Even SEO pros need a refresher

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. You're going to got 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 she who is all knowledgeable all the time, never needs a refresh about anything ever, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, Mordy Oberstein. How are you today? I am appreciating your introduction as ever, very kind view. Thank you very much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's refreshing, isn't it?

Crystal Carter:

I feel refreshed. I feel like I'm seeing things in a new light. I feel like maybe things are becoming more clear and that after approaching it from a different direction, I can see it afresh.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm like your Sprite, I'm refreshing.

Crystal Carter:

I was really big into Sprite in the nineties because they were really big into basketball. They were just like, "Yeah, Sprite has to do with basketball." And I was like, "Yeah, I love basketball." It was like peak Michael Jordan and Space Jam and Dream Team.

Mordy Oberstein:

Obey your thirst. Image is nothing, something something is everything, obey your thirst.

Crystal Carter:

They had a bottle cap contest that was huge.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right, the yellow bottle caps.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that was a big campaign. Also a big marketing campaign was the McDonald's Monopoly thing. Do you remember that?

Mordy Oberstein:

I do remember that. Do you remember the McDonald's Off the Hoop though?

Crystal Carter:

No, I don't remember that one.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or am I confusing Sprite and McDonald's? Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting these crazy shots.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I do remember that campaign, that was a good campaign.

Mordy Oberstein:

So much good, the nineties is the best decade other than the eighties, I kind of lean a little bit more eighties, nineties campaigns. Regardless, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, which goes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can get automatic alerts about significant traffic changes to your site right inside of Wix.

Why? Because we all forget stuff. My kids forget things all the time. They forget to put the milk away, dirty clothes away, anything away really. Regardless of my kids, we could all use a refresher every once in a while about SEO, which is why today we're talking about why everyone from an SEO pro to someone new to SEO sometimes needs to refresh their SEO knowledge. We're talking why SEO lends itself to needing refreshers, how to know if you need an SEO refresher, how to re-familiarize yourself with an SEO topic once you know you need a little refresher because you're a little bit rusty with it.

Also, Seer Interactive's CEO Wil Reynolds stops by to share how relearning things has helped him advance in his professional life. Plus, we'll go deep into how to refresh your brand and how SEO can help. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news of who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So like Coke's slogan of 1924, I should gone called Sprite looking back at it now, whatever like Coke slogan of 1924, refresh yourself as episode number 57 of the SERP's Up podcast, like Coke's 1904 slogan, is going to both be delicious and refreshing so that by the time we're done with you, like Coke's 1959 slogan, it'll be really refreshed. I come up with my own slogan, but as you can tell, you can't beat the real thing. So catch the wave and more Coke slogans, I could go on forever. First off, the fact that they have so many slogans that deal with being refreshed is amazing. Go look at their history because they have endless amount of slogans. It's amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Another similar one is the Google logo. The Google logo, it's changed, but it really hasn't changed the entire time. It's always been sort of those colors and they've just very finely refined the font as they've gone along until we got to the sort of more, I guess, Helvetica kind of style of font from something before that was very Timesy, et cetera. So just ever so finely done it, and in fact, Wix just refreshed their logo as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everybody's refreshed now.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, everybody's feeling refresh.

Mordy Oberstein:

I forgot we refreshed our logo. That's right, we got rid of the dot in the I, now it's just one stick.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly, exactly. And also I think they slimmed down a little bit in parts of it as well. So yeah, normally I think it's a sign that something's changed a little bit and maybe you want to sort of take a new approach, but at the same time you want to stay true to who you are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, we'll talk about that actually in a little bit because we're talking about brands and how to know when to refresh and how to go about diagnosing the refresh. So we'll get to all of this. But first, SEO is a lot. So we're talking about refreshing your SEO knowledge, every once in a while you need a refresher, and there's a lot of reasons why that is. First of, like I just mentioned, SEO is a lot. There's a lot of topics from local SEO to technical SEO to content to links. There's a wide gamut of knowledge that you need to have at least some level of familiarity depending upon what area of SEO you touch on, if not all of them. And SEO is constantly changing whether it be AI or Google updates or new guidelines or updates to previous guidelines or new systems that Google has or new ways of utilizing those systems that Google has gone about, there's a constant stream of changes that come along with SEO.

On top of all of that, there are small little details that sometimes really, really matter and sometimes you forget those small details because literally buried deep, deep, deep within the recesses of Google's guidance and Google's guidelines and their documentation. On top of all of that, SEO is siloed. So you might spend most of your time doing local SEO or you might spend very little of your time doing local SEO, and one day having a local SEO situation, you're like, "Whoa, wait a second, I don't remember because I don't really do a lot of local SEO until today, until right now," so you'll need a refresh. Then on top of all of that, we're all just human, so we all kind of forget things every once in a while, literally happens to me all the time. And I'm not unusual, well, I am unusual, but I'm not unusual in this regard.

I cannot tell you by the way to that, there's so many times where if I've asked Barry Schwartz, "Is this new?" The SERP itself changes. How Google constructs the results page, the features they show, they might add a new feature, take away a feature which has been done many times before, or they might reformat a feature or redesign the SERP or change an ad label or change this or change that and people will go on Twitter and ask Barry Schwarz, who we feature every week on the SEO news, "Hey Barry, is this new?" And literally there have been times I'll be, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And he goes, "No, and you are the one who found that it wasn't new three years ago," and I had totally forgotten.

So my point is, yeah, it's a little embarrassing when that happens to me, there are a lot of reasons why everyone from the most knowledgeable SEO to someone new to SEO is going to need to refresh their SEO knowledge. There's really no way around it. But yeah, that's embarrassing, that's happened multiple times with Barry.

Crystal Carter:

To be fair, you ask Barry if things are new a lot so the chances that you've asked it before are fairly high in that regard. Sometimes you can schedule to check that something needs a refresh, like maybe a skillset set or maybe sometimes it's set for a schedule. So for instance, Google Ads, if you've got Google Ad Certified, or at least back in the day when you got Google Ad Certified, there would be a time limit on your certification and they'd be like, "Hey, well in two years you're going to have to retake this test." Driver's licenses can be that way as well and they'll say, "You got to retake this test." Why? Because things will change. Performance Max, for instance, is very different from the sort of original Google Ads set up. If you have a Google Analytics Certification from two years ago, it's not going to be worth anything in the days of GA4, for instance. So sometimes there's going to be certifications and they will have a time limit.

Similarly, people who are managing content, I know that the blog team here, for instance, has a date that they schedule to go back and refresh that content, to have a look at that content and make sure that it still makes sense, that it's still accurate and things like that. Because as you said, it's constantly changing. There'll be new competitors, there'll be new SERP features, there'll be new capabilities on your platform or within your team. For instance, it may be a year ago you didn't have somebody that was able to speak technically about certain things, maybe now you do have somebody who can speak technically about things. Maybe a year ago you didn't have somebody who was doing a lot of video, but now you do have somebody who's able to do a lot of video. So that can be something as well.

Externally, there can be new regulations that come up or new requirements. So something like GDPR was a prime example. In the EU everybody had to sort of go like, "Okay, well we need to rethink how we approach this whole situation." And then in the US there's some websites who were just like, "Actually, we're just going to not let people from the EU come to our webpage." So that's a way to think about it as well.

So I think that it's worth remembering don't take anything for granted in terms of what you know. I had a conversation with someone recently and they had some very firm opinions about core web vital stuff, and I was like, "Google changed it. They changed their opinion on core web vitals and it's not as cut and dry as it was before." It's A TLDR, complicated is what I'm saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

We actually covered that on the podcast a couple episodes ago with Brittany Muller.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So sometimes you need to just go back over and see what's changed because external things are happening. And I think that when I know that it's time for that, it's essentially when you hear that there's a change that you're unfamiliar with or when you're starting to see that maybe people who are taking a different approach are getting different or better results than you. So if you look up and you're seeing that lots of people who are eligible for a certain type of rich result are showing at the top of the SERP, then maybe you should refresh that content that shows on there. Or for instance, Google will sometimes update their seat staying in the rich results area, Google will sometimes update their requirements for rich results ever so slightly So that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, but that small thing can have big implications.

Crystal Carter:

Right, precisely. So that means that you've got to go back through and you've got to see how big of a deal is this? Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is this something that needs to be done absolutely right now or is this something that we can sort of put on the back burner for a little bit while we get the resources for it? I think that that's really useful to think about it. And in terms of prioritizing, again, it has to do with resources. If I think about like redecorating my house, for instance, I'll be honest, the wallpaper in my living room could definitely do with a refresh, but I literally cannot be assed. I don't want to have to go and look at swatches of wallpaper.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then pulling it off, ugh.

Crystal Carter:

I just don't want to. And so yeah, it could do with the refresh, absolutely, but I don't want to so I'm not going to. But my windows in my house, for instance, they did need some updating because yeah, it was cold. And so I was like, "Okay, well, we need to fix these," because the necessity.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have to do that.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's been cases, like I'm trying to think, updates to structured data markup, right? So what makes you eligible to appear as a rich result. And for example, I'm going to say two years ago, Google made a change to what is required to show up as a rich result for events. And if you have no events on your website, you'd be like, "Ah, I'll get to that later." But if you are a heavy event website, then you need to get on that. By the way, for the record, the Wix sites already had that taken care of for them. We already built it in, it was part of our best practices. We had a do nothing, and if it was, then we would've added it and you would've had the do nothing plug. It's our podcast, we can plug Wix.

But it kind of highlights the point to me of why you need to read the SEO news because first off, social media is a little bit less reliable relative to the past for these kind of things. It used to be you would go on Twitter, the SEO community was very active, three seconds flat, you'd realize something's up. It's not the same anymore. It is to a certain extent if it's a Google update, but the smaller things I think slip through the cracks more often than they used to so I wouldn't rely on social for this anymore, but I would go to say seproundtable.com, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, especially seoroundtable.com, where Barry covers all of the small things, whereas Search Engine Land will cover a lot of the big stories, or SEJ will cover the big stories, Barry covers every little thing that changes on seoroundtable.com, and it's super important.

Crystal Carter:

I was just going to shout out to Barry because whenever, and we've definitely had a "Nuh-uh, yuh-uh, nuh-uh, yuh-uh," about Google, about like, "Oh, Google said this," "No, they said that," "Well, no, they said this, or this changed or that changed." And honestly, the service that Barry does with documenting the little changes and the evolution of different changes, for instance, so it's an incredible resource that he provides there. So for instance, if you want to know the evolution of featured snippets, for instance, you can go on SEO Roundtable and you can see how featured snippets have evolved since 2016, since they were starting testing them, since they were moving things through this, since they were doing that sort of thing. And you can go, "Are featured snippets machine learning powered?" And then you'll say, "Yeah, from 2014," they'll say, "Back in the day they said yes, they are powered by machine learning," et cetera, et cetera, and it's an incredible resource.

So yeah, I cannot recommend enough because the other thing is that Google, for instance, they don't always store their pages. So if they change the page, you could go and look in a way back machine, for instance, but you can't necessarily see the change on the page. So for instance, the ranking systems page recently changed to remove core web vitals as a ranking system, but they added it as a ranking signal on the helpful content thing. But if you go to the ranking systems page, there's no mention of it, there's no mention of the change, you can't see the record of it. However, if you go on Search Engine Roundtable, then you can see the whole conversation and the whole evolution of all of that stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, he reports everything. And featured snippets is a great example because some of the changes that Google just makes to the format of them can have big implications. For example, Google, I don't have a timeline, say the last six, seven months has started showing more multiple URLs within feature snippets. So not just you ask a question, "How much does a cow weigh?" I don't know. And you get an answer back in a feature snippet. Now you can have multiple URLs, multiple snippets, kind of like what Bing does, but you wouldn't know that unless you either see it out in there in the wild or you're keeping up with what Barry's writing or you're going back and looking, "Okay, I need to refresh about feature snippets because I'm really focused on them right now. Let me see what Barry's covered in the last few months." That is a great way to refresh.

And I just want to pivot a little bit and point out, there's no stigma about needing a refresh. And anyone who says, "Oh, you needed a refresh on that? Whoa, what kind of SEO are you?" Is, A, not a nice person, and B, completely wrong because it happens to everyone.

Crystal Carter:

Everyone, everyone. People talk about SEO experts and SEO beginners and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Everyone's a beginner at something, everyone's a beginner at something. And definitely a lot of people in SEO are specialists, and that's totally great, that's totally fine. And you mentioned this before, that it can be siloed where you work a lot in local SEO for instance, or you work a lot in enterprise maybe, or you work a lot in technical SEO sort of stuff. So maybe you work a lot in technical SEO and maybe content stuff ain't your thing particularly so you might need to start from the beginning of sort of understanding the elements that you need to do in order to get some results in terms of content or in terms of whatever it is that you have a skill gap. And I think that that's fine.

And I think also, even if you aren't necessarily running the project directly, so let's say you were somebody who has a technical SEO specialism and you're leading a project because you're adept at leading projects, but the project involves a lot of content staff, for instance. You need to, as a project leader, understand what's going on in that space. You maybe don't need to know every single detail of it, you maybe have somebody in your team who's working on it, but you need to be sort of up to date on what is useful.

I think one of the other things that's really great is to check out conferences and podcasts like this and webinars and things for getting an idea of what the state-of-the art is. If you go to a conference and you see a talk about a topic that you've never heard of, check it out, check it out. It literally costs... I wouldn't say it costs you nothing because conferences do cost you something generally speaking, but you can sit there and if you're like, "Ah, this isn't for me," that's fine. If it is for you, then you go, "Oh, actually there's some things that you mentioned there that I hadn't considered, and maybe I can go back and I can fill in those gaps and get myself up to speed." And it's quite a good way to get a good overview before you do a sort of specific upskill. And that's my general approach is that I'll find some two-hour lecture from Cindy Krum and then figure out how to get myself to make sense of the different things that she's discussing there because she's super.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's exactly how I approach it. Sometimes there's a very specific thing that pops up, and this happens all the time, whether there's a particular SEO question or scenario that arises and you just, "I don't remember the answer to that, that was so specific, I did that five years ago." And you go and you research it and you find it. And then there's some cases where it's more of topical like, "I haven't dived into GVP in a long time, let me..." And for that, you want to find trusted sources. We spoke about this way early on in the podcast, but how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice.

But I'll just harp on what we spoke about there for a second. Look for people that you trust, whether it's outlets like the Wix SEO Hub, or it's people like Cindy Krum. You want to make sure that the information that you're getting is, A, current, because there's a lot of people who are talking who are not current, and it is a little bit of a problem. So look for recommendations. If you don't know where to go, then find somebody you know on social, be like, "Hey, I'm looking for more about local SEO, could you send me a few resources?" Literally you can ask us on social media, we'd be happy to direct you. But people will generally answer you and it'd be helpful, just make sure you're looking at the right resources and trusted resources when you're trying to refresh on a topic.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think in terms of resources and tools and things, don't expect that a tool that you used like six months ago or a year ago is exactly the same. There are going to be constant iterations and updates for different SaaS tools all the time. So Facebook Ads in particular is a prime example. Literally if you leave Facebook Ads for two weeks, then you might have to come back and relearn the situation. So it's really important to keep on top of your tools that you're using. And yeah, let's say you weren't doing local SEO, and then you're back in local SEO, you're going to have to do a refresh on Google Business Profile.

And I think it's really useful to find people who are product experts for some of those things. And I think there's a lot of people who stay on top of those... Probably the best resource that I would find, particularly for tactical and tools things is Aleyda. Aleyda is really, really, really adept at scanning what's going on in the industry and also resharing other folks' stuff. So somebody builds something cool, Aleyda will share it from her platform, she'll share links to it, she shares it in her SEO FOMO newsletter. I would highly recommend it, particularly for tools things, that she's a good one to follow and to sort of signpost you to other people who are good to follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now because we wanted to show you that everyone needs a refresh every once in a while, we went out and we found one of the biggest SEO OGs of all time to talk about how going back and relearning and getting refresh has helped him as a professional. Here is Seer's founder and CEO, the one, the only Wil Reynolds on how going back and relearning something helped him as a professional.

Wil Reynolds:

So how has going back and relearning something helped me as a professional? I once decided to spend a year not reading any new books and only rereading old books. And the way that that helped me is a lot of the books that I read that I really loved 10, 15 years ago, my career and the business was in one place then. So I actually took a lot of different things out of the book or the set of books because now the business and my career are in a different place. So what I kind of learned from that, and I strongly recommend to a lot of people, is consider taking a book that you enjoyed reading, but it's been five or 10 years ago, and the way the world comes at us, probably five is fine, and then re-listen to it again and see if you get very different things out of it based on the place that you're in at the current moment.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much for that, Wil. Make sure you give Wil a follow over on Twitter at W-I-L R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, Wil Reynolds, we'll lead to his profile in the show notes. First off, forget as an SEO, as a marketing professional, just as a person, that is a great point. But going back to the SEO marketing side of things, it is a really true point that why you shouldn't just wait for the refresh but actively look to refresh, actively let's say go through Google's documentation again, have another look at it because what you take away from it now, five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years into being an SEO, into being a digital marketer is going to be different than what you took away from it that first time you read it when you were first on your SEO journey, that kind of thing. So it's a great point to as to why you should be proactive about refreshing your SEO knowledge. Really cool.

Crystal Carter:

I couldn't agree more. And I think that he was talking about place in your business, in your career, but I think also in your skillset, you are constantly building your skillset as a digital marketer. So it might be that six months ago when you read it, you were reading it from a content point of view, and maybe now you've got a real good handle on like page SEO or something like that and so you go back to a really good piece of text and you're like, "Ah, actually I can see this, this, and this."

The Quality Rater Guidelines is a really, really good example of that. So the quality rater guidelines are available from Google and they're extensive and they change every year. If you troll around, you can find older copies of it. But what's interesting is going through and looking at the different things that they're asking for and looking at the different things that they're looking at. And when you have one set of skills, you'll say, "Okay, well we could do this, we could do that, we could do that," and then if you go forward, you can add more things to it.

And this is similar I think with clients. So when working with clients, we would always set a time for R&D so we'd maybe set out six months of planned activity and then at the end of that six months, we re-audit, right? We refresh our perspective on where we are with the client, with the website, with the web project, whatever it may be. And based on that, we would take a new position, a new approach, or refine our approach because again, we have new skills, we have new things. So yeah, absolutely. And revisiting things that you loved is great. I always really enjoy listening to jazz, for instance. And if you listen to a jazz quartet, maybe one time you listen to the saxophonist and then maybe the next time you listen to the drummer and the next time you listen to the person playing the piano or something, and you will find different things in different parts of it. It's a great way to approach content that you love. And yeah, I think Wil's got some great points there.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's why I watched The Big Lebowski over and over and over again, different jokes every single time. Again, thank you so much, Wil. Make sure to give Wil a follow. Again, we'll link to his profile in the show notes. So speaking about refreshing and refamiliarizing yourself with whatever SEO topic we're talking about, one thing that very often comes up, we actually hit on it way early in the episode here, is refreshing your brand. And whether that be a visual update or an entire new brand identity or creating brand identity from the start even... Well, that's not refreshing, but you kind of know what I mean. Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to talk about how we can go through and refresh your brand as we get into a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy.

So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I feel like when you try to refresh your brand, let's say, let's make it an easy case, you have a problem, you have a branding problem. You're whatever company and you made a mistake, and I don't know, you positioned yourself in a way that it didn't really resonate with your audience. In fact, it backfired. Let's just go with that for a second. And I think we focus or we overfocus or overemphasize the fix, but I think the biggest problem is the diagnosis. I'll explain what I mean.

So when you're trying to refresh your brand, I think the first thing you need to do is figure out, "Okay, do I need a refresh?" And as Crystal mentioned before, Wix, when we refreshed our logo, we sat down and someone at some point said, "You know what? Has design language shifted? It seems that design language has shifted and perhaps we're a little bit out of date, we should refresh our design language." And I'm assuming, I don't know firsthand, that's how the logo refresh for the Wix logo came about. And it really speaks to putting your finger on the pulse. You have to have your finger on the pulse when it comes to your brand. And that could be anything like I just mentioned, the design language or that could be just chatter about your brand and general sentiment around your brand. And there are tools out there that you can use that sort of monitor these things. But there really is no way around, in my personal humble opinion, having your finger on the pulse and really being in there, looking at what people are saying and really understanding what the environment is about for your brand.

And then comes the most important thing which is diagnosis. Okay, let's go with the example you have a sentiment problem. Okay, great, where's the problem? What's the root of the problem? Is it how you relate to your audience? Is it perhaps there's a lack of cohesion with your own brand identity and people are confused and when people are confused, they end up being frustrated? Is it simply a lack of an evolution of your product? Forget the brand, the product hasn't evolved, right? And now you need to figure out how to deal with the branding because the product is the one that caused a problem to begin with.

Whatever it is, the diagnosis is the most important part of the problem. Why is it happening? Why is there a problem with the brand? Or why do we need the refresh? What is exactly is the issue that we're trying to resolve and what caused it? Because you can't really diagnose the issue until you figure out what caused it and what's the root cause. And then the fix, and the fix to me is easy. Once you have the diagnosis, the fix should be obvious, "Oh, design language has shifted, our logo is now slightly out of date. Let us refresh the logo."

Crystal Carter:

It can be very tricky. I think also it's important to understand that the core of what you were saying was the finger on the pulse sort of element, and I think that that is something that's really, really important. I remember reading something, and I was unable to find it, but somebody was talking about, I think it was a post about how brands die. And it was talking essentially about how you can have brands where they're not paying attention to customer service stuff or they're not paying attention to customer sentiment, and by the time they do pay attention to customer sentiment, it's already gone past the point of fixing it. So you have to pay attention to the customer service, and you have to be actionable with those things.

And I think it can be tricky sometimes diagnosing it. So for instance, sometimes you have a situation where people are like, "Oh, people don't like this, or people don't say good things." And sometimes the things that people are saying are not even accurate, sometimes the things people are saying aren't even accurate. So then when you're trying to diagnose it, why is it the case that people are able to say stuff that's inaccurate about your brand? Why is that the case? So when you think about the diagnosis, the issue isn't even necessarily what people are saying, it's a question of relationship.

Mordy Oberstein:

1000%. Take Google, Google is a great example. People are saying, let's say Google and SEO, wrong things about what worked for SEO, what doesn't work for SEO for years, right? Going back to Matt Cutts who used to work at Google, I don't know, like 10 years ago at this point and people still kind of propagate these falsehoods we covered in another episode, Debunking SEO Myths, around what Google does and doesn't tend to prefer. And you could look okay what they're saying, and that's one thing, "Oh, LSI keywords are really important," which they're not, that's not true, it's a myth, but why are people saying that is the root cause. And that to me has to do with the fact that Google's algorithm is not 100% transparent because it can't be, A, it's impossible for it to be. And two, it wouldn't be a good idea for them to do because people will try to game the system.

So now you have a situation where people are trying to feel a sense of control over things with a certain aura of mystery and clarity, that's not a real word, about what's actually happening here. And that lends itself to people looking for security in all of these things that they think work. And because Google is not being transparent because they can't be, it's not possible, it's a machine learning system, you don't know the algorithm, that breeds a certain mistrust. "Oh, Google, you're not telling me 100% what's in the algorithm because, oh, you're trying to lie to me," which they're not, it is they literally can't tell you what's in the algorithm.

So there's this sort of weird mistrust which sort of propagates these myths and falsehoods that comes out why? Because of the way the algorithm is constructed, that's not possible to give over and Google shouldn't give it over because people will misuse that information. And that relationship now between some people out there in the SEO world and Google is one of mistrust, and that's the core symptom.

Crystal Carter:

And I think to counter that, Google since the days of Matt Cutts has done things like they've had the search liaison so you have Danny who's joined the team, you have John Mueller who's joined the team and would do Webmaster hangouts and stuff and chat to people about different things. And they've done a lot of stuff in their documentation to try to be fairly transparent about a lot of their stuff. But I think there was a realization that they needed to have an education piece and that they needed to have a direct relationship with the search community in order to make sure that people are getting good information and that know where to go when things are happening. So I think that that's a prime example of figuring out what the diagnosis is in order to make sure that you've got good channels to manage the brand well.

And I think that the other thing that's interesting is that particularly with the search liaison thing, taking Google as an example, they have that conversation from their Google search central channels, they don't have those conversations from their Google channels on social media for instance. They have how search works, they have search on, they have Google I/O, they have various different events and activities and stuff, but they have specific channels that are dedicated to having conversations about their brand.

And I think it is important to remember that when you're thinking about your brand and you're thinking about your brand refresh, sometimes it should also be a question of adding on to your brand. Maybe what you need is you have Batman, so if you think about Batman, you have Batman and there's like, "I'm Batman," Batman, right? Then you have Batman and Robin, right? And Batman and Robin is a different ballgame. Batman and Robin has a slightly different vibe than just Batman on his own. So sometimes it might be that you need a new strand, you needed a new angle to add to your brand so that people understand what's going on there, and so that you can dedicate information or dedicate time and resources in a focused way towards something that you care about.

Just like in the same way that a normal person might be like, "Hey, yeah, on the weekends I do rock climbing." And you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were, I don't know, an accountant or something." It's like, "No, actually I'm also an amazing rock climber." And you have your rock climbing friends and they know that you do the rock climbing thing and that's a slightly different thing from what you do. So I think it is also a question of remembering that refreshing your brand can sometimes be adding onto your brand so that people can see the main parts of your brand in a new light as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Great point. And it's kind of exactly what Google did. And if you see, Google really a diagnosed a problem, and they did a great job using John Mueller and Danny Sullivan and John in particular, really trying to combat that, "Hey, there's a certain level of mistrust for a variety of reasons that brewed, now we have to handle that." And the fix then becomes about, A, execution, which is not always easy, but it's really, "Okay, what we need to do next, we need to build trust." The next move should be easy after diagnosis, like, where do we go? Obvious where we go, the diagnosis naturally leads to it. And Google did a brilliant job with this.

But it's really the point, I think when we think about brand marketing, we think, "Oh, creative idea around this, creative idea around that," that's true but that only comes after, in my opinion, the real branding work, which is diagnosis. And then you can get to all those crazy ideas and all those fun ideas and all that great stuff about how to implement the fix.

Crystal Carter:

And it can be hard, diagnosis can be hard, and-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's the hardest part.

Crystal Carter:

I don't mean just hard from a sort of like, "Oh, it's hard to find out," I mean also it can be painful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah. And by the way, no matter what, take Google for example, does everybody believe them now? No, you're not going to convince everybody. You need to have realistic expectations. There's always going to be people saying, "LSI keywords are a real thing, Google's lying." That's going to happen.

Crystal Carter:

But I think also sometimes you have to have some home truths. One of the things that John Mueller very often says is like sometimes SEO ain't the only answer, sometimes the issue is actually something to do with product or whatever it may be. Do you know what I mean?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, exactly.

Crystal Carter:

So sometimes you have to have some home truths. Like I broke my arm when I was 16, I ran into a parked car on my roller plates. Anyway, I broke my arm and I went to the emergency room, the ER, and they're like, "Oh, can you put your arm like this on the X-ray machine?" And I was like, "No, I cannot, I cannot." They were doing this so they could diagnose the problem, but it was painful for me because if I could do that, I wouldn't be in the emergency room in the first place. So anyway, but what I'm saying is it can be painful to have to look at yourself and go, "Why is this happening?" And maybe the issue is something to do with something that's going on with your brand in that maybe you actually need to do some fundamental changes to that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, no matter what changes your brand is going through, there's always something that's changed in the wider world of SEO so here's this week's Snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news.

First up, and mainly because it fell through the cracks of when I record these news segments, I try to balance out observing the Jewish holidays and recording these segments, the many articles from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable say there is a new helpful content update. It rolled out on September 15th, Barry covered it on Search Engine Roundtable. There was also a downtrend in some of the volatility on the 21st, which Barry also covered over at Search Engine Roundtable. It's hard to pinpoint what that volatility downgrade means as the whole volatility landscape over the last two months is out of whack. I have some wild conspiracy theories about that, but I try to only wear my tinfoil hat on Twitter so we're going to forego that for now. By the time you hear this, the update may already be over, making this old not new. So keep tabs by heading over to seoroundtable.com, as you always should for the latest and greatest on all the idiosyncrasies of the SEO world.

Okay, article number two from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google confirms quality is foremost factor in search indexing. So Google has their podcast, Search off the Record, and they said quality, content quality, website quality is the most important thing. So it's official. We said it was meta descriptions, but clearly I was wrong. Joking, I never thought that, nor should anybody have ever thought that. Quality is obviously the most important thing for all things.

Anyway, lastly, Barry did it again, the last time he complained, Bard didn't have any updates. Google released an update to Bard. Well, he did it again, he went on Twitter, started complaining, "Hey, there's never been an update in 465 days," I'm making that number up, and then Google updated Bard, which just shows you who's pulling the strings over at Google. Anyway, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search can now check Bard's answers. There's a whole slew of changes and updates that Google has made to Bard. These updates include Google telling you if the content in search results is similar to what Bard conjured up. That is very cool and interesting.

They also expanded Bard into 40 new languages. There's a connection to Google Flights, hotels, et cetera, to help you get real time info. I tried the flight things, it gave me relevant information that was up-to-date. I just don't see how that's better than going to Google Flights where the experience is far more holistic and visual. But it's cool. And you can also see a connection or make a connection to your Google account so that you can pull in information from there into Bard. Google said they won't add the information that you connect to the wider Bard database. So that's good to know.

And with that, that is this week's snappy news. Always so snappy, always so newsy, always so many changes every week, and it's part of, like we said, refreshing about your SEO knowledge, the SEO news, why we cover it.

Crystal Carter:

So newsy and so fresh, like a Mountain Dew, like a mountain breeze.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mountain Dew? Ugh, gross.

Crystal Carter:

No, I mean like dew on a mountain.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, like real Mountain Dew. Got it, got it. Not that disgusting stuff. No offense if you like Mountain Dew, but I clearly don't. But you know what I do like? I like Travis Tallent. Travis Tallent is our follow of the week, and you can follow him over on Twitter, or X now, I'm just going to keep calling it Twitter @TallentSpeaks. That's @T-A-L-L-E-N-T S-P-E-A-K-S over on Twitter, TallentSpeaks. He's a VP of SEO and Global Agency over at Brainlabs. He does a lot about branding and SEO, which is why he's our follow of the week because we're talking a lot about branding just now and SEO. So perfect follow for this week, Travis Tallent, check him out over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, Travis is great. He's got some fantastic insights, and he's always just full of tons of energy about what's going on in search. So yeah, absolutely follow him.

Mordy Oberstein:

Amazing. Well, that's it. We've reached the mountain of refreshment.

Crystal Carter:

Are we going to go to the fountain of knowledge?

Mordy Oberstein:

Every week.

Crystal Carter:

Every week?

Mordy Oberstein:

Every week on this podcast, it's the fountain. I'm just looking for the fountain of youth, the fountain of Knowledge, not my problem, it's the youth, that's what I'm in need of. Also the fountain of babysitters for my children for the summer vacation while we're recording this and oh boy. Well, on that happy note, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week as we take up the future of SEO in 2024 in a very very special episode format. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of 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.