now, this recognition of, okay, we know who that is, they are an expert on this, they are writing it for this company, for this blog, for this website, rather, now this post benefits from their authority. So they give it a very narrow, simple, linear way of seeing that play out. Because I think it's way more than that narrow, simple way of playing out. It's a very holistic in and out, back and forth kind of dynamic. But just to give it a sort of define it, that would be one way of thinking about how the company benefits off and piggybacks off of the authority of the individuals who work for it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So it's all a contributor. Is it Leviathan? It's a person that's made up of lots of little or lots of smaller people. Is that the one that I'm thinking of, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

Isn't a Leviathan a giant monster, the giant sea serpent from the Bible. Our second biblical reference today.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so maybe that's not the one I'm thinking.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think you're thinking of the Megazord from Power Rangers, made of moving parts and transforms.

Crystal Carter:

No, I'm not thinking of the Megazord. I am. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan is sort of one person and it's got lots of smaller people. But basically, your company, your business is made up of people and Google knows that. And Google knows that and when they talked about their helpful content update for instance, they were talking about content written for people by people. They understand who those people are. And it's really important for you in a business of any size to think about who the people on your team are and to have an understanding of their digital presence. So I call it a biographical entity. Lots of people call it other things. But it's important that people know that you're related to the company and that they can verify your expertise.

So one really, really simple, easy way is to actually spend a little bit of time on your LinkedIn profile, even if you're not posting every day about how you're thrilled about whatever it is you've done or making some long-winded metaphor that has nothing to do with being a tax attorney, but you've decided to put it out on a LinkedIn anyway. Even if you're not posting enormously. Most professionals' names, if you look up whatever their name is and their professional thing, one of the first entries that shows up on Google will be their LinkedIn profile for instance.

And Google has said, I'm sure I've heard John Mueller say this. I can find the link in the show notes. But he said that that's one of the ways that they verify E-A-T, or one of the sources that they go to for thinking about that. And also, it's a case that the Google also uses this, often pulls LinkedIn content for saying what is so-and-so known for. It'll show up as a featured snippet for that. They'll say, so-and-so is known for being a fantastic figure skater or an amazing flutist.

Mordy Oberstein:

Artist. They're an artist. And also make sure you have it on the website itself because Google looks for multiple... LinkedIn, Crunchbase. Let's assume you don't have a Wikipedia entry that'll make things overly simple. There's none, right? You don't have to have a Wikipedia entry to be an entity. That's so not true at all. But if you put it on the website itself, Google might actually pull the website and make the connection between the entity which you want to and the entity you're trying to, which is the business, and connect them together because it's on the same website. That's where the entity exists. Whatever it is that you're doing, and it's a great business strategy overall, build up the people that are working for you, that are part of your company because you can create strong biographical connections or knowledge graph connection between them and the business, which impacts the visibility of that business in a lot of ways on Google search and well beyond.

And now let us go well beyond by diving into what is going out there on the great beyond that we know as the SEO news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy News. Well, it's been a while since we talked about an official Google update. So here it comes, or rather here it is. At the time of this recording, the February, 2023 product review update is live as reported by Barry Schwartz over a Search Engine Roundtable. 5:00 PM Eastern Time on February 21st saw the release of the latest iteration of the product review update. While this update only applies to pages reviewing products and even lists of best products, it can impact general shopping SERPs as product review pages that get shuffled around impact the overall rankings of URLs on those SERPs.

So for example, you sell laptops and are ranking for the keyword by laptop, your pages might not be directly impacted by the product review update. But if the page reviewing laptops of all sorts of kinds gets a ranking boost at the hands of the update and happens to rank for that very same keyword, that might mean you now rank lower. So if you sell products, definitely keep your eyes peeled as the update continues to roll out. As of the day of this recording, the summer censure is showing multiple days of elevator ranking. Since the announcement, it would seem at least on the surface, that this update might have a little bit more teeth on it as compared to previous iterations of the product review update, or maybe even the more recent iterations of the product review updates.

Best advice, showcase personal experience using the products when creating product review content. All right, this one's for all y'all AI nerds. Bing has pulled back the curtain... Try that again. Bing has pulled back the curtain in a recent blog post by VP of search and AI that explains how Bing's new AI chat shows relevant information when open AI's data source only goes through November, 2021. In a nutshell, Bing has something called Prometheus, sounds fancy, which feeds open AI relevant information from the actual Bing index, meaning now the AI has the latest and greatest and most updated information possible.

It does so by breaking down the chat prompt the user enters into various subqueries. So for example, if UX being chat rather, how do you make bread and dessert for someone with an allergy to gluten? Bing would break that down in to, how do you make gluten-free bread and a separate query for, how do you make gluten-free dessert? It would feed open AI with any of the needed relevant information on that topic. By the way, by working it out in this way, Bing can also present citations for specific sections of the AI response, which it does, which is pretty cool.

And last up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, you can now better optimize LinkedIn articles for search as you have access to custom set the title tag and meta description, which is I guess nifty, if you write articles on LinkedIn. Which I don't, but maybe you do. So now you know. And with that, that is the snappiest of SEO news.

So much news, but we only did a few stories.

Crystal Carter:

It's a really dynamic time in search.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was a busy week, a dynamic week in search, considering all that's been going on.

Crystal Carter:

So much.

Mordy Oberstein:

So much, so much going on. Do you know who also has so much going on? Our follow of the week? This week's follow of the week, who you should be following on. Social media is former member of Wix's own SEO advisory board, former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and current LinkedIn data nerd, Michelle fricking Robbins.

Crystal Carter:

Michelle Robbins. Michelle Robbins is a fantastic legend. Legendary, but also amazing. She was on the Wix SEO board previously and she is somebody who really understands the value of SEO for business and the value of SEO for business objectives. And she speaks with incredible clarity and knowledge around this. She's a great follow for lots of reasons. She was recently featured on the Search Off the Record podcast, talking about her career, her career journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is Google's own podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Google's own podcast. And it's fascinating. And she's someone who is... yeah, she's so clear, so smart, and so laser focused on making sure that digital activity leads to business growth and that is what it's there for. We don't make websites for the sake of making websites. We make websites to achieve an objective. And it might be that we want to share something that we really, really love and that might be the objective. But the website, for instance, is a tool for achieving that objective and that she's very good at making sure that people are focused on moving forward with her objectives.

Mordy Oberstein:

So not to play down the other follows of the week that we've recommended in the past, but having worked with Michelle on the Wix successor advisory board, I'm thinking for like probably the better part of two years. I'm saying this to all genuineness. I left every meeting that she was a part of having learned something from her, and I always felt privileged to have been a part of that because I was able to learn from Michelle. So this is a very strong recommendation to follow Michelle Robbins online, on LinkedIn, on Twitter. On Twitter, it's @MichelleRobbins, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E R-O-B-B-I-N-S, over on Twitter, of course, we'll link to it in the show notes. So I think that's it.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's it.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have reached the precipice.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, do we a... what is it?

Mordy Oberstein:

A Leviathan?

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Megazord? Do you have a Megazord? I wish you had a Megazord.

Crystal Carter:

Do the eyes have it?

Mordy Oberstein:

The eyes? Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Nevermind.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have gone off the rails. Thank you for listening to the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to retain your SEO clients in 10 days. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or are waiting on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.