Repurposing your content for search

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the un-impeccable, the uncomparable, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal J. Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, snap.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't think I've ever used your middle initial before.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah, that's what I was saying. That's why I was like, oh no, it's gotten real because like we're pulling out. We're pulling out. It's like when your mom calls you and she uses your full name and you're like, oh, snap.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not good. Things are bad.

Crystal Carter:

Things are happening now.

Mordy Oberstein:

When that happens, things are definitely bad.

Crystal Carter:

I did not clean my room and I'm about to hear all about it, that kind of thing. Oh, no.

Mordy Oberstein:

But I didn't realize this until right now, by the way, which is just terrible. We have the same middle initial.

Crystal Carter:

Oh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I doubt it's the same name. I don't want to discuss my middle name, but I doubt it's the same.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not Jacob?

Crystal Carter:

Jacob is a good name. I like that as a name because you can short it to Jake. You can shorten it to Jake.

Mordy Oberstein:

Jake, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Jake's a good name.

Mordy Oberstein:

Jake The Snake.

Crystal Carter:

What's it called? Was it like Big Man Jake or something? Was that a movie or something?

Mordy Oberstein:

It might be.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. Something like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well, anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can easily turn a great point in a blog post into a video for social media with a huge library of templates courtesy of Vimeo. I know, I've used it. This, as we're taking a look at repurposing your content for search. Have you ever done a webinar, perhaps a podcast, and now you're interested in making that content work for Google Search success? Then do we have the episode for you? Sorry, too salesy. Then you're in the right place. Still too salesy. Then today, we're talking about repurposing video and audio content that you love so much and making it work for the SERP. To use transcription or not to use transcription, this is the question when we're repurposing video and audio assets for search. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of user intent, how not to waste your time repurposing the wrong assets.

Friends, Romans, lend me your ears and you shall hear how AI can help you repurpose video and audio content for search. Also, LinkedIn's own Purna Virji stops by to share tips on how to repurpose content at scale. And we'll talk the flip side as we get into repurposing your audio and video content into Google SERP features. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. So if repurposing be the music of Google rankings, repurpose on as episode number 48 of the SERP's Up podcast is a bounty that is boundless as the sea. That's all the Shakespeare I know. In fact, that's more than the Shakespeare I know. I had to Google half of that.

Crystal Carter:

Alas, poor Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Alas, I do not like Shakespeare.

Crystal Carter:

You do not like Shakespeare?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, which is I don't know why I went all Shakespearean. It started off with to use a transcript or not to use a transcript, that is the question when repurposing content for search. Oh, my God, I guess I got to go Shakespeare with this, so I did.

Crystal Carter:

Maybe so. I feel like there's a way. Shakespeare wasn't that into video particularly.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. He was more a podcast person.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I reckon. He was more into-

Mordy Oberstein:

Relax.

Crystal Carter:

... waxing more poetical and things like that, but I think that yeah, maybe he would've had a YouTube channel or something if Bill was around today.

Mordy Oberstein:

He would have had a YouTube channel. He would've had a thumbnail of him doing crazy poses.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. He'd be like, like and subscribe to The Bard, dropping bars here on the YouTube channel.

Mordy Oberstein:

So basically, Shakespeare would be your typical less unreputable YouTuber.

Crystal Carter:

He'd probably be making YouTube Short or TikToks or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

They would not too short. It'd be very long. It'd be-

Crystal Carter:

Absolute.

Mordy Oberstein:

... very long,-

Crystal Carter:

Very long soliloquies-

Mordy Oberstein:

... very long.

Crystal Carter:

... and very dramatic things for some of the tragedy. I've seen a lot of Shakespeare and some of the tragedies, they're brutal at the end and everyone.

Mordy Oberstein:

Know what will be a tragedy? If you had a great audio and video content and you didn't repurpose it for search because repurposing content is incredibly powerful. It helps build cadence. I love talking about cadence. I had a whole tweet the other day from a recording, not the other day, from re-releasing all about how cadence is your ally as a brand marketer. It helps you to reach new audiences in new ways and new channels and it's super efficient because you're maximizing the amount of effort you put into the content creation process. However, I tend to think that we generally think of repurposing, at least I do, about taking written content that's really made for search and turning it into a podcast or a video or a short. But today, we're doing the opposite. We're talking about the reverse of taking your not written content and then turning it into written content that you can repurpose for search. Crazy, crazy right there.

I think it's a whole different mindset, by the way, and I think it's what makes it difficult. When you're to say creating an infographic for social, that's a very specific kind of mindset. You want something catchy. You want something that's going to grab on. It's going to get retweets. It's going to get liked. It's whatever it is. It's a very in the moment kind of way of thinking. But search is very, very, very different. I think the biggest thing here is mindset. Mindset matters most. I'm a big believer in that. I think here in particular, I think there's a lot to swap around in terms of mindset when you're repurposing audio video content for search versus taking, let's say, a blog post and repurposing it as audio video content for other media channels. I think that means, for example, just to be really specific about it, I think you want to leave aside the hook to a certain degree and bring out quality insights and targeting, which is to say it's different than say social media where the hook is super important.

I think in terms of mindset, you want to figure out how to work faster because the barrier to entry is harder. You're creating written content for search. It's very time-consuming. I think you want to fit into a larger strategy that has lasting power because hot trends on social and capturing that for a quick win so you can get a thousand more followers for you and your company, in two weeks, that's just not search and it's a completely different mindset. So talking about repurposing content, audio, video content for search, I feel like start with the mindset.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think that essentially, when you're thinking about taking video and adding it into the content that you expect to rank on search, then you should be taking the same SEO approach that you would to everything. So thinking about keyword research, thinking about the keywords in the content. On YouTube, for instance, you can search for the words wI've done it before where I was looking up something and I was looking for somethingithin the YouTube transcript. They auto-generate transcripts. You can search for the words within the transcript.  and I found a video of you, Mordy Oberstein,-

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you really?

Crystal Carter:

... talking about something else. The topic of the webinar wasn't anything to do with that. The topic of the thing that you were on wasn't anything to do with that, but you had mentioned this specific element within that transcript and so they're able to pull those things out. So when you're creating content, it's very important to think about what you're saying in the video if you're planning, as part of the content life cycle, to include that into other parts of your web page. The other thing that's really important to think about is that video content can be repurposed on multiple pages that you expect to rank for search. There may very well be a few different places where you can put this on your website and you should think about that again when you're in the mindset that the point of entry is high.

It takes a long time to think about a script and get your lighting right and get everybody in the right place and make sure the sound is all good and all of that sort of stuff. It takes time to invest in video, so you want to make sure that you're able to get maximum impact out of that content, so something that is fairly evergreen, maybe something that doesn't need to be changed every two weeks. Like you were saying, you don't want something that like, oh, it's a trend to this week and then nobody cares next week because it's not that useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

SEO is long-term stable growth for the long run.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. Exactly. So think about that when you're thinking about the kinds of things that would make good video and would make good video for people who are searching. I think also it's important to think about how the content that you have that you expect to help other content rank will help that content to rank. We generally see that the click-through rate for videos is much higher, sometimes three times higher than the content that doesn't have videos on the SERP because you've got a few different options to show that video on the SERP. So make the most of it. Make sure that the video lines up with the content that's written with any images that you have with all of those things, that it's not just some random video that's nothing to do with the page because Google can tell and that's important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that's a good point because we're talking about you're setting up the video and you're thinking about the transcript, which is what you're going to be using for ranking and getting the right keywords in there. But let me bring up a question to you. Does it always make sense to transcript? Because sometimes, I find that the transcript can be very broad in a way. I'm not describing it the best way possible, but it's conversational, so getting those meaty points taken out of the transcript and really focusing on them might work better. Forget for search for your readers, but it also might work better for search. Now you can add in headers. Now you can structure the content a little bit better. I'm not saying that transcripts don't rank, can't rank and whatnot, but I'm wondering your thoughts on, you know what? Maybe that would be a good use case for AI. Maybe you take the transcript and say, "Hey, AI. Take this transcript and turn this into something that's more structured."

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think I've done similar exercises and you can tell the AI, I don't want this rewritten. Don't give me your hallucinations. I don't want that. I literally want you to tidy this up.

Mordy Oberstein:

Add headers to it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Take the ums out. Take all the likes out, like like, like, like and that sort of thing. So that's really useful. I think in terms of the content that supports the videos, so one thing that's really interesting about videos in search is that Google has recently, they keep adding more and more features on Google Search Console to help you manage your video pages. They've more clearly defined what a video page is. They've added in more documentation about what are the best requirements for having your videos show on the SERP, and particularly if you're using YouTube, which evidence has shown that YouTube is the service of choice. So definitely have a look at that. I'm talking about a lot of this at my MozCon presentation in August.

Mordy Oberstein:

A plug.

Crystal Carter:

So I'll get into this in a bit more detail, but studies have shown anecdotally in any way, we're seeing a lot of evidence that YouTube is a preferred platform. But the other thing that's great about YouTube is that YouTube has a lot of the defaults that match up with a lot of the requirements that Google has. YouTube will automatically generate a transcript. If you improve that transcript on YouTube, that is valuable.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's also true.

Crystal Carter:

That is useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point.

Crystal Carter:

Because YouTube, they doqn't always get it right.

Mordy Oberstein:

They don't always get it right. It's a little bit weird sometimes.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and they don't always put the periods, the full stops, whatever you want to call them. They don't always put those-

Are
Mordy Oberstein:

That's what I mean.

Crystal Carter:

... in the right place.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're talking about AI. I'm talking about AI and AI and AI. We talked about this with Ross Hudgens on our webinar that we did over the Wix SEO Learning Hub. When you give AI confines and you let it work in a closed environment, it is way better. If you already have some sort of content, which you generally have with video or a podcast you have, the transcript, you have something you're working with, it's an optimal case to use AI to refine it, which I'm not saying you don't need to go back and refine it yourself a little bit more, but you could take a lot of that hard work out. The repurposing video audio for search is a prime case where I think AI does work.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it does. It does. It works really well. And the thing is YouTube's using AI to understand it. YouTube's using AI to generate the transcript in the first place. So essentially, you're adding into more refinements there. So with regards to what's on the page, generally speaking, there can be good practice into adding a transcript. Again, it will depend on the quality of the transcript. Some videos are made specifically to be part of a page and so they essentially read and are written like a transcript. If you have a more conversational situation like a podcast or webinar or something or it's something to that effect, some editing, it can be really, really valuable. I think that it depends on the medium and on what users are expecting. I have very much, particularly when I've been looking for a quote, been extremely grateful when people have put the entire transcript of a webinar or an activity on a website because you can get the quote much more clearly when it's on the page.

If you try to extract the transcript from YouTube, it's a little bit annoying. Then I use the AI to take out all the timestamps. So yeah, I think it depends on what the value is of the transcript and you'll know whether or not you were on topic or whether you were on a tangent and we're talking about Shakespeare when you were supposed to be talking about videos.

Mordy Oberstein:

We would never do that. We would never do that.

Crystal Carter:

Laser-focused.

Mordy Oberstein:

All the time. So we covered transcripts. We covered AI. I want to cover one more point if we could, and that's how to know if you're not wasting your time. How do you decide when you should repurpose video or audio content for the main search results? Because I'll give you a case. Did you know, Crystal, that Beatle videos has a global search volume of 1,100 searches every month according to Semrush? Wow. Did you know you should not repurpose your video content for written content there for the SERP because all of the results Google is showing is from YouTube? I could repeat this with the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. See?

Mordy Oberstein:

Beyonce.

Crystal Carter:

When you said Beatles, I wasn't sure which Beatles you were talking about. I was like, are we talking about stag beetles-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, my God.

Crystal Carter:

... because I like stag beetles. Stag beetles are cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let me quickly run this through Semrush again.

Crystal Carter:

B-E-E-T.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Beyonce videos has a monthly search volume of 4,400 every month, and I guarantee you if I Google it, it will all be YouTube videos. Do not waste your time. What I'm trying to say is you need to go and look and see what the intent on the surface because maybe it doesn't support written content.

Crystal Carter:

So here's the thing. When you're thinking about this, I tend to go the other way. I tend to look at what content you have on your site. Let's say you have written content on your site and you have some videos on your YouTube channel. You can do this on Semrush. I'm sure you can do this on other tools as well. Look at your site and look at which pages are ranking and which pages could be ranking for videos, which pages-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're spoiling it.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

You're spoiling it.

Crystal Carter:

What am I spoiling?

Mordy Oberstein:

This. This is our dynamic segment for later. Later, we're going to be going going Google where we talk about looking at what's ranking on the SERP for video and audio content.

Crystal Carter:

In the tool, you can do this. In the tool, you can do this. You can see what things are ranking for which SERP features. There's a few different tools that will tell you which SERP features are available and you can look on mass at your tools rather than just looking at a single page, which we will discuss in more detail. But you can look at which keywords your page is ranking for and you can look at and see where there are video opportunities. Doing it that way is really, really effective and can help make sure that you're not wasting your time and that you're complimenting content that is ranking well as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

It could be anything. It could be like, okay, I'm going to spend time optimizing this transcript and on the SERP, all that's there are very short, quick answers.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have to just make sure you're lining up with the intent when you're repurposing content for the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

Of course. Sometimes, it's a question of having a little bit of a mix and match. I'm going to caveat and say this isn't necessarily editorially my favorite publication, but one of the things that the Daily Mail does is they do a TLDR. They'll have an article about, oh, Blue Ivy performed with Beyonce at the London Show, and yes she did. Blue Ivy did not come out at the Cardiff show and I was a little bit upset because I was at the Cardiff show and I was not at the London show, and I was like, whatever. Okay, fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow.

Crystal Carter:

Anyway, so let's say there's this article about that. They will have the headline and they will also have a couple of TLDR points. So they'll say like, "Blue Ivy showed up for this song. Blue Ivy did this. Blue Ivy did that." They have a couple of lines and then they'll get into the long, long, long, long, long of the whole article. For instance, if you're seeing something like that and let's say maybe at this time, this moment in time, maybe you don't have time to do a full refit of your transcript page, but maybe you have time to do at the top a couple of quick summarizing points of this topic covers this, this, this and this. That's something that can help you to satisfy some of that quick TLDR intent and also allows you to have the people who want to get in and get the quote or who just want to jump to the part that they're interested in, which are those people, and I'm one of those people, then it allows you to satisfy both intents for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if you're doing all these different intents and all these different pieces of content and all this repurposing to try to take your audio and your video content and make it ready for rankings among the traditional blue links, then you need to do it at scale, which means we need ideas about how to do this at scale, which is why LinkedIn's own principal content solutions evangelist, Purna Virji, is here to discuss how you can repurpose content at scale. By the way, she got a new book. I'll link in the show notes. We're plugging her book.

Crystal Carter:

Get the book.

Mordy Oberstein:

Get the book. Here's Purna.

Purna Virji:

Hi, Mordy and Crystal. I'm here to share three tips in just about three minutes on how you can repurpose your content at scale. To do this, we're going to take inspiration from Hollywood. Think of a movie like Star Wars. That one creative has been turned from movies into toys, video games, lunch boxes, clothes, you name it. That one idea has been used in a ton of different ways to make billions and billions of dollars overall. May some of that force be with us and it certainly can be with these three blockbuster strategies to repurpose content like a movie mogul. Let's start with tip number one. Now, if we think about biopics and movies based on true stories, they tend to have a really great track record at the box office. We can channel that same idea by building content from news and current affairs to be relevant and timely or suddenly rewrap our content in this news and current affairs newsjacking shell.

Let's say, for example, you're a financial planning company and some existing content that you have provides advice on how people can reduce the inheritance bill. How can you reuse it in a way that feels current and fresh and still interesting? That's why you turn to the news. For example, a company called Birkett Long had seen this news story talking about how the actor Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, 007, will not be gifting his estate. So they created a post all about that and then they segued very, very cleverly into sharing their practical advice into how people can reduce their inheritance bill. So clever, existing content rewrap to feel fresh and current and get people to want to read it. Tip number two, remakes of older movies or foreign movies are big business. What we can learn from that is why create from scratch when you can curate from what's worked elsewhere? One of my favorite places to curate from, your data, especially data that can help you stand out during your customer's research process.

Think about things like success or effectiveness rates or you can share how customers saw a big improvement. Any values or benefits for choosing you that can be found by data can be turned into really high-value content that already exists. I swear if Mulder and Scully from X-Files were content marketers, they'd agree that the content is out there. You just need to join forces with other teams to find it. Okay, tip number three, think about spin-offs, re-releases, movies made from TV shows, they all show us the value of reusing our own heads in new ways. But now when I'm saying reuse your existing content, I'm not saying just take the existing content and slap it everywhere. No, because that's not really exciting, is it? Something that many people miss, but is one of my favorite tips to do is to go and look at high-value or high-investment pieces, whether it's a research report or a white paper or some ultimate guide. Generally, there's a lot of really good richness in there and its content that can appeal to different types of audiences.

So what I advise people to do is pull out different excerpts from it and create shorter pieces that are very highly targeted to certain demographics. Let's say if you are a B2B company and you are trying to appeal to maybe an HR or a manager would be the ultimate decision maker, but the employees of the company would be the end users. You'd want to appeal to both so that way, you can get employees asking and recommending your brand, but you also then appeal to managers and HR to assign the decision. This way, you can speak much more relevantly to each audience and it's not starting from scratch. You can do this by just repurposing what works. So remember, you can create dozens and dozens and dozens of assets with minimal work when you can use the same core IP in a variety of different ways. So anti-hustle culture, reuse, and recycle. Let's even be sustainable with our content. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Purna. Love all the movie references. This is great.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, movies, TV. We had Star Wars. I'm guessing. Where it’s giving me like sci-fi fan vibes because she mentioned Star Wars and the X-Files.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love sci-fi. I love sci-fi. You know what I also love? Repurposing content the right way.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so many good points. When I'm thinking about repurposing content, I'll tell you the way that I approach it is, what can I spin off really quickly that I can replicate over and over and over again without a lot of resources?

Crystal Carter:

Also, I think it's a question of what can add value to users in a new way? She talked about Star Wars for instance. One of the reasons why they rebooted it again was that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Make money, was to make lots of money.

Crystal Carter:

Well, there's that, but I think also, was to appeal to a new audience. We see this with a few different things where they'll take something that's a little bit retro and they'll reboot it with maybe a younger team or something. So then you have the people who remember it from the nostalgia, that audience, and then you have the people who are seeing it afresh and they're relating to the newer people who are involved with it. I think that this is the thing with your content. We've been talking about video in this particular instance. There might be people who really love a really chunky article that they can sit down with a nice cup of coffee and really get into. There's going to be some people who like video, who like to get video and they're getting most of their notifications via YouTube or via another video streaming platform.

So if you're connecting with them in a different way, then that means that you're able to reach them in a way that they find most valuable. The content is going to be really good content, but if you're able to reformat it and repackage it, then yeah, all the better and great, better for user value.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, just make sure that you're not alienating your previous audience when you're creating this content like Star Wars did. I'm salty, very salty about the whole Star Wars thing. We had 20 years, 20 more, 30 years, 35 years, whatever, for Luke Skywalk to come. We're not even going to go there? I will say with repurposing content, one of the things that you want to think about is, hey look, you just got to get going with it sometimes. In order to get going with it, take the path of least resistance and build upon that and then take it from there because it can seem daunting. It can seem overwhelming and it can seem like five jobs all into itself. Get going. Find a quick way to get some momentum on it. See the value in it and that'll help you keep delving into that process even further.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, since we're talking about video and audio content, as you probably know, audio and video content does live on the SERP itself. Google has SERP features for both video and audio, which means that you want to get video and content itself to show up on the SERP whenever appropriate. Let's see where video and audio content on the SERP is heading as we take a directional look at where things are trending towards when it comes to audio and video content on the SERP as we are going, going, going Google. And it's going, going Google. It's out of here. As a podcaster, an award-winning podcaster I might add,-

Crystal Carter:

I've seen the award. Thanks, Mordy for reminding me that you got an award.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Hold on.

Crystal Carter:

It's obnoxiously gold.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is so golden and it's so heavy.

Crystal Carter:

It's like, what's that? There is a guy, speaking of movies, the baddie in Goldfinger.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never liked those movies.

Crystal Carter:

No, Goldmember, Goldmember, the Austin Powers.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

That, I know.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

If it was Bond, I don't know, but Austin Powers, right up my alley. You may know that I like podcasting. One of the things I pay attention to as a podcaster is what happens on the SERP for podcast. We've all blog post about this on the SEO hub, the Wix SEO hub that I'll share in the show notes about how to optimize your podcast for search. One of the things that Google tends to show is a box or a carousel, however you want to describe it, that lists all of the podcasts related to the queries. If I search for baseball podcasts, I'll get organic results, but it'll generally sit under a giant box of actual podcast listings that represent baseball podcasts. Now, something that I happen to notice is that for more niche areas like SEO, for example, that carousel is often gone, which by the way, means that the organic placement itself, meaning your actual organic result for the podcast are being shown on lists that represent in the podcast are really important now or more important than they were before.

They're really important before because that carousel is gone. I'm talking about, say particularly when you're searching for something, SEO podcast, the carousel, as of this recording, has been gone for a while. I was tracking, by the way, sports medicine podcast, not that I'll do a sports medicine podcast, but again, as a podcaster keeping tabs on these things, that's gone. The only time it shows up is when you search for best SEO podcast. Now the carousel is back, or best sports medicine podcast. I have a theory.

Crystal Carter:

What's your theory?

Mordy Oberstein:

I have a theory that Google realizes that people are trending towards not going to the SERP for podcast anymore.

Crystal Carter:

Interesting, interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're just going to go to Spotify.

Crystal Carter:

That's very interesting. I think that that's absolutely true for some searches. You're going to get people who go straight to Spotify or maybe go straight to Google or to Google Podcasts or there's the Apple Podcasts as well. I think that it's a prime example of how SERP features are amazing, but it's also important that you rank in the plain blue links when you're doing things because we've seen that the podcast carousel, for instance, will show. I think on marketing podcasts at the moment, in the UK anyway, I'm getting the display, but as you're saying, it's very dynamic and I've seen that SEO podcast one go up and go down and go up and go down and show and not show.

I think that if you're not ranking on the blue links at all, then when those features come and go, which they are want to do because Google might be doing a test or Google might be changing around, they might try to change the SERP feature, if you're not ranking on the plain blue links as well, then that's something that can be a challenge. This is one of the reasons why you should think about that for all kinds of content and not just podcasts as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and something to really pay attention to and it's interesting that it's changing. If you look at traffic around, let's say Spotify itself, you see a lot of the direct traffic, the organic traffic, a lot of this is going up and up and up over time. We didn't even see how the market ecosystem's play into what happens on Google. I'm just speculating. I don't really know.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I think they're also sending a lot of traffic to Spotify. So certainly on mobile, if you look up, I think we mentioned Beyonce or whatever, but let's mention her again, but if you look up one of her songs or one of her albums or something, they might very well give you a link to Spotify that goes direct to that part of Spotify that goes to that page or goes to that song or goes to that playlist or whatever. So they're very happy to send people directly into apps in order to satisfy the user need.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So that's audio. Let's talk about video because you started getting into this a little bit earlier around what's happening with the video SERP and what matters, what doesn't matter these days for getting your video onto the SERP. By the way, just some personal experience, we've seen it with our webinar videos. If you can get a video onto the SERP, you can drive a tremendous amount of views, traffic, or whatever to describe it to your YouTube channel, which is amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think it's important to remember that those two things should work in conjunction. It's very much the case that if you have a video that is on your website and that you're using as a supplementary or complementary or even the primary aspects of a particular web page or blog, then you should also make sure that you're optimizing that page on YouTube. You can add in some of the chapters, for instance, on your YouTube videos. You can add in links back to your content on your YouTube video. You can add in keywords into your YouTube. You can also add in other things. Depending on how you're configuring your website, you can also use some of the attributes from your YouTube optimizations on your web page. So for instance, on Wix, we have Wix Video and one of the things that Wix Video does is you can embed a video from your website.

Wix Video is using YouTube's configuration to generate schema markup for that video. So when you add a video onto Wix using Wix Video, it will automatically generate schema markup for that video and it will also pull out the attributes from the YouTube video. So not only will it pull out the summary and the name, but it will also pull out some of those keywords that you would add into your YouTube optimization. So if you are thinking coherently about your YouTube strategy and your video strategy as you're making your content, as you're optimizing your content, then you can find efficiencies through your optimizations. We've seen that users are very often clicking those links that are in the descriptions. We see that regularly. And also, the other thing that's really important to think about is backlinks. When you add a video onto YouTube, that counts as a backlink and that counts as referral traffic and that counts as Google being able to understand what's going on there. So that helps to distribute your content in a number of ways as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And if you're going to have the video on the page, one thing to note as of more recent times is that in order for your page to have the video thumbnail show up, it has to be the video is the main content on the page.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's something to consider because if you do have that kind of video and you can show it where it's appropriate to show it towards the top of the SERP for that particular page, then do it because results that are visual are far more clickable than results that are just unto text.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. Put the video at the top. Put it at the top. Put it at the top. There's nothing worse than having a video on your page and it says at the bottom like, "Oh, this isn't the main video." When you go onto Google Search Console that you can look in your video pages report and you can see whether or not this thinks this is the main content of the page, and if it is the main content of the page, put it at the top so that Google knows that it's the main content of the page. You shouldn't be any ambiguity about that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Since we're talking that directionally about Google, the fact that Google's adding more video information into Search Console kind of tells you everything that you really need to know about where the web is at.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Precisely. Users are updating video all the time and users really enjoy video. We see the number of videos that people are watching only increases every year. The thing that's really strange is that even though that people are watching more and more videos, marketers are saying they should make more and more videos. If you ask users do they want more videos from marketers, they say yes. So I'm like, when will it end? How many videos do you need, people? No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, I could literally waste my life away on YouTube. I am your target market.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I've definitely done that of an evening. I watched that video. It was seven ways to tie a scarf, which is years old, but that was peak what am I doing with my life. Because I knew all of the different ways. There's only so many ways to tie a scarf.

Mordy Oberstein:

I literally enjoy sports people talking about the same point, different sports hosts talking about the same point over and over and over again on a daily basis.

Crystal Carter:

I really like watching people get their hair done on YouTube. I like the before and after. I like that when somebody comes in and we're like, oh look, now they've got a different hairstyle. Well, it's very nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like yelling and screaming. You like-

Crystal Carter:

Potatoes, potatoes. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yeah. Hey, look, by the way, I sent a bunch of tweets about baseball, which you never even saw. You should check out. It's old Slack. They're hilarious.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're talking about videos. Anyway, speaking of videos, we have a great Follow of the Week for you who does a lot of videos, but we got some news for you first.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

What's the news?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. What is it?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know yet because I haven't gotten to yet, but I do know one thing. It's snappy. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First things first, the SEO tools that track changes in the levels of rank fluctuations have all been red-hot. Google is really mixing up rank these days. To that, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable writes that, "Coming to a theater near you, you could expect an official Google algorithm update this summer." Prepare for impact, red alert and a bunch of other urgency-related catchphrases. Also, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable again, Google Merchant Center: How To Build Trust With Your Customers. A lot of really, really, really interesting takeaways from this one. This is how Google's looking at authority related to products, looking at trust related to products. One of the things they wrote is "include an about us page on your website to show your authenticity and tell customers your unique story."

It's a very underrated tactic. You really should focus on the about page. It's one of the only pages where you can explicitly tell Google who you are, what you do in very direct terms. Also tell your users at the same time, but from an SEO point of view, really, really helpful. Also, Google wrote, "Help potential customers understand how to use your products or how other customers have used them. Show reviews and testimonials about your products and business." I've longed held that one of the things that can help a landing page really do better on search is showing informational content, how to use the product, when to use the product, all of that FAQ-ish kind of stuff. Usually on landing pages, we're very conversion-minded, but Google's basically telling you here, if you have a little bit of an informational intent embedded in there, it could be really helpful and I think it very much resonates with users at the same time, especially if they're a little more skeptical.

Last one for you from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google's On Domain Name Selection: Branding Over Keywords. It's always good to get a refresh on this sort of points and to spell some SEO miss. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast. The question, overarching question was, what do I do? Do I use a keyword to pick my domain name or do I choose a more brand-focused domain name? Gary from Google wrote for example, or rather he said, he didn't write, it's a podcast, Gary over Google said that basically, there's a very little impact from a ranking point of view using the keyword in the URL, but there could be a very big impact from a conversion point of view. I think the example that he gave was, let's say you are selling passport pictures and the domain name is something that relates to passport pictures like best passport picture place versus something very generic like get pictures. You're going to probably choose as a user the domain that is more specifically focused on what you're actually looking for.

So keyword, not a big impact on rankings, but actually having the brand focus on what you do in very specific way, meaning don't worry about the keyword ranking stuff so much, more on the branding side can have a big conversion impact. John pointed out, and I always like John's perspective on these things, John Mueller said, "You should think long term because changing your domain name is always a hassle and you want to keep it for a long time if you can." What he's referring to is you want to think about how your business is going to expand. For example, I mentioned back in the day, the name of my website was vcrs.com when no one uses a VCR anymore. If the domain was more reflective on the wider media as opposed to the specific device, then I might be able to keep the same domain name as technology changes as my product or service offering expands.

So really good points, really foundational points. Always good to get a refresher. Thank you, John. Thank you, Gary. Thank you Martin from Google for the podcast episode. We'll link to all these articles in the show notes and that is this week's Snappy News. As promised as always, so snappy.

Crystal Carter:

So snappy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Snappylicious, really. If it is a soft drink, it will be Snapple.

Crystal Carter:

I literally was just thinking of that and particularly I was thinking of the little poems that they put on their caps of the Snapple. That is proper microcopy. I don't know who thought of that, but the person who did-

Mordy Oberstein:

The branding right there.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's iconic. It's iconic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Now, you know what else is iconic? Love my segues today. Sam Oh. If you're looking for videos about SEO, then you should definitely check out Sam Oh and the videos he's done for, Ahrefs. I'll call them timeless classics on SEO YouTube.

Crystal Carter:

We were very fortunate to have Sam Oh join us at a Wix SEO event at BrightonSEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, I don't want to mess this up. This is our Follow of the Week, people. Sam Oh is our Follow of the Week. I got this, unprofessional award-winning podcast host.

Crystal Carter:

He is award-winning. You need to put that on your YouTube bio. Okay, so our Follow of the Week is Sam Oh. We were very fortunate to have him at a Wix SEO event during BrightonSEO recently. He walked in and he went, "Hi, I'm Sam Oh," and I was like, "Sam, everyone here knows who you are. We all know who you are." He's had billions and billions of views on YouTube and the guy is such a nice guy. He is so methodic and so clear in the way that he creates his videos and the content that he creates and the way that he approaches SEO and it's really very much a resource. It's the kind of content that is just exceptional. He's been doing it for a few years and he's a great asset to the SEO community, an absolute pillar. So absolutely follow Sam Oh, not only because his content's great, but he's a nice guy.

Mordy Oberstein:

And just to add value of it, is that on YouTube, I don't know how to put this gently, sometimes the SEO content is not of the highest quality and it's hard to know who to listen to. Sam is somebody you should listen to, so do follow Sam on Twitter. It's @samS-G-O-H, so S-A-M-S-G-O-H. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes. Now, if we were taking our own advice, we would repurpose our outro every single week.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sometimes it does pay to do custom stuff, so we're going to do a custom outro.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're not going to repurpose from week to week.

Crystal Carter:

All right.

Mordy Oberstein:

We value the podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Is it you're…

Mordy Oberstein:

You get what I'm saying? I'm saying we're talking about repurposing and saving time, but we're not repurposing something that many, many podcasts often repurpose, which is the intro in the outros.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. So are we saying goodbye now?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yeah, sorry. This is my way of saying goodbye.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Bye, everybody.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much for joining us at SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, does social media matter for SEO? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check all the great content and webinars at the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at 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.