'Tis the season for 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 putting out some groovy new insights on what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the festive, the fabulously festive, the incredibly festive, the oh, so festive head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Welcome and hello to all you SEO, oh, oh people.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's Festivus for the rest of us.

Crystal Carter:

Festivus, indeed, all of the things. I wish you all of the holiday loveliness, and I hope you eat too much food because that's...

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great wish.

Crystal Carter:

... the whole point of the whole thing. Like Viva la Carbs, enjoy all of the potatoes and bread and cake and various other carbohydrates.

Mordy Oberstein:

Whatever holiday you're celebrating, we want you to eat too much.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed, indeed, indeed. Like 'tis the season for stuffing your face.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just not the season for hopping on a scale.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, me. Honestly, honestly, they will tell all your business. They'll just be like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'm feeling good about myself. And then the scale's like, nah, nah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not Scalability Season, that little SEO.

Okay, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter search slide over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tags generator to add 2024 to all of your title tags.

Actually, don't do that. That was a joke.

Crystal Carter:

Don't do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't do that. But if you do want to update your title tags for the holiday season in a real way, and if you're running specific campaigns and want to create new pages and create title tags for those new pages and meta descriptions, you can use our AI meta tags generator to do it, which is why today we're talking about SEO for the holiday season as we ho, ho, ho, all the way to the top of the serp while we look at keyword research for seasonal topics, updating content for your campaigns and when to get started with holiday season SEO.

Spoiler alert, by the time you're listening to this podcast, it's too late. But anyway, Ari Murray of Sharma Brands weighs in on how to get creative with the holiday season campaigns. Plus, we talked about how to position your brand during the holiday season, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

So hop on the sleigh as we take flight to light up the holiday season or holiday season SEO brighter than your annoying neighbor who goes way too far with their holiday season decor on episode number 66 of the SERP's Up Podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic intro as ever, as ever, as ever.

Okay, so seasonality. Seasonality, what are we talking about? Seasonality is essentially like when you see regular increases or decreases in organic traffic in line with annual or occasional events. And so the seasonal traffic's patterns can mean that you see traffic increased loads on particular blogs or across your whole website depending on what you're doing.

I've worked with a few seasonal businesses and it can be very much night and day in terms of traffic. So for instance, I worked with an amusement park client and in the wintertime, they were based in a place where they had Halloween, they had a Christmas sort of thing, and then pretty much in Q1 or January to March, it was pretty quiet, very, very, very quiet, and then things would start ramping up in the summer.

And it's really important to think about that when you're working with a business and to understand your traffic trends because this can affect lots of things. This can affect how you do your reporting. This can affect when you invest your time, when you start asking people for questions.

So for instance, with a seasonal business where they're peaking in summer or they're peaking in other times of year, that's not the time to ask them to review a bunch of blog posts. That's not the time to ask them to sort of, let's do a content refresh of everything. That's the time for you to carry out stuff that you can do without them being involved, that you can do on your own, and you can let them know that it's done and they can be happy with that.

But I think also there's a couple of other things to think about. A seasonality, there's weekly cadence. So B2B businesses, for instance, will see a lot of their traffic Monday to Friday. I've worked with retail clients and they often see a spike over the weekend, for instance. So they start seeing their spikes coming in on the sort of Friday, and then they see people increasing their shopping over to Saturday and Sunday.

So that's really important to think about. And again, that can affect when you do your reporting. If you're reporting everything on Monday, say, and let's say that the sales from Saturday or Sunday haven't actually come in yet, then that's not a good time to do your reporting. You might want to do your reporting later in the week. You might want to do your reporting on a Wednesday so that they can make any actions on Thursday so that they can be ready for Friday, for instance.

Then there's quarterly trends. So for instance, some traffic patterns don't follow a specific month. So things like Easter or Passover, Chinese New Year, school vacation, Diwali, things like that, they change from year to year. So these are all dates that will change over year to year. So for instance, for things like that, you'll need to think about maybe let's compare the quarter to the quarter, not necessarily the month, year-on-year, for instance. So that's something to think about as well.

And then you have annual spikes that happen, which are your typical seasonality. And I think the other thing that I find about this is that with B2B businesses, for instance, people tend to think that B2B businesses don't have seasonality, that this is all B2C, with hotels, with summer stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not true.

Crystal Carter:

It's not true.

So for instance, divorce lawyers, and I didn't know this until I was working with a lawyer client, but they will see a peak following school vacations and public holidays. So after big seasonal, end of the year, for instance. So there's a lot of people stop at the end of the year, there's often a big spike in divorces after that, and it's sad but true.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

I think also you see in January, for instance, Wix often sees a surge in people wanting to build websites. Maybe people thought, you know what, this year I'm going to start that new thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll give you a quarter's ending or the financial year ending. My uncle does title closings, and at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's a huge spike and everyone wants to get it, right? So it's across the board.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

It impacts everybody and everything in a way. You cannot escape seasonality.

Crystal Carter:

No, you can't. So it's really important to understand the business and to chat to them about that because you might not realize those things until you actually speak to the team. For instance, if you're working in the public sector, one phenomena that I've seen is that towards the end of the financial year, there's some situations where in the public sector, if you don't spend your budget, you don't get the budget for the next year.

Mordy Oberstein:

And governments sometimes have different financial years or points of the year than the average quarter. I think their financial year might start in September or something like that.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

So for instance, I worked with the university before, in the university, their financial year ended in the summer time, for instance, because that had a thing.

So that's important to think about, and that will impact all of your SEO activity, because when the season-

Mordy Oberstein:

Money always does.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

So when peak season hits, you should already be live with whatever you need. You should be preparing in the off season, just like if you were on a sports team, you prepare on the off season, you prepare all your content, you get everything ready so that when peak season hits, you're already ranking and maybe you're ranking 20, right? Maybe you updated the content and it's just hanging around at number 20.

But by the time people are sort of getting into search, Google seeing your content, they're coming back to your content, they're seeing that you're getting some activity on your content, and then you will move up the ranks very quickly. I've seen this happen. I've done this before and it works really, really well.

So you want to be thinking about how you can manage that. But in order to do that, you need to understand your data and you need to understand the seasonality of your business.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let's get started again with the SEO stuff. I think the natural place you want to start is keywords.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I'll give you a stupid example. Like outdoor ceiling fans, probably not a big thing in the winter time, by the way, unless your market is in Arizona, which because it's summertime all the time. Right?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, so those are the things you need to think about. Right?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

You may be dealing with a seasonal product, but your market is not seasonal, or you have an international market and it's always summer somewhere.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Precisely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

So things like Google trends come into play as opposed to looking at additional keyword tool, for example.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also, I think that when we think about the keywords, it's also important to understand that some of those keywords can give you viral seasonality. So I asked a few people on Women in Tech SEO about this, and I had some folks come back to me, and essentially what you get is you sometimes get a situation, and I've seen this before as well, where you basically have something that...

So I was working with a client and they were a financial client, and they had this particular account that they talked about, this particular financial account or whatever, and every time there was a new regulation around that, or every time it was updated, if you think about mortgage rates, for instance, that's something that we'll say, oh, mortgage rates are up. So every time that hit the news, they would see a big spike on this particular article. They didn't have to update it all the time, but they would see a big spike on that particular article.

If you were looking at that particular thing and you wanted to see whether or not that had a good impact on your SEO, you wouldn't want to necessarily compare it to last month necessarily. I mean, last month you say, oh, this month we did it well, last month we did it not so well. But if you wanted to look at it, you'd want to look at the pattern of how much-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, the pattern's more important than anything else.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

So you want to see the last time this spiked, we got this much traffic, and this time it spiked, we got that much traffic. And then you want to look and you want to compare the things there.

So I think that people think about seasonality literally as winter or summer or things like that, but there are nuances, and the keywords can make a really big difference.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what I'm trying to say before. There is no such a thing as escaping seasonality. If you're in the financial world, your season is whenever the Fed makes an update. That's your season.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

It's definitely going to go up and down, and you need to understand that.

Also, if you're working with different teams, you need to understand the different seasonality of the different parts of the team. So for instance, if you're working with a law firm, the divorce lawyer folks are going to be busy in January. The people who are working with financial stuff or the people who do, like tax attorneys, et cetera, they're going to be busy at the end of the year. And you need to think about, you can need to stagger your updates. You need to stagger your part of your partnership.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's my point where I mentioned the ceiling fans. So imagine no one just sells outdoor... Maybe somebody does, I don't know. Maybe someone sells outdoor ceiling fans.

Crystal Carter:

Outdoorceilingfans.com.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's your whole bit, outdoorceilingfans.com.

But usually something like Home Depot. If you're on the Home Depot team or something like the Home Depot team, your job is to understand seasonality. Your job is to understand where on the website seasonality will impact it, because hammers might not be impacted by winter or summertime. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe people will do more home repairs in the summertime. Again, I'm not an expert, especially not home repairs. But all things being equal, hammers would seemingly be something that's pretty consistent across the board. But outdoor ceiling fans, you need to identify where... And you have also need to qualify like what's the proportion of sales and traffic that come from hammers versus what's the proportion of sale and traffic that come from outdoor ceiling fans?

And when you see a decline, you're like, oh, no, there's a decline. No, because if you have an over proportionate amount of sales and traffic and performance that come from outdoor ceiling fans relative to hammers, that's actually logical and probably healthy.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Right.

And if you want to keep things rolling in a business like that, for instance, then you figure out which ones are the seasonal things that are going to flow through. And this is where you also need to coordinate your SEO with your sales teams, for instance. So if you have a shop like say Home Depot or something where they actually have a physical venue, they will know what things they're going to be displaying over the course of the year.

For instance, it's autumn, right now. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. It is flu season, right? I have a little bit of a cold right now. Okay so-

Mordy Oberstein:

You feel clumped?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit clumped.

So I was at a shop today and in their display they had sunscreen. And I was like, why y'all got sunscreen out? There's no need for sunscreen. And then they had some of the cold and flu things. Like that's what people are looking for. People are looking for cold and flu. People are not looking for sunscreen right now in the Northern Hemisphere particularly.

And so I think it's important to think about that so that your online stuff can reflect what's going on right now in store and in the zeitgeist and in what people are talking about because that is what's front of mind.

Mordy Oberstein:

The other thing I wanted to talk about is content. Because inevitably, you're going to update, create content, do something with content around the holiday season. For example, is a good one, we're talking about holiday season SEO or any sort of seasonality. But let's just sit with holiday season, for example, because it is such a clear case. You're going to update content inevitably. You're going to have different sales and specials and whatever. And I find a big mistake that SEOs make is in not realizing that you can't just change content at one point. It has to go all the way through.

So let's just say for argument's sake, and I'm not advocating you do this, you update your title tag to say holiday season. So our outdoor ceiling fans for the holiday season, because what I want for Christmas is an outdoor ceiling fan, because I live in Arizona. I don't actually live in Arizona. I don't even celebrate Christmas. So whatever.

But let's just say that was the case and you updated the title tag there, but when you get to the actual page, nothing changed. So make sure that all along the way, all of the pain points, all the touch points actually align to what you're doing on the SEO side, because inevitably, what's going to happen is you'll get the click, because oh, it's a holiday season, ceiling fan.

Grandma wants a holiday season... She wants a festive outdoor ceiling fan.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I will click on this. And then you get to the page and it's your regular commercial outdoor ceiling fan. Where's the festivity in this? And folks will be like, hey, you got me the traffic, thank you, but nothing's actually converting, what's going on? And that's because you didn't think about the full touch point.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

So there are tons of seasonal cues that you can do. So, again, you can think about your title tag. I've done this before. We had a shop and they generally had like, oh, buy sustainable clothing, candles and more, was in their title tag or whatever. And I was like, well, we can change that to gifts, because that's what people are looking for. So we'll just change it. So it says, gifts, and yeah, we saw a big impact for that. So that's a title tag that you can update.

Also, your OG tags. I'll tell you what, Starbucks is updating everything in store and all of their online stuff to pumpkin spice as soon as a leaf turns yellow, okay? As soon as-

Mordy Oberstein:

They have a scout. They have someone looking at leaves, like, do you see a change of yellow?

I do. I do. I see yellow.

Crystal Carter:

I do.

Go. Go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Update, go, pumpkin spice.

Crystal Carter:

Everything's pumpkin spice. Go, go, go.

Mordy Oberstein:

They have one button and then it changes everything to pumpkin spice.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

So they know this. And basically, this is really important because when people are sharing, when people are saying, oh, hey, I saw this thing. I really think that grandma's going to love it, or whatever. It's got the little festive thing, that's going to give people signals without them even reading anything, without them even clicking through, you know that they're ready, et cetera, et cetera.

So your OG image is super, super easy to change. Changing the banner images on your website, updating those images so that they're more festive can make a really big difference. And also you want to think about updating your links and so updating comments and also consolidating content.

So for instance, I had a client and they had a seasonal thing and they did every year, and I see this all the time, and something I've seen work for multiple clients is that there's an awareness day or there's a holiday or there's whatever. And every year, they go, Groundhog Day, 2021. Groundhog Day, 2022. Groundhog Day, whatever, whatever.

Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, make a page. If you're doing it every year. If you are an Owl Sanctuary, and every year there's National Owl Day. I have no idea if there's National Owl Day or who celebrates it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I see what you did there.

Crystal Carter:

If there is a National Owl Day, for instance, and you're an Owl Sanctuary, and every year you do something for a National Owl day, you can have one page that on your website that's National Owl Day. And you can update that with National Owl Day. You can put the content, the content can be about 2024, 2025, whatever it may be. But you can update that. And as soon as the event finishes, you can say, National Owl Day 2025 is going to be on this day.

And then if anybody's looking for that over the course of the year, if you have any other owl enthusiasts who are looking for that, they'll be able to find that on your website, and you'll be able to keep that link warm in the off season before things come back. So then when it is time to go full steam ahead with whatever it is, then you can add your links from there. But treat it as a pillar page.

And so before National Owl Day or Groundhog Day, or whatever it is, start consolidating your links. Go through any content that you have that's older or that maybe is from years ago. Consolidate that content into something that makes sense. Get rid of old content that you don't need. Update the links across there so that Google, so that users are focused on the content that's happening right now. Because if it is that you have this fantastic, wonderful day planned for this year, and the page from two years ago is ranking, that's not going to help you. That's going to confuse users, and that's going to confuse Google. So make sure that you go through and you update all your links, and you update all of the things that are going on and all of the content, and consolidate any content where you can.

Mordy Oberstein:

And with the holiday season, it's important not just to go through and make sure you've updated everything, everything gets checked off, and you have all your ducks in a row or owls in a row, just to keep with that. I don't know if owls go in a row, but they...

Crystal Carter:

You know in England they say twit-twoo.

Mordy Oberstein:

In England, what say?

Crystal Carter:

Owls say twit-twoo.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, the English people talking or mimicking an owl goes...

Crystal Carter:

They say, twit-twoo.

Mordy Oberstein:

... an owl goes hoot, hoot.

Crystal Carter:

No, no, they go, twit-twoo.

Mordy Oberstein:

I will die in this hill.

But it's not as important to have all your ducks or owls in a row, as I was saying, it's important to get creative with your holiday content campaigns and even your holiday SEO.

To help us talk about getting creative, we have Ari Murray, who's the chief growth officer over at Sharma Brands, and who runs the Go-to-Millions newsletter to talk about how to get creative with your holiday season campaigns.

Ari Murray:

So every holiday I think about first how I shop, and how I shop is how everyone shops, which is I go to Google and I search my heart out. I think that we always forget that when you're running any sort of campaign on paid social or even on organic social, when you're running on paid social and you're thinking about Google and you're thinking about Meta and you're thinking about LinkedIn or wherever you're running your campaign, when I'm thinking about paid social, I always first think to Meta because that's where I spend most of my time, but I know that if I'm running an Instagram ad that my audience is being interrupted at what they do. We have to show them a flashy video, and we need them to stop and really understand and click, and we need their thumb stop to be there.

But for search, it's so different. And for me, I think about when I shop, I am searching for something. And so I'm really quick to look for terms that I wouldn't use to describe the brand if I was making an ad for that brand.

So let's pretend I'm working on a really expensive glassware company. If I was this glassware company, I would have a lot of rules. I would have, we don't use the word luxury, we don't use the word elegant. We don't even use the word necessarily holiday or gifting. We want to speak of ourselves as something that can be for every day and not for this temporary season. So for search and for SEO, we would write a listicle and an advertorial that lives as long form content on the site. And the sole purpose is for you to search extensive gifts for the woman who has it all, or fancy glassware for mother-in-law, or what to get the person who has everything.

And those are the terms, and those are the words that I would incorporate into my long form content. But then when they take the click and once they find us and they've found us, then it's really about making sure that they actually get to read what we said we were going to give them, which is a really cheeky article that has a lot of content and shoppable links, but also just a deep understanding of they're here to shop and they're here searching for something for this person. And that's what we're writing.

So my whole technique here is I don't want you as a brand to shy away from a word that you don't feel is brand safe. Just because it's not on brand doesn't make it off brand. And for SEO and for SEM, it's always about what can we do to really meet our customer where they are? And they're trying to shop and discern through all of the things that Google and search can feed them. And I don't want them to not find us because we don't want to call ourselves luxury, or we don't want to call ourselves elegant, or we don't want to call ourselves designer. That's what people are looking for if they're looking for this brand, because their price range. And so maybe not on an Instagram ad would this be comfortable, but for search, it's something we're willing to bend on.

So for holiday campaigns, I guess my single tip is to be creative, you have to break the brand guidelines so long as you're not off brand.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Ari. Really love that point at the end too for a second. But just make sure you give Ari a follow over @arihappywick, That's A-R-I-H-A-P-P-Y-W-I-C-K over on X, formerly known as Twitter, or I like to call it, Twitter, still known as Twitter, and not X. A link to their profile in the show notes.

I just want to say amen to that. By the way, that whole, not the Twitter thing, what she was saying, just talk to the audience.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just talk to the audience. And by the way, it is a good point because sometimes you can do things that in the pages that you find through search, because they are like two or three clicks deep that you may not want to say on your homepage or use the brand terms on your homepage. But I've done this a gazillion times. We're like, hey, you know what, it's three clicks deep. No one other than people finding us on search or maybe through social media, depending on how you want to run your campaigns, aren't going to find this.

So it's okay to be a little bit more flexible and it just talk to them the way your audience wants to be talked to, not the way, like, oh, I'm going to position my brand this way. That's great. But if nobody's looking for that and nobody wants that and no one's talking about that product in that way...

Crystal Carter:

They're not going to find it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

I don't want to call our car an SUV. I want to call it a four by four, then does anybody still call them four by fours anymore, like is the '90s?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. But if you find that people aren't calling it that anymore, then you have to change it because people won't know what you're talking about.

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's not on brand, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Well, maybe your brand should have to think about-

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what's on brand? Making money, that's what's on brand.

Crystal Carter:

Your brand needs to think about what it is. So for instance, if we were in England and I said, oh yeah, the owl goes hoo-hoo or toot-toot or hoot-hoot, people would be like, what are you talking about?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not a good example. We go for accuracy.

Crystal Carter:

What are you talking about?

Mordy Oberstein:

And there has to be a line somewhere, Crystal. You can't just spread lies and say owls say things they don't say.

Crystal Carter:

Look, look, look.

They call it coriander in England, for instance, rather than cilantro. But if I started talking about coriander all over the place, people would be like, I don't know what you mean. If I was in, I don't know, Poughkeepsie or something, and I was like, who wants some coriander? Nobody would say anything, because nobody knows what we're talking about.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like calling an eggplant, an eggplant in England. What do they call it?

Crystal Carter:

Aubergine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, say that in Jersey, see what happens.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they would be like, you call me what?

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you just say to me? Say that to my face.

Crystal Carter:

With a nice Parmesan.

Mordy Oberstein:

So it's such a basic point, but it's something that I think sometimes brands... She's right. Sometimes brands can get a little caught up into that's not our brand language, which is a little bit snobbish, I'll say.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

But I think with content, you can be clever with that. I think you can be creative. Again, if you put something on, it doesn't have to be the homepage. You don't have to hit people over the head with it as soon as they get to website.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, don't do it on the homepage. Yeah. Like fine. Do your thing on the homepage, fine.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

But you could have a blog that addresses that and links off to other comments and other content that is more on brand or whatever, and you can say, hey, this isn't what we normally do, but we found that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Just be honest. I think that's the other thing is that consumers are so much more sophisticated these days because a lot of consumers are also content creators as well. So it's most important to think about that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, a hundred percent.

And with that, so I think, and well, Ari said, and we were talking before about creating content on the SEO side itself, we keep coming back to a point of your brand and how it uses content to relate to the audience. So with all of this talk about SEO strategies and a wider  a brand strategy and in getting creative, Chris and I thought, let's take a deep look at what it means for your brand to actually speak to their audience during the holiday season. So here is a deep thought about your brand talking to your actual consumers during the holiday season, so a Deep Thought with Crystal and me, Mordy.

So okay. I see a lot of on social media or top five ways to align your brand to the holiday season or whatever, whatever, and it talks about product all the time. Make sure your product... Whatever it is, it's very... When we talk about seasonality, I find, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's my personal bias, but I find we get very product-focused. But I want to talk about that your brand and the messaging and the positioning and the tone it takes should also adjust to this season.

So I'll say, for example... And by the way, the product side, it's super easy to see. During the summer, IPA sales go up a ton because everyone wants an IPA during... It's refreshing. It's not refreshing in the middle of the winter. It's just like weird. I would drink an IPA in-

Crystal Carter:

You want a stout in the middle of the-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, you feel your beer. In the summer, you're fun, you have an IPA. In the wintertime, it's time for a Guinness, which is a meal, it's not even a drink.

But it's the same thing with the way you speak. So for example, let's just say for argument's sake, your audience are cutthroat business people. So you're going to speak to them in a cutthroat business kind of way. Let's get right to the bottom line. But during the holiday season, even your most cutthroat executives, I would hope their heart is warm, just a tinge.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it has to do with value. I think it has to do with the value of something and how you articulate value. Google is trying to deliver customer value. So people search for something and then they're trying to give them a valuable search result that will either get them to the good information or help them to achieve a goal or something to that effect. And all of the things on your website should be helping to point people to the value of it.

Now, the value of something will change depending on seasonality, but also depending on how you speak to them. So for instance, if you had, I think there's a lot of these exciting nightlights for kids, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids have a dinosaur one.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Okay, and some of them do other things. For the child, the value for that is like, oh, it's shaped like a dinosaur. Oh, it'll sing you a song. For the parent, the value of that is that it might get your kid to actually go to sleep on time. And when you're talking to those two different audiences, it's still the same product, but you need to make sure that you're illustrating the value to them in a way that it resonates with them.

Mordy Oberstein:

So what I'm saying is sometimes that same person, sometimes they're the kid and sometimes they're the parent.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sometimes even as a parent, I want a dinosaur nightlight. No, but I'm saying you change throughout the year. It's summertime, I don't want to go like, don't bog me down with business details. It's summertime, I want to have fun. It should be a little fun. I'm not saying you got to go crazy, but speak to your audience where they're at. If it's the holiday season time, it's not like blow the competition out of the water time. That's not the vibe.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So just make sure that you're adjusting. Just like you would adjust your product, make sure you're adjusting your brand terminology, your brand tone, the way your brand is positioning itself. It's not time to talk about how competitive and great... It might be time to show like, hey, we're donating to a charity, which you should do for a legit reason, not just because I want to get more customers. But those are the kind of things that you should be doing to reach people where they're at, not where you think they're at.

Crystal Carter:

Read the room, people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Read the room.

Crystal Carter:

Read the room.

Mordy Oberstein:

Read the room. But we do it all the time. I'm not saying anything complicated, but we do it all the time with product. We read the room with a product. We change the title tag and say, holiday season. We add, I don't know, a peppermint cane to the image of the cell phone.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because just like there's a pumpkin spice button, there's also a peppermint cane button that you push. It's the leaves have turned brown, it's peppermint cane time.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It's great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hit the button.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also your customers will be at different points in their life as well. So I think it's important to think about that.

So for instance, I work with a library, Libraries Unlimited, shout out to them. England's been having what they call a cost of living crisis, for instance. And there's been a lot of trouble with people having warm spaces and things. So the library's library all the time. But what they started doing was they were saying, hey, just in case you need a warm place to hang out, we are also that as well. Like, hey, there customer. If you're having trouble with any of that sort of stuff, we can help. Did you know that we also offer this thing that we can help you with?

And it's the same customers. They're talking to the same customer, and they have the same offering that they always did. It was always a nice, warm, cozy place to be in the library. But just reminding people that we also have this, that is also a value to you at this particular time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, this particular time. There's seasonality in the product. There's seasonality in the brand, positioning, language, marketing, all of it needs to change to match seasonality.

You know what never changes though?

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

The SEO news. Not that the news hasn't changed, but who covers it and what he does, and how he does it does not change. He's as constant as the North Star, then pretty sure is not the idiom, but it doesn't matter. He is Barry Schwartz, and he is this week's Snappy SEO News.

Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. It's in the stars this week as Google announced Gemini. Inserts Oracle sounds. For Christie Hines at Search Engine Journal, Google introduces Gemini and updates Bard with Gemini Pro.

So a few things to note. Gemini is a competitor of GPT-4, and always at the Chat and can't help myself of GPT-4, and according to studies, seemingly performs better perform than GPT-4. Gemini aims at making multimodal connections. That's fancy talk for saying it can understand audio, video and text inputs and all other sorts of inputs in combination. Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro. There are different levels of Gemini. I'm making the quotation marks of when I say levels with my hands, you can't see that. I just realize, but I'm making quotation marks for levels of Gemini. And Gemini Pro is what is now powering Bard.

And, this is where I think it's super interesting, it can also create custom UX to address user questions. So basically, let's say you're searching for, tell me a good recipe for cornbread. It'll adjust the layout and format to help you better explore that type of query as opposed to, let's say, you search for who are the top five best baseball players ever. It might produce a different kind of format for that.

I think something like this allows for what I like to call content portals where you can dive down or dive deep down a rabbit hole of a particular subset of topics in a way that kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, come out of that rabbit hole and then explore something else, which is helped by the fact that anything on the screen that Gemini shows you, you can sort of click on and say, okay, let me know about this a little bit more.

So you can sort of really dive down the rabbit hole. The way the UX is set up, I think it's super interesting, and I think something like that would be fascinating on the SERP. I know everyone will kind of freak out about that, but I do think it's fascinating.

Okay, back to Barry. And this one is nuts. From Search Engine Roundtable report, Google local rankings now look if a business is open or closed, i.e business hours. This came from a study done by Joy Hawkins at the great Sterling Sky agency in Toronto. And what they basically saw was that when a business is closed, it kind of gets pulled out of the local packs. Let's say I'm searching for, I don't know, a pizza near me, and there are a bunch of listings that are now closed and some that are open. The ones that are open will appear. The ones that are closed will not appear. If later in the day, some close and I search forward again, and now there's different ones that are now open, I'll get the ones that are now open in the local pack and not the ones that are closed. Barry himself tested it out for a bunch of different types of queries and pretty much saw the same thing.

I am not a big fan of this, to be honest with you. I think, for example, I might be searching for... Let's break it down. If I'm searching for pizza near me, okay, probably I want the restaurant that's open right now. If I'm searching for something like, I don't know, lawyer near me, if it's 12 o'clock at night, I'm not looking to call a lawyer. I'm probably looking just to do some research and maybe call them tomorrow. So I don't think this, as a ranking, factor, quote, unquote, "really" meets user needs in the way that it's supposed to.

Anyway. And lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, and from, again, from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, November 2023 reviews update completes after 29 days. That is a long rollout. Check your rankings. It's a reviews update. It's not limited anymore to just products. So check your rankings out. Going to be hard to pull data on this at the aggregate level because you had an overlap between the November 2023 core update and the reviews update. I'm not really sure how you separate that out. I'm actually in conversation with December team to see, maybe somehow we could, but I don't know.

And with that ambiguity, this is this week's version of the Snappy News.

I want to say something. So we record the main part of the podcast before we actually record the news, but we are so confident that we're going to cover at least one article from Barry that I am confident saying your news from this week is from Barry.

Hope you had a nice holiday, Barry. Hope you're having a nice holiday, Barry, and we appreciate you and thank you and love you. Now you feel awkward, Barry.

You know what's not awkward? Following people on social media? That's never awkward. I think it's always a good thing.

Crystal Carter:

No, it's never... It's always-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, you're like, yeah, follow?

Crystal Carter:

Sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not awkward. That's a good thing.

This week's follow of the week is none other than the founder and CEO of Rise at Seven, a fabulous agency based out of the UK and I think now globally around the world, if I'm not-

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The US as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay, there we go.

And it is one of the only Carrie Rose who you can follow over on Twitter. I'll not call it X. @CarrieRosePR. At C-A-R-R-I-R-O-S-E-P-R. Link in the show notes. But give her a great follow. She's fabulous.

Crystal Carter:

She's fantastic. Do follow her. She's got some great case studies. She's great for this particular episode. She did something with Game called The Christmas Tinner or something like that. And essentially it was a Christmas dinner in a can, and they did a fantastic-

I know. Exactly. Your face.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm making a face that sounds like Spam.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, you're making a face.

No. So it was a fantastic, incredible campaign. They got some really good traction for it. And when we were thinking about seasonality, that was the first campaign that came to my mind. At Rise at Seven, they do a lot of creative campaigns that are connected with SEO. That's really sort of their bread and butter. That's a great example of it.

They also had one with dog sweaters as well, where you could wear a matching sweater with your dog, which is another campaign that they did that went really well, which is kind of seasonal as well, because sweaters are cozy and stuff.

But yeah, Carrie and the team do some great work. Follow her. She also shares a lot of digital PR examples.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, ton of stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Which are great, particularly for seasonal ideas.

Mordy Oberstein:

So give her a follow. Again, it's @CarrieRosePR. That's Carrie with a C on Twitter, whatever, X, link in the show notes.

And well, by the way, bread and butter, that's an underrated meal. Think of meal and talking like her bread and butter.

Crystal Carter:

I love bread. We talked about carbs. We talked about carbs. When I came to visit you, I was like, bring me carbs.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah. And I did.

Crystal Carter:

You did and I was like, yeah...

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I brought you carbs.

Crystal Carter:

... this is a good colleague. I was like, you see, you see.

Mordy Oberstein:

But you ever go to a restaurant and they don't do it where I live now, but they give the basket bread with the little like, the restaurant butters. And the  pumpernickel!

Crystal Carter:

But when they're warm. When they're warm, that's great. I mean, Olive Garden made their entire, the whole thing about Olive Garden is bread.

Mordy Oberstein:

Here's some bread.

Crystal Carter:

Right? They're just like, I ate the bread.

Also, Red Lobster have very good cheese rolls as well. Those are good as well.

But yeah, I love carbs. I love bread.

Mordy Oberstein:

Best part, okay. I have my cheat days on my diet. I'm like, carbs. I don't want to go like the fanciest... I want carbs.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, pumpernickel, pretzels. I love their pretzels.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hot pretzels, bagels.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, good. With good mustard. You got to have the good mustard with the pretzel. People put other stuff on it, but I'm like, nah, it's about the mustard.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it can't be like, it's more than sitting in the case. You go buy a hot pretzel for weeks on end, that's all crusty. That's not good.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not what you want.

What you do want though, is check us out next week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Sorry you're going to miss us. Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to hand off your SEO work to clients.

Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning up at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn.

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