How to scale local SEO

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy, overseeing the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the always on point, always on target, always insightful, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that fantastic intro. I'm exactly where I want to be.

Mordy Oberstein:

For free.

Crystal Carter:

In the building. She's in the place. There's one announcer, speaking of local things, there's a local announcer in Cleveland, or he was in Cleveland who used to do the Cavaliers commentating, and every time anyone did a slam dunk, he would go, "Throw the hammer down." It was amazing. I feel like they should get him do commentary for Thor. So whenever Thor throws the hammer down, he would go, "And Thor throws the hammer down."

Mordy Oberstein:

Or if you're a carpenter, you could hire him to watch you as you work.

Crystal Carter:

Precisely. I feel like you could get a sound on your phone or something, and then just whenever you finish doing your carpentry, you just go-

Mordy Oberstein:

Every time you're hammering.

Crystal Carter:

Right, that sort of thing. But that's one of the fantastic things though about local sports announcers, is that each city will have their local announcers and it is unique to that location. So it's something that adds local color and helps you create a bespoke experience for people in that vicinity.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, bespoke. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also grab competitor analysis insights without ever leaving Wix, with our brand new SEO ranking app, a huge pull of competitor insights. Look for it in the Wix app market today.

What does that have to do with today's topic? Absolutely nothing-ish. Well, no, no, not true, not true. Let me find the connection on the spot, fresh for you off the cuff. You can use the tool that I just mentioned to advance your local SEO efforts. Because oh, oh, oh, today is local SEO. We're talking how you can make your local SEO scalable. We're talking about leveling up local SEO production, scaling local landing pages like a beast, when to scale local SEO and when not to, and how to maintain consistency when scaling local SEO. To help us scale the ladder of local SEO, Elizabeth Rule over a sterling sky shares her most important tip to know when working with a business that has multiple locations.

Plus, we take a look at what Google's People Also Ask teaches us about SMBs and SEO. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following in social media for more SEO awesomeness. So put on your best Spider-Man costume and join us as we scale the walls of local SEO in episode number 51 of the SERP's Up podcast.

Disclaimer; if you wear a Spider-Man costume does not mean you'll be able to scale walls.

Crystal Carter:

No. You won't.

Mordy Oberstein:

But do try.

Crystal Carter:

No, please don't try. Don't try.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry. I mean, don't try. Don't try. Unless the wall is you're not high up and you're just trying to climb a wall, in which case you would look a little bit weird, but no harm would come to you.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure Spider-Man jumped over short walls as well sometimes, if he was just in somebody's backyard or something. There's no need to do a full leap and bound, if you can just do a little hop.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no. If you're Spider-Man, you jump over with maximum effort.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, I got you. I got you.

Well, we are your friendly neighborhood SEOs, and we are going to be talking today about what it means to scale local SEO, why this is something that even needs to be discussed, and some of the challenges that I've experienced and other folks have experienced along the way. So when we say scaling local SEO, essentially what we mean is when you have multiple location businesses, or you might even have a franchise business model where you need to essentially scale your local SEO tasks. So these are all of the standard local SEO tasks. Things like location landing pages, like your Google business profile, like your citation management, reviews management, local keyword research. All of those things that you would do for a single business for local SEO, you now need to do for multiple businesses across local SEO.

And this can get very complex very quickly, even as soon as you have two businesses, you have to start thinking about this. I've worked with clients who have three or four locations and they have similar challenges to clients who have had closer to 400 locations via franchisees. And this is something that can be really, really tricky. And the thing that's tricky about it is maintaining consistency and making sure that you're monitoring the implementation that you've established. So it's one of those things that actually thinking about some of the superhero things that you're talking about, it's a little bit like Batman. If you're trying to scale local SEO, one of the first things you need is tools. Just like Batman.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a Cape.

Crystal Carter:

And a Cape. And someone named Alfred as well will generally help.

Mordy Oberstein:

An acrobatic sidekick.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, of course. These are all important things when you're scaling.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a really awesome car.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Shall I keep going?

Crystal Carter:

Theme song? Theme song. I think a theme song would be good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, always need a theme song.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, of course, obviously.

So, you're going to need some tools. Tools are going to be incredibly important for you and incredibly useful for you. So if you think about something like Bright Local or something like Uberall, these are tools that come to mind when I think about managing citations for instance. And if you're not sure what a citation is, this is essentially a listing in the Yellow Pages or Yelp or in other things like that, you're going to want to make sure that you've got all of the listings for where your business is and your business information consistent across every single place your citation is listed. And this can get very tricky very quickly because if you're not managing this with a tool, with a centralized tool, then sometimes what can happen is you can have duplication, you can have the wrong information, people can leave the business, and then maybe you don't have the information to hand or don't have access to the accounts and things like that, which is why tools like Uberall, like Bright Local exist. So those can be really, really helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also, there's Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, parenthetically.

Crystal Carter:

There is an Uberall.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry to interrupt, sorry. Had to, marketer's going to market.

Crystal Carter:

There is an Uberall app in the Wix marketplace, so you can get a look at that and get a taste of what that can do for you. And I've worked with clients where they don't know who set it up, they don't know where it came from. And so even if you only have one or two businesses at business locations, this is something that's really useful. The other thing that's really useful to think about is a Google business profile. They have some tools set up for helping you to manage multiple location businesses. So you can put all of the business locations for a single business into a folder. So if you have a Dairy Queen for instance, you can have a Dairy Queen folder and then you can have all the different locations for all of the places where you can go and get a lovely frosty treat there as well.

Crystal Carter:

The other tools you might want to think about is tools for social posting and managing some of the posts on your Google business profile. So one of the things that can again get really, really tricky with multiple business locations is, do you have separate Facebook pages for everything? Do you have a centralized Facebook page thing as well? These are things that can come up a lot, and also it's something that can be tricky to manage because if you don't have them all underneath the same account, then it can be tricky to get the logins and all of those sorts of things. So it's also really important to have your systems in place. So you want to make sure that you've got good systems. And when you're thinking about your location pages, that's something that's important as well. So making sure that you're templatizing how your pages are created.

So things like your location, schema, your FAQ, your imagery, even how your heading tags are organized and how the page looks can be really important. So if you look at large scale businesses like McDonald's, they will have a template that is the same for every single location to make sure that it's consistent across every single location, so that everyone who comes to find a McDonald's location will be able to find that information.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not to say though that you should have the exact same content across all 4,000 location pages, which is a very common problem, which is a no. Don't do that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. No, you absolutely shouldn't. You should have unique information, but the format of it should be similar. So for instance, again, you're going to have your schema, your location, your map, what services are available, all of that sort of thing. But they should also be specific to you. And you also touched on a point about content. Content can be very tricky when scaling local SEO, because you get into site architecture. Do you have one blog for everyone? Do you have mini blogs for other people? Do you have one website for everyone and then send out the information there? Do you have micro sites for each location? These are things to think about as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. It's really complicated, especially on the blog side. For example, let's say you're not McDonald's and you're not trying to rank for french fry, because it doesn't matter, right? Because as long as they get to McDonald's, there's a McDonald's near you no matter what. But if you're, let's say, only in LA, Boston, and Miami, then the blog content will probably have to be locally centric. So let's say you're offering medical services, I don't know, medical testing. So you have medical testing in Miami and medical testing in Boston. Ranking for medical testing as a keyword itself is probably not entirely relevant. Great if you can, but there's a lot of traffic that just could be not qualified because all the other locations people are searching from are not relevant to you. Then how do you do that? Because now you have one blog with multo….. If I'm coming from Boston, I don't care about the blog post about Miami.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So then you have to plan your content strategy to include touch points where you are doing specific local things. Like let's say you've got your medical testing or something, and let's say the medical test is for diabetes, and let's say there is a diabetes fun run, or something, like a charity fund run that's happening in Boston where your business is. Well, yeah, you should have some content around that if you're involved in that particular thing. But do you put that on the main blog? Do you put that on the thing? How do you spread that around? So you have to think about your site architecture, you have to think about your blog strategy.

Crystal Carter:

So you have to think about your site architecture. You have to think about your blog strategy and your content strategy so that your content includes those things and that you're surfacing it in places that are important. So for instance, if you have a location page for your Boston business and you have one blog a month that's specifically dedicated to Boston stuff, then you should make sure that on the feed for your Boston location page that you have the Boston specific blogs on that feed. There's no point putting the Miami specific ones on the Boston one. That will make things confusing. But you also want to think about things like your imagery so that you've got local imagery on there, that you've got people for the local team that are visible on that particular page as well. But basically when you're thinking about scaling SEO, you need to be extremely organized.

The long and short of it is that you need to be extremely organized. And even if you're just thinking about three businesses, four businesses, or even if you're thinking about 400 business locations that you need to manage, you need to have systems in place so that you don't end up tripping over yourself, duplicating content, sending people to the wrong page, ranking on places where you shouldn't be, having content that's out of date or that is inaccurate in one location and not another, and things like that. So essentially you need to be extremely organized and you're going to need tools. We have a blog on the Wix SEO learning hub that says, do you need SEO tools? Not for everything, not all the time, but for this, you're going to need some tools. You're going to need some tools.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with tools. Those are great. By the way, quick thing on the blog, if you're doing this, and let's say you have a location in Miami, Boston, and New York, so you could just make the locations of categories. So you show up at the blog, right? It's just blog or whatever. It describes the blog itself, and then you have the categories, and if you're from Boston, you click through the Boston. If you're from New York, you click through New York.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's one way to do it. You can do them with sub folders. There's a couple of ways to do it, so to have a think about your architecture, but yeah, you do need to think about your architecture. And also if you're planning on expanding further, that's something to think about as well. So how you're going to potentially expand. The other one to think about, I worked with a client who is dealing with franchisees and they were spinning up all kinds of websites and content and things, because another way that sometimes people do content for local things is they'll syndicate essentially. So you have one central blog that creates content and send it out to franchisees, and then franchisees can publish it on their smaller blogs things. The trick with that though is that you end up with a lot of content that's very similar across a lot of different URLs, which can be tricky.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a big problem getting it all indexed. It's something you really have to think about, right? You think, okay, fine, I'm smart, right? I've automated all the content, it's all coming from a spreadsheet. It's all being automatically populated, which by the way, separate point, I will read to you from Google's guidelines around the helpful content update, describing something that is not helpful. Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics equals unhelpful. Side point. But yeah, if those pages are too similar outset of it not being helpful or it being unhelpful, Google will be like, this page looks like that page. I index it.

Crystal Carter:

And even if you think about users, users can't tell. They'll be like, this looks the same as the other page, and I can't tell this is the same page. I can't tell if this is the same page that I just looked at or not. So these are important things to think about, and I think with franchisees it's really useful to give them guidance. And I think for this particular client, it had all gotten very out of hand, and so my team had to just bring it all back in. So we centralized everything, and I'm working on another project right now with a local charity that's doing a similar thing and they've got 50 plus locations and everyone's been kind of doing things as ad hoc, which also can happen with legacy products. So for instance, this is an organization that's been around for a while and they have some content that was on Facebook, for instance, before Facebook centralized more of the multi-location pages.

So that means that they have to retrofit how they are distributing their content and scaling their activity. So now that there's more tools available, they're able to centralize it. But again, this is one of the reasons why keeping things organized both within the actual content that you're outputting, but also who is the contact for the information about the location.

If you're working with franchises or if you're working with multiple marketing teams, then you're going to need to make sure that you have the details for all of the multiple marketing teams and that you have access to all of the accounts for all the listing pages, for all the other things. Because I think one of the things that people forget about local SEO is there's a lot of off page SEO that happens with local SEO, and you sort of need to be able to do that and need to be able to manage that, and you have to be extremely, extremely organized in order to scale your local SEO. So if you learn nothing else from this, get yourself together, get a spreadsheet, get a checklist, get yourself together, make a plan before you start scaling local SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's especially because it can be super complicated on the site structure side. For example, let's say you're a business that you have in New York, you have five locations, and in Boston, Massachusetts rather, you only have one location, but now the hierarchy is going to have to be different from New York if you want each page to have... Each location rather than have a specific page. A good one, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Precisely. And I think sometimes you get where businesses are pretty much right next to each other, and that can be tricky as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's also very confusing. By the way, real quick one, if you can pull this out one way to differentiate for you, forget SEO for a second, because it is really weird. Sometimes you show up on a website and you're looking at multiple pages, say, I don't know. Let's say I'm looking at, I don't know, Bob's Burger, Bob's got a burger place on one block and like a Starbucks. There's a Starbucks on this street and Starbucks on the next street, and I don't even know which one I'm looking at anymore because they're exactly the same. Show a picture of the branch at the top of the page because it'll usually look different.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, photos are really, really important, and I talked about this before, but photos are also particularly important with regards to visual search because if somebody is doing a visual search or Google's looking up what's near them, Google is able to discern location landmarks from images when they're doing their visual search information assessment. So if you're able to add in some landmarks, for instance, if you have a Bob's Burgers that's on Coney Island and you've got the big wheel behind you, Google's going to be able to place you and they can geotarget those things, particularly if there's a specific landmark on it. If you're Bob's Burgers on Liberty Island, is that the island that the Statue of Liberty's on?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Yes. By the way, my immediate association to Liberty Island, when you said that was X-Men. If you're from New York and I've been to Liberty Island like a dozen times.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

My state, that's how we're wired. That's pathetic. Sorry, everybody.

Crystal Carter:

I was thinking of Liberty City, which I think is the GTA game from years ago.

Mordy Oberstein:

There is a Liberty Science Center in New Jersey.

Crystal Carter:

There we go. But yeah, look, I think it's just really important to keep organized. We've got some great resources around local SEO on the Wix SEO hub from some fantastic local SEOs, Claire Carlisle, Crystal Tang, Darren Shaw. They talk about a lot of this stuff, and they're all very well versed in scaling local SEO and also Amanda Jordan also has some great information about local landing pages.

If you have a look at those and potentially get in touch with them, they're all super friendly and super, super involved with this kind of thing. So if you are interested in scaling this, and if you're looking at your local SEO situation and you have multiple locations and you are not organized and you are seeing that you do not have the consistent information for your businesses across all of your locations, that you don't quite have a content plan that's working for all of your locations, then have a look, get in touch, and try to get yourself together a little bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, I know we mentioned it in the intro, when you have to start thinking about local SEO at scale, and when you have more than one location, like two.

Crystal Carter:

Literally.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of local SEO at scale, we wanted to know what the most important thing to consider when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view. So we asked just that to Elizabeth Rule, an SEO analyst over at Sterling Sky. So here's Elizabeth on what she thinks is the most important thing to remember or to know when working with a business that has multiple locations from an SEO point of view.

Elizabeth Rule:

Hey there, this is Elizabeth Rule, a local SEO analyst with Sterling Sky. One of the most important things I think business owners should know about managing multiple locations is that more isn't necessarily better when it comes to Google Maps. So Google Maps rankings, most people know the three pack that shows up directly in the search results. What people don't know is that Google really doesn't show the same business twice in that map pack, that three pack ever. So if you have two locations for the same business in one city, you're going to have a really tough time ranking both of those in the same map pack. So if your locations are too close together that they would be eligible to show in the map pack together just because of their proximity, it's probably better to just focus on one and put all your effort into one of those locations to help it do better, rather than having two locations that are too close together.

Trying to get both of those to rank is going to be pretty much impossible. What we recommend business owners do is to get locations outside of their main city to expand their service area if they're looking to get more traction on Google Maps. But you of course want to own your backyard first, but if you're looking to expand, you're really going to want to look outside of your current city to do that if you're looking to expand on Google Maps. But there is always the opportunity to expand organically, really anywhere. So business owners that are looking to expand their visibility outside of their current one location, I always tell them instead of looking for another location to get a Google business profile, which is extremely expensive most of the time, try adding more service area pages to your site and optimizing those for the people that are located-

Elizabeth Rule:

And optimizing those for the people that are located in your service area you're not currently serving because they're not finding you on Google Maps. Organic is still a great way to get a lot of local traffic and it's pretty inexpensive. You can create tons of service area pages and optimize them, add the information people are looking for pretty cheaply compared to getting an entire lease and maintaining a location, a physical location to have a Google Business Profile listing. So this is my biggest tip for people trying to manage multiple locations on Google Maps or local search, invest in service area pages aka city pages. They are going to be one of the biggest in best investments you can do for your local site to improve that local SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much Elizabeth for that. You can definitely follow Elizabeth over on Twitter @ownyourserp. That's O-W-N Y-O-U-R S-E-R-P. Own your SERP, get it? Own your SERP because it's a local business. You got to own your SERP. Elizabeth works over with Sterling Sky, with Jay Hawkins. Sterling Sky does amazing content about local SEO, a bunch of studies and Elizabeth is constantly sharing her knowledge about local SEO on Twitter, and you definitely want to give her a follow, join in the conversation with her. She's a lot of fun. And again, check her out on Twitter @ownyourserp. A link to her profile in the show notes. Now, speaking of local SEO, one of the things that you never actually look at when you're doing local, but you should be, is the PAA box?

Crystal Carter:

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Why? I'm going to show you why, because it's a wealth of information. As we go ahead and have some fun with Google's People Also Ask. So when you search for, are you thinking about rather local SEO and research and tools, as you mentioned before, one of the things you're probably not thinking about are the People Also Ask box.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. But you absolutely should. You absolutely completely, completely, completely, absolutely should. I've looked at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square, for instance in London, and it's a prime example of the kinds of things that you'll get there. The thing about the PAA is that they are actually from the questions that people are asking. And what it will do is it will tell you the kinds of things that people want to know about your business. And this is something that I actually got clued up to from Lily Ray, and she was saying that it's worth looking at these things and seeing which questions you are answering on your website and which questions other people are answering on their website.

And looking at the Leicester Square results I found, so for instance, they were asking how many seats does the ODEON Leicester Square have and the answer comes from Wikipedia. What's the biggest cinema in Leicester Square? And it says, oh Leicester Square ODEON and that comes from London Tourist Guide. Which screen is the best screen at the ODEON Leicester Square and that comes from insideci.co.uk. None of those are from Leicester Square ODEON. Y'all, guys. Guys, this is a huge opportunity for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Super Hot Chili Pepper song talks about Leicester Square. That's totally random. No, that's totally random.

Crystal Carter:

My favorite thing is that in England you always get Americans who are like, "I'm going to Leicester Square."

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. I had an Uncle Lester when I was a kid. My grandfather's friend, Uncle Lester. Anyway, one of the things that I like to do with this is when you were looking at a local business, if you look at the People Also Ask box, which again, those four questions, it's usually four, that Google shows that are questions that people also ask that you expand them. You get an answer with a URL to where the answer came from. Kind of like a featured snippet in there is you get to profile like what might be some problems with this business and also what are some unique things you could probably create content around. For example, I used to work in the West Village in New York City, and there was a great cafe on MacDougal Street between Bleecker and West Third, West Fourth, West Fourth called Caffe Reggio.

And it's famous, it's been in a bunch of movies. I think it's in The Godfather. Yeah. For example, it says, what movie is Caffe Reggio in? What is Caffe Reggio known for? What is a history of Caffe Reggio? No one's asking what time do they serve their breakfast menu until, no one's asking how many flavors of coffee do they have at Caffe Reggio. They want to know about the movie. So you should have content about the movie on the website, which I didn't check. Maybe they do or don't. I don't know. I didn't look. I should have looked.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's absolutely worth doing it. I think it's also interesting you mentioned the problems. I've definitely had it where I've looked up at something and I've looked up the business and then it said something that was a negative that I'd never even thought of.

Mordy Oberstein:

I saw the same thing for Peter Luger was a famous steakhouse in Brooklyn. So the questions from the People Also Asked box are one, does Peter Luger have a Michelin Star? Two, how much do Peter Luger waiters make? We'll ignore that for a minute. Three, why did Peter Luger lose a Michelin Star?

Crystal Carter:

Okay, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So addressing that Michelin Star fiasco, I'm assuming it's probably something-

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure Peter's making great food.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, Peter Luger is famous. I don't know what the deal... I have no idea. I've never eaten there before, so I don't know. But it's something that you're going to have to, if you're a local SEO, it's something you're going to have to deal with because if that's in the People Also Ask box, it's probably in the reviews also.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it can sometimes be hot gossip. It's like you're going around, you're just searching for whatever it is-

Mordy Oberstein:

Meet up at Peter Lugers?

Crystal Carter:

Like you're going around and you're just searching for whatever, and then they're just like, "Why did so-and-so disappear?" And you're like, "What? I didn't even know that was a... that's a thing? I didn't even know that happened." And then suddenly you're looking at this saying for this other type of information from this business, but I think it's again, the business that we talked about, own your SERP. This is entirely a perfect example of how you should own your SERP for good, for bad, whatever. If your people are asking questions about you, you should be answering them. They shouldn't be getting that information from someone else.

Mordy Oberstein:

How about this one? Speaking of famous New York eatery landmarks, Tavern On The Green in Central Park. One of the questions in there, first one is, why is Tavern On The Green famous? What do people wear to Tavern On The Green? And three, is Tavern On The Green still around?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, that's a scandalous one for a business. Close down at one point and they opened up again. I think it's happened multiple times if I remember correctly. Let's mean you're going as a marketer and as an SEO, you clearly have something to deal with here because people don't even know that you're still around. So your client being SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO, maybe you need to go one step beyond SEO to like local advertising or local community stuff because people don't actually know that you're actually still around. They think you're not still around. So let them know you're still alive.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And also I think it can again, give you opportunities to sort of see about potential links as well. So for instance, if there's an article that's an older article that's saying that you closed and maybe you closed and reopened, or maybe you closed and you moved and someone posted a blog mistakenly maybe that said, "This business isn't here anymore. It's not there, you can't find it," and you're like, "No, we are here. We're just down the street," then it can give you an idea of maybe which communities you need to reach out to, maybe where you need to do some more link building in order to make sure that people know that you are still indeed around.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you know what we're going to do right now then, we're going to help the SEO news sites build their links as we get into this week's snappy news. The links to which will be in the show notes to read all the articles there. You're welcome to all the SEO publications that we're going to link to. Here's this week's snappy SEO news.

Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news. Let's start with a good SEO scandal. Who doesn't love a good SEO scandal. From Search Engine Land's Danny Goodwin, Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages. So CNET said they want to prune their content by deleting old pages of content as they believe Google only awards new content. I've seen many, many sites do this, and it's really the wrong way to go more often than not. In this case, Danny Goodwin writes quoting CNET, that content deprecation "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant, and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," that Danny says was according to an internal memo over at CNET. Danny goes on to write "Deleting content does not signal those three things. Publishing relevant, trustworthy, helpful, quality content for your audience on a technically sound website is what makes you worthy of greater organic visibility."

Danny, I could not agree more. As I've said, I've seen sites delete content that wasn't getting a lot of traffic as they thought it would help Google see what pages should actually rank. More often than not, in my honest opinion, you are removing pages that help position your site as an authority. Just because a page per se doesn't get traffic or doesn't rank doesn't mean that it's not part of that authority equation that helps the other pages that do rank rank. So read the whole article. There's a lot of little juicy little tidbits in there. It's a great little case study about SEO and I think is for most instances an SEO myth. Okay, a little bit of sad news for you from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, he writes, "Google downgrades visibility of HowTo and FAQ rich results."

So the FAQ feature took FAQ structured data markup and produced a set of expandable cards that was essentially your FAQ on your actual webpage on this Google Results page, on the SERP itself. It really made your results take up a lot more space on the results page and the HowTo carousel is very similar in that it was a set of visual cards that appeared on your result or within your result as a carousel that walked you through how to do something. So say how to sew a button, you get a little set of-

Mordy Oberstein:

How to do something. So say, how to sew a button. You get a little set of cards that visually show you how to sew a button with a couple of words on each card. So, that's basically gone well, I guess. I really like those. I really like the FAQ feature in particular. I felt that if your site was smart about it, it's a great way to compete with some of the larger powerhouse sites that maybe weren't paying attention to the FAQ feature. You could add markup for your FAQ, get a much bigger result as maybe one of your big competitors who wasn't really paying attention. But I guess, oh well, it's gone. If your site had them, they probably don't have them anymore, and it can really cause an impact on traffic from Google. So, keep an eye on your data to see if anything changed.

The FAQ feature will still be there in select cases. Google has said, "Going forward, FAQ from FAQ page structured data, rich results will only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown. Regularly, sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on rather their eligibility." So this is basically talking your Harvard Health, Mayo Clinics, Web MDs of the world. Again, I thought it was a great feature, I'm sad to see it go. There's speculation that maybe it's because SCOs were kind of abusing it as putting FAQ markup and everything, I don't know.

Anyway, last but not least, from search engine land, but not from Barry Schwartz, but rather about Barry Schwartz, this one coming from SEO legend JR Oakes. It's called Tracking 20 Years of Search: Key takeaways and findings from an analysis of SE Roundtable's historical Google Analytics data from 2003 to 2023.

So, you all know at this point, Barry Schwartz covers the SEO news. We featured him on basically every show. He has been covering the news, as you can see here for 20 years. He's written over 30,000 articles. Anything and everything that's happened in SEO has been covered on seroundtable.com, which makes it really interesting, a really interesting place to study and see how SEO has evolved over time, which is what JR did. JR had access from Barry to search into Roundtable's Google Analytics data, and he used it to pull and create some really cool insights that will help you get a really nice history, as I mentioned, of SEO. As again, Barry has literally been the one creating the narrative around SEO by covering everything in SEO.

So for example, you can read the article, you can see things around the popularity of various search engines based on how often Barry covered them over the years, which Google updates got the industry talking, the relevancy of certain aspects of SEO over time. For example, more recently, you see there's a little bit less about mobile SEO than in the past. I cannot more highly recommend you read this article. I will link to it in the show notes, check it out. It's a great ode to Barry, but it's also a great way for you to get a really nice understanding of how SEO has sort of evolved over time.

And I'll just take the opportunity again to say I always try to thank Barry for his 20 years of service, 2003 to 2023, at least from the Google Analytics data here, for covering the SEO industry as well as he does, and as consistently he does. As JR says in the article, Barry is like a robot. He just covers everything all the time. So thank you Barry, and that is this week's snappy news.

Always so snappy, always so newsy, and you're welcome for the links.

Crystal Carter:

You're welcome. There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's all we're going to say. Now, speaking of that, I have no actual natural connection to this, but a follow up week, you thought there was going to be because I'm always so good at it, but I have nothing. I am out. Nada. No smart pivot.

Crystal Carter:

No smart pivot, just-

Mordy Oberstein:

No smart pivot.

Crystal Carter:

... Just a straight pivot.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do have a smart SEO for you. There's a pivot. And I do have a smart SEO for you.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which you should be following on Twitter, and/or whatever social media platform he's on, such as Threads, is now the new hot one. He's there also. He is local SEO legend Greg Gifford.

Crystal Carter:

Greg to the Gifford. The Gifford, the amazing Greg Gifford.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Giffster.

Crystal Carter:

He is the absolutely... He is absolutely a local SEO legend, and such a nice guy and such a fond of knowledge.

Mordy Oberstein:

Super nice guy.

Crystal Carter:

And he's full of energy and full of warmth and so kind, and you see him on lots of things. He's done the Semrush Introduction to SEO course as well. So, he's the guy with the glasses and the beard that you've seen on lots of things. And he seems really warm and friendly, and then you meet him in person and he's really warm and friendly.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's really warm and friendly, and he's got an amazing knowledge of pop culture. It's like-

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Savant level knowledge of pop culture.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. He's so bubbly and friendly, but if you ask him specifically about SEO stuff, he goes straight into nerd mode.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's just like, oh, epic decks. He's always a pop culture thing for all of his decks. He speaks all over the place. By the way, he works for some great people over at SearchLab, that's Mark Belan's Company out of Chicago. Greg puts on some great content local search Tuesdays, where he is giving you tips about local SEO, so we'll link to that in the show notes as well. He's an absolute legend, an absolute great follow. So please, give a follow over to Greg. Learn something about local SEO as you follow @Greg Gifford over on Twitter. And that's it.

I don't have another pivots. I'm pivot-less today.

Crystal Carter:

Pivot near me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pivot near me? Oh, I see. Perhaps I should next time scale all of my pivots so that I have a whole series to pick from.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, pivot Chicago, pivot New York, pivot Los Angeles, pivot...

Mordy Oberstein:

Why did  I pivot as a Michelin star? Because I didn't have any, that's why.

Crystal Carter:

Because it it moved to Montana? I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

I would love to move to Montana.

Crystal Carter:

Have you heard about the TV show Yellowstone?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's over.

Crystal Carter:

I know, you've been telling me about Yellowstone for months.

Mordy Oberstein:

Over. Kevin Costner's not coming back. It's over. It's a sore point for me.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you looking for Yellowstone? You're not going to find it, but are you looking for the Serves Up podcast? If you're going to miss us, don't worry. We're back next week with new episodes as we dive into the role quality plays, and the people also ask Box. Look forward to wherever you can consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, 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.