Harnessing SEO for lead generation

Mordy Oberstein:
It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. And I'm joined by the astonishing, the astounding, the awe-inspiring, fabulous, fantastic, implausible, improbable, incredible, miraculous, phenomenal, remarkable, singular, spectacular, strange, stunning, unbelievable, unusual, wonderful wondrous head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:
I just had a micro machines flashback. My goodness there, Mr. Oberstein, that's quite a lot of adjectives.

Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, I don't know what strange is doing in there as a synonym for marvelous.

Crystal Carter:
I didn't know, is that what ... What did ChatGPT telling you to say?

Mordy Oberstein:
Well, I'm just looking at thesaurus.com. I put in marvelous, and I just read them off. And strange, did you know it was a synonym for marvelous? I did not know that.

Crystal Carter:
If something fills you with ... that want to marvel at, it might be strange. It might be good strange, like, "Oh, this is a-"

Mordy Oberstein:
Like me.

Crystal Carter:
... yeah, if I walked into my house and there was a 300 bouquets of roses, that would be strange. It would be good strange, as long as I don't have to clean up the roses when they're all dead. But it would still be strange.

Mordy Oberstein:
That's marvelous.

Crystal Carter:
It would be marvelous as well.

Mordy Oberstein:
Marvelous. Yes, marvelous. You know what else is marvelous? The fact that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the leads, well we don't have the leads, but we have a tools to help you capture the leads, like all sorts of light box templates and options, chat interfaces, and a heap of analytics to help you see trends about your people such as leads per source analytics support, and much more. Capture, manage your leads with Wix, which leads us to what we're talking about on this episode, which in case you have in guess is leads and SEO.

Crystal Carter:
Leads.

Mordy Oberstein:
Not like the place in England. Leeds, Live at Leeds, L-E-A-D-S, leads. Yes. Leads in SEO. How you can capture and bring in those coveted leads with SEO. We're talking things like the challenges of trying to capture leads via SEO. What makes SEO for lead generation different from all other forms of SEO, the mindset that makes for good SEO.In trying to capture leads and more. We're going to then kick it up a notch as content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones shares how to use content marketing to effectively drive leads. Plus we'll explore a little old SERP feature that drives leads, that has undergone some significant changes. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social. Grab your sheep as we shepherd you and lead you to the Promised Land on episode number 37 of the SERP's Up podcast where we talk about leads.

Crystal Carter:
We talk about leads and sheeps and-

Mordy Oberstein:
And sheep.

Crystal Carter:
... and sheep. I must give a shout out to Jon Payne who is an SEO at an agency called Noisy Little Monkey, and who before being an SEO was actually a shepherd.

Mordy Oberstein:
No way.

Crystal Carter:
That was his actual, literal job was a shepherd.

Mordy Oberstein:
By the way, I just sitting around thinking it seems like the job for that would be a shepherd.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah. I feel like the sheep aren't going to give you a lot of back chat.

Mordy Oberstein:
No.

Crystal Carter:
You can just sit and contemplate and ... although I think the weather can be tricky, I looked at some throwback shepherd outfits. They used to have these giant felt coat things that you could sit in and it was kind of like a tent and a coat and things. If you go on Pinterest, they're amazing.

Anyway, we have led ourselves astray. We are going to come back to our lead gen conversation. So yes, today we're talking about lead gen SEO, which if anyone has ever worked in B2B SEO, this is very often the general ethos behind what you're doing. This is slightly different from e-commerce SEO where very often, you have someone where you're like, "Hey, we have a product that we sell." They come to the website, they click on the product, they buy the product, they get the product delivered to them. The hey, bang, presto. Fairly straightforward with regards to attribution, with regards to figuring out the ROI of your SEO activity and things like that.

Lead gen SEO on the other hand can mean lots and lots of things and it can mean that you're trying to get an email, you're trying to get a signup, you're trying to get a phone call, you're trying to get general engagement. You're trying to get something that gets you to get a relationship with a potential user so that you can follow up with further activity with your SEO and your other marketing information. One of the things that can be tricky about lead gen SEO is that particularly if you're thinking about content marketing, sometimes you need to have the content that works for the top of the funnel. You need to have that informational, engaging sort of content.

But some of that stuff can be a little bit undirect, or indirect is the word. So, for instance, if you were trying to market two shepherds when you were trying to think of what shall I do with all this time sat on a mountaintop for instance, you might want some content that's a bit more conversational about the life of a shepherd and what that entails and things like that. But if you are trying to sell them at some point to subscribe to your shepherd fitness thing, or whatever it may be, then ... I've gone off on this train of thought, I'm sorry, I'm just going to keep going…

Mordy Oberstein:
And they have a staff holding course, like how do you hold this shepherd staff?

Crystal Carter:
Yes. Let's say you have a staff holding course and let's say you need to convince them that that's something that they need to be into. Then you might not want to lead straight in with a buy this, buy this right now. So, it's more of nurturing a relationship. But sometimes that means you have to invent opportunities for conversion and sometimes they need to be a little bit less direct. So for instance, it might be that your conversion on the page is a softer conversion.

So, rather than somebody buying something, maybe it's that they scrolled to a certain part of the page. Maybe it's that they played a video, maybe it's that they used a tool. So, Ross Simmons was saying one thing that's a really good lead gen thing is calculators for instance. So, let's say you want to calculate the maximum time that your sheep should be on a mountain. Let's say you've got a shepherd calculator on your website, that might be a really good tool for that particular audience.

And then let's say you've also got a downloadable resource, that might also be a really good tool. We talked about some of that before. And what can happen with that is if it's part of your marketing funnel and your overall marketing strategy, these tools can often lead you to opportunities to have more direct marketing.

So, for instance, if they've played a video, then you can take that information and you can advertise to the folks who have played that video maybe in another video space. So that your lead gen tool is part of a wider, wider marketing funnel that includes a less direct marketing, SEO content and also a more focused ad campaign.

And the challenges of this can be tricky because if you've got all of these different wheels within wheels, if you have your information on top of the funnel content and then you have your ad strategy that comes in after users have engaged with that content, then that leads to attribution challenges.

So, I had a conversation with Kevin Indig about this a while back and he was asking what's the hardest part about B2B SEO? And my response was showing ROI on the deals that can take months. Months. So, people can come to your website once, they can come back two months later, they can download something here, they can click on something there. And the attribution challenges of that can be very, very complex. And these are much more likely to show up in lead type businesses. For instance, like for lawyers, for instance, if somebody thinks they might need a lawyer, they might read a blog on your website, they might read another blog, they might go around and look at a few other things. There might be a few different touchpoints. So, how do you know which part of the funnel was the thing that sealed the deal for that particular client?

So, that attribution thing can be really tricky. One of the people that seems to have touched on that significantly is Amy Bishop who covers it really, really well in an article. It's an old article actually, but it's an oldie but a goody.

Mordy Oberstein:
Oldie but a goody.

Crystal Carter:
An evergreen, as it were. So Amy Bishop covered this when she was talking about choosing an attribution model on search engine land and she covers lots of different ones there. I think a lot of SEOs will rely on first touch, or last touch, or first conversion, or assisted conversion, but sometimes there can be more touchpoints than that. And it's important to understand the full marketing journey in order to be able to demonstrate ROI, demonstrate the value, and to be able to get maximum value out of your lead gen SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:
It is so interesting because it demands that as an SEO, you start thinking a little bit like a marketer. We talked about this in a recent pod, last week's podcast. It all comes full circle because you need to start figuring out, okay, what are the assets that are going to drive the leads? How do I do the SEO on those assets? For example, webinars, most people do webinars as a form of lead gen.

We at Wix do not, by the way, at least on the SEO side. Not to say that that's a bad thing to do. Let me rephrase that. If you do do that, it's a great way to get leads. But you need to think about what kind of audience is going to be attracted by that, how they're going to use that, and then how they're going to then go further down the funnel because of that one webinar. You really need to think about the challenges of once I have them, I need to make sure that the next asset also performs well.

Crystal Carter:
And also, you need to make sure that the leads that you're generating add value to the business and are not wasting the lead management team's time. So, for instance, let's say if you are doing a webinar and let's say you're doing a webinar and it's off-topic for your brand, it might be very, very popular to everyone who's showing up, might be very, very popular. But the leads that you get from that might not necessarily be valuable to the team.

This happens a lot with competitions. So for instance, if you're doing a partnership and you're saying, "Oh hey, we're going to do a competition, we're going to give away something for free." Sometimes if the thing that you sell is very expensive, then you might get 200 people sign up to the competition, 2,000 people sign up to the competition and your sales team, who are used to closing deals which are worth a few thousand pounds or something, doesn't have time to call back or touch base with 200, 2,000 people who are very unlikely to purchase because they were looking for something free and the thing that you sell is more premium. So, it's very important to understand how that plays into it and double check the value of your leads when you're doing SEO. Super, super useful.

Mordy Oberstein:
It's almost like the same thing as grabbing irregardless traffic, there's no point in doing that. It's a waste of time. But in this case, you're actually doing harm because you have other teams working on this trying to grab those leads and convert them, when there's never a chance to begin with. And no one knows that except for you because you knew that webinar wasn't really on target. Right, Right. My point, that you always had to be thinking about ... The North compass should be like where the brand is going, what the brand is trying to do.

To the point a second ago, just want to double back on that because the funnel is messy. So, you may have done a great job with the SEO and the webinar page and you've got them, and you signed them up and whatever it is, and now have their emails. What's really going to drive them now is now, they went to your webinar, they saw how wonderful a brand you are and the wonderful content you're putting out. They have a vague idea of what you do at this point, very, very vague.

And the next time that they see you is they're doing a search for a product related to what you do or service that you do. If you don't rank there, you've missed out because what might grab them is not the fact that you've sent them an email after the webinar trying to sell them something. They may have not even opened that email now. What will grab them is they went to the webinar, they've done a search for the product that you sell and they say, "Hey, wait a second, that's the same ... Those are the same people that did the webinar. I'm going to buy it from them." But if you don't rank there, the second stage of that very messy funnel, what worth was the webinar?

Crystal Carter:
Right, right. It's very important to understand that it's all part of a full funnel, as well as making sure that you're covering those products. Make sure that you're covering those ideas as well. So, let's say you're inspiring people to do, I don't know, whatever particular idea it is that you're talking about at the webinar, you also need to cover those terms as well. So, think about where you're engaging people so that it makes sense. And I think also, it's worth double checking, in my experience, it's worth double checking with your teams where the leads are going.

Mordy Oberstein:
You want to make sure that what you're doing is actually working. Follow up with them like, "Are these leads good?"

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, yeah. Are these leads good? Because my metrics are showing that everybody went to the webinar, they all went to this blog, they all went to this, they all did this great stuff. My metrics are showing that we had this many signups for this, or this, or this. Is that coming through.

Mordy Oberstein:
Right, because the data can only take you so far. You don't actually know what you have to qualify the data. The only way to qualify that data is actually talking to the people on the sales team who were actually working with the lead. So, I had a company I used to work with, that was something we did a lot of. There was a lot of conversation between what we were doing with say, our blog and what we were doing on sales and was it actually the people we were targeting? Was it actually working?

Let me ask you a totally separate topic question. Well, not totally separate because we're on the same topic of leads, but you're doing something like you're getting the lead, a downloadable asset, a webinar, whatever it is. Often, do you find that the content on those pages are a challenge, or the content strategy from an SEO point of view is a challenge? Because those pages don't tend to be overly rich with content.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, a lot of those pages will be CRO optimized for instance. And I think that it's important to make sure that you have consistency of voice across whatever it is you're doing. So, I think that even if the word count is low or whatever, you can still maintain consistency of voice. So, it shouldn't be where you go from a like a, "Hey everyone, let's all just learn and grow and stretch together." Let's say you've that's your webinar vibe. Let's say it's a wellness webinar, I don't know. And let's say you have that and then they get to-

Mordy Oberstein:
Wellness for shepherds.

Crystal Carter:
Wellness for shepherds, yes. So, let's say it's a wellness for shepherds, yoginar. Yoginar? Yoginar?

Mordy Oberstein:
I love that. That's a webinar about yoga. It's a yoginar.

Crystal Carter:
Oh my gosh, me too, yoga-

Mordy Oberstein:
Or a Yogi Berra, which could also be a yoginar.

Crystal Carter:
So, let's say you're doing a webinar, and it's wellness stuff and it's all very friendly and it's all very ... and then they get to the downloadable thing and it's just a completely different vibe. And suddenly, it's like, not only do we want your email address, but we also want your date of birth and your this and your that and we're going to call you. And then the email that they get is another tone of voice or the salespeople, that whole funnel thing, if it's not cohesive, it's going to lose you customers.

So, I think from an SEO point of view, I think you need to think about how you manage that. It might not be that you even have those pages indexed necessarily, but think about the user experience and that there's a consistent user voice all the way through your lead gen funnel.

Mordy Oberstein:
Which goes back to what we were saying before that when you deal with this kind of content, it's the larger picture that's important. Because as you say, you might not have that page indexed. You might have the blog post funnel them through so that the blog post is what ranks and brings them in and then you funnel them to the downloadable, or the whatever it is. And I think that's where, when it comes to these kind of assets, or these kind of pages, it's your larger SEO strategy and how you'll say, for example, the strength of the domain overall as it relates to the topic. Those kind of things come into focus because it's usually not the on-page content for the webinar page that's driving your ranking. It's usually the fact that yeah, you're a super authority on that particular topic, or you have other ... whatever it is that's driving the rankings for that page. Because if it's just a per page basis, pretty much everybody has the same content. "Sign up for our webinar, enjoy webinars about blah blah, blah. You'll get great insights about blah, blah, blah from the webinar." It's like the uniqueness is not from the content on the webinar page. Let's be honest.

Crystal Carter:
When you're thinking about your lead gen, that's important to consider, is how to differentiate and how to make it clear that you're adding value and what value you're adding. I think that also with lead gen audiences, is absolutely key because you are nurturing ... it's part of a nurturing activity. So, you're expecting, particularly for B2B engagement, you're expecting that this will not be your only touchpoint with this particular user. They are going to see multiple pieces of content across your website, hopefully. They're potentially going to have some emails back and forth from your team, hopefully. They may even have a phone call from your team. So, this is not going to be the only touchpoint.

So, it should be good quality and it should give them a feel that this is going to be something that adds value to them overall. So, I think that that's really important to think about as you go forward with lead gen.

And so, if you don't have a clear idea of who your audience is, then it's difficult to add that cohesion in order to have a good quality SEO all the way through. And it also makes it very difficult to support it with wider marketing activity. So, for instance, if you have the lead gen activity and let's say the webinar's over and you put the webinar video up on the webpage and now that page is ranking generally. Your lead gen funnel will include people who come to the webpage, so that's an audience. And then people who watch the video, that's another audience. If that audience is very random and difficult to attribute, it's going to be more difficult and more expensive for you to do PPC or paid advertising for that audience.

If that audience spends a lot of time on multiple different social media platforms and things like that, it's going to be difficult for you to focus your social media advertising on those particular things. If this audience reads lots of different publications and things, it's going to be difficult for you to target your campaigns and things like that. So, have a clear idea of your audience when you're doing lead gen and who you are trying to get leads from. It also helps your sales team to understand who they're talking to.

Mordy Oberstein:
Which is what you want. You don't want ... You want the system to have a qualified understanding of what the heck they're dealing with.

Crystal Carter:
Right, right. And very often to potentially get the audience idea from the sales team.

Mordy Oberstein:
Right. Now, speaking of your wider marketing efforts and leads, we have content marketer extraordinaire, Kelsey Jones, here to help us understand how you can effectively use content marketing to grab leads. Take it away, Kelsey.

Kelsey Jones: Content marketing is really effective for grabbing leads because you're able to meet the audience at the exact moment where they're looking for information and also possibly looking to buy or become a client somewhere. So, my strategy when it comes to content marketing for lead generation is to think about all the angles of content that a potential customer may be looking for, and then also the stages of the sales or conversion funnel that they may be in.

So, that really depends on if you're B2B or B2C obviously, but thinking of it as a moral, holistic approach and how you can generate leads at every step of the funnel, instead of just right before they're about to make a purchase, really does make a difference.

So, for instance, I've joined email lists and newsletters for brands that maybe I'm not ready to purchase from them yet, but I really like their content and I really like the value they provide. So, by being able to connect with them ongoing when I am ready to make a purchase, then they're the first ones I think of. And so, that's a really holistic approach for content marketing that I think a lot of people forget, especially the execs team and the sales team, they want the leads right now.

And as we in SEO and content marketing know, it's not always the case. And that doesn't always come easily, especially if your sales cycle is pretty long. I've worked with companies where their B2B sales cycle is up to 18 months. So, that's a long process and you want to be able to provide content to a potential client or a customer throughout that entire process.

So, you're not only thinking of yourself as a potential business engagement for them, or a product they can purchase, but also as a source of education and truth. And so, that's why I always try to think of what content can we create where we're providing value to the customer or our target audience and showing them more about the industry, more about terms or norms in the industry that maybe they didn't know about, or new technology, or processes, and just helping them feel more competent in the industry and more educated. And I think the more often we do that, the more our target audience is able to trust us. So, thank you so much for letting me participate.

Mordy Oberstein:
Thank you so much, Kelsey. You can follow Kelsey @wonderwall7 on Twitter, W-O-N-D-E-R-W-A-L-L seven on Twitter, link that in the show notes. And she's incredibly on target in my opinion. Again, talking about it's a wider strategy, it's not an immediate thing. You have to think three steps before. If you're an SEO for example, who's very much ... and this is fine, that's who you are, who's very much within the exact strict confines of SEO, and you need a more holistic view of how the funnel might work, the pain points of the user, whatever, so speak with your content marketing team. They might be a great resource for you. They might be a great, first off, they'll be a great ally for you in dealing with let's say clients or internal stakeholders, say, "Hey, where are the leads? We them now." That team gets it. So, they will be an ally with you to say, "Hey, yes, we're with you. We're going to get these leads. Here's the process. Here's how long it's going to take. Patience, please. Patience is a virtue." But also, if you are on the more technical side of SEO and you want to get a wider, more holistic understanding of how the user's going to walk through this funnel, then the content marketing thing might be a great resource for you to help you expand out of your comfort zone.

Crystal Carter:
And I think that it's great to compare notes because if you're doing technical SEO, you're going to have a lot of information from a technical point of view about devices and different technical metrics that you can see from different bots that are being crawled and lots of different ways that people are accessing the site and lots of different things that people ... where people are getting errors, where people having touchpoint issues, things like that.

So, I think it's important to compare notes and to build good relationships with the different parts of your team so that you're reducing friction across your funnel, so that you're building that trust that she's talking about. Because if people are coming up against technical impediments, technical challenges across your site, that's going to diminish trust. And some teams will be able to see that, some teams will be able to see other things. So, it's important to have good conversations with everyone all the way along.

Mordy Oberstein:
Now, speaking of leads, one of the ways that some local service businesses, people like lawyers have been getting leads from the Google SERP are called local service ads. It's a special, high quality ad where Google has screened and vouched for the business and even to a certain extent, can provide financial guarantees designed to make the user feel safe, which is amazing in its own right that Google does that. But okay, leaving that little point of sigh for a moment, there have been some significant changes to these ads in, I'll say the relatively recent past, which leads us ... so sorry for that, leads us to a segment we call, is this new?

Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 5: Is this new?

Mordy Oberstein:
No, and most things that we cover on this segment it is not-

Crystal Carter:
It's not new.

Mordy Oberstein:
... it's not going to be new. It's not new. It's new-ish.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, that's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:
It's like a used car. It's like five months old. Is it a new car? No. Is it an old car? Also no.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, no, I mean, it was owned by this lady. She just drove it back and forth to the supermarket. It's never been on the highway. It's totally fine, you'll love it, it's great.

Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, turns out the transmission's totally shot. She completely destroyed the car and now you're stuck with a lemon.

Crystal Carter:
It's totally fine.

Mordy Oberstein:
Let's just be honest here. So if you were to Google something like lawyer New York City, and if you were in the US, you might see a little sponsored label that says, "Google screened." And it's a series of little cards that show the picture of the lawyer, Mr. Morgan and Morgan, and their ratings. And it says how long they've been in service and you get a phone number and you click on it and you get more information and you call them up and folks pay to be featured there. They have to be screened to be featured there and they pay money for what essentially leads from the Google SERP.

Now, Google in the relatively recent past in the early March, expanded the types of businesses that this feature is relevant for. So, now for example, beauty school establishments, or driving instructors, or childcare people, or funeral homes, that's morbid, can now apply for this special Google screening, Google guaranteed local service ad. The problem is at the same time, there's been a lot of fake reviews and spammy practices. Novel. In the local space, there's spam. I'm sorry, I broke the ... is that new? No, that is not new.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, there was somebody who was talking about this with garage door lending, that they were saying that there was someone who was abusing this particular system. I think it was-

Mordy Oberstein:
What often shows up in these kind of spaces, is they're not actual garage door providers per se. They're like call centers that farm you out different garages. I've spent time doing ... I have no life, googling things like New York City plumber and then calling up the phone numbers and then realizing that this is not an actual plumber. What they're doing is, they're a call center that plumbers pay for the leads. So, they farm you out to a plumber who's paying them to get the lead. So, it's like a lead within a lead and it's mind numbingly abusive, and these are the kind of things that plague these kind of spaces in local, which you wouldn't think would be happening because Google's supposedly screening and guaranteeing.

Crystal Carter:
So, I mean, this is something that the app Liaison has been working to manage and things. And I think that one of the things that's tricky for some of the local stuff is that there's so many players and there's so many players of different, with different tech stacks, and with different tech abilities, and with different marketing things. So, within the local space, you're going to get a lot of new entrepreneurs and new smaller businesses, who maybe aren't as familiar with some of these tactics. So, I think it's a very difficult job to wrangle all of this on behalf of Google.

But I think this is also one of the reasons why it's useful to get a little bit of guidance if you're looking to get involved with local search ads, to get a little bit of support if you're looking to get involved with local search ads. I would be remiss if we didn't bring up the local search ranking factors, which was also recently released from the team at White Spark. It's a fantastic report that talks all about different local search things and within it, they have a section that's all about LSA ranking factors. And one of the top ranking factors from the folks who were contributing to the report was a number of reviews, which is very, very interesting.

So, I think that we are going to link to a few show notes of some of the examples of some of the local search ads, but you'll see that some of the ones who are on the top have a lot of reviews and it's something that's really valuable. So, the number of reviews is really valuable. The responsiveness to leads is ... also seems to be a ranking factor with regards to local search ads and hours of operation set on listing. And the report gives a total of 14 different factors. And it's worth thinking about that if you're getting involved in local search ads. Which if you are in any of the verticals in which it is, it is allowed, it's worth considering.

Mordy Oberstein:
They show at the top of the SERP, most visual thing there, if you're again, searching for a lawyer or whatever city, it's going to be the most noticeable thing there. Google gives you this check, a Google guarantee. So, you really feel like, all right. It's not like a regular ad where you have that real commercial transactional intent to click on it. This doesn't apply. Google's renaming or redefining the game with this by saying, "We guarantee this. We've screened these people." Even if you're not way, way, way bottom of the funnel, this is where you want to go.

And it's something to keep up with because for example, the point about reviews is a great one because by the way, we've seen reports now from Jason Brown for example, that people are using ChatGPT to fluff up reviews, which didn't see that coming before that on the news, and I believe it was a couple weeks ago. But one of the more recent developments within the local service ads, LSAs, has been that you can now report some of the reviews being left in them.

So, now if you see people ... so your competitors are leaving bad reviews on purpose, you can now theoretically flag some of these reviews and do something about it. So, if you are in this space, it's a space that's always changing. It's worthwhile to keep up with what's happening in there. Have a look what your ads ... Go to the SERP, see how your ads are appearing, sitting different ads that are appearing, see what features are now available there because new things are popping up all the time. Again, it's in the last month or so, there's been three or four new developments around local service ads, is why we're covering it here.

So again, keep up with it. It's one of those things that it's like ... I don't know, there are things that you can leave and look at once a year and it'll be fine. There are things that you should be looking at, I don't know, once, twice a month, see what's going on. This is one of those.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, and I would say that it's worth getting a little bit of guidance on your local SEO, if it's something that's important to you. And whether you engage a consultant or agency, that's one consideration. I know that's not financially feasible for everyone, but we're going to do our follows later on and we'll follow someone who works in this space. But I would also say it's worth following some reliable local SEOs as well. So, Darren Shaw is a fantastic follow in this space. And also-

Mordy Oberstein:
Roy Hawkins is a great follow.

Crystal Carter:
Roy Hawkins is a fantastic follow in this space, they both speak about this a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:
Jason Brown, Greg Gifford, there's endless number of amazing local SEOs. Elizabeth Rule.

Crystal Carter:
Emily Fuller's also talked about this as well. So yeah, do keep an eye out on this. It's something that's worth looking up. But yeah, if you go to Twitter and type in LSA and SEO, you should get some folks who are worth looking at and we'll be able to point you to some really good resources around this and will help you bulk up some of your local SEO knowledge. And also, we should give a shout out to Crystal Tank from our recent Wix SEO webinar who also knows all of the things about local SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:
So with that, perhaps there's been some latest developments that we have not covered around local service ads that perhaps are in this week's news. Perhaps not. We don't know because we haven't done the news yet.

Crystal Carter:
We haven't done the news yet. Are you going to do it now?

Mordy Oberstein:
We're going to do it right now. Get ready, get set. Here's this week's version of the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Two in the bag for you today with one from a non-typical source. Sorry Barry, they can't all be your articles. Up first from The Wall Street Journal. Google plans to make search more personal with AI chat and video clips. So, it seems Google will be making some big announcements around its new search engine, Magi, Magi, Magi, I don't know how to pronounce it. M-A-G-I. No, no one knows how to pronounce it at its Google IO event.

The Wall Street Journal says a new changes would quote, "Nudge the service further away from a traditional format known in informally as the 10 blue links. Google plans to make its search engine more visual, snackable, personal and human, with a focus on serving young people globally according to the documents." The documents being referred to there, I guess the leaks they got that have spread these rumors to them.

I have very strong thoughts on this. I will not share them here, but we do plan on doing a special episode of the SERP's Up Podcast after Google IO, so maybe I'll share them there. After the actual event and the actual announcements. Okay, by the way, hat tip to Glen Gay for finding this article, sharing the article, follow Glen on Twitter. He shares a lot of great articles on Twitter.

Okay, it's Barry time, cue MC Hammer music. Per Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, "Google no longer recommends canonical tags for syndicated content." Oh, my. In a nutshell, he did ... by the way, the oh my was me. Barry did not add that to the title. In a nutshell, Google says, "Hey, don't want folks syndicating your content to outrank you? Well, the canonical tag is not the solution for you. Just have them no-index the content because that's what all people who are paying for this indication want to pay for the content and not to rank."

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, to the point where if I were a dolphin, I wouldn't be Flipper, I'd be flippant. Barry asked at the end of the article, "Can you force them?" Meaning the people syndicating your content, "... to block the content from Google? I doubt it." The answer by the way, is yes, you can. You have it in the contract that they have to no-index the content. Some creators today try to force this with a canonical in the contract, but now that doesn't help anymore. So, all right, whatever. But you theoretically could do the same thing by asking for a no-index in the contract. Good luck to you with that.

These complications are why you need to decide if, when you decide to syndicate your content or not to syndicate your content, if you really want to go through with it or not, because you may very well not rank above the syndication itself. It's why some big publishers have actually stopped syndication in the past. People actually do decide to or not to syndicate based upon the traffic implications to their website because of this. So, theoretically, you could ask for the no-index. Good luck asking a big news organization to add a no-index tag to their content. They won't get any of the traffic. They're actually paying for the content and syndicating the content so they get traffic. So, it's complicated. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. So much news, so much help. So much newsieness, it's all news, all the time. Love the news.

Crystal Carter:
News.

Mordy Oberstein:
What's new?

Crystal Carter:
It's what's new in the news.

Mordy Oberstein:
In the news. You know what would be new in the news? If we didn't cover an article from Barry Schwartz one week? Not that I want that. I love covering Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:
I mean, he writes so many articles about the SEO things. Yeah, you're right

Mordy Oberstein:
It's be unfortunate new-

Crystal Carter:
It would be-

Mordy Oberstein:
... bad new. Not all new is good new. Some new is bad new.

Crystal Carter:
Good strange, bad new.

Mordy Oberstein:
Marvelous, marvelous. Well, let's just shepherd this all along as we get into who you should be following for more social awesomeness around SEO. And this week's follow is Crystal Horton.

Crystal Carter:
Yes, Crystal Horton is a fantastic local SEO and she's worked on some of these LSA ads. She works a lot with new businesses, helping them get involved in local SEO. She's also fantastically smart and clever and warm and very engaging online. And she's also very competitive. I did a Twitter space with her and I was like, "So what's your general goal with SEO?" And she was like, "Destroy the competition." I was like, "Okay, all right."

Mordy Oberstein:
Nice. No mercy, take no prisoners.

Crystal Carter:
I know. And I think that when you're working on an SEO campaign, are you working with someone who's SEO, if they've got that instinct that's going to work well for you. So, a big follow to you, Crystal Horton, you're fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:
Another Crystal, two Crystals for the price of one on this episode. There's so many Crystals in SEO, it's amazing.

Crystal Carter:
I know.

Mordy Oberstein:
It's marvelous. So, you can follow Crystal Horton @imcrystal, that's not I am, it's I-M the letter. It's not, I am as in I-A-M. I-M Crystal with a C, H-O-R-T-O-N, I'll link to that in the show notes, so you don't have to rely on my botched spelling.

Crystal Carter:
It's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:
It's fine. Crystal Horton on Twitter, you'll find her.

Crystal Carter:
Woo.

Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah. So, I think we've shepherded this episode and we have led it to its natural conclusion.

Crystal Carter:
Yeah, we found our way back.

Mordy Oberstein:
Oh, that was so bad.

Crystal Carter:
But you might have some other puns.

Mordy Oberstein:
There's always room from war puns.

Crystal Carter:
I think so.

Mordy Oberstein:
But instead of doing that, we'll spare you. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episodes. We dive into building SEO momentum for growth. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.