Getting with the programmatic SEO program

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 around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of Brand SEO at Wix. Joined by Better Head SEO Communications. The person who knows all about all of the things most of the time. Because if I say all of the time, I'll get a snarky look. Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

There's no snarky looks. It's only happy looks.

Mordy Oberstein:

I say, you know all of the things, but everything. Like you're like, oh no, that's a lot of pressure Mordy. I don't like that. So...

Crystal Carter:

That's true. They say a man who knows something, knows that he knows nothing at all, or at least that's what Erica Badu said that one time. She's very wise.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, she's wise. I think Socrates said like, the only difference between me and you is that I know what I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

There you go. There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you're a narcissistic, self-centered... I think that was the implication, what he was saying.

Crystal Carter:

Erica Badu and Socrates obviously like two grateful...

Mordy Oberstein:

He's a pod.

Crystal Carter:

Designs entirely.

Mordy Oberstein:

This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can combine the power of Python and Wix's full stack dev tool Velo to build out programmatic dynamic content for yourself. Behold the full-on nerdiness and power of Wix. And if you don't believe you can do it, Colt Sliva  over on Glassdoor did in his article all about just that because he literally did just that. We'll link to it in the show notes because today, guess what we're talking about? Programmatic SEO.

That's right. We're talking about programmatic SEO as in what the heck is programmatic SEO? Is programmatic SEO a zero-sum game? Can everyone get with the program? What works, what doesn't work, and what to be wary of when doing programmatic SEO.

And all-time SEO, all star and knowledge bomb dropper, Paul Andre De Vera will join us, share his tips on keeping things personal when working programmatically, and we'll dive into a special tool around programmatic SEO and beyond. As I already mentioned, Wix is Velo, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO News and who should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So program, get your program here as episode number 39 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you get with the program, the programmatic SEO program that is.

I went full on, I'm a vendor at a baseball stadium.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I mean, they're very good at their jobs. I do love that when they, the guy's got the train. They-

Mordy Oberstein:

Programs!

Crystal Carter:

Who wants? I'm like, yeah-

Mordy Oberstein:

Hear hear! At Bryant, that's like, we had our stand-up Brighten SEO. We were giving out beer. I'm like, this is a perfect time to be a baseball stadium and a beer here. They don't do that anymore. You have to go to the stands to get your, that was half the fun.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Guy walking around yelling, hotdog! And then you have to pass it through the row to the person who actually ordered the hotdog. So everyone's hands all over your hotdog.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's all very communal.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Very authentic. Sometimes you buy a thing just because of the experience. I used to go to green grocers and he just had platitudes for everything. I'd be like, oh, can I buy some grapes? He's like, all right, sweetheart, can I have some oranges? All right treacle. And what about some satsumas or something's like, oh, all right my pet. And I just kept buying things just to see if he ran out of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice, nice.

Crystal Carter:

He never did. I don't know how, but yeah, I found it quite amusing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is an amazing set. It's almost like Trader Joe's. When you go to Trader Joe's, they have a whole experience, ringing the bell, or wearing the pirate shirt. You go just for that.

Crystal Carter:

My Trader Joe's experience has never been like that. I've never worn a pirate shirt.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I don't wear the pirate shirt, but they're wearing pirate shirts and stuff and Hawaiian shirts and pirate patches and all... It's all thematic at Trader Joe's.

Crystal Carter:

Thematic programmatic. What are we talking about today?

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so looking to create hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of pages of content that follow the same template or format? Then programmatic SEO might for you. It also might not be for you, but we'll get to that in due course. So programmatic SEO, if I had to define it while standing on one foot, should I stand on, I will stand on one foot. I'm sitting down. I don't know how to do that. It's when you pull data or content in from a database into a content template, and then by natural result you have a heap of pages for your website.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

While some would argue that e-com, Kevin Indig, isn't a case for programmatic SEO, I would perhaps argue and say that it is a really easy case to point to about using programmatic SEO wisely. You pull things in like the product name, the description, which you can use for your title tag and meta description respectively as well, and all the naming from the inventory database. And you plug that in with your usual shipping and return policies you have on every page. And you basically have spun up programmatic content for who knows how many number of product pages without actually typing a single word.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's programmatic. I feel like some will disagree.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot of people who are using this for e-commerce, incredibly, incredibly productively. Wayfair is someone who used programmatic SEO and has used some of Google's own tools for some of them work in there and they're crushing it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Hey, look. It works and it's good.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's entirely the kind of thing where you have something that has a lot of attributes, that has a lot of structured data, has a lot of things. For instance, if you think about a sofa, you're going to talk about the material. You're going to talk about how many seats it has. You're going to talk about whether it reclines, whether it has Bluetooth. I saw a sofa with Bluetooth-

Mordy Oberstein:

No. We were just shopping for a new sofa. Our children have destroyed it. And we had it for 16 years. I love it. It's great. I'm going to keep it, but not in the living room because I can't part with it.

Crystal Carter:

That's such a dad thing to do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And there's like all these, I just want a sofa. And it's so much stuff. Sorry, sidetrack.

Crystal Carter:

Right. But I think when you have a product that has lots of attributes, and particularly if you're thinking about something like Google Merchant Center encourages you, it requires you to add in all of those attributes to your data sets, to the information that you have about your products anyway. So it makes sense to take that data, take those attributes, take that information and use it to generate content in a programmatic way. And so e-commerce is absolutely perfect for this. And it also means that you're much more consistent with your product pages when you're creating your product pages so that everything has the same information-

Mordy Oberstein:

Which makes making changes and fixing things. And it's also easier. So just one last point before we actually dive into the thick of it. Often is what I think separates our programmatic SEO as a content strategy from regular traditional SEO is that often when you're doing this, your goal is not to rank well for a specific page or specific keyword word, but to spin up so much content that it doesn't really matter. That if you have a hundred thousand pages ranking nine or 10 on the SERP, you'll get all of that same kind of traffic or the amount of traffic that you would've had if you were ranking number one with a far fewer pages kind of thing.

So that's of course is kind of tricky from a strategic point of view. And all of the metrics might not be the same or as important when you're working programmatically and dynamically. So that's another thing to kind of keep in mind. But that's sort of the general gist on programmatic SEO. I for one, just going to say this at the onset. I'm a bit of a programmatic SEO, curmudgeon, even though I do think it's a great place to test things, but that's just me. Crystal, what about you?

Crystal Carter:

I think that it gives you the opportunity to serve content for really long tail keywords. This is something that Miriam Myriam Jessier talks about in one of the articles that we have on the SEO hub. And because you're able to use the information about your products, the entities associated with your products, the keywords associated with your products as fodder for content creation in a programmatic way, it's easy to spin up very long tail, very specific keyword categories or category pages or product pages for specific things. And so I think programmatic SEO is great when it solves a problem. Like any SEO. All of the SEO that you're doing is all about adding value for users. That's at the end of the day, adding value for users. And Google's measuring whether or not you're adding value for users. So when they ranking, that's a reflection of the value that they can ascertain that you add for users.

So Etsy does this programmatic SEO, Wayfair I mentioned as well. If you're able to drill down into those Etsy keywords, gold earrings with leopard print trim in a hoop shape, and I'm looking specifically for those things, or shoes in this size and this color of this thing. And I'm able to drill all the way down and not have to filter through all of your pages and not have to navigate to everything, but to get exactly what I want from the SERP, then absolutely that's where programmatic SEO wins. And I think that that's where programmatic SEO really, really succeeds.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let me ask, when would you specifically recommend or not recommend programmatic SEO?

Crystal Carter:

If you have a large amount of content and you have a large number of products, and also if you have the tooling to do so, as well and to maintain it, I think also a lot of businesses that are working in a sort of high product turnover, like fast moving consumer goods space, they're going to need to do that because they need to be able to spin up content straight away so that they can sort of say, let's capitalize on say a trend that's happening straight away, or let's take this massive catalog.

Because I've worked in, I previously worked for a toy manufacturer and we had all of our products, that we manufactured and we had the one, all these giant spreadsheets and all of that sort of stuff. And if you are trying to manually implement making all these changes to every particular product, then it's impossible. It is an impossible task. So when you have a big product set, then programmatic SEO is a fantastic one. Also, if it's something that you're seeing that your competitors are doing, and you might want to think, I need to keep pace because this is what consumers are going to be expecting to see. So it's always important to think about not just how people are searching on your site or how people are arriving on your site, but how the wider ecosystem is also experiencing a search.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point because it doesn't, first up, doesn't have to be zero-sum. It doesn't mean I only doing programmatic SEO. If you see that competitors doing it for certain types of keywords, certain types of pages or whatever it is, and you can do that for that. And if you want to take a demonstrate for different pages, you can do that for that. You could also programmatically build on certain elements of a page. Why wouldn't you? For example, on the e-comm side. Let's say for whatever reason you want to write custom descriptions. God bless. The shipping and the return policy. If you're not just reusing that on every page programmatically, I don't know why you wouldn't, for example. So that's a very hyperbolic example, but it's not zero-sum. You can use programmatic SEO in certain places on your website. You can programmatically build certain parts of the page. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

But I will say, the way I think about it as well, going back to my point of being an SEO curmudgeon about programmatic SEO is I kind of view it AI. AI generated content. It's very, very similar in my mind because you're talking about the possibility of running into creating a lot of low quality content. Or a lot of un-targeted content. And I feel like sometimes you do need to be careful. Cases where the language structure does matter. So for example, in the product review space. To programmatically build out product review pages, if you're a website that has, that's your whole thing, you're like a CNET and you're programmatically just like you're taking certain inputs, taking output certain inputs and creating pros and cons list out of them whatever you're doing. I think that's going to be a space where you have to be careful. Where you might build it out programmatically, but somehow supplement it at the same time.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. I think that goes back to your point of having a mix of programmatic content and I guess more manually created content. But I think that essentially we're working in a space where a lot of times we have massive data sets that we're trying to wrangle both from an SEO point of view, but also from a sort of just general marketing point of view. And I think that the efficiency that the programmatic SEO potentially combined with it, because this is the other thing that a lot of people are combining programmatic SEO and AI content, particularly for content generation. So for instance, you would say, I have a product with this attribute, this attribute, that attribute and that attribute. And then it'll write a product description for that particular, then you can use generative AI to write a product description for that content. And that is something that is going to be saving a lot of time. And also, again, producing a lot of consistency with those things.

Though again, as we have with any AI thing, editing is key and QA is crucial. So checking over those things and making sure that you're not publishing things, that AI generated content that isn't accurate and making sure that you've trained your prompts so that they accurately reflect what your products do, how they work. So I think that we did a webinar on chat GPT and AI writers and how to use them. And one of the really good examples that Ross Hudgins showed was giving a generative tool, a dataset, for instance, say a product dataset and asking them to create a piece of copy based on that. And I think that if you're able to figure out the best prompt that works for your type of data set, then that can help you to scale content very quickly.

So I think that it can help you to, could connect with niches really quickly. It can help you to spin up a lot of things. But also I think from a programmatic point of view, if you're talking about thin content, or maybe not necessarily low quality content, but maybe sort of fairly repetitive content, and Google talks about this, they show a case study for Wayfair, for instance, about this, for ads. So for instance, if you're a locksmith and you're working generally in New York, you might want a PPC landing page that's locksmith for the Bronx, locksmith for Brooklyn, locksmith for Westchester, locksmith, for Manhattan, for Harlem, for wherever. And spinning those out programmatically? Yeah, brilliant, because you're not indexing them anyway and you just need them to match what the query is that you're serving for your ads. And this is something that Google is advertising on their Think With Google, there's a great Think With Google example-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, on the ads side. It makes absolute total sense to do that. And even on the SEO side, a lot of it's the same thing. If it's a local pages go, most of that page's content is going to be very, very, very similar. And it's a matter of going in and changing a couple things around here and there and make it a little bit better and unique then do that. One of the other things that kind of touch on, something you were talking about that I wanted to quickly bring up is that when you do this, it's a great environment to test things. So if you want to have a certain way of constructing the page or certain type of description, it's a way of figuring out what really works, what doesn't work. Because you're working with A, a huge amount of page, so the data you're going to get back is going to be way more accurate than, oh, I have a couple of pages made a title tag change here.

Is that really, so you are in an environment that already lends itself the testing where the results are way more accurate equals make those changes much quicker and it helps you drive. Okay. Here's how I think Google's kind of understanding me, which is kind of what Colt did in the post that we mentioned before. He spun up a website programmatically and he wanted with the idea of seeing, okay, what sticks? How is Google understanding this content and is this the right way to go with it or is it not the right way to go? So he spun up the programmatic content as a way of seeing what direction to take the final draft, which I thought was really interesting.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. Testing is absolutely crucial because Google will very often look at pages as a page type. So for instance, if you see a search console error, they will say, here's an example of a page like this. If you have 45,000 product pages, they're not going to show you the error for every single, the in-detail for every single product page. But they'll say, here's an example of one that you have. And then you can look at that. And so if you submit it up programmatically, then the fix, you might make a big mistake at once, but you can also make a big fix at once. That's really useful to being able to test that. And also, if you've ever done CRO testing, one of the things that can sometimes be a challenge, particularly when you're doing one page at a time, is actually getting the traffic volume to get any kind of data that's of any use.

So if you're spinning up, many many pages have the same basic format, the same kind of iterations in terms of your CRO, then you're going to be able to get a lot more data more quickly than if you were to do it one page at a time. I think one of the other benefit, I can't remember if Colt touched on this as well, but one of the other benefits of programmatic SEO is that it's really easy to align it with things like schema markup, for instance. So I'm think I've mentioned them before, but I remember I judged as a search award and one of the entries was from Dairy Queen. And one of the things I love, they spun up all of these and they programmatically did this. They spun up all of these pages for their Dairy Queen locations and it has all of the attributes and they're aligned with the things that are on Google business profile. They're aligned with the things that are in their structured data and they're aligned with the things that are on their page.

And so you can see that consistency going all the way through, what the hours are, where the location is, what the amenities are, whether they have delivery or pickup, or whether they accept credit cards and all of that sort of stuff. So they're able to spin those all up and they're also able to roll them all out to multiple channels. So you get all your pages that are marked up in the same way, and you have all the schema that works with all of those. And then you have all of those are also attributed to each of those Google business profiles. So what you get with programmatic SEO is the ability to use your content as a data set and to be able to use it consistently across multiple channels, which is epic.

Mordy Oberstein:

So taking into a completely different direction, going back to what we were talking about before about trying to add a personal touch, all your programmatic content to help us with that is the host of the SEO Video Show great YouTube show.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

At SEO. Knowledge Bombs.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's fantastic. Here's Paul Andre De Vera about when working with content at scale, how do you ensure you keep the right tone and personal touch with your content?

Paul Andre De Vera:

Maintaining a personal touch in your content is important to building a strong personal brand voice and establishing connection with your audience. One effective way I achieve this is by writing the way I speak. Recording yourself, taking and getting it transcribed can be an awesome exercise to help you capture your personal tone and language. You can then use transcriptions as a basis for your content, editing and refining it as needed to make sure it meets your personal language and fits within the context of your content strategy.

However, when working with tools like Grammarly, it's important not to accept every suggestion blindly. These tools can help identify and correct grammar and spelling errors, and they may also try to substitute words and phrases that are part of your natural speaking style. I personally like using words such as, awesome, love it, fabulous. These are examples of words that Grammarly may flag, but is part of my personal language. Incorporating personal touches like these can help your content feel more genuine and relatable to your audience, building a stronger connection and establishing your brand as approachable and authentic. Just be your silly self consistently online just as you are offline.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Paul. Definitely. Again, check out Paul on Twitter at Paul Andre and check out the SEO Video Show

Crystal Carter:

On YouTube.

Mordy Oberstein:

On YouTube. Look, by the way, his point about Grammarly.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel that in every bone of my body.

Crystal Carter:

Yo.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because sometimes it's like, change this change. I'm like, no.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

No.

Crystal Carter:

No. I'm not changing that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not changing that. That's a whole linchpin.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Like Grammarly, that's my vibes. That's just my style. That's how I do it. Also with Grammarly, it's obviously they're making it so they and talk about Grammarly all the time. But I remember reading, I'm sure I mentioned this before Toni Morrison had a book and she just, she's, it was one sentence for the whole page and it was beautiful and it was fantastic. But I also say, and and and and and. And sometimes I'm trying to get some rhythm.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, like, like, like.

Crystal Carter:

I do say like.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm talking about myself. I say it all the time.

Crystal Carter:

I'm from California. That's how we do... it is what it is. But I think that, yeah, what he's saying about adding in, making sure that you keep your tone of voice is really important. I think about brands that have a tone and it's really important. So for instance, MailChimp has a tone that they just sort of have a tone, even when it's a small little piece of micro copy, there's definitely a tone of voice to it. There's a couple of other brands that I can think of that are a little bit, there's brands that are a little bit salty sometimes. So the-

Mordy Oberstein:

Wendy's?

Crystal Carter:

Duolingo can be a little bit salty sometimes. Duolingo has a very dry sense of humor as a brand, and that's kind of their style. And even sometimes to the point where you can recognize the style, you can recognize someone from their styles. And I think with some of the AI things, like Google I/O thing announced that Google Cloud is making it so that you can use your own data sets to train information. So it might be that you add your language style guide into something to maybe move that into programmatic SEO. There's a lot of moving parts going on at the moment, but I think that making sure that you've got your clear tone of voice when you're spinning things up programmatically is, yeah, really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Super important. This again, it tells all the time, and I like my soapbox where brand marketing overlaps with SEO, it's such an under discussed undervalued point. And it's something that I know we talk about, you need to align with your designers and your devs, but a lot of times you need to align more with your brand marketers because they're the ones defining how you're going to have to speak publicly. And if they see the programmatic content and they see that it's not in line with the brand tone of voice, they're not going to be happy. So better get that done beforehand as opposed to after hand, which is, I know not a word, but it definitely-

Crystal Carter:

After hand?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Why would you say beforehand and then after the fact? Makes no sense. Let's be-

Crystal Carter:

Should it be before fact and-

Mordy Oberstein:

It should either be before fact or it should be after hand.

Crystal Carter:

After... Nobody's saying after hand, it's-

Mordy Oberstein:

Now we are.

Crystal Carter:

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Mordy Oberstein:

So anyway, after hand that, speaking of programmatic content and SEO, we already mentioned cold sliver and how we use a combination of Python and a little tool we call Velo to dynamically create pages at scale. So we figured we jump into this fellow called Velo with a programmatic edition of Tool Time. Velo is a full stack dev tool inbuilt into Wix. So you can enable dev mode, which by the way, Phil should be getting a Mortal Combat... Enable dev mode.

Crystal Carter:

We should talk to the team and be like, what we need is an explosion though. It goes... Dev mode.

Mordy Oberstein:

And just like a firebomb goes off on the page.

Crystal Carter:

Instead of deploying, you should just go finish him.

Mordy Oberstein:

Dev mode activated. Finish him.

Crystal Carter:

And then when you run your code, it should go …..

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll see if we can add to the roadmap.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll advocate. This is why we advocate very much a lot internally.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel we should add this to our list of things to advocate for.

Crystal Carter:

Dev mode.

Mordy Oberstein:

Activate it. Okay. So yeah, back on track. Velo.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So Velo. So Velo, I love Velo. I love Velo so much. Velo is absolutely brilliant. It is a JavaScript like playground essentially within Wix. And you can build JavaScript things all the way through it. And there's lots of fantastic stuff. So we have something called the content manager, and essentially you can take a spreadsheet, it's a spreadsheet sort of format, and it works really well for programmatic-

Mordy Oberstein:

Programmatic SEO. Because you're connected to a data set and there's your content.

Crystal Carter:

You can also connect to external datasets, you can add your own datasets, you can connect to other databases as well. And there's lots of tools for Tree to be able to do that. And basically you can use it for, you can use it with JavaScript to create all sorts of fantastic things. So Mark Preston is somebody who created an SEO jobs board, for instance, using Velo. And so you're able to create tools there. And I've also created a few tools myself. I created a Bingo game on my website.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you really? You used it to get a Bingo game. I did not know that. How did I not know that?

Crystal Carter:

I need a bingo game for, it's like a conference SEO bingo game.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's right, you did. I do remember that. Okay, fine. I'm not a horrible friend.

Crystal Carter:

So the other thing that's great about Velo is that Velo has, so you might say, well, but I'm not a JavaScript person. I don't know all the things. That's okay. Because first of all, our documentation is extremely extensive. Second of all, within Velo, they have tons of guidance in the actual code. So if you input the code incorrectly, it will tell you. It will give you an error or it'll give you a little thing that says, hey, you should have this, or there should be a variable, or you should update that part. So that's really useful.

The other thing that's great is that you can use it with an LOM. So for instance, Bard. Bard is trained on loads of bits of code, so is Chat GPT. So I have, I've created something and my JavaScript is, okay. And that's generous. My JavaScript is okay. But I was able to go, I was basically able to take some of the guidance that I got from Velo. So Velo says, oh, this bit of code isn't quite right. And I'm like, okay. So I popped that into GPT and I was like, hey, GPT, I got this error for this code, but I wanted to do this. And GPT was like, yeah, try this bit of code. So then I popped it back into Velo and then I got a different error and then I put that back into GPT, and by the time I'd gone back and forth between these two things, I was able to build something that was amazing.

So what's really cool is that we have... It's got so many different functionalities in it. There's something called Velo Examples, which is a collection of lots of really cool things that people have built on Velo. And on each of those pages there is, there's the code, there's a demo, and you can copy the code from it. The other thing that's great about Velo is that the code is transferable. So for instance, we have lots, it's all sort of API based, and we have a library that's Wix SEO. So if you have a piece of code that is for changing the canonical, we had this situation, didn't we Mordy? Mordy, you were like, oh-

Mordy Oberstein:

A bomb, A podcast website. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Somebody was like, oh, I want to change the canonical on this podcast change. I was like, oh, you can do this. He was like, oh, maybe you can set up a call. I was like, no, literally just copy and paste this code.

Mordy Oberstein:

The code, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Copy and paste this code and put it on that page and it will work because it's all sort of set up to work.

Mordy Oberstein:

You could do that dynamically. You could dynamically as structured data to whatever you want, kind of set up pages, you want to do it. There's so much you can do with it.

Crystal Carter:

And you can create your own variable. So if you have a piece of content on your page, let's say you've got the word or something, you can create a variable. You can name that variable, you can use that variable in your code further down. We also have connections into NPM. So there's like lots of API integrations that are built in Google sheets and Google Maps, for instance. But you can also connect into NPM. I literally love Velo. The team behind Velo have nurtured this and have spent so much time making it fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's so much content, by the way. If you, we'll link to a bunch of it. But there's an endless amount of content they've put out there... It's a cavernous library of content Velo, which we'll link to it. It's awesome.

Crystal Carter:

And I think the thing that's great is working with those things, but also, particularly if you're a noob, like me, to JavaScript, is that the things like GPT, like Bard that are trained on code, you can say in JavaScript, how do I do this? So if there's something that's specific, you can also back up some of the things with general information about JavaScript and things like that. So it's fantastic. And it also opens up a whole world of functionality on Wix, and I think it's going to be fantastic as we go into the headless space.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I was going to say it. It's perfect. Because we've just gotten headless for this. For example, the CMS that you just mentioned.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can use that. It's headless. You can take that and you can plug that into your front end, and you can use the Wix function, that CMS functionality kind of wherever.

Crystal Carter:

And the things that with the headless Wix situation, a lot of the things that they leaned on in the first instance are particularly lean themselves to programmatic SEO and programmatic data creation. So for instance, like the events, the bookings-

Mordy Oberstein:

Booking, products...

Crystal Carter:

Products, all of that sort of stuff, it leans itself really well... Lends itself really well to that. So between the headless space and the Velo and all of the amazing functionalities-

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot of automation you could be doing.

Crystal Carter:

A lot of stuff you can do. I mean, who even needs to touch it?

Mordy Oberstein:

Who needs humans anymore?

Crystal Carter:

But I think it's really great, and I think it's great to see the combination of opening up the platform more and also bringing in some of the AI elements that we have and making it really accessible to lots of different developers and lots of different development needs.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's really cutting edge stuff from really great people. Now you know what else is new? The actual news. So here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy news, two little juicy SEO tidbits for you this week. First up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Neva, the ad free search engine announces closure. Neva was built, by the way, as a sort of a way to downplay the role of ads and search and increase the role of content creators. It had an AI chat experience, and it had a pretty good little search engine. Unfortunately will be shuttered, which is very unfortunate. You never want to see anything fail. It was a nice idea. It really does though, kind of highlight how hard it is to compete with Google. So as you see things developing in the AI world and you see, oh, Google's going down... Take a deep breath, take pause. It is very hard to compete with Google.

From his royal Rustiness, the king of bricks, Mr. Rusty Brick, AKA Barry Schwartz, the fourth. Google helpful content update can demote and now promote content. As you may know, and as we've talked about here on this very podcast, Google announced that the helpful content update will be getting a revamp. This was announced at Google I/O 2023. In specific, Google said the system would help identify "hidden gems". Seeing this, friend of the show, an avid Yankees fan, Glen Gabe, asked Google search liaison Denny Sullivan, if this was an update to the current functioning of the ranking system or a new ability altogether. Denny said, "The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more hidden gems on search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well."

So in a nutshell, the helpful content update will not only be about hitting sites with low quality, but will now have a net positive impact of uplifting the hidden gems of the web. I feel like there should be a special badge if you are one of these hidden gems of the web that says, hidden gem of the web, you could plaster on your homepage. And that is this week's Snappy News.

I just got to say, I just love by the way, that when the news happens so organically like that, in this case, Glen Gabe asking a question, Barry covering it. They're great people, Glen and Barry. Speaking of people, by the way, that brings us to our follow of the week, which is, we've already mentioned him three or four times at this point. He is Glassdoor's, SEO, former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board. He's a writer for the Web Almanac. He's Colt Sliva.

Crystal Carter:

He's such a nice guy. He's so smart.

Mordy Oberstein:

The nicest dude, right?

Crystal Carter:

So nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

The nicest guy.

Crystal Carter:

And so smart. I think the first time that I came across Colt was he was speaking at SMX about something very clever, and I remember watching the talk and I was like-

Mordy Oberstein:

It was very clever.

Crystal Carter:

I remember watching him. I was like, this guy knows stuff. This guy is so smart.

Mordy Oberstein:

I came across him the first time at, when he was at IOL rank, we were working Gareth Sussman. I think he was on my podcast I was doing at the time. I don't remember anything about-

Crystal Carter:

Probably.

Mordy Oberstein:

Probably.

Crystal Carter:

Probably.

Mordy Oberstein:

The smartest guy, the nicest guy. I worked with him obviously on the Wix SEO advisory board, but also we worked together on the SEO section, on the web almanac. He was such a resource. I will tell you right now that Web Almanac, or at least the SEO section, would not have happened if it weren't for Colt.

Crystal Carter:

The other thing I would say about Colt is that he has such a healthy curiosity and people say, oh, what do you need to be in SEO? Like, do you need this skill or that skill or that skill. I'm like, fundamentally, you need to be curious. You need to be the kind of person who would talk about-

Mordy Oberstein:

John Mueller.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, you need to be the kind of person who wants to go down the rabbit hole who wants, hears like, oh, there's a new toilet. They're like, what does it do? What happens if I do this? What if I do that? What if I look at this?

Mordy Oberstein:

You change the JavaScript around on the toilet, what happens?

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. And Colt, he likes to build things. He likes to explore things, and he's super approachable and super interested. So yeah, can't say nice enough things about Colt, like do follow Colt.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't just follow Colt, interact with Colt, talk to Colt.

Crystal Carter:

Tell him that we sent you. Tell him that Mordy and Crystal sent you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Talk to him. He's on Twitter at, S I G N O R C O L T. Of course, we'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes because I don't expect you remember how to spell that by listening to this in your car. But that does bring us to the end of the podcast. I would programmatically end the podcast now.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

But I don't know how to do that with my VO. I guess I could record an ending and plug that in every single time, but I feel like that would not be doing justice to the audience and to the podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, well, you know...

Mordy Oberstein:

Not a good use of programmatic.

Crystal Carter:

No, I don't think so. No, not on this particular occasion.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, fine.

Crystal Carter:

You betcha.

Mordy Oberstein:

Here's the custom ending. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to get started with international SEO as we chat with drum roll, Aleyda Solis. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning lab over at www.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning lab 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.