Writing helpful content ain't easy

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us, 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 Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who makes it look so easy. It's the legit, makes it all look so easy when it is not easy, the one, the only, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much. I can't remember what it is. What is it that I make look easy?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's all of it. It's all of it.

Crystal Carter:

It's all of it?

Mordy Oberstein:

You're doing the conferences, all the stuff.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot of flapping that happens in between. Yeah, there's just a lot of flopping that happens in between. And there's a lot of many, many piles of makeup to look like I have slept a decent night's sleep-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh my god.

Crystal Carter:

... when I am there at the conference and having had been up for far too late the night before. There are various tactics and techniques. My top tip, for ladies anyway, and for anybody who is partial to this particular garment, is if you were traveling anywhere, basically, I only pack dresses and onesies and it just means that you can minimize how much you have to pack, and you can pack more outfits in a smaller amount of space. It's really, really useful. So if you have a onesie or a jumpsuit that's way less; Takes up way less space than having to pack a bunch of different things. That's super useful. Also, hydration.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wear the same clothes multiple days. The choice is yours.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. This is true. There's lots of ways to do it. Lots of ways to get to the same-

Mordy Oberstein:

I recommend your way.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's-

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're around other people.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. This is true. It's useful. It's useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Well, with those fashion tips, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only describe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also start building content now with a Wix CMS, as this week, we're talking about the ins and outs of just right good content and why it's way harder than you think. Hence, the whole Crystal makes it look easy. Get it? It all comes together.

Crystal Carter:

How easy.

Mordy Oberstein:

All comes together.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're talking the temptations of quick and fast content creation for SEO, creating the content your audience craves, and why it might not be what you think. And how to write great content that actually has meaning. To help us record a great podcast, SEJ, Search Engine Journal's managing editor Ben Steele will join us in just a few moments. Plus, we see what Google's People Also Asked tells us about how Google sees "good content." And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So uncap your pens and dip your feathers in ink, or just use the keyboard, how quaint, as episode 92 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you see how the pen is mightier than the SGE Because SGE doesn't produce good content. That's me saying SGE doesn't produce good content.

Crystal Carter:

Do they talk about pens on SGE?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, but they say all sorts of wacky things about what you should do with them.

Crystal Carter:

About ballpoint pens or fountain pens or the permanent marker pens. Those are the best ones. I mean, Sharpie, they're really just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, those are good if you have kids under the age of anything.

Crystal Carter:

For kids, I like the sniffing pens, which is terrible. Why would you encourage children to sniff pens?

Mordy Oberstein:

Whoa. No, no. You don't want to give the kids a permanent marker to sniff?

Crystal Carter:

No, but the ones that smell? Like the blue ones smell like blueberry and-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Crystal Carter:

... like those ones, but why would you encourage children to sniff pens? It's not a good thing, but I used to love them, but now as an adult-

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. I'm bringing it up, not encouraging it.

Crystal Carter:

As an adult, as a parent, I'm like, "Why would I? I wouldn't want to do that. It's-"

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I'm not saying you should.

Crystal Carter:

... It's not good. That's not good content.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not good content. That might be the easy thing to do, but it's not good content.

Crystal Carter:

It's not good content-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So let me give a little bit of a history of this. Okay, Christina, why are we talking about just write good content if you're not super involved in the SEO space, you're a casual SEO-er? Google has been trying to rank quality content for the longest time, but it's really made ginormous shifts and paradigm shifts. We talked about this before on the podcast since around 2018, had the core updates and the this and the that and the helpful content update, which is no more, but that's confusing and I want to get into that right now. And the advice that Google has been giving, Google's Danny Sullivan, their Search Liaison, is look guys, the links and the this and the...

Just write good content. Write content that's valuable to the user, write content that's helpful to the user, write content that the people are actually going to want and going to use and it's going to be meaningful to them. Just write good content. And SEOs are like, "Just write good content like, let's not make magic pixie dust." So there's been some controversy around just write good content. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that just writing good content is not as easy as you think. This is why we're doing the episode. So now let me introduce to you Search Engine Journal's own Blue Ben Steele or Ben Blue Steele, Ben Steele.

Ben Steele:

Hello.

Mordy Oberstein:

How are you?

Ben Steele:

What an amazing intro. I'm doing pretty good. How are you?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm tired after that intro.

Ben Steele:

It sounds tiring.

Mordy Oberstein:

I should really sniff some markers.

Crystal Carter:

No, don't. Seriously, don't.

Ben Steele:

Did you see, someone posted a screenshot of an SGE answer that suggested that in order to help pass a kidney stone, you should drink at least two quarts of urine in a day?

Mordy Oberstein:

Not only are we aware, but we covered it on It's New with-

Ben Steele:

Oh, hell yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unbelievable. But you know why?

Ben Steele:

So wily.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because it's sterile and I like the taste.

Crystal Carter:

Oh my gosh.

Crystal Carter:

Oh my gosh.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a little much. It really is a little-

Crystal Carter:

Did somebody post it on Reddit? Is that what happened?

Ben Steele:

Yeah, I don't get how that came up. That's weird.

Crystal Carter:

How did it end up in the SGE?

Mordy Oberstein:

It got confused. They changed it later where it meant drink two quarts of water so that it helps your urine. It got confused. It put the word in the wrong place.

Crystal Carter:

Did it go, "I'm an LLM. I'm sorry. I cannot understand the internet and I'm not want to talk to you anymore. Please ask a different question"?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's how you know, by the way, it's an LLM, not a person. The person would double down like, "No, no. You should drink two things. I'm right."

Ben Steele:

Is this SGE or is this Bear Grylls?

Crystal Carter:

Right? Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. So just in case someone's not familiar with Search Engine Journal, please do tell us about SEJ.

Ben Steele:

Sure, yeah. Searchenginejournal.com is a website that covers all things SEO and digital marketing. We have prolific news writers who cover everything that's going on in the SEO industry. And we also have a team dedicated to creating really helpful content, which is what we're talking about today and about SEO and how to manage your own websites and your own businesses when it comes to existing in the digital space. We have a ton of really fantastic contributors who are expert SEOs in the industry as well, and so we've got their insights coming through the door all the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have a weekly now with Kevin Indig.

Ben Steele:

Yeah, we're sharing some of the content that he puts out on his newsletter, which is really exciting.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love Kevin.

Ben Steele:

He's great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Love Kevin.

Crystal Carter:

He's somebody who makes a lot of good content.

Mordy Oberstein:

Quite helpful. He's quite helpful as a person in general. Anyway, so we're talking about helpful content and one of the things that we talked about before we got onto the show, way back when we decided on this topic for the show actually, was Google saying, "Yeah, just write good content. It sounds super easy," and SEOs are like, "Give me something more." But at the same time, a lot of SEOs are creating, or they're trying to leverage, we'll call it fast food of content. It's super quick. We're trying to get super quick wins, super quick content. Let's get it out there, get it done, reach huge audiences. And then they feel like they're kind of wondering, why doesn't Google love me? Isn't my content helpful? But I don't think they really understand what helpful content is.

Ben Steele:

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So what is helpful content and can it be fast content?

Ben Steele:

The answer to the second question is yes, but... At least in my opinion. See, a lot of folks get hung up on the way that algorithms work. And what I've always said is, your primary responsibility as a content focused SEO or someone writing content in the first place is to meet expectations. And fantastic content will exceed them, but the primary goal you have is to set them and then meet them. And that's a problem that a lot of people struggle with is first of all, you have to do a lot of research to work out what kinds of expectations you should be looking for, and then actually properly fulfilling them is hard.

So yes, fast content exists, and I think that a lot of people are trying to optimize right now especially, for quick answers and fast content. Because they know that if you can do that right, well then you can get in search features. You can potentially show up in SGE, because SGE is pulling answers from page 60 of Google if it's a good answer to the question. One lead did a great webinar on that with our own print. And so quick answers does not actually mean quick to create, is the problem. So you can create content that's good, that's fast to consume and that can even benefit you, but the amount of work that goes into that is quite significant. That's something that people get hung up on, is that like, "Oh, I can just make some quick snippets and some quick things and it'll be great." Well, no, they'll be quick. Good content should be quick for the user to understand, but that doesn't mean it's going to be quick for you to make. That's something I see quite a lot, is short means fast. Sorry, go ahead.

Crystal Carter:

There's that thing, that it's like, "I'm sorry this email is so long," or, "I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter." There's that sort of thing as well. It takes time to make something concise. It takes time to make something that is edited down to something that's actually useful. And LLMs are terrible for this, so if you get an LLM and you say, "Give me the answer to this question," they'll go off on tangents that are unrelated, they'll talk about stuff that you don't need to hear about. They'll cover lots of different stuff just because they're trying to cover all the bases necessarily, but they don't always give you just the thing that you need until you drill down the prompt really, really precisely. And that takes time in itself, so I think that's worth considering.

But I think one of the other things that came to mind while you were talking was people trying to jump ahead without going through some of the steps in between. So trying to find shortcuts with some of these tools or trying to find shortcuts to good content. Like, "Oh, if I just add this thing, that'll be the thing that makes the difference."

And I think it's like I took my kid ice skating and he was trying to do a bunch of jumps and stuff, but he'd only just learned how to ice skate. And he was like, "Oh, I want to do these jumps." And I'm like, "Look here. All good ice skaters can do jumps. They can do the Lutz, then the quadruple Lutz or the double axle or whatever. Yes, good figure skaters can do that, but they're also very good at just skating. All of them are very good at skating. You can't skip that step. You still have to learn how to skate. Of course, you're going to learn how to do your double axle and you go spinning around and all that sort of stuff. Of course you'll learn how to do all that if you want to be a great skater, if you want to be really good at that. But you also have to learn to be a very good skater. Same with ice hockey players. They're also all very, very good at skating before they can do any of the other stuff."

Mordy Oberstein:

Except for the goalie, because he's not moving.

Crystal Carter:

They're good at standing up when they're covered in lots of pads. That's a feat in itself.

Ben Steele:

For sure. Yeah, my particular favorite YouTube rabbit hole is historical martial arts. And when a lot of those folks talk about how they train, it's interesting because in the movies when people are training to sword fight, they're doing all these fancy things. And if you watch somebody who does HEMA actually doing a training session, they'll spend hours just skipping around with no weapon in their hand, just working on their footwork. And they look ridiculous doing it, but it's like that's what you have to do. You have to get the footwork to a point where you don't think about it, and then you can put a weapon in your hands.

Mordy Oberstein:

Chasing chickens, right?

Ben Steele:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

There's lots of boring stuff that people do in order to learn how to do that stuff. And I mean, even in the age of LLMs, learning how to clean data, learning how to sort out the data that you're giving to your LLM, the data that you're giving to whatever tools you're using to help you do that stuff is something that is boring, time-consuming, and takes practice. And you have to figure out how to make sure that your prompts make sense and all that sort of stuff. And that's stuff that you have to build up. You can't skip the steps.

Mordy Oberstein:

But that's what I think makes it so hard for writing content because you think, I speak English, I write English, I can write content. It's not like that. I'll give you an example. I was looking at a bunch of sites that got impact... A bunch of pages rather, that got impacted by the March 2024 core update for this post that I'm supposed to be writing up for the Wix SEO hub. But by the time this article comes out, that post will be well released. But one of the things that I saw, and two of the examples that I was looking at, two of the three examples so far that I really want to focus on, the pages that did well, did a good job of addressing how the user's going to experience the thing. For example, one of them is about hip surgery. And it was about the doctor's going to do this, then the doctor will do that, and then you can expect the doctor to do this.

And it was really walking you through not just like what is hip surgery, but what is hip surgery for you and what is it going to mean for you? And it was very different than the other kind of content ranking. And the way I'll define it is, it was not sterile content. It was not, what is hip surgery, what are the different types of hip surgery, how do you recover from hip surgery? It was meaningful in the sense that it was dealing with an actual person or a group of people in mind. And I was thinking, I was looking at these other pages that are still, some of them aren't ranking well, some of them are still ranking and they're still very, very sterile. And I feel like in the future, Google's going to eventually drop those off.

If I was a smart SEO and I'm going to now rework this page for my client and it's completely sterile, how would I do that? And I was thinking, how would I do that on this page if I didn't want to start from scratch? That would be really difficult. And it took me a long time to figure out, you know what I would do with this page? I would probably do this, because I've spent the better part of 10 years doing that; Of thinking about how am I going to... Not just how am I going to write this page or this post. How am I going to position this post? How am I going to differentiate this post? What angle am I going to take with this post? And even after doing this for 10 years, with this particular page, I sat there for a good 20 minute, I don’t know what to do with this thing. It's creating hopeful content. It's not easy.

Ben Steele:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's very hard to position that the right way.

Ben Steele:

Yeah, and I'm having that experience myself right now where one of my primary responsibilities is ebooks, and we're currently writing our annual ebook about our ranking factors. And when I sat down to this thing, I was like, "What the heck am I going to say about ranking factors after the last year? How could I possibly be helpful to an SEO who's like, 'What the heck is going on right now?'?" And so that took a long time to work out and we're getting there. I just submitted the draft, so-

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh.

Ben Steele:

... fingers crossed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Roll back the curtains. What did you do? What was your thought process? How did you go? Because you're right. That's one of those kind of pieces of content where, okay, here are the top most important ranking factors. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's been done a million times before, and to be honest with you, we talked about this podcast, we have a whole episode about it, it's really not that helpful. So then what did you do? Could you share secrets?

Ben Steele:

Yeah. All right. So we did that the last, I think, three years. That's what our book has looked like of, here are a bunch of ranking factors. And we took a myth busting approach, which we found to be relatively helpful at the time, which is here are all the misconceptions. We're going to bust those myths. We're going to talk about what we have evidence for and we're going to go over... I think we did like 80 or so per book or something-

Mordy Oberstein:

I've referenced those before. They're good.

Ben Steele:

... Oh, really?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Ben Steele:

Awesome. And I sat down to it this year and I was talking with Katie, our Editor in Chief, and we were like, "We can't do that again this year. It doesn't make sense. It's not helpful anymore because everything is currently changing. Whatever we write in the book, the production process is long enough that it's highly likely to be out of date by the time it's gone to publish. So what can we do?" And so we decided on a bit of a mix. The first thing we did was we looked at the format of our most popular ebooks, and it's always the expert roundup format, when we get a bunch of SEO experts. I ask them questions, they answer them, and then I put it all together and you've got an ebook full of a bunch of varied insights from a bunch of different people. And then you have me talking about what I think the trends look like. And those are by and large our most popular books. Those are our SEO trends and PPC trends books that we do at the end of the year.

And so we said, "Okay, what if we take this successful format and apply it to ranking factors so that we can have a broad diversity of opinions on what ranking factors means? We know that our audience likes hearing from these people and so let's see what happens." And so that's kind of what we did. We changed the format. We were at first a little worried, like, "We've done it in a very specific way for three years. What's going to happen?" Because like I just talked about, setting expectations and then delivering on them is one of the core parts of being a successful SEO. And I can get more into that a little later.

And so we're like, "Well, we are completely overturning the expectations that we've set the last three years, so is that going to work?" And we're like, "We got to take the risk because it's better to risk this than to be unhelpful. And we think that analyzing individual ranking factors is unhelpful at this point." The book talks about the change, it talks a little bit about some of the things that we do at SEJ to account for the changes that are going on and the disruption and the instability. We asked people, "What do you think are ranking factors that matter right now?" And we ask people, "What do you think is going on? And what do you think about content in this wacky state of serfs, to be honest?" We had a lot of conversations about what does the advice make good content look like when good content isn't really being rewarded a lot of the time? How can we sit here with a straight face and repeat the same old advice when it's clearly not working right now?

But we also talk about some of the things that we've done that have seen an impact, and it does ultimately come back to making good content. And it's just about being more specific about the way you do it, more intentional, unfortunately, in the end, that appears to be the secret.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's, by the way, a great point. You started off saying the same format wasn't going to work. And I feel that's one mentality that content writers and SEOs kind of fall into, is helpful content is one thing, and it's not one thing. It's constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. The notion of good content in general is evolving. Think of an ad. Think of an ad back then in the 1950s. That was considered good ad content. Come on down. You look at it now like it's schlocky, it's gimmicky, it's ridiculous. But it was good content back then. And a hundred years from now, people look back at our, and like, "That? Really? That was good content?" So it's constantly progressing, constantly evolving. So to think helpful content is X isn't the right way to look at it. Helpful content might mean X for Google right now, but in a year from now, it won't be. That's why we look at algorithm, because you see how is it progressing. What's different in this update versus some of the trends we've seen in previous updates?

Ben Steele:

Yeah. Mm-hm.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also the piece that you did there of looking at... You're giving us a very top level summary of how you did this, but you looked at what does our audience enjoy, what does our audience appreciate? And I think that's really important. I think that when people are making good content, and especially, especially, especially now where there's so much AI content out there, there's so much uncertainty from lots of different venues, lots of different channels, et cetera, you have a community. You have a user base that you know, you have your own data from your own sources, and you know that your audience likes this. You know that your audience likes to hear from multiple perspectives and you are able to provide them with the thing that they like.

Even if it doesn't rank right, even if this content doesn't rank, you know that you're serving those users. And if you serve those users, then those users will refer to you, will talk about you, will come back to you, will reference you, will search for you on the SERP and will find you, and you will be useful to those users. And Google will see that. So I think when people think about good content, I think that it's so important to put the users first. We have a few different pieces of content around the Wix SEO Learning Hub that are around this as well. And I think that that's super, super important. And I think that you just can't go wrong. You can't go wrong if you are thinking about what your users want first because they'll appreciate that and what works with your users.

At the same time, I think that what Mordy's saying about the evolution of content is really important as well. So I think that format can change as well. So what makes content good can sometimes change from the format. So you're talking about an ebook. Ebooks have really evolved. I remember when ebooks were pretty much like a PDF sort of thing. And sometimes they're that, sometimes you can also get them on a Kindle thing, sometimes you can get a combination of a few articles altogether. I know y'all do that a little bit as well. And there's lots of different ways that you can do an ebook these days. And there's lots of new channels for ebooks. And I think that that's really important. Similarly, and I'm going to date myself here, but if I think back in the day, we would get the Sears catalog and we'd go around and we'd circle the things that we wanted. And back in the day, that was-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, those days. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

... good content, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Mm-hm. That's great.

Crystal Carter:

I'd be like, "Check out that Barbie house. This is what I want."

Mordy Oberstein:

That was fun, when it came in the mail. That was-

Crystal Carter:

Right? It was good. And to me, to 9-year-old me, that was great content. That was fantastic. But now people have their Amazon wishlist or whatever, or people have their wishlist on wherever, and that's more useful because you don't have to carry around the 600 page thing. And if the price changes, you can see it in real time and things. So the format there can also make content good. And I think that that's really important to think about as well, and for SEOs to not just necessarily fall back on what they always do, as Mordy was saying, but to pay attention to new opportunities to connect with people. And even new methods to connect with people in order to make the content good.

Ben Steele:

And you know what one of the biggest changes has been for the better internally when it comes to performance? It's been collaboration. So as an SEO, or I'm more editor, less practicing SEO, so as a content specialist I'll say, I don't necessarily have all of the information, all of the knowledge and all of the expertise required to front to back create an experience fully that an audience member wants. But the closer I work with my marketing team, the closer I work with my sales team, the more I can get that data, get that understanding, and take insights from the expertise of the other fantastic people I work with. And the more I do that, the closer that we collaborate, the better an idea we get of things like, what does our audience want? What do they respond to? And so collaboration and breaking down silos is a very important part around content.

If you want content to be successful, you really need information from all these sources. And it's been a huge... We've been doing this internally for a while where we try and sort of, like I said, break down the silos and make everyone's reporting and everyone's expertise available across different teams so that we can make use of that information and get fully aligned on our company goals. And it's had huge impact. And we've noticed that when we make these decisions, these audience focused decisions that are backed up by good data from our marketing and sales teams, that even if Google doesn't reward us right away, we can tell that the audience rewards us, and that's when we know we're doing something right. I think that's something that is going to be critical looking forward too, is remember that Google isn't your ultimate end goal. It's one of your channels, but if you're serving your users in whichever... That works in any channel, right? And the path of the algorithms is ostensibly, allegedly to reward behavior like that. Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Well and it wants to follow the user, right? It wants-

Ben Steele:

Right. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Google wants us break it down. Google wants ad clicks. The results have to be good at being relative to what users are expecting. So Google's chasing users while we're chasing algorithms. The point you made about experience and that whole narrative and actual expertise and collaborating with people who have the actual knowledge, I think that's been one of the more healthy things that's been going on in the SEO industry for the past, I don't know, couple of years, whatever it's been. And I think it's fascinating to see that shift. That wasn't a part of the conversation when I got into SEO at all. You send the content brief over to a content writer from every content market and they create the content, you're good to go.

I think now though, the next step is going to be, okay, we understand the experience, we understand the value of expertise, the value of firsthand knowledge, all that kind of stuff. Now we need to focus on the best way to transmit that knowledge and transmit that information. Because the value of the content and the helpfulness of the content is only as good as A, the actual substance itself, and B, how you transmit it. Just use a crude example, if I were to say to you, "Give me the salt now, jerk," you wouldn't really want to pass the salt to me. But if I said, "Please pass me the salt," you would pass me the salt. So it's not just the content itself, but it's how you say it that's super important. I don't think that's been part of the narrative yet at all, but I really hope that it will be.

Crystal Carter:

You think people should be more polite to Google?

Mordy Oberstein:

Now we're getting spicy.

Crystal Carter:

I said that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not sure this is helpful.

Ben Steele:

I think you can actually see, in the stumbles that Google's making, you can see the intent here. For things that exactly what you're talking about, Mordy, where it comes to not just the substance, but the experience of your content. And I think that a lot of these kind of the stumbling blocks are indicative of yes, they're trying to do what they're saying. And we're in a period of big disruption and there's a lot of missteps been happening all at once, but you can kind of see the direction even in the stumbles made by the algorithms. And we had a contributor in the ebook, here's a sneak peek, make a point that, I think it was Kevin Rowe made the point that we're seeing AI algorithms get released, but training them is different to how they act in the wild. And he was saying that eventually you just have to kind of release them and let them learn in a live environment, and that's going to be full of problems and mistakes, and then you fix them as they come up. And so he thinks that's what's happening.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. I agree with that.

Ben Steele:

I found that to be a pretty insightful comment because it's like, okay, so yeah, we have a ton of disruption. And he likened it to learning how to box. If you can hit a non-human target as much as you want, but eventually you got to get in the ring and get hit. And this is Google's algorithms getting hit, but then they get better. And you can see in where they're as stumbling is that they're trying to account for things like how you present your content. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing issues where original content is getting pushed down in the SERPs by content that is just kind of regurgitating it, but making it a little bit more accessible more quickly. And that's obviously not an ideal use case, but you can see the attempt to be like, "Okay, what's the user experience of this? How easily can a user parse this content?"

Mordy Oberstein:

On that note, if somebody wanted to attempt to hit you up for some knowledge and information about writing helpful content, where could they find you?

Ben Steele:

These days, I am mostly on LinkedIn. I've pulled back my X, Twitter, whatever presence quite significantly. So for me personally, it's just Ben Steele on LinkedIn, and you can find me by searching my name with Search Engine Journal.

Mordy Oberstein:

We will link to that in the show notes. Is your LinkedIn profile a picture like you giving the Blue Steel look?

Crystal Carter:

From the left. It might be.

Mordy Oberstein:

That'd be great, if it was.

Ben Steele:

I'll have to get updated headshots.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can have AI do it for you.

Ben Steele:

Oh. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

For anyone who does not know that reference, please go and watch Zoolander. Your life will be better for it. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Be at least 10 times as big.

Crystal Carter:

We're men. We're men.

Mordy Oberstein:

I got the black lung-

Ben Steele:

Oh my gosh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Keep an eye out for the ebook. When does that come out?

Ben Steele:

June 11th is when the ebook comes out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so we'll be able to link to it. Nice.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, because this will be out on the 19th.

Mordy Oberstein:

On the 19th, so-

Ben Steele:

Oh. Heck yeah. All right.

Crystal Carter:

Tell your team, you're like, "Look at me. I'm just marketing the book we just dropped. You're welcome."

Mordy Oberstein:

The audience get a backstage look at our scheduling.

Ben Steele:

Awesome. Thank you guys.

Mordy Oberstein:

So much fun. Yeah. Okay, so we'll link the ebook in the show notes. Check it out, have a gander at it, and check out SEJ and check out Ben.

Ben Steele:

Thank you guys so much. It's been a wonderful experience being on here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, it's been fantastic having you. Talk to you soon. Speaking of good content, what happens if we start running Google searches about good content? What could we learn? We'll find out as we have some fun with Google's People Also Asked box. So I decided to throw in some... When I say fun, by the way, it is not going to be fun. I'm just giving you a little spoiler alert, this is not fun.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I decided to throw a bunch of keywords into Google: What kind of content do users want, how to write good content, what is good content? And I'll tell you, I personally have been on mobile. This is an interesting point, I should tweet about this. I find myself clicking on more PAAs on mobile now than I used to and I'm-

Crystal Carter:

Why is that?

Mordy Oberstein:

... sure it's because the things I'm searching for or Google's... Maybe it was showing them higher up than they used to, or the results aren't so great, so I'm like, "Ah, I might as well click on the PAA." Or maybe I'm not good at searching anymore, so that secondary question's really what I wanted, and Google did a good job showing me that question. Whatever it is. I'll tell you, when I searched for these things, I didn't find much of it helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Okay,

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, here we go. Sorry, Google, you can't win all the time. What kind of content do users want? The first question is, what type of content is most consumed? That one's not bad. That one's not bad. Maybe I'm looking for, okay, what kind of content are people going to actually consume?

Kind of an offshoot of that, what kind of content is most engaging? Particularly, I'm looking for something around social media content. Maybe I really meant social media content. I would look for something engaging. Okay, fine. Okay. The third one is, what is the most used content type? I don't even know what that question means. And then the fourth one is, what content gets the most attention? Which is really the same thing as the second question, it was content's the most engaging? So not very helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I don't know. They're odd questions. I had a look at, how do you know if content is good? That was my seed question. The featured snippet there was from Quora.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot of-

Mordy Oberstein:

Where I go for all of my high quality substantive information.

Crystal Carter:

Obviously. And so the questions came off of that was, how to tell if content is good. There's an answer there from Sitecore. How do you know if content is successful? Another one from Sitecore. Sitecore crushing it here. And then we had, what defines good content? That's a good question as well. And how to determine good quality. A lot of these are very, very, very similar, which I think is really interesting because how to determine quality content, how to tell if content is good, what defines good content, and how do you tell if content is good, they're very, very similar. I think it's very interesting because essentially what you get with the PAAs is that they are essentially a repository for a lot of the featured snippets. So it's very interesting that you would have different featured snippets. And you see this really regularly, different featured snippets, different PAAs for very, very similar questions, which is what you found as well you were looking at-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, very similar across the board. I have other ones that are also very similar. Just to give you some contrast, by the way, if you're listening to this, if you search for how to throw a curveball, and these are the things I would actually click on, how do you throw a curveball correctly? Okay, fine. That's maybe a little bit too similar to the query itself. What is the proper curveball grip? Is it bad for an 11-year-old to throw a curveball? It's a very specific intent, which is true, it is bad for their wrist. And then, how do to throw a 12 to 6 curveball?

So certain curveballs go, imagine that the curve goes from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock. That's old school curveball. The more modern curveball kind of goes from, I don't know, 1 o'clock to 1 o'clock. Not 4 o'clock, 7 at clocks. I'm bad at clocks. So it's a little bit different. They're very differentiated. They're different questions for different intents and really helps you go down the curveball wormhole. If I search for, what is good content, I get, what does good content mean? That's what I asked. That's what I asked. What is good quality content? So okay, slight variance. How to make good content? Okay, fine. What is good content versus bad content? I get you're adding in the extra contrast. Yeah. But that's a little bit like, all right, same but different. I actually threw that into people also. I actually go into Also Asked, so you could see the further breakdown. So if you go into what does good content mean, Also Asked breaks down the next PAA questions being, how would you know a good content?

Crystal Carter:

A good content. I love the misspellings. I love the bad grammar and the PAAs. They're my favorite.

Mordy Oberstein:

What is an example content?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

What is excellent content?

Crystal Carter:

Okay?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. What type of content is best? Yes.

Crystal Carter:

For?

Mordy Oberstein:

What does bad content mean? So I was a little bit surprised that Google took the word mean very literally. Like, define the word content. That's not what I was looking for exactly.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it can be very surprising. I think this is one of the reasons why it's worth going through the PAAs with a tool like Also Asked. With a tool following, just going to the SERP and following that path as well. There's so many tiny subtleties that make the difference. The other thing I think that's also worth thinking about particularly, and I think of this when I'm looking at competitor research and stuff, is also checking the actual search volume for them. Because just because there's a featured snippet, doesn't mean that that's actually getting any search volume very much at all. So that's worth looking at as well because it could very well be that maybe they have... I looked up, are smoothies good for you? Because I've heard people who say that actually, smoothies have too much sugar or they take out all the fiber, where some people are like, "I juice every day." So anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what Barry Bond said.

Crystal Carter:

With something like that, it might be that more people are asking more of one particular, or phrasing the question in one particular way and getting to the serp in that way, even though they're very, very similar. Sometimes you can see that those slight differences can make a really big difference in terms of search volume. Because the chances are that you'll probably, in terms of featured snippet, PAA sort of thing, you may very well be at the top for the high search volume thing. But if you go for that one, you might also rank somewhere lower down for the other one. So that's worth thinking about as well. But yeah, the PAAs, the way that they arrange them can be very interesting in terms of the similarities between the words and everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

So it just goes to show you, sometimes you can learn a lot from the PAAs and sometimes you can't.

Crystal Carter:

I still don't know if smoothies are healthy or not. I still can't tell.

Mordy Oberstein:

It depends. If it tastes good, not healthy. It tastes meh, probably healthy.

Crystal Carter:

Does it have kale in it? That's probably healthy if-

Mordy Oberstein:

Kale in it is definitely healthy no matter how much sugar you put in it. That-

Crystal Carter:

Some of them are just like a juiced salad. Some of them are like, "We put kale and celery and thing," and you're like-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's healthy, but that doesn't sound too appetizing to me.

Crystal Carter:

Spirulina, like all these things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wheatgrass.

Crystal Carter:

Wheatgrass. I actually like wheatgrass.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's interesting. You know what else is interesting? Whatever's happening in the SEO news this week is always interesting, and it's usually always covered by Barry Schwartz. So here's our ode to Barry each and every week, and some other people who cover the SEO news as well, like the great folks over at Search Engine Journal. Here's this week's snappy SEO news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. First up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google, sometimes search experiments conflict causing issues. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast, Gary, however you pronounce his last name, was talking about Google experiments and said that sometimes that multiple experiments can cause conflicts with each other. He wrote, "Very often these experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other." Glenn Gabe chimed in on X writing, "Sometimes problems in the service and maybe what we see as changes are due to multiple experiments running that don't work well with each other."

You can even see this with the algorithm updates themselves sometimes, which is why I think Google tries to integrate things into the core as much as possible, in my honest opinion. And folks have covered this for a while. Glenn has some great posts on this, on warring algorithm updates. So for example, back when you had the review updates being announced before they were called the Product Review Updates, you might see a site, I don't know, gain a whole bunch of rankings with that update. Month later comes along a core update and kills all those rankings. So sometimes those systems can compete with each other. I was talking about this on LinkedIn, I don't know when. I post too many things on LinkedIn, so good luck finding it. But sometimes if you don't think about... If think SEO factors, for lack of a better word in isolation, and you don't try to think how everything kind of balances out, you could end up focusing on things the wrong way.

I think the example that I gave was, oh, I'll focus on links. I'll get a lot of links. So if you're focused on the link factor in SEO, you'll grab all these links, but then what happens when the user actually gets to the site? Because Google rewards it with rankings because you get so many great links, yada, yada, yada. The user gets to the site, the site's not great. So now the user behavior side of the algorithm, however that plays itself out, whole separate controversy, would say, "Oh, wait a second. This site's actually not so great. You got all the great links. Okay, okay, I see that, but let's actually demote the website because the behavior on the site or whatever shows that this site maybe isn't what people want. Maybe it's not quality." So you have to think about the algorithm harmoniously. Anyway, getting a little bit off track with that.

This from Danny Goodwin covering Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land where we got Meta Barry there. 13 SEO takeaways, some Googles, Elizabeth Tucker at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz interviewed Elizabeth Tucker, who's the Director of Product Management of Google Search, and Danny wrote up a summary of the 13 things you should know about what Barry and Elizabeth covered. There's a whole bunch of really cool things in there. I'll kind of roll through just a few of them. For example, there's a whole thing on why SEO should focus on the big picture. Elizabeth said, "We are trying to satisfy people with all these different informational needs with all sorts of different great types of content and websites. I do worry that when people kind of get down in the weeds on specific technical details or signals we may or may not have, it might take away from that big picture question of, is this helpful, yada, yada, yada." Absolutely a hundred percent agree.

They got into why the March 2024 core update took 45 days to roll out. Basically saying that that was the biggest update that they basically ever had, with Elizabeth saying that there was some re-architecture work going on. They said that we actually had a mini war room going on. We were doing live monitoring, co-capacity and latency in our data centers, because it is unusual for us to roll out so many different changes at once. We did so successfully. Part of that was actually why the announcement about the March 2024 core update took a little bit while for Google to announce it, basically saying they want to make sure that things were... I'll just quote them. Why am I trying to put words in their mouth? Quoting Elizabeth, "We wanted to make sure all the changes were entirely rolled out. Hundreds of people were involved. So just answering the question of, are we done yet, involves so many different pings, et cetera."

One of the interesting things that I took away from the article, and I'll end here because it's a whole bunch of other things about what causes radical fluctuations, how many systems are involved in Google's core updates. Danny does a really nice job kind of covering the conversation that Barry had with Elizabeth, but there's a section that Danny has about how Google defines low quality. And I'm going to reignite this debate, I guess. I don't know why it's a debate at this point in the SEO world, but whatever. Google basically said like, "We look at the Search Quality Rater guidelines as our definition of quality." I will read through this as much as I can. It's a lot. I don't want to take up too much. It's supposed to be snappy, Mordy.

Elizabeth said, "We rigorously define high quality, low quality. We give examples, and this document is truly the foundation of how third party evaluators then go and evaluate results for quality, meaning the Search Quality Rater guidelines." Elizabeth wanted to say that there's no one size fits all for quality, "It's actually a fairly nuanced thing." Completely agree with that. Quality is incredibly nuanced. She offers an example of how that might be, why that might be, and then she says, "So we've laid it out in our Search Quality Rater guidelines. We take into account the quality of the main content, things like accuracy for informational content, talent and skill. We look at things like page experience. Can people find the main content easily?"

So she says, "So take a look. It's all there. I said this before, I'll say it again. The Quality Rater guidelines should give you a directional look at how Google is thinking about quality. What is actually in the algorithm or not, different question, but it will give you a look inside the brain or the mind of Google." Continuing with Danny Goodwin covering Google's statements, this one is Danny covering Liz Reed and an all hands quote, or not quote, titled the article, Head of Google Search: AI mistakes won't prevent progress. Basically, Google had an all hands saying, "Hey, look, there's going to be problems. We're going to tackle them. That shouldn't mean we don't move forward with the AI. I don't know what you want to call the AI world on the SERP and so forth, yada, yada, yada."

I mean, Google kind of has to say that. Obviously I think they do mean that, but they also kind of have to get that message out there. I think it's a very important message for them and then how their whole wider ecosystem works. That's all I'm going to say about that. Read into that what you want to. One thing that I took away was a quote where she said, "We don't just have to understand the quality of the site or the page. We have to understand each passage of a page." So in the AI overview, you have different links to different subsections of the AI overview. For example, one I always go back to was, how to prevent kidney stones, and in there is a section about diet. Google might have to understand, hey, wait a second, we're going to link out to that page there. We have to understand that this page has a section about diet, and that section about diet and kidney stones is really good, and that's the one we're going to link to when we cover that subtopic.

It is an interesting conversation, and I think maybe we should have a little bit more of a conversation about, of how Google is understanding the subsections of pages. Anyway, that is again, not so snappy this week, Mordy. Got to do a better job. I talk fast. I try to talk fast. Maybe that's not a good thing, but I try to make it snappy by talking faster and it's not working. There's just so much news going on. Anyway, this is the not so snappy news. Yeah, so that was ever so snappy, as usual.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, newsy news. There's been so much news. The news has been really tricky. Or the news has been really interesting because there's been a lot of really big things like the updates and people starting new search engines and stuff like that. And then there's been a lot of little, tiny, teeny tiny-

Mordy Oberstein:

If you like the teeny tiny things and the big thing, as always make sure to check out It's New over at Wix SEO Hub, and RustyBrick's YouTube channel. Speaking of news people, our follow of the week are two news people. Hey, we're going full on SEJ this week as our follow of the week this week is Angie Nikoleychuk, and Heather Campbell, both from SEJ.

Crystal Carter:

Angie and Heather are so, so, so, so super nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

They are the nicest team, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

They're so nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Behind the scenes?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

So nice, so easy to work with. Love working with SEJ people.

Crystal Carter:

They're super nice and I think it's-

Mordy Oberstein:

Great team.

Crystal Carter:

... one of those things like, sometimes folks are popular or whatever or have a big following and you sort of wonder why. And then you meet them and you're like, "Oh, this is why. Because y'all do really good stuff."

Mordy Oberstein:

And we had Angie on for one of our live SEO audit. Angie's great. She'll tell me she'll listen to the Edge of the News Podcast, which I do their news every week, and like, "Yeah, I really disagree with what you said there." I love that. I love that. That's great.

Crystal Carter:

No, it's good. She's got such great insight and she brings a lot of her CRO knowledge into the stuff that she does, and she was great on the site audit. We did a site audit on quick wins, and definitely worth having a look at. I think that's evergreen content, so go and check that out as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And definitely also check out Heather Campbell, who's been fabulous on the things we're working on with her as well. Heather is the Director of Marketing at Search Engine Journal and does a lot of their write-ups also for them, so give her a big follow. We'll link to their social media profiles in the show notes. And hope you found this episode helpful.

Crystal Carter:

I did. I got lots of helpful tips.

Mordy Oberstein:

At the end of the day, just write good content. That's all. Just do it.

Crystal Carter:

Write good content, and may the algorithm be forever in your favor.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, so I definitely let the algorithm be in your favor, and then do us a favor and tune in for our next episode. So that means thanks 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 the unsung heroes of SEO; Those who maintain rank. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over on wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning up 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.