Will your audience actually care? How to gauge interest

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO Podcasting. Welcome to SERB's Up.

Aloha. Mahalo for joining SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at, and I'm joined by she who is always in the know about what you need to know, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

You know what I'm saying? You know?

Mordy Oberstein:

The more you know-

Crystal Carter:

That's how you know. I know what I know. I say what I say.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a song like that, isn't there? I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

There is a song like that. It's a Paul Simon song.

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by old music,

Crystal Carter:

Old music and old people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Here we are. Where you can only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search slide over at Wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get our free SEO course and where we have an entire suite of analytics that can help you understand what is working for your audience, what isn't working for your audience. Look for it in the Wix studio back end as today we're talking about, how do you figure out if your audience will be interested in all that content you spent hours making before you spend the hours making it?

We're talking leveraging SEO and social media data to predict interest levels going beyond the metrics and typical KPIs to foresee the engagement future and how the context of the wider web can help be your guide. Flying Cat founder, Maeva Cifuentes stops by to share how audience interests impacts revisiting older content. And president of AKvertise, Akvile Defazio offers her take on how to gauge what will or what won't resonate with your social media audience.

Of course, we are snappies of SEO news and who usually be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness. If your outlook feels murky or if you're not sure what's in the cards, bones, or Ouija board is trying to tell you, but hint, by the way, is telling you nothing because all that's nonsense, then put another quarter in the amusement park's fortune-teller machine as episode 114 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you predict your audience's future.

I feel like we need more magic eight balls.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I could definitely do with some in most situations. Lottery tickets, and I don't know. Traffic. The other day, we were driving, and Google was like, "Go this way," and we were like, "That's not the way." And then we went five more feet, and it was a horrible traffic jam. And if I could have predicted the future or at least scrolled up, then I could have prevented that entire situation. That would've been good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Prevention in bad situations is what life is all about.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a bad situation would be if your content isn't resonating with your audience. I don't think we need any obvious reason why we're covering this topic. It's bad if your content's not resonating with your audience for multiple reasons. There's multiple data points that you can use or multiple ways you can look at data in order to get a sense of where things are. Let's start off on the SEO side because we're an SEO podcast. SEO data is very helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Essentially the thing is, people think about keyword research as it being this ephemeral thing that is unique to SEO. Keyword research is audience research, y'all. It's audience research. Keyword research is audience research. There's been lots of stuff we've just had in election, regardless as to how you feel about it. A lot of people have feelings about it, but regardless about it, there's been a lot of talk about how people have been responding to it, and a lot of people have been looking at the search data to see how people are responding to the results.

They've been saying searches for this query have gone up, or searches for this query have gone up, and things like that. People were also looking at some of the queries on the day to see how people were responding to that because it's audience data. That's essentially what it is. When you're trying to figure out whether your audience is interested in the topic that you want to write about, it's very important to look into the keyword research stuff just to get a ballpark of whether or not anyone even cares about this topic.

You can also ... I know a lot of people ... We had Andy Crestodina on, and he was talking about that sometimes he posts things on social that don't have a lot of SEO potential, necessarily, from a general search point of view, but are maybe very niche, and I think that's something that you can think about for that as well. You can get a gauge of whether or not other people have posted within the social media platform about that particular topic and see what response they got and whether or not people were interested in that there.

But essentially, those keyword research tools are audience tools. They're giving you a gauge of the interest that an audience has in that particular topic. It is always worth carrying out some kind of research there before you start pitching your topics, before you commit hours and hours to drafting copy, getting graphic design, getting images, getting interviews, getting all of that stuff going.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's so many ways to look at that kind of stuff. I mean, look, typical SEO did branded keywords, which is like, "SEO. We don't want to focus on branded keywords," but your branded keywords and what people are searching for when they're looking for you is a huge indicator for what your audience is actually coming to you for. You might have thought they're coming to me looking for me for X, but really they're coming looking for Y. I should make more content about Y. Oversimplifying it, but it's really not that complicated either.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think sometimes with branded keywords, it can also show you product gaps or information gaps. For instance, if people are asking all the time about, I don't know, a particular vacuum cleaner warranty, maybe it's because they can't find that information anywhere else, and it mentions it on the box, but there's nothing in the ... There isn't something that's on the webpage that says about it. There isn't something in the KBs and the knowledge documents that say about it as well. That can tell you that that's the product gap and an information gap that you have there.

It can also tell you sometimes if there's an issue with your product even. If they're saying vacuum cleaner noisy, for instance, it might be that we have a noisy vacuum cleaner, and this is something that people don't like. That's something that will tell you things that people who already know your brand are interested in.

It can also make sure that when you're looking at branded keywords, it can also make sure that you're able to stay serving the clients that already know you. Sometimes people are constantly searching for new clients, constantly searching for new folks, and if you're not tending to the warm leads, you'll be missing out on a lot of value there as well. Hannah Smith, who's a great marketer, was talking about this as she shared an example from Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's is a supermarket chain in the UK, and they found that if they just increased the amount that people who were already shopping with them spent by 10 cents or something, they could increase their bottom line by billions or whatever. And they did. And it was very successful. And it was very low lift for them. Brand can be really good value.

If you've got an email newsletter, for instance, that's saying, "Hey, guys. Come check out this new thing," but you don't have the content to support it further down the chain, then people are going to go searching for that on Google. And if they can't find it, then that doesn't reflect well on your brand.

I think that when you're thinking about what your audience will be interested in, also think about what feeds into your wider marketing funnel. If you're thinking about your TV, your video, your other campaigns, your other advertising campaigns, if you don't have supporting documentation, supporting content on your website to help people know they're in the right place, then that's something that people are going to struggle with. Looking at your own marketing funnel is also a great place to start and when you're thinking about what things people need to know about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Zooming out like that, by the way, if I zoom out from that, zoom out from the zoom out, very meta, if you want to take a look at a more holistic way of thinking about how do you track what your audience is interested, you need to look at a bunch of things like that. You need to look at what people are interested in. Where are things going in the ecosystem that you're in? Whatever vertical you're in, you need to have your finger on the pulse. What are people talking about? Where's content moving to? What are they preference anything? What are people buzzing about? What are they talking about more? One of the reasons why you want to be on social media is just you can be just lurking there is to see how the conversation is just changing, and you want to look at wider sentiment across the web.

You want to look at, by the way, just looking at where people are mentioning you, how they're mentioning you, how they're mentioning your competitors, how they're talking about your competitors, how they're engaging with your competitors on social media, how they're engaging with you differently than your competitors on social media or wherever it is, at a conference. Looking at all those wider things and go on and on and on, I just listed 14 of them way too quickly for you. I get it. It's a podcast. You can go back. Is how you kind of keep tabs and leverage what's happening out there in the wider ecosystem in order to understand where you should be focusing your efforts.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that this can be really tricky, or sometimes people feel like this can be really tricky for new brands. New ideas. Let's say you invented something brand new. I don't know. Spas for dogs or something, which isn't new, but I don't know. Let's say it was you were the first dog manicurist in Toronto or something like that. Let's say there wasn't anybody who was searching for a dog manicurist in Toronto, and you don't have any search volume previously, or you invented this brand-new product that's never existed. People think there's no keyword search volume for that.

Well, my answer to that is think about the solution that you have. You must have started your business for a reason. There must be a solution that you are trying to address. There must be an issue that you're trying to solve. When you're thinking about the keyword research for that and trying to see if you have content that people are interested in from an organic point of view, then you need to be thinking about the solution. Are there people who are like, "I really wish that my dog's manicure matched my manicure. I want to find out how I can match outfits with my dog," or whatever it may be? Or whatever solutions. There's probably more noble solutions that people will have for their businesses, but look at the solutions because the solutions will be there.

There will also be people who are doing something similar, but they're not-

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. I was just going to say that. Read my mind.

Crystal Carter:

Right? You can look for those things. You can look in reviews are a great place to look for things where people are like, "It doesn't do this. I really wish it did that." And you can be like, "I do that." And you can address that with your content. That's something to think about as well, is that not just thinking about the keywords but also the reason why people are searching for the keyword. And people call that intent, but beyond the jargon, it's really why people are searching. Think about why people are searching for whatever it is they're searching, why people need this content, and that won't steer you wrong.

Mordy Oberstein:

My last point before we get to Maeva is that you're hitting on just this. You have to understand the context of the user. The life context of the user. I'll just give you a horrible example that I always use. Minivans. Everybody hates minivans. You know why you hate minivans? They're not fun. They don't look cool, and they just mean pain. They just mean I have to schlep my kids all around town, and my kids don't appreciate it at all. You need to understand that life context. That person's buying the minivan. What is their emotional situation? And what will speak to them? And what won't speak to them?

If you're going to write a blog post, How to Make Your Kids Happy With the Minivan, don't care about making them happy. I want to be happy. I want to be happy. How to make yourself happier with the minivan. You have to understand what is that life context and what are the implications of that life context emotionally, essentially, whatever, on the end user. That's really everything.

Now, if you want to take that and you want to revisit some of the older content that's really out of date, content about making your kids happy with the minivan, how do you do that? How does audience interest impact revisiting your older content? Here's Maeva Cifuentes on doing just that.

Maeva Cifuentes:

The question is, how does audience interest impact your process or mindset when revisiting your older content? Audience interest, which is ever-changing, should always be the number one thing that drives the changes you make to your content. Whether that's signaled by quantitative metrics like engagement rate or conversion rate or qualitative metrics, like what topics are trending on social media or what people are asking about on sales calls, it always needs to be a part of what I'm planning, whether that's new content or revamping existing content.

Now, this process changes depending on the level of involvement I have with the audience. For example, if I'm working on an SEO strategy about SEO or B-to-B marketing, well, I'm in that space every single day, so I know what people are talking about. I follow the biggest news sources about it. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm in the paid communities. I'm practicing it myself, and I'm on sales calls every week hearing the concerns of people all the time. I know what people are talking about, and I know what trends are relevant or irrelevant. It's easy for me to identify whether I need to make updates at the topic level or the content level.

For example, if I had old content about something like keyword density optimization or exact-match domains, I'm not actually going to spend time and effort updating those because they don't contribute to the new conversation. I don't necessarily need to prune them. Whereas if I have any content about AI and SEO that I wrote a year ago, for example, I know that people have new questions, and technology has already changed, and this piece needs to be updated probably every six months to stay up to date and relevant.

Now, if I'm managing SEO for a client whose industry community I'm not a true member of, things might be slightly different. In this case, I try to meet with one of the client sales reps once a quarter and dig into the conversations that they're having. What are the people asking now? What are the concerns today? As well as using tools like SparkToro or other audience research tools to better understand and dig into what they're asking about.

But the resulting process stays the same. Find out what's relevant. Find out what pieces are not worth the update, even if they used to perform well, and find out what pieces need to be updated more often.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make sure you follow Maeva on LinkedIn or all the other social media platforms where she is around. Again, it always comes down to that one point. What is the audience? Where are they at? What do they need? What's their situation? In the context of AI where she gave the example, if you know your audience already has an interest in AI, then you know that their situation around AI has changed because the technology has changed. You need to change with that. It always comes back down to that one fundamental point, I feel.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that shows that you know your audience. And if you don't know your audience, if you're like, "Hey, guys. I've showed up. I know this new brand new thing called ChatGPT," and they're like, "We've been using that for eight months, 10 months, 12 months," or whatever it is, then they're not going to be impressed. You have to stay on top of it, and you have to show your expertise with your content. And that will build you good relationships. That will demonstrate what you have to offer and will help you in the end with your business-

Mordy Oberstein:

It'll help you rank better because your content will actually be up to date and on target with what Google's looking for. All that good stuff.

Now that we've talked about search and how to use search data and beyond search data, you've decided now you're going to run, I don't know, Meta ad or whatever sort of social media activity to target your audience, but how do you know what phrasing or messaging or even visual would actually resonate? President of AKvertise, Akvile Defazio, weighs in as we step into the great beyond.

Not only are you creating content and spending time creating the content, but now you're actually spending money on the content. I feel like you kind of need to know what your audience actually wants.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that people try to do shortcuts around this, but to be honest, and I think both of our contributors here have mentioned this, but you need to be on top of things. You need to be in the game.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point. There's really no other way to do this than actually being in it, right?

Crystal Carter:

Right. You need to be in the game. You can't fake it because your audience will smell it. They'll be like, "This doesn't smell right. This is a little fishy."

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's get into the game of what Akvile had to say.

Akvile Defazio:

When it comes to keeping tabs and understanding how to engage our target audiences, regardless of our goal or our brand or the platforms that we're advertising on, it's really all about testing and listening. Trying different phrases, whether it's a headline or visuals of formats, and seeing what really clicks with people and how they behave based on the different metrics. And it's amazing how a small tweak, like changing the tone of a headline or adjusting the hook a little bit on a video or testing a different image, can completely change how well an ad performs compared to the prior iterations of it.

One way I like to do this is I'll look at organic social media, or even I'll talk to the customer service teams, and I'll try to get an understanding of what is gaining traction. What are people talking about? How are they engaging with this piece of content? And that helps me get a good sense of the current needs and the preferences of the people that are engaging with this brand. Maybe customers that are sharing feedback about, "Hey, I really love this product that's comfortable to solve this problem, or it's stylish. I love the price of it," ... Those feedback loops are incredibly valuable. Whether you're reading through the comments, checking reviews, maybe even conducting surveys, you can get a real-time insight straight from your audience and then repurpose that in your marketing and your advertising initiatives, and it's amazing how that works.

Another way I like to use that type of data is I'll plug it into an AI, and I'll tell it to give me the top maybe three to five emotions that we can identify from existing customers or maybe from just the comments. Also, identify what the value props are. What are people most excited about this? Why are they so glad that they bought this, and it was worth their money, especially in this economy? That really gets me a better sense of what I can use in messaging and kind of complement it with creatives and work with our design teams on that.

And lastly, another thing I like to look at is competitor analysis. What are they doing well? Where are their gaps? How are people commenting on their organic social and just anywhere else on the internet in terms of reviews? What can we do that's better to get more of those customers for our brands? That's been really helpful as well.

At the end of the day, when it comes to this, just test, listen, adapt, and repeat, and see how much more you can engage your audience and really lean into the things that they care about most because, at the end of the day, it's about them. Your business is there providing solutions, but how can you make someone's life better and more interesting, efficient, in some way? And just lean into those audience insights, and use them in your advertising.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you, Akvile. Make sure to follow Akvile all across the various social media platforms. A great follow, great speaker, by the way. Thank you so much again, and a great point about testing. Everything's test. By the way, a test can be, "I wrote a post, and it didn't go so well. And I wrote another post, and that one went better. And now I know." Sometimes you have to fail a little bit also. That's cool.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think that there are lots of different ways to test content. On social media, one thing that I know some Instagram folks who will tend to test ideas on a story before they commit it to a full reel or a full video or a full YouTube video or that sort of thing as well. They'll test it in a sort of low-stakes space before they commit to something larger. Again, and you could do the same thing with a LinkedIn post and maybe see if people are interested in that and then maybe go into a full-blown article or things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Great point.

Crystal Carter:

There's lots of different ways that you can test your content for advertising and for organic content.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what content needs no testing whatsoever? Barry's. You know it's going to be good.

Crystal Carter:

Always.

Mordy Oberstein:

Always, always on target, always to the point, and always short.

Crystal Carter:

Snappy, if you will.

Mordy Oberstein:

Snappy, if you will, which means it's time for the snappy news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news coming right at you with the Google November 2024 core update rollout is now complete per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. The update was supposed to take two weeks to roll out. It took 24 days to roll out. That's more than two weeks. Now would be a good time to go check your rankings and see what actually happened in the end as a result of the update. Again, don't go freak out. Just don't freak out.

Anyway, at the same time, there was an interesting little podcast done by Google. Google has a Search Off the Record podcast, and a lot of little interesting tidbits kind of came out of it. Barry covered a lot of it over at searchengineroundtable.com. I'll try to cover a little of it all really quickly. There's three articles on SERoundtable.com. I'll link to all of them in the show notes. Boy, this is a sponsorship of SERoundtable.com, which you should check out, but also check out It's New, our daily news series with Barry from SERoundtable.com.

Anyway, Google marauding black holes with clustering and error pages. Basically, there is a way where you're paid to kind of end up in a black hole. Google won't really come back to them and look at them again maybe forever, not forever, for a long time, and they can kind of get stuck. And there's a fascinating conversation. I can't cover all of it here. I'll read to you a little bit of what Martin Splitt from Google said to kind of sum it up. This is a recording from Barry's article. Martin Splitt from Google summed it up with an example.

Is that these cases where you have a website that has, I don't know, 20 products that are no longer available. They have replaced it with this item is no longer available. It's kind of an error page, but it doesn't serve as an error page because it serves an HTTP 200, but then the content is all the same. The check sums will be all the same, and then weird things happen right. Right. Make sure your pages are marked with appropriate 404 status code, et cetera.

Similar, on the same website, SERoundtable.com, Barry writes, "Google search. How clustering works with localization. The whole concept of hreflang and localizing content, which Google says we know it's confusing for SEOs. It's also confusing for us." One interesting little tidbit here. They talked about pages had a one-to-one translation of ... Let's say if you have a page in English, and you translate it into French, versus pages where now you're going to localize. The content's going to be a little bit different.

Google said, "But the full translation pages should not cluster because they have different tokens they're going to retrieve for different queries. We don't want them in the same cluster." Google, if it sees that you're just translating one-to-one to one-to-one in the same language, it gets that. It also gets, if you're not doing this, says, "Hey, wait a second. The page in English ... It might be for this kind of cluster of keywords, where, for the page in French, it's really going to be targeting something different because it's not a one-to-one match." That's interesting.

Under the third article that Barry covered on this podcast, Google does try to handle broken canonicals. There was a whole discussion of how Google handles canonicals. They said that, yes, "We have some validation in place to try to break the real canonical when we think they're wrong," but basically Google said it's not extremely reliable, so don't do that. I'll link to all three of the articles in the show notes because each one of them is their own story, and it could be an own podcast episode, really. That will be there for you in the show notes. Again, make sure you check out It's New with me, Crystal, Barry Schwartz, and Greg Finn Monday through Thursdays. And this has been another version of the Snappy News.

I wonder if Barry does test things out.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, he's a developer, so he must test things.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I'm sure he test things on that side, but in the content side ... I'm going to try it or just goes. I think Barry just goes.

Crystal Carter:

He just goes?

Mordy Oberstein:

He doesn't care.

Crystal Carter:

Forward only.

Mordy Oberstein:

You like it? Fine. You don't like it? Also fine.

Crystal Carter:

The Barry train just keeps on rolling.

Mordy Oberstein:

Keeps going. You know what I do like, though? I like our follow-up of the week, which is Anu Adegbola over at Search Engine Land. You know why it fits into this episode, by the way? Because in all of her articles, she literally has a thing why we care.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, yes, yes. I always really liked that for that particular publication because it's a really good TLDR, and I think that it's really great for that.

Anu's also great at this. She speaks to her audience. She has an event thing called PPC Live, which is an event program in the UK, and she does a lot of sort of talking to her audience about what kind of things they might like to see at the event. And so, there's lots of ways that she can test whether or not it's going to be resonating with everyone. And I think it's really, really good. Speaking to your audience is something that cannot be underestimated.

Mordy Oberstein:

A million percent. Give Anu a follow over on, I think now, LinkedIn primarily. On LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes.

Honestly, we just should ask our audience, what are you interested in? Tell us.

Crystal Carter:

Let us know, guys. And while you're thinking about it, leave a review. Just saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

Leave a review. Tell us, "I like playing with Hot Wheels." Tell us whatever you like.

I'm a grown man who plays with Hot Wheels.

Crystal Carter:

I'm an adult fan of Lego.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, by the way, I'm not knocking. You can collect Hot Wheels. They're cool to collect. I don't think anybody plays with them if they're 40 years old. And if you do, it's fine. Totally fine too. I'm going to stop talking now.

Couldn't you at least get Matchbox? Anyway, 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 influencer marketing for conversions. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn.

Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and courses on and resources on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn.

Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.