What you need to know if you want to go Enterprise 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 groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by someone who is good, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Totally got you by surprise at that one.

Crystal Carter::

You did. I thought you were going to be like, "Ooh."

Mordy Oberstein:

Nope. Someone who is good.

Crystal Carter::

That was a good note. Thanks for just... Yes. Also, thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, the context for this is, and I guess you'll see our recording schedule and I'll hint at it. Yesterday was Barry Schwartz's birthday. Happy birthday, Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to Barry rested break. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

But by the time he hears it's going to be weeks after his actual birthday, but Barry-

Crystal Carter::

We should also wish him happy birthday when this comes out.

Mordy Oberstein:

We should. So, Barry put out a Tweet saying, "I wish there was some kind of automated AI that would automatically reply back to when people wish you happy birthday on Twitter with, 'Thank you.'" So, you could have gone on Twitter and wrote an entire spiel to Barry like, "Barry, we love you. You're amazing." He would literally reply back to everyone, "Thank you." Period.

Crystal Carter::

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, that's where I got my intro to Crystal this week.

Crystal Carter::

There you go. Thank you. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Period.

Crystal Carter::

Full stop. End of sentence.

Mordy Oberstein:

Full stop. End of sentence.

Crystal Carter::

Moving on.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, please. Moving on. Period. Thank you. Period. Do you know who Barry Schwartz is? By the way, Barry Schwartz, I call him the Godfather of SEO. He has been covering the SEO news for literally forever. He has SERoundtable.com, news editor at SearchEngineland.com. He is a huge asset to the industry. So, please follow Barry Schwartz and read his news content. You will learn a tremendous amount about SEO. And he's a great follow on Twitter because he is, as much as he denies it, he's a real character.

Crystal Carter::

He also has a weekly video roundup, which is sponsored by Wix.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's true.

Crystal Carter::

So, yeah, check that out. That's a really good watch on a Friday morning while you're having your cup of coffee. It's a good way to keep up on point.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. You can see Barry wearing a Wix hat. This episode is sponsored by Barry. No, just kidding.

Crystal Carter::

No, it's not.

Mordy Oberstein:

This podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can filter through all of your pages with the Wix site inspection tool. Literally, filter through them because they now have filters. So, you can filter through up to 2000 pages of Google Search Console, URL inspection, API data to look at the indexation status of the specific types of pages on your site, or filter according to indexation status. Or filter according to a whole bunch of other different ways, because it's Wix making it easier for you to work at scale, which is a large part of...

Crystal Carter::

I just wanted to chime in and just say I love it. I love that feature so much. I'm sure Daniel Weisberg from Google might be listening, but it's better than Google Search Console because you can search for a word that might be in your URL, it might be in the page title. You can search by that. You can filter by rich results. You can see that all on one table. I literally love it so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Same here.

Crystal Carter::

They announced that there was a filter and I lost my mind. It's brilliant. Check it out, please.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can now search for pages by the keyword in the URL, by the words in the URL. There's a million ways to now organize your data.

Crystal Carter::

And on Google Search Console, you have to do three clicks or a redjects or a thing to find the thing. It's like, what? Just let me search for-

Mordy Oberstein:

Before you even finish the whole word that you type in, it's already pulled it out for you.

Crystal Carter::

Yes, I love it. I literally love it.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is amazing. Which is a large part of doing SEO at scale, which is a large part of enterprise SEO, which is what today's episode is all about. No, it's not a Star Trek convention. It's the enterprise, but it's enterprise SEO. Or SEO for enterprise, however you want to phrase it.

Crystal Carter::

Engage.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, thank you. Engage. Thank you. Make it so. Today, we are looking at what you should expect when working SEO at the enterprise level. How enterprise SEO does and doesn't differ from "regular SEO." What skills come into focus when doing enterprise SEO? And we have someone who has become synonymous with enterprise SEO stopping by to talk about how you can do enterprise SEO and still be hands on. Eli Schwartz, the author of Product-Led SEO is stopping and by to share his thoughts and his insights. Plus, we're going to talk to vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia, who's going to stop by with us to chat all about what it means and what you should know when talking to enterprise level clients. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Beam me up, Scotty, because episode number 33 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking on the enterprise.

Crystal Carter::

I'm like, more Star Trek jokes. Honestly, please.

Mordy Oberstein:

Endless. Did you know by the way, that he never, Kirk never said Captain Kirk, William Shatner of Star Trek, never said, "Beam me up, Scotty," ever on the show or the movies?

Crystal Carter::

Who said, "Beam me up, Scotty"?

Mordy Oberstein:

No one.

Crystal Carter::

Leonard Nemoy?

Mordy Oberstein:

No one said it. He said something similar to it.

Crystal Carter::

That's not rational.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fascinating.

Crystal Carter::

In a sense it's futile. I know. I can literally just spat out things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Endless. Endless. We'll know we've gone too far when we break out into William Shatner impersonations. Okay, so.

Crystal Carter::

Okay, wait, wait, wait. Who's your favorite Star Trek captain?

Mordy Oberstein:

Kirk.

Crystal Carter::

Kirk.

Mordy Oberstein:

Kirk. It's absolutely.

Crystal Carter::

Come on.

Mordy Oberstein:

First of all, I grew up on Kirk in the movies. It's very nostalgic for me.

Crystal Carter::

I'm sorry. So, it's a close tie between Janeway and Picard, and all Sisko.

Mordy Oberstein:

Janeway is wonderful. I think the number two for me is Picard, followed by Janeway, followed by a Sisko, followed by it doesn't matter anymore.

Crystal Carter::

I put Kirk pretty low on the thing. People, listeners, listeners, listeners to this podcast of who I know the Treking community is a lot, chime in. Tell us who's your favorite captain? Who's your favorite captain?

Mordy Oberstein:

There is no competition. We've gone too far. There is a bias. There is a bias in SEO. If I can go out on a limb here, people will think local SEO was simple because it's SMBs, and enterprise SEO is complex because it's huge in large organizations. That I don't think is the truth. Certainly not in the way that the perception of many of us think it is. Local SEO can in fact, by the way, be enterprise. Right? Think, I don't know, you're doing local SEO for Taco Bell.

Crystal Carter::

Yeah. Dairy Queen.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go.

Crystal Carter::

Pret a Manger.

Mordy Oberstein:

We listed all these companies. Papa Johns. Forever.

Crystal Carter::

People who have multiple locations.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. That is what we're trying to say. Also, by the way, small websites have their own complications and SEO at the enterprise level might not be as complicated as you think the way you think. Sure, they might have lots of pages. More pages than a typical SMB. But is that fundamentally what makes enterprise SEO more complex? Let's find out.

Crystal Carter::

Make it so.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make it so. Engage. I think there's this general thought around enterprise SEO where it's more paid ads, therefore it's more complex. That's what enterprise SEO more complex words to me, and being at Wix at the enterprise level, why at SEMrush also is very enterprise. To me, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here, we could talk to Nick Wilson about this on another podcast. What makes enterprise SEO complicated is the sheer size of the company itself, not the size of the website.

Crystal Carter::

Yeah. I think it can be a little bit of both and I think it can also be the difference between a tugboat and a cruise ship. If you need to move a cruise ship through a space, you have to move it all at once and you have to do a lot of planning. It's going to take a lot of planning in order to make sure. If you've got a tugboat or a canoe or whatever and you need to leave the harbor, you just go.

Mordy Oberstein:

You untie the boat, you throw on your little captain's hat.

Crystal Carter::

Right, exactly. Let's talk about captains. Lots of stuff about captains, right. So, you can get yourself on your little ship and you can sail away into the blue.

Mordy Oberstein:

Someone put on the Styx Come Sail Away right now.

Crystal Carter::

I was thinking of Enya, Sail Away. Anyway. So, if you're sailing out, it's not a big deal. Yeah, you can do that and you can be nimble. It's not a big deal because you can say, oh, you know what? I'm just going to post that blog. You could be nimble. If you are moving an entire unit, then you have to plan and that planning can take a long time. So, if we're talking about the cruise ship metaphor, because I love a folksy metaphor, if we're talking about that you need to tell the harbor master, you need to tell the people who look after the harbor, I'm moving my ship. Right? I'm getting out of this dock and I'm moving my ship. They're like, okay, we need to clear the way, we need to do these things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sign these forms.

Crystal Carter::

Right. There's things you have to do in order to engage that. On an enterprise level, if you want to do things, there's lead time. You have to take lead time into account, and sometimes that lead time can be months. Sometimes that lead time can be even longer than that. So, when you're thinking about your SEO and you're thinking about SEO implementations, particularly like tech SEOS implementations. If you want to address some tech debt for instance, that's in your website stack. Or if you want to create a new asset on your blog or create a new asset for the digital asset or something. You have to think about the fact that there are wheels within wheels within wheels, and you have to be able to move as a unit. You can't think of yourself in a siloed space because you're part of a larger unit.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what it's like, to use another analogy? Let's say you want to get ice cream. You hop in the car, you get ice cream. Now, let's say you have 10 kids. Now go try to get ice cream.

Crystal Carter::

Right, right, right. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have 10 different people with 10 different considerations and it's at the enterprise level. So, you might think, wow, let's target this keyword. Make it a really simple case. Target this keyword, engage. Then someone says, the brand manager says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is not on brand for us." But the SEO, the traffic. That's not what the brand does. There's so many different teams with so many different considerations, who have a voice and a legitimate voice on what you do and what you don't do. Navigating all of that, extremely complex. If you were to ask me, if I'm doing SEO with scale already and I want to move to the enterprise level. Or I'm not doing SEO with what I want to go into enterprise. The greatest skill I think you can have is being able to navigate different relationships, considerations, compromising, planning. That back and forth with other people comes much into focus, uniquely so, in enterprise SEO.

Crystal Carter::

This is something that Eli Schwartz talks about. He says you need to make friends with everyone. I think also you need to have your ears to the ground about where things are moving. I was on a recent discussion with the women in tech SEO crew, talking about their state of technical SEO report that they put out with ERA digital. We were talking about enterprise SEO and we were talking about how you get things implemented. One of the consensuses that we came to was that timing is everything.

If you know that a team is moving on an initiative across your company, and this also applies to smaller businesses as well. But let's say that you're working for a theme park or something and the theme park has a new ride that they want to promote. And you have an SEO thing that you want to get done and you've been trying for months to get it done. If you can position the SEO tactic, the SEO implementation that you want as a benefit to this other initiative that's coming down the pipe, which you know that the company has momentum on, then you're more likely to get that sign off than if you just have something random that's like a thing that you think is a good thing that's best practice that will generally help the website.

If you have something that works with the timing of the company, that's really useful to think about. And thinking about budgets allocation, thinking about when your company signs off marketing plans, for instance. If the marketing plans are signed off in October and you show up with this great idea in December, they've already signed it off and they're midway through and you need to think about that as well. So, I think there's a lot of wheels within wheels and finding out is really helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

That goes back to your point about the boats, or in my case, the kids and the ice cream. If you want to successfully navigate that slow moving ship, it means that you have to be almost a type A personality to a certain extent. If that's not you, by the way, then make sure there's somebody on your team who that is them. Because you need to know in advance, be able to plan it in advance and predict the various scenarios that will play out. If this happens, we're going to have to do that and now I'm going to know these five different things and set up meetings with these five different people, and have that all planned out. So, before you even get to the doc, or before you even offer the kids, hey, let's go for ice cream, you need to have a plan of how that's going to happen and what that's going to look like.

Crystal Carter::

I know that for instance with Wix there's a logo maker tool, which the team put together, and that took a little while to put together, but it's a fantastic tool. It's a fantastic tool for users in lots of ways and adds a lot of user value for users for instance. Putting that together and getting all the moving parts and getting everyone together to make that happen is something that's really valuable. I think also when you're in an enterprise team, and even when you're in a smaller in-house team or an agency as well, being prescient, being aware of who the gatekeepers are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Very much so.

Crystal Carter::

Can be really, really, really useful. I don't mean gatekeepers as in like boo, you can't come in, but I mean people that are facilitators. Being conscious of who those people are and identifying them and being able to see who that works, because it might not even be the people that you would normally on paper assume. It might be that there's somebody who manages the diary for the CEO or manages the diary for the CMO or something. If you don't speak well to them, you will not get a meeting. It might be that might be the person that you need to think about. It might be that it's not necessarily the person who is the team lead, but it's the project lead who's actually driving some of the decisions and things. So, be aware of those so that you can get your implementations met.

Also, when you're thinking about your SEO implementations, I think it's also important to tie them into the team's priorities. If they don't fit in with the team's priorities, then it's going to be very difficult to get signed off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. That's another thing that really has to align priorities. Also, because in my experience you could only, and I think you understand this also, we've experienced this both, where you're going to have overlap. People have their own priorities and your priorities are going to overlap. Sometimes your priorities align and you work together, and sometimes your priorities are the same and it means cannibalization.

Crystal Carter::

Right. So, you've got to think about that. I think from a keyword research point of view, from an enterprise, that's definitely something that people should think about. If you're working on a big domain, and one of the things that's tricky with enterprise domains is that not only do you have your main domain, but you very often will have your knowledge base or whatever. You'll very often have support docs, help docs and things like that. You may also have a lot of old content. So, if you're working on a website, if you've gotten to an enterprise level, chances are the domain is a little bit older and is going to have a lot of webpages. It might be that there are pages from way, way, way, way, way back.

Mordy Oberstein:

You talked about this in a previous podcast, you have to be careful with those things also because if you pull off the wallpaper, sometimes the wall crumbles.

Crystal Carter::

Right. Precisely. I think that when you're looking at your keyword research, you should also be looking at how to make sure that you're not overlapping with yourself. I think we talked a little bit about keyword cannibalization, which I think is a challenge for enterprise SEOs. One of the tools that I found recently that's really useful is a keyword gap analysis tool, Semrush.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pretty cool.

Crystal Carter::

Which is supposed to be for they're looking at competitors. But it's actually really, really useful for looking at your own content and finding the gaps in the existing content you have, so that you can create some complimentary rather than competitive content.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. So, different folders compared to each other, different sub-domains compared to each other, that kind of thing.

Crystal Carter::

Precisely. It's a really, really good tool that you can look at for your own. So, if you compare all of those different things and then you can see untapped, picked from the untapped.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Where it's overlapped and you're just going to end up killing their page, people are not going to be happy. Don't do that. Yeah.

Crystal Carter::

Yeah. It may even mean you have to work harder to make your content rank and perform and engage and all of that sort of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Or if you are going to do that, you need to sync up to make sure that everyone's aligned in all the resources and all of the SEO juice are going to one place, for lack of a better word. Now, if you're doing keyword research, that's great. You're at the enterprise level, you're doing keyword research. Are you really though? Are you that hands-on? Is it all strategies? Should you be hands-on? Probably, yeah, but how do you remain hands-on at the enterprise level when you're so busy? All these big pages and big things and different meetings and different teams. Oh my goodness. To help us answer that, Product Led SEO's author, Eli Schwartz, is here to tell us how to remain hands on when working at the enterprise level.

Eli Schwartz:

Figuring out how to stay hands on an SEO when you're working at an enterprise level is no easy feat. By the very nature of the job, your job is more likely to be focused on meetings, architecture, strategy, diplomacy, politics and all things that are the furthest thing from hands-on. As a consultant, this is even more challenging for me because I'm not hands on. I'm not working within a company. I don't really get to look at the source code of anything. I don't see Jira tickets. I'm barely in Slack conversations. When I am in, these are the conversations that I'm invited into.

So, I have to find other ways to be hands-on. I'll do things like work on my own projects, launch pages, break pages. I recently launched a new website with Wix, and when I forwarded my website over from WordPress over to Wix, I intentionally 404ed pages to see how long they would still be in the index. Spoiler, it's been about two months and they're still in the Google index. So, if you do a site query on my site, EliSchwartz.co, you're still going to find webpages that are 404ed and they're still in the Google index. So, I do things like that to stay really on top of the real hands-on part of SEO.

The other things I'll do is I'll do things that are out of my typical role as a consultant. I'll coach new SEOs or I'll coach enterprise SEOs and help them understand and help work with them, and really for my own learning to understand how to navigate the challenges that they're working on as a part of their roles. If they have a challenge with how do they get an engineer to do something, how do they understand the reporting they have? These aren't things that I get to do in my regular consulting, but these are things that I get to really learn and do from coaching.

Coaching isn't necessarily the part of consulting that I might earn the most from or I might focus the most time on, but it actually is for me the most rewarding because I am getting my hands dirty. I am learning things and I am navigating challenges, and it keeps me up to date with existing issues around SEO. For example, most of my larger clients are very, very unlikely to ever get hit by a Google algorithm update. They aren't going to get penalties, they aren't even doing things that are big enough and important enough to get the attention of Google. However, with some of the coaching projects that I work on, those are smaller sites. Those will be the kinds of things where they are seeing changes from Google algorithm updates and they need to message that to executives. They are seeing things and they need to message to counterparts across the company, how do we go ahead and fix this? That's the primary way that I'll get most of my hands-on access and really stay up to date.

Of course, I'm sure other people are recommending and I would totally agree with that, read blog posts. Be on Twitter, be on LinkedIn, be a part of conversations. But the one extra piece I do is when I hear these things and I see these conversations, I go ahead and try to test it on my own. But this is something that I am very proactive about. How do I stay hands-on rather than just staying high level?

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you very much, Eli. Don't forget to check out Eli's book, Product-Led SEO. A little plug for Eli. Hey, if somebody's coming on the podcast and they have a book, we have to plug the book.

Crystal Carter::

Plug the book.

Mordy Oberstein:

Plug the book.

Crystal Carter::

That's what you do. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like I'm like Jay Leno or something. I have a guest on, I'm plugging the book.

Crystal Carter::

Some shameless self-promotion but not self-promotion. Something that's just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Marketer's going to market. That's how it goes.

Crystal Carter::

This is it. This is it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Respect.

Crystal Carter::

Resistant is futile.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a good point and it's a good point at the enterprise level and in general. If you want to get hands-on experiences with SEO and you're like, I don't know, I don't have a local SEO client or whatever it is, I don't have an eCommerce. So, try to spin up a mock site. Try to get your hands on. Take that extra initiative. If you're sitting at strategy meetings all day long, great, start a podcast. Create a podcast website. Run that website. Do something with it, not just a test. Actually run something. Create a blog, run that blog, do the work read. Keep your hands dirty in the SEO by being a little bit proactive and spending a little bit of time on, even if it's a small website, it's something tangible.

Crystal Carter::

Yeah, yeah, it's so true and the best SEOs do this all the time. I hear people who are like, oh, I did this course but I need to get some SEO experience and I need to get a job somewhere. Or I need to get a thing somewhere. I'm like, you don't need anyone's permission to do SEO. You can just do SEO. You can start a website right now and you can do SEO. You can start creating content. You can start doing content optimization. You can start thinking about your content and that sort of thing on things like Medium, on things like LinkedIn, on things like that. But do SEO.

And then I think really nice working on enterprise level, John Sehada is also somebody who does this a lot. Barry interviewed him recently, or there's a video interview of Barry and John talking about this as well. John's like, oh yeah, I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that. Barry was like, I literally love how in the weeds you are. The best SEOs are doing this all the time. I know somebody who is an enterprise SEO who works for a major fashion label. She's like, oh yeah, we've been experimenting on this project with AI content and seeing how that performs and that sort of thing. I think that if you want to learn how to do SEO, doing is the most important thing. Because SEO in theory is great and you can learn a lot of stuff from reading blogs, but until you put the content into, until you set it live, it's not really active. You have to set it live and you have to see how Google responds, how people respond, how the internet responds to your content.

Mordy Oberstein:

This goes to a point John Mueller made a while back a couple years ago, where someone's talking about creating a test site. John's like, well. John, the search advocate over at Google. You don't usually put the same kind of effort into a test site as you do a real site, so it's hard to really see how things would actually work and play themselves out. The real thing is the real thing. Now, sometimes in enterprise SEO, you work in-house. Sometimes, however, very often actually, you consult at the enterprise level when doing SEO. Which means you have clients, which means you have high stake clients who have big budgets and big expectations, on my. To ease our anxiety around this, we're going to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about how to talk to big name brands or running big budgets with big expectations. Our very own vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia stops by as we go across the Wix verse.

Speaker 5:

Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift-off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to the show, Matt. Really nice to have you here.

Matt Matergia:

Pleasure to be here.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm kind of excited to pick your brain. Enterprise level clients. When you're talking to SEO, not SEO, just purely in abstract, not connected to any vertical, what goes through your mind when you have to deal with a, say, a complicated SEO? I'm sorry, a complicated enterprise. We're not doing SEO. A complicated enterprise client.

Matt Matergia:

You can't get off of the SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like a drug.

Matt Matergia:

So, all right. I think SEO doesn't matter what you're talking about with an enterprise client, right? It all comes back to understanding their business and understanding the problems that they're having and how their business works. In the sales world, we talk about discovery, right? Discovery is basically understanding who you're talking to, where they are in the organization, what their goals are, what their problems are, what opportunities you can gain out of this. So, we always say good discovery leads to good opportunities, and that's Sales 101, right? But that is really understanding clients and understanding their business.

Crystal Carter::

What's your process for getting that level of understanding that helps you to create an effective relationship between yourself and an enterprise client?

Matt Matergia:

I would say base level, it's curiosity.

Crystal Carter::

Okay.

Matt Matergia:

It's curiosity and asking good questions.

Mordy Oberstein:

You and John Mueller. So, we did an episode on building the good SEO team, and we asked Google's John Mueller, what are the traits of a good SEO team? He said curiosity.

Matt Matergia:

All right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Great minds.

Matt Matergia:

Yeah. Wow, what a level I've set myself at.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is, right? You've reached. We all aspired to each level of John. You have just said we've been trying for this, what, how many episodes? Like 33 episodes? And you've been here for five minutes.

Matt Matergia:

Yeah. Well, I'm honored. I think maybe we should just end this right here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Somebody's got another meeting to go to.

Crystal Carter::

I would say also when you're working with clients who are enterprise or are part of a larger organization, in my experience, timelines can be something of a challenge or can be something that needs to be managed anyway. Have you found that to be the case as well?

Matt Matergia:

Yes, of course. Timelines, budgets, and also what is driving the timeline is usually it's the process on the other side. It's that decision making process that you need to understand, because we all have maybe a timeline in our head of the ideal process that we want to go through. But if you don't understand what's going on the other side and the business case that they need to make, the people that they need to get involved, the approval that they have to get, then those timelines, it's expectation versus reality. There can be some huge gap between what you're expecting the timelines to be and what they might be expecting. Which goes back to curiosity because you need to ask the questions to understand what that process is going to be.

Crystal Carter::

Right, and I think that that's part of building a relationship with someone from a team like that. And that's a healthy relationship because you don't want to be pressuring someone. How come you haven't responded to this email when they don't have the capacity to get back to you straight away. Or they've got some other things that are going on around or that sort of thing. So yeah, I don't know if you can talk more about that.

Matt Matergia:

Well, I was joking. We had a sales kickoff in New York, I guess it was two months ago now, but I was joking with the team because we were talking about building trust and where you need to get with your main stakeholders and the sales process. We were talking about breaking the cell phone barrier. We were saying if you don't have your main contact cell phone and you don't have the right to be texting, calling, whatever, and you don't have that relationship, forget it. You're not closing the deal because you haven't established trust. Right? I made that up, breaking the cell phone barrier, but it goes back to trust really.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't have your number so I kind of...

Matt Matergia:

We don't have a good relationship.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're not there, huh? Oh man. I really misassessed this whole relationship.

Matt Matergia:

I'll Slack it to you. We're on Slack.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh okay, we're on Slack? Okay, so Slack is not... Wait, what if you're in a group Slack together with them, so it's a cross company Slack?

Matt Matergia:

Actually, that is definitely a good sign, right? When you have something like a joint Monday board or a joint Slack channel and now you're bringing in all the players. I feel like now you're starting to work on actual implementation or getting to the actual project, for sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, you're really trying to integrate with that person as much as possible.

Matt Matergia:

Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Crystal Carter::

I think from an SEO point of view, the process of building trust with your clients is very similar whether they're enterprise or whether they're a smaller scale. I think when you have that level of trust, when you think about timelines, sometimes it might not be the right time for whatever it is that you're doing. But if you have a level of trust where they've got you on speed dial, they've got your number, they've got all your information, they know that you're solid and stuff. Then you were talking about opportunity as well, then they're able to connect with you when they need you for whatever it is, and you're able to fulfill whatever it is that they need.

Matt Matergia:

It's expectation setting. It's been a long time since I've worked selling SEO to enterprise clients, and I'm sure in a decade. But sophistication of the marketing teams, I'm sure it has improved or let's hope. But a lot of the partners that I'm working with today, they're working with small businesses. You think, all right, I'm going to invest money in SEO and overnight I'm going to show up on Google first page because you have a unscrupulous SEO agencies that are always saying that, right? So, part of the way that you can build trust is also that you do proper expectation setting.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, a great positive or bonus is that when this person you've made contact with, whether it be you have their home phone number, their children's names, whatever it is that you have, if they go to another company, I've seen this a gazillion times, if they like you, they'll bring you into that company. Which means that you've not lost the other client. They don't necessarily get rid of you because your POC is gone and you've gained a new client, because your POC is now in a new company. And you know that person's children's names and you're on a first name basis, and you go to the country club. Whatever it is that you do together.

Matt Matergia:

I feel like CMO turnover is the bread and butter of marketing agents.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're like, all right, let's see. When you intake a new client, I wonder what's their churn rate going to be here at their own company?

Matt Matergia:

Yeah. Like, all right, every two years I can just hit the.

Mordy Oberstein:

This guy's great. I love this person. He just brought me 10 clients just by himself moving around.

Matt Matergia:

Exactly.

Crystal Carter::

I think there's also, talking about churn, sometimes when there's new team, let's say you're working with an account or you're working with a team, sometimes when there's a new company or a new team member, sometimes they're like, we want to clear out. We want to get new contacts and things like that. Have you got any advice for how to establish good relationships with talent incoming management?

Matt Matergia:

Yeah. In the sales world, we look for signals. Signals could be maybe a company has raised money or maybe they had a change in strategy. But certainly a signal could be new leadership coming in. Because 100% whether they're going to come in and bring existing vendors and existing relationships, or they're going to look for new ones, they're going to 100% make changes and they're going to want to make those changes usually within the first 90 to 180 days. So, specific to how do I establish those new relationships, I don't think it's any different necessarily than just establishing relationships in general. But I think looking for those buying signals is very important, and having your finger on the pulse to know what's going on to be proactive in those situations is important.

Crystal Carter::

In my experience, also having your act together also helps. So, if you have a well-oiled machine and you're like, this is our report that we do every month and this is our thing that we do every month, then when the new person comes in, you've got all that stuff for them to see and the transition is easier. I don't know if you find that that's useful from a sales point of view as well?

Matt Matergia:

Everybody wants to look good. So, if you are the facilitator of that person looking good, then you've just earned their trust, right? 100%.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter::

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of looking good, if people wanted to look good and follow you out there on social media, where can they find you?

Matt Matergia:

I am MTerg on Twitter. M-T-E-R-G.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice, and we'll link to that in the show notes.

Matt Matergia:

I'm not as active as either of you, but I am there.

Crystal Carter::

But you're on LinkedIn as well, yes?

Matt Matergia:

And on LinkedIn. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, nice. LinkedIn's great. I go there once in a while. I visit. Not like TikTok. I don't even know what that is.

Crystal Carter::

That's not true. Marty has a very active TikTok where he does lots of dances, too.

Mordy Oberstein:

Dancing and I fall downstairs. That's what I do. On purpose. Or some people can like it, laugh at me. I just hurt myself. Anyway, forgetting that rabbit hole, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate you sharing your expertise and experience with us and look forward to seeing you around the virtual office, because we're not in the same office. We're not in any office together.

Matt Matergia:

Nope. One day I'll get to Tel Aviv.

Mordy Oberstein:

One day I'll get to Denver.

Matt Matergia:

Yes. Look forward to that.

Crystal Carter::

Fantastic.

Matt Matergia:

Thank you both. It's a pleasure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Three, two, one, ignition. Lift-off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Matt. I've had numerous conversations over the years with Matt. Super nice guy, super friendly, super accessible, and one of these people who you walk away feeling like they know way more than they let on kind of thing.

Crystal Carter::

In a good way.

Mordy Oberstein:

In a good way. I mean it in the best way possible. Some things that I'm not going to let on that I do know, well maybe I will, that you'll soon know, if that makes any sense whatsoever. I'm not sure. As I pivot into the snappy news.

Crystal Carter::

And now, with the snappy news and news from Bing, they have announced that their new Bing has increased the number of conversations that you can have with Bing chat from 15 up to 20. You can also have a total of up to 200, which is an increase from 150. They've also explained that they are adding in image and video search, which will make it a lot easier for you to have a bit more information there. And that they're adding local grounding to give better results for local search. Also in local search, if you are using Bing places, you might also be interested to know that they have improved their location recognition API to include something called local intelligence, which allows you to create territories and to do better local SEO via Bing. They're also adding more information about demographics and continuing to build and grow.

We reported last week that the March core algorithm update had completed. However, in the early days of April, we are starting to see a lot of movement around there, to the point that Barry Schwartz reported seeing early signs of a Google search algorithm update on the third. A lot of people were saying that they have seen some reversals and a lot of changes early in the month. So, if you have a website that you're looking after, have a look at those results and see if anything has changed.

Picking up on the AI news from Google, they continue to roll out Bard in a testing framework, so more people are reporting that they're getting access to Bard. They also announced recently during a podcast with the New York Times that they are also testing Bard in Gmail. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, discussed some of their approaches to innovation and responsibility, and also discussed and denied that he ever issued a code red as part of their approach to AI.

Finally, news from ChatGPT is that ChatGPT has been disabled for users in Italy, reported by Christie Hines in Search Engine Journal. It seems that OpenAI did not in properly inform users that it was collecting personal data. This may have been in contravention with GDPR. And as such, they have now blocked access to ChatGPT for Italian users while they tried to make adjustments to potentially reestablish the ground rules for use in that area. This brings into question some potential challenges for how generative AI tools like Chachi PT, Bard and New Bing may approach this privacy space going forward. That's all for today's SERP's Up podcast snappy news.

Mordy Oberstein:

Coming back now from the snappy news, always good to have news.

Crystal Carter::

Always good. Have we reached the final frontier of our podcast?

Mordy Oberstein:

It was the undiscovered country of SEO enterprises.

Crystal Carter::

That's very fair.

Mordy Oberstein:

A little Star Trek Six reference for you there. All right. I feel like we're spanning generations, we keep this podcast going on any longer. But before we do lead the part, we need to talk about who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness, and this week we have a great follow for you, Paul Andre Devera, also known as Dre. An absolute character who you may not realize specializes in enterprise SEO.

Crystal Carter::

So, he is living my podcast sound effects dreams because he has a fantastic podcast and webcast called The SEO Show. Do check the out on YouTube and on all of your best channels. He is somebody who drops the air horns that go. He just drops them in the middle of whatever he's doing and it's amazing. He has a lot of fun with his podcast and with a lot of his web stuff, but don't let the fun fool you. He's so smart and so strategic about the things that he does. I was on a recent discussion for Majestic, where we were talking about enterprise level SEO. The amount of sense he was talking, the amount of clarity that he has about how to approach enterprise SEO is phenomenal. He's super intelligent and really engaging, and a great follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

I've had numerous conversations with him. I've interviewed him. He is so on the ball and his take on SEO is so accurate and it's real. You're not getting the influencer flop. You're getting a real take from him. Again, like the SEO Video Show, the production value is off the chain. Little plug from myself, beginning of each show I do the SEO joke. So, if you want to hear me do an SEO joke, check out Dre's show. Marketers going to market.

Crystal Carter::

Yeah, he's got a fantastic theme song as well. Which I thought that he'd done it himself, but he didn't do it himself. I wish he had, but there we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's over on Twitter at Paul Andre, that's P-A-U-L-A-N-D-R-E. Paul Andre on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes so you could follow him, check him out across all of his platforms, especially on YouTube and his SEO Video Show. And that's it. That's all we got.

Crystal Carter::

That's it. We've reached the final frontier. We have-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, you made that joke already today.

Crystal Carter::

Did I? Can I not do it again?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. You can pick it again.

Crystal Carter::

Oh, come on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Another Star Trek joke.

Crystal Carter::

Oh, an insert Star Trek joke here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Live long and prosper, everybody. Thank you for joining us on the SERB'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 SEO on PPC with our powers combined. Look for wherever you could consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO loading app over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.