Unifying your offline & online marketing

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. So we're going to have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is so hip, so cool, both offline and online, Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, everyone. I don't know, podcasts are very often, you're not in front of a screen when you listen to a podcast a lot of times. Lots of people are like, "Oh, I'm walking my dog. I'm hiking a mountain. I'm at the beach." That sort of thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a good hybrid. It's both offline, especially if you download the episode, you don't have to be connected to the internet, and kind of online. It's digital, kind of, somewhat.

Crystal Carter:

Right. You could be on a plane and you could not be trying to argue with airplane wifi, which apparently is the slowest thing on earth, or above earth, I guess. And yeah, you could just be living your best podcast life, offline or online, I suppose.

Mordy Oberstein:

I download lots of podcasts before I go on an airplane, because I find watching movies on airplanes annoying at this point. I used to love watching movies on airplanes. Now I find it annoying. I don't know why.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I don't know. The last time I had a big flight, I just read Percy Jackson.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm sorry.

Crystal Carter:

I enjoyed it.

Mordy Oberstein:

The books were good. I read them to my kids, but the movie was-

Crystal Carter:

No, I read the book. I was reading one of the books, Percy Jackson.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, you're reading the book, not watching the movie. No, the books are great. Sorry, Percy Jackson, I didn't mean to... Books are great. Okay. The SERF's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also leverage all the inbuilt marketing tools and capabilities, along with all the marketing apps inside of Wix Studio to build your and your clients' online presence, as this week, we're talking about the connection between online and offline marketing. How does offline marketing impact your digital efforts? Has online marketing become a lost art in the AI and digital age? And what's the SEO connection of it all?

To help us run the proverbial extension cord between your offline and online marketing, Near Media's Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling will join us in just a bit, plus we got a look at a nifty little tool that'll help you see the impact of your offline marketing efforts on the digital stage. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness across social media. So pull out that rocking chair and acoustic guitar and put on your best grunge voice, because like MTV of yesteryear, Episode 109 of the SERP's Up podcast is going unplugged.

Crystal Carter:

That is a deep cut. I loved MTV Unplugged.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right?

Crystal Carter:

The Nirvana one is great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nirvana. Stone Temple Pilots had a great one.

Crystal Carter:

Stone Temple Pilots did have a great one. Mariah Carey's was amazing, and also, they did the one in Latin American MTV and Shakira's Unplugged is phenomenal.

Mordy Oberstein:

Really? I didn't even know there was a Shakira Unplugged.

Crystal Carter:

It's phenomenal.

Mordy Oberstein:

It went that long. I tuned out of MTV by that point.

Crystal Carter:

I don't think it was on English speaking MTV, but I had the album and it was amazing. The band she had was fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm trying to remember, because Eric Clapton Unplugged, it was like amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Oh yeah, that's classic. That's classic.

Mordy Oberstein:

But I can't remember if that was just him doing an episode Unplugged or it was for MTV. It was. I'm looking online. It was MTV.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they're all MTV.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah. That's an amazing album.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, good. For any of you young whippersnappers, go check it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

MTV used to be about music. Is it even a thing? Does it exist anymore?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it does. They just had the MTV Awards, so Megan Thee Stallion hosted it. That's the only thing I know about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'm so busy online, I don't see all those offline things of MTV.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. This is a thing, so much stuff going on, but I think that, for some of those events, they do tons of offline. And I think that it really is, I think, where you see some incredible mixes of marketing genius.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I'll start this with a little bit of a hot tip before we get to Greg and Mike. Digital marketing tends to be pretty siloed about pretty much everything, like SEOs stick to SEO, PPCs stick to PPC. I think it's getting a little bit less maybe right now, but like PPCs are like, "Don't talk to me about organic. Just click on my paid ads." And the truth is, like everything in life, it's a little bit messy. There are all sorts of overlaps and implications across not just the disciplines of digital marketing, but of marketing overall. And that includes the things that you're doing offline.

By the way, I prefer offline marketing. I like offline marketing more than I like online marketing as a consumer. Obviously, I do digital marketing, but as somebody who's watching the marketing happen, I feel that better marketing happens offline than online. For me, when you see that good, really solid TV spot, and I'm trying to think of a good one off the top of my head, and of course, I can't think of a good example, that hits home, like, "Oh, that's good branding right there. I like that."

And it really resonates. Yet, we, the people of the digital, I don't think, tend to give enough credence to the power of offline marketing and the mindset that offline marketing produces. And in fact, I think the only place I ever hear SEOs talk about offline marketing is like, "Oh, if you're doing local link building, you should go to an event and talk to other people, and that'll help you get links." But the merge or the overlap between offline and online is so much richer than that. I feel like you want to say something, so I'm going to stop talking right now.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so I've seen this happen on so many occasions, and basically, this is where great SEOs really shine is that, if you're speaking to your clients and they're telling you about their offline marketing that they're doing, and a lot of clients are going to be sponsoring the little league team or they'll put up a billboard or they're taking out an ad in a newspaper or something like that. Now, I had a client that was working in a space and their audience was older, even older than MTV, Unplugged elder millennial myself. So it was older and they took out an ad in a big newspaper, a full sheet ad in the newspaper, and I was like, "Cool, when's it running?" And they were like, "It's running on Sunday."

I was like, "Great. We will set up Facebook ads that are attached to people that follow that newspaper. We will target people that follow that newspaper and we will send them the same creative, so that, when they're flipping through the newspaper and they see that, they see the ad, they go, "Huh." Then when they're on Facebook and they see the ad again, they will click through it on it." And that campaign went really, really well. We got incredible engagement, we got incredible leads, and it all went really well. Similarly, you sometimes see fails, so you see something on a billboard or you see something on the subway or the bus stop or whatever it is, and you go to Google it and you cannot find it, right? And you're like, "I really want this thing. Where is it? I cannot find it." That's such a fail. It breaks my heart.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fail. Fail. And we spoke about this on the podcast, I forgot what episode it was, but the epitome of that, I think Eli Schwartz pointed this out, it was, I forgot, so long ago already, it was a Super Bowl, and a company ran an ad, and people, it was one of these unknown-ish kind of companies trying to break into a new market. They ran the ad and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go Google them now." And they weren't even ranking for their name, so they spent all this money. And I'm like, "I don't know who you are."

Crystal Carter:

Right, right, right. This is it. So they'll do that or they won't put the email or they won't put the website on the visuals or they won't take into account the multiple channels. So layering your advertising to retargeting folks that are related to either the event or the location. So I've also done things where we've had a client that was doing an event and you can target, you can geotarget, your ads. So in Google Ads, for instance, you can geotarget, let's say you have an event at Madison Square Garden, you're sponsoring Madison Square Garden. You can geotarget your ads for people who are at Madison Square Garden. So if somebody's at Madison Square Garden and within like a quarter mile radius of the Madison Square Garden, you can target it at them. And then, when people search there, when they're in their hotel or when they're even at Madison Square Garden, you're more likely to show up on the top.

And if they're seeing that you sponsored the halftime show or whatever it may be, then it allows you to connect the dots. And so, I think that's really useful. And also, there's also retargeting from brand engagement. So let's say somebody signs up for your newsletter or people put their cards in a fish bowl and then you win a prize or something like that, people will sign up for something there, then you can put them on a dedicated cohort mailing list and then, you can roll out your marketing accordingly for that. There's lots of things you can do there. Another one to think about, in terms of uniting your offline with your online marketing, is visual search. So I've had it before where I've been at a conference and I have taken a picture of somebody's role banner. And Google lens, if you're on an Android, is baked into your images.

So if you take a picture of somebody's role banner, it will scan it for text, and if there's a website, it will give you the opportunity to click on that website. If there's a QR code on the role banner, it will give you the opportunity to click on that role banner. And it will tell you about the business that you're looking at. And if you have your logo in your website, then it'll be able to say, "This is that element." So I've spoken about this significantly, but yeah, the way you think about your positioning, your brand positioning, in real life is really, really important. Because people are taking photos all the time, and Google allows you to search any photo at any point. So it really is a missed opportunity if you're not thinking about making sure that your branding is really cohesive, that your logo is the way it's supposed to be, that it's the right color, that it's well illuminated, that it's not behind something else, it's not surrounded by a bunch of other logos, all of that sort of thing, so that you can get both online and offline impact.

Mordy Oberstein:

You mentioned conference. Before we pivot to Greg and Mike, I just want to mention, when we do a conference, one of the things we're looking to do is to create buzz on social media. It's like it's not a secret, and the way you do that is all of your offline activities. What do you do? You take a cutout of Barry Schwartz, you take a cornhole game, you put it in front of your booth at brightonSEO in the UK, and you have tons of people playing this thing. And right behind Barry is a big old Wix logo, and people are taking pictures with the cutout of Barry Schwartz and the cornhole game. In the meantime, they're taking pictures of the Wix logo and sharing it all over social media.

None of that, all of that buzz and visibility and brand awareness on social media, all of that happened because of all the things we're focused on offline. Online wasn't even really a thought in terms of the actual process of what we were trying to do in terms of creating that cadence. It was just like, "Okay, we know this will happen if we do this, so yeah, let's do it." But in terms of the execution of the thing itself, it was all focused offline, but huge online.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it's really important to remember that a lot of our offline lives are online. Like pics or it didn't happen. If I go on vacation, people are going to know about it. I'm going to take a picture. And so, it's important that we remember that there is a lot of hybrid experiences in all of the things we're going around in, and also, that people will talk about these things in real life. So if you have, I think, Amex Bike sponsors like bicycles in different towns, that there's Barclays has had some bikes that they were sponsoring in London. And people call them like the Barclays bikes. "Oh, I was using a Barclays bike."

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, exactly.

Crystal Carter:

And that's something that's offline that comes into online parlance, because it exists in the real world. So I think it's really important to remember that and to pay attention to how people are discussing your offline activity and monitoring those things. So if you're able to see that people are talking about the Pink Wall, for instance, there was, I think, Fred Segal has the Pink Wall in Beverly Hills or whatever, then maybe you should have a page on your website about the Pink Wall, so that people, when they Google that, you show up for that. And Google will give you that traffic, because it's your Pink Wall.

Mordy Oberstein:

And with that, let's pivot into our conversation with Near Media's own Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal. Welcome to the show, Greg and Mike. How you doing?

Greg Sterling:

Good. Thanks for having us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'm sorry you had to endure that really long intro.

Greg Sterling:

It was very long and painful to listen to.

Mordy Oberstein:

For the record, we're jumping right into the interview. They don't even know how long the intro was. It didn't even happen yet, to break the fourth wall.

Greg Sterling:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

So pitch your podcast, the Near Media.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah, so Near Media is now on, I think, 175. We're ahead of you by a few, Mordy. Hopefully, we'll stay that in that position. It has become a podcast mostly about Google and local SEO, but we do also talk about other things, privacy and AI trust. I think it's pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. And it usually features Mike, in addition to me, and David Mihm, who's also one of the co-founders of Near Media. And we just recently had you on, Mordy, to talk about the role of brand now in SEO, which was a really great session. And we do three segments typically. Each of us takes, unless we have a special guest, we take a sort of a news item from the week and then, unpack it and debate it and discuss it. So that's the simple version.

Mike Blumenthal:

And the more complex version for me is that I do it, because at least once a week, I get to sit with two very smart people and dissect things in a way that maybe I hadn't thought about. And by doing it weekly and having three or four topics, it really brings local and local marketing more clearly into focus for me. And so, for me, I do it for myself, because I gain so much every week by talking to David and Greg.

Greg Sterling:

We try and contextualize things also. We're not simply just telling what happened, but go ahead, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to say that, because no, because you should also sign up for the newsletter. I actually just used what you all write. Someone was asking me for exemplar content where there's a lot of information, but you also understand what they're actually thinking and how they're thinking about it and actually use your newsletter for that. So I highly recommend that people sign up for it. Links in the show notes.

Mike Blumenthal:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, you're one of the only newsletters I get that I actually read. It's in my inbox right now. I have to read it.

Greg Sterling:

That's perhaps the most flattering thing anybody could say, because there's so many newsletters. And you're not the only person to say that, but it's an enormous compliment.

Mike Blumenthal:

Greg's mother said it too.

Greg Sterling:

From beyond the grave. Remember the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Tevye's dream, that's what it was like. It was exactly like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

My wife quotes that scene all the time, "What are you talking about?"

Greg Sterling:

Perhaps we should get your wife on here. We should be having a conversation with her.

Mordy Oberstein:

That would be an interesting conversation by the way to have and one that would probably not work out well for me.

Greg Sterling:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

What will work out well for me is talking about online and offline marketing, something that we touched on when I was on your podcast that got me thinking about it. So let's talk a little bit about, I don't know like a hot topic, but has offline marketing, because you all are very thoughtful thinkers, has it become a lost art? Does it feel like it's become a lost art, at least from the digital folks?

Greg Sterling:

I would say, to sort of jump in here, I would say yes is the short answer to that. I think that people see online marketing and offline marketing as two completely distinct universes, with offline marketing being sort of dying a slow death, maybe with a couple of exceptions, like out-of-home billboards and maybe direct mail. But people sort of think that digital marketing is the successor to offline marketing, traditional marketing. And traditional marketing has almost no role to play anymore, because everybody's online and everybody does everything online. That's the sort of simple version, I think. Mike, do you have a different view?

Mike Blumenthal:

Well, at LocalU, we always pitched the idea that offline and online were two sides of the same coin, in that, if you are doing something in the real world, say sponsoring the little league in local or helping the blood drive, then putting that online had the double benefit of appealing to your existing customers, plus appealing to Google. So we always pitched it, and I still do, as sort of a duality. And in the end, when you think about it, really, Google needs that offline stuff, as we learned, particularly with things like Navboost and other sort of links. But Google needs that sort of view to really be able to rank businesses effectively. So from my point of view, they've never been separate. Now, clearly, there's been this decline of traditional offline in local, like the Yellow Pages went south.

Greg Sterling:

Newspapers.

Mike Blumenthal:

Newspapers went south to a large extent, although in my community, newspapers still play a role. So it's important, from my point of view, that these businesses, and I think this showed up in the survey you did, Greg, that businesses still do some offline stuff and prioritize it.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah. It's really different by industry, and you see a lot of variation. And some industries still do traditional media and say it performs pretty well. It outperforms expectations. There's an interesting sort of, people have expectations of how something's going to work out versus something else, and traditional media seems to often outperform expectations. Because people have very low expectations. I want to add one thing to what Mike was saying. Reviews is the area where these two things come together most obviously, right? People are typically having an offline experience of some kind with a service business or a restaurant or a hotel or whatever it is, and then, they write a review online. So that offline experience and activity shows up directly in reviews, and those impact local rankings and general rankings, depending on the website.

Mike Blumenthal:

I would extend that metaphor though or that idea, because like I said, with the little league, most local businesses at least are already doing donations to the little league or whatever they choose. And the only thing they should be doing, in addition to that contribution, is making sure that it's visible on the little league websites or Google knows about it. Or in the case of joining membership groups, like the Chamber, they're already doing that. The critical issue there is making sure that the Chamber has the right link to your business, so that Google can see it. Or becoming a member of the Better Business Bureau.

And the same with media, that, if you have a local newspaper, which we still do, getting in that local paper and making sure that you're visible in their online version, so Google can see it. That sort of, to me, is the ultimate local marketing strategy, where you're doing all the traditional stuff to build your brand, going to business meetings, helping people through the community, asking for testimonials, and getting media, all that stuff should have an online mirror and an offline reality. And if you do that, then Google will naturally rank you higher.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's interesting, because you're talking about the little league example, which is such a nostalgic example for me. For those who are not from the US, little league is the kids' baseball teams and you would normally have their uniforms and the local grocery store would be a sponsor and they have the logo on the uniform and so forth.

Mike Blumenthal:

And there'd be a big banner in center field.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, right, right. It's funny, because that's a mindset and I feel like that's a mindset that people don't have online sometimes, "I'm going to go interact, I'm going to do community work, I'm going to create partnerships." And that should all translate online. But that way of thinking, I find, sometimes, people don't translate from offline to online. Offline is about partnership, it's about community, it's about whatever, relationships, because there is no click. There's no way to click on the center field banner, on the uniform banner. You have to think a little bit more strategically, because there's nothing immediately in front of you. But on online, I feel we all get distracted though, "I'll get a click, I'll get the traffic, I'll get the ROI, yada, yada, yada," and you don't take those offline ways of thinking and then, translate them, use them online, which I feel like you should be doing.

Greg Sterling:

One thing I would add to that is that this online marketer mindset, which is about measuring everything, tracking everything, everything has to be accountable. It's this sort of brand performance marketing dichotomy in a certain way. In order to build your brand, you have to be willing to do things that you can't immediately measure and that have a sort of a ripple effect or an intangible effect. And I think there's a lot of bias that digital marketers have toward doing only things that can be tracked, that you can show to your boss, that contribute to your KPIs, that there's a certain kind of mindset and worldview that, I think, results in a bunch of lost opportunities. Rand Fishkin has advocated doing things that can't be measured. You've got to do stuff that isn't necessarily going to be measurable or visible to you in Google Search Console.

And I think that that's exactly right. You have to do a bunch of stuff, especially in the offline world that builds goodwill, loyalty, word of mouth. Consistently, if you're a small business owner, consistently what you say, whether or not it's true, what you say and what you often perceive is word of mouth is the number one source of leads for you, right? And that's really about customer experience and brand ultimately. Sometimes, it's about price, but mostly, it's about a holistic kind of idea, "Oh, this person painted my house, they did a great job. I need somebody to do my taxes. I need whatever it is. I need a landscape designer."

And it's consistently the most reliable and, very often, the biggest source of leads for these local businesses, not withstanding all the online stuff. And so, that's a lot about the things you do in the world to enhance your reputation, enhance your brand. And they're not really measurable in most cases. A lot of businesses will say, "Well, how'd you find us?" And sometimes that's inaccurate, but that's kind of a crude way to do it in a way that has been done historically. Anyway, I could go on.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. Oh no, I don't want to stop...

Mike Blumenthal:

My take on that is that particularly small bricks and mortars, who never really measure that, like you said, should occasionally measure it once a year, once a quarter, should survey their clients. So at least they have this general sense of what is driving traffic, right? If they say word of mouth and that turns out to be 35%, then they know that and they can then focus on the things that matter. But I think that, to some extent, it is at least broadly measurable and small businesses should take the time to occasionally do it. All too often, they're too busy, they don't think of it. But in the businesses I worked with who I recommended it, it was incredibly insightful.

Also, when you map that against the analytics, you can get a sense of how many map directions or calls actually convert to sales, so that you can then model what a growth in phone calls might mean, in terms of business. So it's critical component to both understand and plan, but it's also critical component to get the most out of your digital marketing. So I would highly recommend it to a small business, if they have any business, to occasionally be doing that, which is how they found them.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's interesting, Greg, that you mentioned Rand, because I don't know if you all saw this, he did a, I think it was a video on LinkedIn or something like that, where he showed Google brings whatever amount of traffic, 55%, 60% of all web traffic. But if you're only looking at it directly, "Oh, Google is where I should focus, because that's where the web traffic is coming from," you're really missing how it all works. Because what happened is they saw you at an event, they saw you on social media, they saw you at a conference, they saw you at a little league, whatever it is, and then, they Googled you, found you, and that traffic gets attributed to Google, but it's not really Google's traffic. It's just they're a facilitator in that sense.

Greg Sterling:

That's totally true. It's kind of a last-click mindset in a certain way. I think, if we all just reflect on our own behavior in the world, you see something, you see an ad, you see a billboard, somebody tells you, recommends somebody, and what you do then is you typically search on that business or that person to look at their reviews or to get more information or get an address. Yesterday, I'm having some car issues, and so, I was at a mechanic and it turned out they couldn't help me. And so, I said, "Could you recommend somebody else?" And they said, "Oh, I recommend this other person." And so, I looked up that other person online, I looked at the reviews, and I called from the GBP page.

So what they're not going to see is that whole interaction in the real world. They're going to just see the Google interaction and make some assumptions, as you're saying, about the source of that being Google. But really, the source of it was this guy's recommendation and this other mechanic's recommendation, which would not be visible, but it illustrates the larger point that there's a lot of stuff going on, as Rand says, in the world, that then people follow up with a Google search.

Mike Blumenthal:

And what Greg left unsaid was he wanted to check this guy's rating to confirm that the person who recommended it was right.

Greg Sterling:

Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's what people do. What is that called, Mike? What is the term for that?

Mike Blumenthal:

I'm not sure.

Greg Sterling:

Word of mouth now usually comes along with some kind of Google search or some kind of lookup online to validate the referral. You can learn a lot about behavior just from reflecting on your own and your immediate family and your friends' behavior, which people don't do that much. It's anecdotal, it's unreliable as a sort of a you can't make a lot of business decisions on the basis of that alone. But it's really helpful information that gives you context that you don't otherwise get just from data.

Mordy Oberstein:

To bring that into the local space for a second, because I feel like one of the things that I do when I'm looking something up and you're looking at their GBP profile and there's nothing there, they may be a great business, there's no post or products, there's no description, it kind of feels bare bones. That leaves me feeling like maybe they're not so great. And it's kind of like, is that a ranking factor? Some of the things might be, but the fact that you don't have Google posts there, I don't believe is a ranking factor, unless Joy Hawkins has discovered that, somehow, it is a ranking factor, and I completely missed that study. But it does come from that mindset. It's not something that maybe is attributable to any traffic.

I can't measure its effectiveness in my bottom line, but if I'm thinking like I'm a real marketer, I'm going to realize that, if I don't have that profile filled out, when people are coming to verify if I'm actually somebody of decent reputation, they're going to be left feeling like, "Ah, this looks a little bare bones. Do they not really care? Are they not really active? Are they not really alive?" And being alive for a business is a very big thing, but it's not a measurable thing that you could tangibly say, "Because of this feeling of vitality, I got X number of more leads."

Mike Blumenthal:

I would reinforce that, in our research, where we do consumer behavior research, and we've done a number of verticals. But hotels was the most recent one. And people spent a tremendous amount of time looking at the photographs on Google and on, say, Booking.com in Europe, because that's very popular. One woman I had looked at 11 different places to stay, looking for a full-length mirror in the bedroom, because you couldn't tell how well you were dressed if you only had a half-length mirror. And it's like hotel after hotel, but she would look at all the pictures and literally look for the picture of the room with the full-length hotel. So pictures play an incredibly important role, both on Google, on your website, and on whatever directory is important in your industry. We know that from our research, but other attributes do as well. Reviews. We listen to people when they're doing these searches, and 65% of them say, "Reviews are important to us."

Now, we don't know about the other 35%, but they just didn't say it, doesn't mean it isn't important to them. BrightLocal indicates it's upwards of 85%, although they're mostly looking at stars and quantity of reviews, and only 25% of the time do they ever actually read them. But I agree with you, having a full profile now, most people don't dig in as deep as posts, but from where I sit, any page on Google you can control, you should. And it makes sense to me to maximize your potential surfaces. And that's Q&A, that's posts, it's all that sort of stuff.

Greg Sterling:

People are evaluating the credibility of businesses. It's kind of curb appeal. The Google Business Profile, as well as your website, are kind of your brand online. If things are well filled out, well developed, there's a lot of information there. It's going to give people confidence. What people are looking for online very often is confidence to try that business or call that business or include that business in their final consideration set. And so, as you sort of point out, even though somebody's heard that this is a good business, they might be skeptical if they see something that looks very thin or is unclaimed or doesn't have a lot of information. And there are tons and tons of businesses that fall into that category, that may be doing a great job, but they just haven't taken the time to claim their profile or do anything with it.

Mike Blumenthal:

An example where we saw this very explicitly in consumer research was in physician search. People would come in looking for an OBGYN or a general practitioner and they'd say, "I want the best." They'd go into the Local Finder, which I thought people never went into. They'd scroll 20 deep and pick three or four that had the best reviews, and it was a case where they would skip over people that didn't have pictures or reviews. And they'd go to the ones that did, and it was clear they were willing to scroll. And so, you saw a very long tail in the Local Finder in that industry, in that vertical, because people did take the time to look for more complete profiles.

Mordy Oberstein:

That totally aligns. It's what I do. It totally aligns with my actual experience. Do you find, because you both are so heavily in local, and there's such a natural tendency to see the connection...

Mike Blumenthal:

"All local all the time," that's our radio show's motto.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a natural bridge between offline and online, I think, is unique to local. Do you find that the local businesses realize that connection more so than, say, like a SaaS platform, that kind of thing?

Greg Sterling:

Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Blumenthal:

Well, I was going to say it's very vertically dependent, right? In storage. Most of them get it. In doctors, two-thirds of them didn't get it. It's very vertically dependent, whether they're engaging with Google.

Greg Sterling:

I think, for the longest time, since the beginning of the internet, the consumer behavior really has been search online, buy offline, and then, that's changed with the rise of e-commerce, but it's still relatively small, 15, 20% of total retail, and at least in the United States. Elsewhere, it may be different. And so, consumers, for 20-plus years, have been using the internet as a tool to do research and get information about often local businesses or things to do in their area or where to buy something or where to find something. And I think business owners do this themselves, but they often don't, this comes back to what I was saying earlier, they often don't generalize and think, "My customers are doing this too." I think they tend to focus on channels as independent of one another. It's like, "This is Google, this is social, this is email, this is my website."

And they're not thinking kind of holistically about the relationships of all these things together. I think that that's an unusual small business, a more savvy marketer that is thinking holistically, thinking about the relationship of online to offline, even though these business owners themselves and marketers, however sophisticated, are doing this very thing, they are using the internet, they're interacting with businesses in the world, they're seeing stuff that's happening. I think marketers on TV maybe get it more than others, where they try and connect TV to... Well, TV now is part of online, because it's often streaming, but connect to TV. But things like QR codes and using search volume to measure certain kinds of TV advertising. There are certain pockets where people do really get it and ticket integrated approach, but most small businesses, I don't think do. They don't have that overall view of how these channels work together.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're basically, in a way, describing Nike. I know Nike doubled down on digital, said, "We're going to go direct to consumer and we're going to bypass the store." And people were like, "I love looking for your shoes online, but I'm going to go try them out in the store before I actually go ahead and buy them." And you can see Nike had major, major problems. They actually opened the door for a bunch of other brands, On, to come in, because they weren't filling...

Mike Blumenthal:

Hokas.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hoka, yeah.

Mike Blumenthal:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because Nike wasn't filling the stores up and there was shelf space, so foot Locker was putting Hoka up on the shelf and not Nike. And the rankings aren't Nike's problem. Looking at Semrush right now, since 2020, their traffic's been up like crazy. Traffic is great, but the conversions were the issue. Because, "I don't want to buy it online. I want to go to the store," that gap and not realizing the consumers germinating offline and online killed them.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah, there's also a brand impact there. Ultimately, people are concerned about sales and revenue, but not seeing Nike in the store, not seeing Nike featured prominently does have a kind of degrading impact on the brand. Degrading meaning erosion, as opposed to humiliation, as the case may be.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point. Mike, last word?

Mike Blumenthal:

At one of these rare occasions in life, don't have one.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, really? Do you want me to throw another question out there, so you can have the last word over Greg?

Mike Blumenthal:

Not necessary. Like I said, I meet with Greg every week, because I like to hear his pearls of wisdom.

Mordy Oberstein:

Greg does have pearls of wisdom.

Greg Sterling:

Such as they are. Such as they are.

Mike Blumenthal:

I don't always agree with them, but...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, there's the last word right there.

Mike Blumenthal:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Where can people find you online?

Mike Blumenthal:

I'm on Twitter still, unfortunately, mblumenthal Twitter, I'm trying to increase my presence on LinkedIn and at Near Media, where I do the weekly podcast and try to do two or three analysis pieces a month around tactics and strategy in local marketing.

Mordy Oberstein:

And Greg?

Greg Sterling:

I'm at gsterling on Twitter, I refuse to call it X, and I don't know what my LinkedIn handle is, but you can find me on LinkedIn and Near Media. And my email, for people that want to harass me or give me death threats, is Greg.Sterling.gmail.

Mike Blumenthal:

And mine is MBlumenthal@NearMedia.co.

Mordy Oberstein:

So for the death threats, not on Twitter and not on LinkedIn, specifically email?

Greg Sterling:

Yeah, it's more effective, I think, if you do it directly in email, because otherwise, it'll be sort of diffused and people may comment and may turn it into something humorous. But if you're really serious, you want to go straight to the email, I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, great. So link to the show notes, case you want to follow these fine gentlemen. And remember, I won't put their emails in the show notes, but if you want to send them a death threat, just play back the episode and you'll hear their emails again and you can send them a death threat. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. It's a lot of fun. Make sure you check out Near Media and the podcast and the newsletter. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for coming on the show.

Greg Sterling:

Thank you.

Mike Blumenthal:

Thanks for having us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Greg and Mike, for coming on the show. Make sure you give them a follow. Check out their newsletter, again. I love their newsletters. Again, I told you during the interview, it's one of the only ones I actually open and actually read, which is a rarity, right? Come on, you know what I'm talking about, which is why you don't put too much emphasis on open rates in newsletters. Because I open them so my inbox will be less.

Crystal Carter:

I always open and read the Searchlight newsletter. That's my favorite newsletter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah, don't do it to Searchlight. No, no, no.

Crystal Carter:

Of course.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no.

Crystal Carter:

That's my favorite one to open.

Mordy Oberstein:

It’s about all the other newsletters, other than the ones that we also like, like SEOFOMO, Core Updates by Mike Williams-Cook, #SEOForLunch, Nick LeRoy, those ones you should read. It's the other ones.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's very tricky.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'm just trying to talk truth. Anyway. Anyway, your offline marketing impacts what happens on the digital side of things. We've seen this, we've discussed that. We're at a lot of conferences, and if we do a good job, like you mentioned before, engaging with folks, you see it on social very easily. So here's a little dive into a tool that can help you see it on social, as we go tool time on the SERP's Up podcast. So here's a cool tool for you that I came across and we both came across, that looks like it's like, there's a lot of tools that do this kind of thing, but it looks pretty prolific. It's called Brand24.

And what it helps you do is basically monitor your mentions across social and beyond social, because a lot of these tools monitor social, but they don't go beyond social. But it helps you see the impact of an offline event and the communications impact of that. It can help you see how you're comparing with your competitors. It can help you track sentiment, which is super helpful, and it has all sorts of topic analysis tools as well. So Brand24 for you.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, definitely. And I think it's something that seems to be useful for agencies. It's also something that offers things for information on how to measure your share of voice. So they've got a lot of really great resources for helping you to understand that. I've seen marketers who are working across the social space significantly, and this can be really, really important. I think that, if there's a particular product or particular product vertical where it's quite competitive, that share of voice element is so critical in order to cut through. So being able to see that and be able to have some metrics for that, to be able to illustrate the value of that in-person sponsorship, the value of that influencer engagement, the value of that brand activation can be really, really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

So people always ask, "Oh, well, brand, you can't measure brand, you can't measure offline activity." And it's not true, by the way. It's completely not true. It's just a little bit different than what we're used to on the performance side. You can absolutely track and measure. It's just a little bit correlative. You know correlations equal causation? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. But sometimes, a good correlation ain't nothing like a good correlation. And what this allows you to do is, for example, if you're looking at your trend of negative mentions in the tool, you can kind of correlate, "Oh, wait a second. We launched a new campaign." I will say, North Face launched a new campaign and I did not like it. So if I'm North Face, and all of a sudden, you have these yo-yos like Mordy Oberstein going out there on X and LinkedIn, saying, "I didn't like that campaign," and you start seeing those negative mentions, if it correlates to when you started that campaign, that'll give you a good, "Hey, wait a second. That might be a good indicator of how we measure the success of this new campaign or not."

Now, obviously, you need to go deeper and see what are people saying and who is saying it, because maybe I'm not your customer, so who cares that I'm crapping all over it. But having a tool like this helps you better measure brand, because it helps you find those correlative activities and the data that correlates to them. So that you can dive in a little bit deeper.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that it helps you to sign off, helps you get more funding for the things that you want to do, helps you get more conversions, helps you just move forward with your campaigns. So yeah, it's never bad to have more data.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, and it's also never bad to have more SEO news from Barry Schwartz, whether it's a small change to a line of a SERP feature that's completely inconsequential or an actual thing like, oh my gosh, search console data has an enormous gap or there's an issue with indexing. Barry Schwartz is your go-to source for the SEO news, and we are your go-to source for covering Barry, even snappier than Barry already writes, which is pretty snappy to be honest with you.

Crystal Carter:

That's snappy.

Mordy Oberstein:

So it's like snappy snappiness with our snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, big news this week, as per Search Engine Journal and everybody else covering the story, which is everybody else, SearchGPT launches as ChatGPT's, real-time search feature. So there is a search engine-ish version of ChatGPT, which is called now called SearchGPT, and you can ask it to search for stuff and it'll give you citations and whatnot and whatnot. This is not live, as of this recording, everyone everyone yet for OpenAI. It said all ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist use, will have access today, today being the day they launched this, which was on October 31st.

It's interesting. I will say this, it's interesting. On the mobile version, what happens is there's an icon for search, right? You type in your query like, I don't know, like, "Who is Aaron Judge?" or whatever, and you have a little option to search. And on the search, what happens is there's a little button at the end of the summary, you know your typical ChatGPT summary for sources, and you click on sources and up comes a whole list of the URLs.

You can pull that panel up, and then, you can see the full list of URLs and click on whatever URL you want to. And of course, there's questions of like, will this replace Google and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of talked this about this, I think, two weeks ago on the episode. It's interesting. Leaving that question aside for a minute, it's interesting. I don't find yet that the URLs are accessible in the way I like them to be accessible, particularly on the mobile side. And I think it's a problem, not just because of SearchGPT. I think it's a problem because there's multiple things happening at one time. For example, social media is kind of a mess right now. A lot of these things create a disincentive to create new content. If I can't get my URLs out there the same way, if I can't get engagement on social, which will drive content to the links that I'm sharing on social, do I still have that same incentive to create content?

And I think, it might be a little bit of a hot take, I think the web is in a place right now where that's going to become problematic down the line, unless something changes. The path forward would indicate that there'll be a problem down the line of some sort, and I think it's really problematic for the web ecosystem overall and things like SearchGPT could contribute to that problem. That's my take. That's my personal take. Anyway, onto more AI and search information. This from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. I've always wanted to see this roundtable, by the way, Barry. Where's the roundtable? Do you have a roundtable? If not, I feel like false advertising. There's no roundtable. There is no actual SEO Roundtable. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google AI Answers in Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries, & About This Place." To translate, Google added a bunch of AI stuff to local stuff.

One of the things, for example, is, in Google Maps, you can now say like, "Hey, show me things to do with a friend at night in Lower Manhattan," and Gemini will curate a list for you of little cards, carousel of cards, a typical format you've seen for all sorts of carousels on Google with a bunch of places. And they'll categorize them like things to do with live music, I don't know, comedy clubs, whatever it is. I think that's great. I think that's a great way to get your listings in front of people. I think it's a great way to get people to the Google Business Profile, eventually to your website, and to your business like that. To my previous point, this would be using AI to send traffic to an actual business. At the same time, Google has also announced that they're doing review summaries based on AI.

So they'll go through your reviews and they'll pull out a summary and it will say, "Summarized with Gemini," basically summarizing all the things in the reviews, so you don't have to look through all the reviews. You just get a, "People say this is a great place for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Obviously, my apprehension here is, if you have negative reviewers or you have negative review spammers or whatever it is, that can influence the AI answer. Also, I like to think of the Google Business Profile as a place where there's more control for the business, not less, and this would seemingly be less control in a way. Okay. At the same time, there's also a feature about ask about this place. So let's say you have a listing, I don't know, like Bob's Comedy Club, and you want to know, does Bob's Comedy Club Serve cocktails? And you can now ask Maps about that place, and Maps will tell you, "Oh yes, they serve wonderful cocktails, yada, yada, yada."

Again, great. Could be really, really helpful, but it's because you're directly impacting what someone might do with their money at a particular business or might not do with their money at a particular business, like, "Oh, there's no cocktails here. I'm not going to this comedy club now," but maybe they do offer cocktails. I think it's really, really important for something like this to make sure that the AI answers are as accurate as possible, because you are actually impacting people's livelihoods directly with something like this. Check out the full write up that Barry has over here on SERoundtable.com. Again, is there a roundtable? I would like to know. And that is this week's version of the Snappy News. There are the occasions where I drone on with the Snappy News, and it's not so snappy. Barry actually called one of those instances out on social media. He's like, "You went on too long."

Crystal Carter:

Barry is the king of efficiency. He's like, "How can we get this done?"

Mordy Oberstein:

If you watch, It's New, which is our Monday through Thursday new show with Barry and Greg Finn. I'm repeating myself here, but Barry says that he wears his cell phone in his nerd pocket.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, front pocket.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, your front pocket, the nerd pocket. Because I'm thinking back of when you have pocket protectors.

Crystal Carter:

Revenge of the Nerds.

Mordy Oberstein:

Revenge of the Nerds, exactly. That movie didn't age well, and he puts his phone in there, so that it takes less time to pull out when he has to use it, that fraction of a second.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. It reminded me of stock changing things. When people buy stuff, there are machines that buy stocks and shares and they make them closer to the server, because they save a fraction of a second and get the share faster or something like that. And that works if you're like, I don't know, some giant stock company or something, but I didn't realize that Barry was working in those milliseconds.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot of SEO news to cover. Every fraction of a second counts.

Crystal Carter:

I think you might be right. But your hands are closer to your pockets, to your hip pockets, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Not when you're sitting on a keyboard writing SEO news all day long. Then your hands is actually closer to your front pocket, nerd pocket.

Crystal Carter:

I suppose so.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, Barry thinks of these things. Don't worry. I trust Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Sure, I'm sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

In Barry, we trust. Speaking of great personalities out there across the internet, our follow of the week is somebody who does a great job pulling his offline activities and pulling them online for his personal branding. It's Terry Rice, who is actually a part of our meetup in New York City, the digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal. So look at Terry's LinkedIn profile, and you will see a ton of personal things about exercise and fitness. And he leverages it in and pulls it into his profile to create something that has an amazing personal brand for himself. It has so much value, and it has so much personality. And it's a great way of seeing that, if you do great things offline, you can pull those things into online to add value that way.

Crystal Carter:

Nice. Nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's good stuff.

Crystal Carter:

I'll check it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Please check them out. So Crystal, you going to be offline anywhere? People should come look for you soon.

Crystal Carter:

I'm offline all the time. I'm offline all the time, probably at a conference near you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look for Crystal at a conference near you. By the way, I'm surprised that there's not an SEO conference out there called Conference Near You.

Crystal Carter:

They totally should do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

They should totally do that.

Crystal Carter:

We just did a conference with the team at LocalU and the team at Sterling Sky. They were fantastic. Guys, Joy Hawkins and co, Conference Near You.

Mordy Oberstein:

Conference Near You, maybe not a rebrand, because I know LocalU's got a whole brand, but maybe a special event. Conference Near You.

Crystal Carter:

Local SEOs, y'all need to bring this together. It's just waiting for it. It's like this open goal.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can't believe it hasn't happened already.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or, okay, either that or if they do, let's say they did a conference in Boston, but name the conference Boston SEO Conference Near You, Boston Conference, SEO Conference Near You, SEO Conference Boston.

Crystal Carter:

Greater Metropolitan Boston Area.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, Near You.

Crystal Carter:

Massachusetts.

Mordy Oberstein:

Massachusetts. So that's a lot of letters. Yeah, it's too much.

Crystal Carter:

Cannot spell that. I can't spell that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, no, not a clue.

Crystal Carter:

I can spell Mississippi, but that's because it's like...

Mordy Oberstein:

Is there a thing like a song like M-I-S-S letter?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Sorry, Massachusetts. Well, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we'll be next week with a new episode, as we dive into doing SEO for a sub-brand. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars and whatnot on the Wix Studio SEO Learning over 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 of love and SEO.