The success & failures of an SEO agency

Mordy Oberstein:

It is 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 brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous, incredibly amazing, the uncomparable head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that fantastic, incredible, stupendous, magnificent, oh gosh, I ran out of, it's really-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's hard.

Crystal Carter:

You make it seem easy.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's hard.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that great introduction, that was lovely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Of course. You know Barry Schwarz said we have to redo the intro because we've been doing the podcast... We're inching towards a hundred episodes and we've been doing the podcast for basically two years now. How is it the new wave if we've been doing it for two years?

Crystal Carter:

SEO is new every day. Every day there's something new. I wish it wasn't new, but it is.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why we have a whole series. It's new but also new wave lasted the whole eighties. That was fine.

Crystal Carter:

That's true. It did, it did. I was little at the time, but I think I would've been involved with that hair situation. It was very exciting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, me too when I had hair. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to a rest your newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which comes out each and every month, but where you can also better manage your agency's team with advanced user permission settings and set your clients up for success with direct feedback channels built right into Wix Studio's backend. It's with that, that today we're focusing on the success and failures of the UK's largest SEO agency. No, we're not picking on anyone, but we're going to be joined by Simon Schneiders, the CEO of Blue Array, AKA, the UK's largest SEO agency, who will share both tales from the crypt and fairytale endings as we get the story straight from someone who is in the frontline of it all.

Plus we'll explore the value of your agency building its own custom tool stack. Of course we have these snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. If you haven't had your Raisin Bran just yet, don't worry, as we have two scoops of agency side defeat and conquest as we give you the scoop straight from the source on this, the 97th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Also, if you don't get the Raisin brand reference or you just hate Raisin Bran, pretend I said two scoops of ice cream.

Crystal Carter:

I don't tend to scoop my cereal if I'm completely honest. I tend to spoon.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also, what size is the scoop of raisins? You can have a tiny, tiny ass scoop, it doesn't say anything?

Crystal Carter:

I suppose so I guess.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that even still a thing? Do they even market it like that, like they have two raisins?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I've never been that into Raisin Bran, nor have I-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I was going to say raisins aren't that great anyway, so like "Oh great, thanks, two scoops of them."

Crystal Carter:

We digress.

Mordy Oberstein:

We digress. Please welcome to the show, as I mentioned before, the CEO of the largest SEO agency in the entire UK. Simon Schneiders, welcome to SERP's Up.

Simon Schnieders:

Great to join you Mordy and Crystal, it's lovely to be in the company of Americans and the enthusiasm that you bring to just a general conversation.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that passive aggression or I don't know how to take English compliments?

Simon Schnieders:

No, honestly, I lived in Miami for about seven years and I really do miss the enthusiasm for life that Americans seem to have, whereas we Europeans just trudging, drudging get on with our existences. But yeah, it's great to be around Americans again, love the enthusiasm.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we get started, please, please pitch whatever you want. We like to say Mark is going to Mark and it'd be awkward if you didn't.

Simon Schnieders:

Actually, great, that's a very generous of you, Mordy. I think one thing I'd like perhaps your listeners to do for me is to go to the URL, askSEO.AI, so A-S-K S-E-O .ai and we've got a tool there in beta we're looking for beta testers for, so this is a tool that we've been building in the background at Blue Array that allows us to find corroboration and citation for SEO recommendations. As everybody's aware, SEO is a very subjective field and people like Maile Ohye in the past as well, Maile Ohye from Google, have said that when you are working with an SEO professional or an agency, ask them to cite their sources when they're making recommendations for you. We decided to build a tool that does that for you as SEOs and we're looking for beta testers for that.

You can either upload a document or cut and paste an email in there and then it will corroborate and cite your recommendations. We're hoping ultimately to transform this into a Gmail plugin as well, but for now it's a desktop SaaS application that we're hoping really helps SEOs do a better job and perhaps standardizes the industry to some degree as well.

Crystal Carter:

That's a super genuinely helpful tool and I think it's also useful for a reverse engineering if you're looking at someone's recommendations, they're giving them to you and maybe they haven't given you citations, you can run that through as well.

Simon Schnieders:

Exactly. It can be used in that way. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Wow.

Crystal Carter:

I think for talks and stuff, sometimes people quote stats and you're like, "Where did you get that stat from?" It's useful to go through the PDF or whatever and find out where they got that information from. It's really useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a really great tool. Honestly, when we build out the content for our own SEO hub, we include, I'll call them foundational topics, not only for the average person but also because we know agencies or consultants when you're doing SEO work, you should be citing information. We create that information for people to share. Now, you're doing it with AI. You're making us a little bit obsolete, but hopefully you're citing us also, so maybe not.

Simon Schnieders:

Well, you get to choose your sources when you are using the tool, so you can say, "I only want to include," because you've obviously got things like hreflang where you'll get different recommendations. Bing doesn't utilize hreflang for instance, so you can use Bing's help files versus Google's help files or combine the pair of them or so you get to choose your sources with the tool. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's so cool. Wow, that's amazing. Okay, I already have it in the show notes, so it'll be in the show notes, ask.seo.ai. I got it, right, yeah?

Simon Schnieders:

Brilliant. Thank you Mordy. Yeah, that's it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. That's so cool. Okay. When we were deciding about what topic we're going to talk about, and I love this about you, you said, "Oh, let's talk about success and failures," and one of the things that's so great and people should follow you on LinkedIn, wherever else you are on social media, but I see you the most on LinkedIn. You share your personal stories and behind the scenes of what's happening and it's so connective and it's so personal and it's such a great topic. I don't know where you want to start with this, but we're talking about the successes and the failures of an SEO agency and I'm really happy to have you here to talk about it. Wherever you want to go, the floor is yours.

Simon Schnieders:

Thanks. I like to be transparent about my background, where I've come from. I think people think that you have to be from a certain background to be successful in the SEO industry. I come from quite a challenging background. I was an alcoholic for two decades and found sobriety and through sobriety became very successful SEO, working for a number of big brands here in the UK, people like MailOnline and Zoopla. As a result of that then had lots of requests for consultancy to then start my own agency and I've been completely bootstrapped to success, bootstrapped meaning I've never taken on any funding. I think the most funding I ever had was a few hundred pounds to register the company name and build a website. We've grown as a business customer by customer, employee by employee, and desk by desk.

I started off in co-working spaces where we were able to rent a desk at a time and grow the business until we got too big and then had to go to a big leased office. It's been a journey that I think is replicable for most people. I think if you've cut your teeth in SEO, you are successful at what you do, and you want to replicate and scale what you do and make other people successful through that, then there is a blueprint, I hope, through me. I hope I connect with people in a way that I'm not somehow unique, or special, or different from any of you. If you want to start your own agency, go for it.

Crystal Carter:

I think one of the things that is great about that story is what it's like... I've known you for a few years now and it's just an accurate depiction of who you are. You're very much an open book, you're very, very honest with things. I think the other thing that really strikes me is you share your personal story and through that I hear resilience. Resilience is so important with being an SEO, you hear people saying about what happens with algorithm updates and various things like that, particularly with being an agency owner, because I think agency owners have had quite a complicated ride in the last few years between Covid and other economic challenges and things like that. Did you find challenges during that and did you find that your resilience helped you?

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, I think there's a few things to unpack there. One is perhaps why I feel like, or you may feel as though I'm very honest and transparent. I have to practice honesty. It's part of my recovery, by the way, is that I have to be rigorously honest with myself and I try to be that way with others as well. In terms of macro factors challenging the business, yeah, it's been an awful few years. 2020, everybody was very uncertain about the future. There was no light at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel. Thankfully, when light did start to appear then the appetite for SEO services was absolutely ferocious. During '21, that was when we had what was called the great musical chairs event. Musical chairs being a fun game. I don't know if it's an American.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yeah.

Simon Schnieders:

Okay, all right, fine. Yeah, so the great musical chairs event where everybody's shuffling to different businesses and we had a really high job with retention there, particularly as you've got people moving to London agencies with London waiting and being able to offer vastly bigger salaries.

We've seen SEO juniors, so executives, we call them, going off and getting double the money that we were able to pay for and they weren't ready for those roles. We told them they weren't ready for those roles, but whoever's offering me that kind of salary seems to think I'm ready, so I'm off. Yeah, although we had a real resurgence in SEO, it was almost impossible as an agency only to keep up with demand. You just couldn't staff for it. We were turning away business, as I imagine other agencies were doing as well during that time. I think in '22 we were starting to see that I think the wheels are going to fall off this. This is just completely unsustainable. We use something called attrition where you're essentially as people are leaving the business, not backfilling those roles to make sure that we're in the position we're in today where we're probably one of the very few agencies that haven't had to make any redundancies.

That was just because we had the foresight to see the wheels were definitely going to fall off this thing and we had to prepare for that. We made sure that we were staffed up correctly for a recession, which is ultimately what we went into. I would say that we're starting to see business buoyancy coming back again, but it's a very different type of business. It's very much project work at the moment that we're getting and the challenge then becomes how do we turn that project work into retained work? Because as an agency you need to have retained business in order make sensible decisions about the future for the agency and your customers as well in terms of resourcing the business.

That's where we're at today is we've got the challenge of how do we pivot that business into retainer business and we think we're doing a pretty good job in that area. That's just mostly about making sure that whoever we're working with on a project basis understands the longer term opportunity with us and what that could look like for transforming their business. That's a challenge for us rather than a macro challenge, I think. All agencies we need to be thinking about that is how do we turn this project business into retainer? Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's so astute. Also, I love the thing that I can hear in that story as well is hoping for the best, planning for the worst sort of thing, which I think is something that business owners and agency owners have to think about as well. I think one of the things that I've seen in my time as an agency is the importance of a contract, for instance, it's really important for... Some people are like, "We don't have any contracts," and I'm like, "It's better that you do for everyone," that you have a contract so everyone knows what the terms of engagements are and things because you want to plan for the best but also plan for the worst as well, that sort of thing.

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, I think you don't necessarily need to have long-term contracts that customers feel uncomfortable with. We've always, since the inception of the business, had the ability to serve notice on us with two or three months notice. You could say you're signing a year contract, but it's meaningless because you can serve notice at any stage for three months. It's just a rolling three months, basically. The one I like particularly about that is it puts the onus on us as an agency to deliver value. If you've got a customer locked in for a one-year contract, you can take your foot off the gas if you want to and they're locked in for a year. But I feel that it's better... I've been on the other side of the table as a client hiring agencies that the onus should be on us to make sure that they're seeing success and we're delivering results and they're happy with the relationship. I think that's a good way to turn things around and make sure you are more customer focused as an agency. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to pivot back to something you had mentioned before that you built up the agency desk by desk, employee by employee and so forth. I'm just curious, because you've grown exponentially, it's an amazing amount of growth. You're running your own conference, you have SEO courses, it's really, even a newsletter. What do you think contributed to that growth?

Simon Schnieders:

Well, I can tell you about how deliberate we are about things. Everything we do is quite strategic and to give you an example of that, when you're first starting an agency, you really need to figure out who are we going to be targeting? Who is our customer? In the early days of the business, I very quickly figured out that startups and scale-ups were booming in London and they all talked to each other, they were all very well networked. If I could get in with a few of them, then I would be networked with all of them very, very quickly. I think when you're starting off, you need to make those very deliberate strategic moves, like who am I going after? If you're just doing SEO generally, then I don't think you are going to find your space in the market nowadays.

I think there are some agencies that might be seen as competitors of ours. I don't see them particularly as competitors, but I see what they're doing and I think it's quite clever. For instance, Novus and Re:signal have a couple of agencies over here, which I have a lot of respect for, they've niched down into e-commerce and so e-commerce SEO agency, and I could see that if I was starting an agency from scratch today, that's the thing I do. I'd niche down into a SEO for B2B websites or find a niche within that. That's probably what I'd do to start to be successful. I think when we started Blue Array, we were quite unique in that we were just a specialist SEO agency. I could see at that particular time, and timing is very important and understanding what's going on in the market is very important.

At that particular time there was a book that was being bounded around called the Marketing Agency Blueprint, which everybody seemed to be reading and following, which said that you needed to have an array of different services, so you needed to not be dependent on one particular service line, otherwise you're at the mercy of perhaps that service line not being as popular anymore and you needed to diversify your business. I thought, "Well, if that's the common wisdom, then if I'm uncommon with my wisdom, then I'm going to find a niche." I ignored all of that advice and all of the other SEO agencies at that time had become generalist agencies. They were offering paid search, and paid social and everything else, these ancillary services. I thought, "Well, if we can just go in as a pure play SEO agency, we'd have our niche."

That seemed to be incredibly effective. I knew that lots of companies were seemingly in housing, a lot of digital marketing skills, but SEO was one of those things that's very difficult to hire for, very difficult to retain talent around as well. There will always be a place for an SEO agency, I thought. That was the deliberate or some of the deliberate strategic thinking behind why we did what we did, but it had to do with what was going on in the market at that particular time as well. Say, if I was starting from scratch today, I'd have a different approach to things. Certainly, when I was starting out and focusing on startup and scale up scene, it was very easy. I could go to these big coworking spaces and offer office hours and I'd have lots of people coming wanting to talk to me about SEO. It's not as easy nowadays, you just don't get that anymore. I'd be thinking about a slightly different approach, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I've heard people discuss the niching strategy for agencies and part of me is like, "Yes, I totally get that." Part of me is like, "Is there a risk? Is there a risk?" What if you say, "I'm going to niche down to just do SEO for, I don't know, cryptocurrency or something. I'm just going to niche-"

Mordy Oberstein:

SaaS just for SaaS. Everyone loves doing SaaS.

Crystal Carter:

When you're picking your niche, you talked about some of the ways that you picked that you picked SEO and things, but are there particular strategic considerations? I presume that one needs to look at the size of the market. If you say to yourself, "I'm going to specialize in SEO for people that knit sweaters for cats," that might not be a good niche.

Simon Schnieders:

No, you are right, and if you were focused on the travel niche during Covid, you were in a very bad spot. I think there are macro factors that can come into play there as well rather than just needing to understand the market. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I think the idea behind it is that you don't stay in that niche, I think. You build your business within that niche and you build a name and reputation within that niche, but then you come out of that at some stage. It's a way for you to build a name, build a reputation, and then start to pivot into the broader, more generalist opportunities. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that something that you all still struggle with a little bit? Because if you're saying that the SEO agency world has gone a little bit niche and you've created your agency way back when it wasn't like that, is that a struggle now to figure out a way "How do we kind of keep who we are, but how do we find a niche? Do we care to find a niche? Do we not care to find a niche?" How does it all play out for you?

Simon Schnieders:

We've verticalized the business where we've got three offerings, one of which is we call it Ignite, which is for startups and scale-ups, and we offer a vastly reduced day rate for startups and scale up because that's still an incredibly effective marketing flywheel for us. An example of that would be when we're talking to growth managers at startups, we're actually talking to the next generation of CMOs for incumbent businesses in two, three years time.

For us, that's a particular area we still want to keep quite focused on. Then we've got something called Advantage, which is our core offering, and then we go into a particular offering that is a performance based model, so we call it performance SEO, but it's for particular clients where they want us to come and take the risk with them. We've got some actual skin in the game, but you have to be a certain size and shape for that to work out. At the moment, we're just offering that to e-commerce customers and typically the customer that we go for would be really great battling profile, but immature facets and filters, so we know that there's a massive opportunity there and we're willing to take the risk with them and we can go into that relationship happily breaking even knowing that in six months to a year we'll start to see some really great ROI from them in a way. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

In a way, does it almost feel like starting over, you have to find a new angle and find a new vertical and find a new audience?

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, that's just the roller coaster of running an agency is you've got to keep reinventing yourself and some agencies just manage to do that bull-**** their way through it. The amount of agencies that are out there saying, "We're AI first." If you actually scratch behind that and figure out what that means, it doesn't mean anything.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it recommended you drink urine to treat your kidney stones?

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's an awful lot of bull-****. We try and we hopefully cut through all of that. We're serious about what we do and so we're not just strap lines, but there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. Mordy, you mentioned about you seem to have done really well with the education elements, that side of things. We've got something called the Blue Array Academy. There's about 20,000 students in there, by the way, doing our courses, most of them the free course that we do, the technical SEO course.

But for us, that's a loss-leader by the way. We don't actually make any money out of the Blue Array Academy. For us, that's about elevating and educating those in the industry and for us, if we can, to some degree, open source what we do, and you can get to that through the SEO manager course, like this is the actual stuff we're doing for our clients that helps to raise the standards of the industry as a whole. We come from, and we still are an unregulated industry, I would say it's not the Wild West it used to be, but there's still a lot more we could and should be doing, and that's partly our contribution towards that is hoping we elevate and raise the standards across the industry by open sourcing what we do a little bit more.

Mordy Oberstein:

If it makes you feel any better, the reason why we brought you in, one of the reasons why we brought you into our own SEO course, which is I think still forthcoming by the time this episode comes out was a direct result of your own SEO course. I saw that course. I really liked it. I'm like, "Oh, let's pull Blue Array in for our own course because they did a great job with their course," so direct lead right from the course.

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, there's an incredible team here. I'm proud of every single one of them. They're just amazing. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

No, they're great. I spoke at London SEO XL in 2022, and it was an absolute joy to see the team in action. Lots of people really, really engaged and really dedicated. That particular event took place on May the fourth, and there were people walking around in Star Wars outfits and if anyone didn't know that was Blue Array's team members, that was actual folks from Blue Array who were making the extra effort to make the event particularly eventful. I think that it was very much appreciated and I think that that's something that the team are really dedicated to and I think it really, really shows. I think that you have some very, very smart folks on your team. The other thing that really struck me at the event was the commitment that y'all have to supporting the wider community as well. Not only are you doing things online with the course, but also supporting local folks London to make the London area more robust, I guess you would say, and I think that that's really important as well. How valuable is that corporate responsibility to you as a team?

Simon Schnieders:

In simple terms, they've got my back, I've got their back, and I guess there's some testament to that. I've burned through roughly the equivalent of a million dollars worth of our cashflow in order to keep everybody in the business at the moment. We've had some pretty difficult years since 2020. I haven't made a single redundancy here, but that hasn't come without cost. The cost has been, we've through our cash reserves in order to keep everybody in the business and they know that I'm that kind of employer, that I genuinely put people before profit. We actually haven't made any profit last year. I don't think we made any profit at all, yeah, year before that was quite slim. This year we're looking at probably no to very, very low profitability again.

I think as an agency only, you've got to demonstrate that on a regular basis as well that you've got their backs. It is been a while since I fired a client, but that's a way that I also like to demonstrate that I've got their backs is that if I find any client is being particularly tyrannical, is a bully to the team, for instance, I will fire them without hesitation and move them on from the business and they know that's the way that I deal with things and I've always got their back. Reciprocally, I get so much more in return from them. They're so dedicated and professional in what they do.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to say before time slips away from us that if you're listening to this, I just want you to appreciate, I appreciate just how honest and open you are. There's not a lot of people who will come on a podcast and talk about their business as openly the way that you are right now, and I just want to say that I really appreciate it and I really hope the audience really appreciates it, because it's a treat.

Simon Schnieders:

Oh, that's lovely. Thank you. Yeah, like I say, I have to practice rigorous honesty. It's my makeup now, but I find that it works incredibly well. There's no point in papering over things. You might as well just be honest about stuff and I try to be as much as I can. At the same time, you have to also be a leader in a business and you have to protect people at their times as well and not be fully transparent. I hopefully balance that thing quite well. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, you have to keep a poker face. I think you're probably still allowed to have a poker face, yes?

Simon Schnieders:

Oh yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, good. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Simon, if people wanted to follow you and learn more from you, where could they find you?

Simon Schnieders:

Well, I've just started exploring short form video, so you could probably find me on TikTok, Insta Reels, YouTube shorts-

Crystal Carter:

You have TikTok?

Simon Schnieders:

But I've just started getting involved, yeah, so I finally succumbed to TikTok, but I'm most active on LinkedIn, so if you want to engage with me there, please do, I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments. I regularly open questions up to anybody that's willing to read.

Crystal Carter:

I'll find you on TikTok and I'll direct my 200 very elite followers to follow you as well.

Simon Schnieders:

Lovely.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have no followers on TikTok. Sorry. I'm just not a TikTok person yet. Maybe you'll inspire me because I haven't-

Crystal Carter:

You can just do more of my videos, Mordy and-

Mordy Oberstein:

You just do more of my videos.

Crystal Carter:

Literally just do Mordy tries.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know if I can handle that. It's a lot. Simon, thank you again for coming on and we'll see you out there in the ether that is the SEO universe.

Simon Schnieders:

Yeah, I look forward to it, Mordy and lovely to see you again Crystal. I look forward to meeting up in person again.

Crystal Carter:

See you again soon.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye now. Well, this worked out perfectly. This was not planned by the way, but Simon was talking about their own internal SEO tool that they built over at Blue Array. Before we even knew Simon was even doing that, Crystal and I were like, "A lot of SEO agencies build out their own tools." It's a trend, it's a thing. The question is why. We're going to run through a few good examples of agency side tools as we go through a very unique version of Tool Time. There's a whole bunch that you don't really think about that necessarily as being agency tools, like AlsoAsked.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Probably one of the best SEO tools out there. I will say, it is one of the best SEO tools out there.

Crystal Carter:

It's a great tool and Mark from Candor Agency was saying basically it was something that they were using to help their clients to understand and to access and do better with people as they asked questions. He was presenting on it at an event and somebody was like, "Oh my God, can I get access to this? This would be really cool if we could." They built it out into a tool and it's something that the industry at large is very, very grateful for and I've shown it to people who are not SEOs and it can be really, really useful for helping them to understand the value of content and the user journey because it really maps out a user journey for you on a particular topic really, really easily. Yeah, it's a great tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

You see there's this this trend where agencies build out tool stacks and it's interesting why. Why do they do that mean? Well, I was going to say it's like an obvious lead gen. It's a great way to bring in leads, but it's interesting you would think that wouldn't because your marketing to other SEOs for the most part. How does that work?

Crystal Carter:

What I've seen people do is people will often create a tool, and I think it aligns you next to people that you want to be aligned with, similar agencies, people who are working in similar industries. It also opens you up to a lot more different customers, a lot more potential customers who can see the knowledge and expertise and interest that your agency has. I think a lot of people forget that Screaming Frog comes from an agency tool that's an agency that has a tool that everyone uses that every other agency uses, and that's something that's foundational to SEO, really, particularly for technical SEO now, and it's really valuable. I think it's a great showcase. It's a great show, don't tell around the kinds of things that you can bring for clients.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's great brand building and because of that brand building, you're reaching a larger audience. I'm going to get to in-house in a second. I didn't forget about that, but if you're an SEO and you're like, "Oh, I love AlsoAsked," and you're sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, and sharing AlsoAsked, you're sharing Candor Agency at the same time, basically, and it's extending Marks... We're using also as the example, but it's extending out that reach exponentially. At the same time, by the way, whether it's Blue Arrays tool or whether it's Screaming Frog, you're reaching in-house teams at the same time. Yes, the tool is applicable to other SEOs and other agencies who may not be your target audience, but in-house SEOs might very well be your target audience, especially if their team is not built out or if they're a smaller organization or whatever it is. They might say, "You know what? Let's have an SEO agency handle this for us."

Crystal Carter:

I think so. I think also if you are able to create tools for clients, which is another thing that I've started to see, then that could be a real differentiator for you as an agency. I've seen it before where there are agencies who are building tools that are specific for the client, and sometimes it can be the case that maybe the client doesn't necessarily want their services from you anymore, but they do want the tool or maybe somebody wants the tool. If you've been using the tool for ages and they go, "Hey, could you help me with some additional agency services?" This is something that they do over at Keyword Insights. Andy Chadwick over at Keyword Insights was saying that he built the tool and he started getting service leads from it. Now, he offers services on top of the tool because people who love the tool and love the insights and love, the logic that they can see from Keyword Insights where I would also like some support with this.

That's a great way to show people how you think about search, how you think about content, how you think about technical SEO, whatever in practice. Very often people will come to you for additional tools, as well. Another classic example is the Chrome extension that I use literally 70 million times a day, which is the SEO Pro Chrome extension from Kristina Azarenko over at Marketing Syrup. That is an incredible growth engine for her because there's links in there that go straight to her agency, straight to her training platform and things like that. It's incredibly valuable and I tell people about it all the time because it's so useful and it really just speaks to the expertise and the value that Kristina's able to offer.

Mordy Oberstein:

Especially if you're someone who has a particular identity or a particular focus, if you're, say an e-comm SEO agency or whatever it is, you can build up that specialty and that brand identity and around that and pull in leads or people who are looking at something specifically like that, what Simon was talking about earlier with agencies trying to be a little bit more niche or a little more focused than in the past. That can lean right into that, but whatever it is, it's a momentum builder, which is what you want if you're an agency.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think that we see in the Wix app market, we have lots of tools that are created by lots of different teams, including folks who are coming from an agency background. It creates a lot of leavers and a lot of new opportunities. Even on Wix, we have the logo builder for instance, which is a tool that we have available for free for people to use. We have a QR code generator, we have a few other tools as well, and that gives you an opportunity to speak to people and to show people that you're able to provide a solution. People say, "This thing is broken, I want it fixed."

You're able to say, "Here's a solution to this," and to be able to provide that to them, and around the clock, it's not necessarily passive income depending on how you're configuring it. Our logo gen is free. There's a free version as well, but it can give you a lot of reach and particularly tools also can transcend language for instance. With something like a logo generator, even if it was in a different language, I could probably figure out whether or not I wanted it to have a rocket going to the moon or whatever on my logo and it would help me to achieve my goals. I think that that's really, really valuable as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I would love to have or create a tool and you can call the naming itself would just be amazing, Barry. Barry should have tools. He does have a tool, wait, I'm wrong. Doesn't he have some algorithm update, like history tracker website thing?

Crystal Carter:

Yes, I'm sure Barry has tools. I'm sure he has something.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Barrinator, RustyBricker.

Crystal Carter:

The Schwartzkoff, I don't know. I don't know. Something like... I don't know, something to that effect.

Mordy Oberstein:

Schwartz and SERP.

Crystal Carter:

Schwartzen Ranker. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Schwartzen Ranker. Nice. That's it, trademark. Barry, if you want it, you got to pay for it now, I guess until he creates tools, we'll just have to read his news in the meantime.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

This week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Now, if you're saying, "Hey, wait a second, you didn't cover this breaking news story that happened in the SEO industry," that's because, breaking the fourth wall for you, I'm recording this section of the podcast a little bit earlier than I usually do because of our New York City digital marketing meetup with Search Engine Journal, that by the time you listen to this just happened. Okay, with that, three articles for you from Barry Schwarz, but from two different sources. First up from seroundtable.com, Google core update expected in the coming weeks. Google's Danny Sullivan, the search liaison was in the comments over seroundtable.com and wrote in the comments and replied back to somebody, whoever, whatever. "I would expect we'll see one," meaning a core update, "In the coming weeks because that fits in with our general cycle," but precisely when that's just not known yet.

First, that's really interesting. They have a general cycle because sometimes it doesn't feel like they do. I wonder and am speculating if they do have a regular cycle of the refresh, but they sometimes hold off when they actually look at the dataset and say, "Wait a second, what we've tested doesn't seem to have actually worked the way we want it to. Let's hold off retest or whatever. Or we have other things going on that we have to prioritize and we'll push it off until later." I wonder if they have a regular schedule like Danny is saying, but that it often gets altered for various reasons. By the way, this doesn't mean that it's... Coming weeks can mean two weeks, it can mean 12 weeks. We don't exactly know, but there's one coming, which I guess you already knew anyway, there's always one coming.

On to Barry Schwartz, but this time from search engine land, Google ending notes on search by the end of the month. Who cares? Oh, that's salty. Google had this feature called notes where users could leave little comments, I guess, or running records on search results. Imagine you had a recipe for best meatloaf, you're running the query best meatloaf, you have all the results, and on whatever recipe website you listed like, "Yeah, I tried this, it was really good, but it was a little bit too dry." You could leave like a running record. Google was basically running these inconsistently, not very often, not extremely very helpful. It's not surprising that they're gone.

I feel like this was Google over, not overreaching. That's a bad way of putting it. Overzealously trying to get user generated content onto the SERP because they saw a trend where people want user generated content and there isn't enough across the web, which is why you have the same issue with too much Reddit, too much Quora, whatever, the same kind of thing. That's why they put the notes there. It didn't really work out the way they thought it would. That happens sometimes with products, so by the end of this month, they are going to be gone. Will you miss them? Will you even notice that they're gone? Good question.

On to Barry Schwartz again from Search Engine Roundtable, again. Google artificially, by the way, I split the order up this week just so we go from Search Engine Roundtable to Search Engine Land, back to Search Engine Roundtable. That's how my mind works. Google artificially generated content, AGC classification score, this goes back to the lease that we've spoken about before many, many times. You probably know about them already. Juan Gonzalez Villa found in those, because again, the document is enormous and we're finding new things all the time, something that seems to show some site level AGC classification score, artificially generated content like AI content, score.

Is Google using the score? We don't know. Have they ever used this score? We don't know, but there seems to be some kind of score at some point. Barry points out in the article that from what's written there in the leaks, I hate calling them leaks that this might be related to a really outdated content. Perhaps this is something Google used in the way, way, way past. However, it wouldn't surprise me and I think wouldn't surprise many if Google had some kind of way of classifying either content that was automatically generated like AI content or in reverse classifying content that seems to be written based on actual human experience.

It's a whole separate topic. We actually covered it in our recent webinar with Mike King and Lily Ray, so you can watch the recording on the SEO hub. I'll link to that in the show notes. We actually brought it up at some point, I think later on in the Q&A section we brought it up there. You can listen to our thoughts on that scoring system, what that might be or not be like in that webinar. With that, that is this week's snappy news.

Maybe he should just create his own algorithm update tracker, like the volatility tracker, like "Why rely on SEMrush," and whatever, just rely on Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Well, and if he did, he could do it on Wix Apps builder. He could use the Wix studio apps. He could make an app and he could make a widget and he could sell it in the app store.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make a widget, Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that'd be great.

Mordy Oberstein:

When the volatility gets high, it's like an angry Barry face. When it's low, it's a happy Barry face, which happens to be the same Barry face.

Crystal Carter:

Same face.

Mordy Oberstein:

Same face.

Crystal Carter:

Same face.

Mordy Oberstein:

The entire time. It's not the same, our follow of the week every week must be different. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a follow of the week. It'd just be the follow of the podcast forever. Yeah. This week's follow is Jim Banks. He's got 25 years of high search volume media buying for rapid growth businesses. Check out Jim Banks over on LinkedIn.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, Jim Banks is a great follow. He has a great LinkedIn. He also has a great podcast that he does, which he also syndicates to TikTok, and I follow him on TikTok and things. His podcast is centered around some of the challenges and some of the things I wish I'd known as an agency owner and things as well. He really, really expects people to be honest about their agency journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's topical.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's really great. That's one of the reasons why I thought he'd be a great follow of the week. If you're interested in people telling true stories about the agency journey, he's a great follow. His podcast is called Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, and really, he talks about lots of things. He had a recent podcast with one of the founders or one of the leaders over at Optimizer, for instance, and they're talking about very openly about some of the challenges there. But he's great. Great follow, great guy. Follow Jim Banks.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what? That's a great name for a podcast. I'm going to start a podcast like that, Bad Decisions with Mordy Oberstein, and the first person we can interview is my wife.

Crystal Carter:

Shout out Mrs. Oberstein for-

Mordy Oberstein:

For having a good heart.

Crystal Carter:

Right, having a good heart-

Mordy Oberstein:

And saying yes.

Crystal Carter:

Long, long suffering, Mrs. Oberstein. No, I'm kidding. She's lovely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I think so. Then I'm not paid to say that. Anyway, that'll do it for this week's SERP's Up. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to become indispensable to your clients. When I say indispensable, I think of indestructible from The Simpsons where Mr. Burns says, "Indestructible." Anyway, indispensable. Look for it 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 out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.