Should SEOs adopt a content mindset?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up.

Aloha and mahalo for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. We're putting 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, fantastic, a completely awesome, spectacular, fabulous, amazing, redundant again, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you. Thank you. I'm, I'm not redundant, but I like-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, my intro is redundant. I said the same thing twice. You are not redundant. Sorry.

Crystal Carter:

To be fair though, I made the same Star Trek joke in the last episode at least three times, so that's fine. We've got a lot of content to cover.

Mordy Oberstein:

Star Trek joke can never be redundant. My kid's like, "Hey, what movie should we watch next?" I'm like, "Oh, should watch Star Trek." And I'm thinking about it and I was like, they're going to hate it. I'm like, why am I even going to bother showing them Star Trek?

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what? Don't do that. Don't apologize for that. Your job as a parent to isn't to indoctrinate your children with things that you're into. My dad was a seventies child and basically he had a cassette tape set called The History of Funk Volumes one through Five, and we listened to every single volume Bayside B side for hours every time we got into the car. It was just some version of the history of funk all the time. And like, yes, I do know my Parliament from my Funkadelic as a result, and I had no choice. I had no choice whatsoever. So yeah, go for it. Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fine. I will do that to their detriment. If they say, "Why did you show us this slow old movie?" I'll be like, "Crystal told me to."

Crystal Carter:

Because you want them to live long and prosper.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, I do. More Star Trek jokes here on the SERPs Up podcast each and every week. The SERPs Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we automatically add article markup to your blog post, which you can customize that markup and where you can manage your structure to markup as well as your title tag, meta descriptions, OG tags, and more for all of your blog posts in one shot at the folder level. Because Wix, it's where SEO meets content strategy because today's episode is where SEO meets content strategy.

Crystal Carter:

Seamless, seamless.

Mordy Oberstein:

Seamless so well. That's right today we're diving into the overlap between content marketing and SEO. And should you as an SEO be thinking more like a content creator? Why both content marketing and SEO requires staunch topical focus. The role of media diversification in SEO and content marketing. And why a long tail approach is good for both SEO and for content marketing.

With that Captivate's, Sarah McDowell stops by to share how to market your media assets and how that might be different across different types of media assets. And on top of all of that, Crystal and I are going to explore a possible shake up to both the content marketing and SEO worlds when we dive into whether or not featured snippets... You heard that right, featured snippets, are about to become obsolete, maybe, maybe not. We'll see. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

Mind the gap as episode 35 of the SERPs Up podcast bridges the schisms between content marketing and SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, schism. I always like that word.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a great word, isn't it?

Crystal Carter:

Prism. Prism, schism.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's just one of those words. It's like you use the word schism, you sound smart.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, yes, schisms, of course.

Crystal Carter:

Oh yeah, schism and juxtaposition.

Mordy Oberstein:

How many schisms?

Crystal Carter:

Yes. Mordy, it's very important.

Mordy Oberstein:

So there's a reason why content has come into the focus of the SEO world very, very strongly, way stronger than before since 2018 for sure, since the advent of the new era of the core algorithm updates. And it's why you have all the talk around EAT or rather EEAT, that is never going to sound right. It's like from GMB to GBP does sound wrong.

Crystal Carter:

Or Looker Studio.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look. Yeah, all these things. I guess the new kids like it. Anyway, it has to do with what we spoke about during the episode. We took a look at Google's ranking factors, and there we mentioned things like links are not a direct signal. Links are a secondary signal. Having good back links doesn't actually tell you if the content on the page is any good. It doesn't. It perhaps alludes to the fact that it might be good.

And what Google's been doing in Google's goal has been to get better at actually understanding content, not just finding ways to get around understanding content so we can ring sites. It means to actually understand content as spoken about few times on this podcast, Google using machine learning to do things like better contextualize content making meaning of understanding the words and the phrases by using the context around those words and phrases by profiling language structure in all different ways. Google's getting way, way, way, way better at actually understanding the content. The net result of all of that... We're not getting into all of that again. The net result of all of that is that Google's better able to focus on the actual content of the site. And the net result of all of that is that you should be focusing more on the content on your site.

And I don't know, less on dare I say, links, SEO police come knocking on my door right now, which means the gap between SEOs and content creators has significantly narrowed. In fact, to a larger or lesser extent to be a good SEO, to me... SEOs will fight about this on Twitter... But to me personally qualifying this, not saying universally means to be good at content creation, means I don't think you need to necessarily be a good writer, but you need to know what good content looks like and sounds like and what makes good content. Which means that that gap between content creators and SEOs has significantly shrunken to the point where it's almost nonexistent.

Crystal Carter:

Right? The idea of what good content is includes technical things as well. So good content does not have broken pictures in the middle of it. Good content does not have 404s. Good content does not have problems when you're on mobile. Good content doesn't take a long time load. Good content should also be fit for purpose and should be rendered and served and constructed from a technical point of view in a good way, in a way that adds value to the users. So I think that certainly good SEOs will be working hand in glove with a good technical SEO, with their developers, with their designers, with all of that sort of stuff. It is something that needs to work well and needs to work in a synergy-

Mordy Oberstein:

There it is. Can use that word synergy. And I feel like that's a great place where SEOs bring value to the content marketing table. But I also think at the same time, in reverse to the things that we're talking about now in SEO and content, I feel like marketers or good marketers have been talking about forever. Oh, targeting the audience, multi-layered content experiences, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

For us, wow, this is novel. This is so new. EEAT expertise? Wow. And good content means I need to have actual interesting, I like how you're thinking there. Content marketers or marketers in general, they're like, "Oh, we've been thinking like that for years."

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that this also goes back to some of the... I was reading something, someone who was talking about, oh, Google trends and how to find trending topics and things and like, oh, you need to look at political and in considerations and social things that are happening and maybe technology trends. And I'm like, that's a PESTLE analysis. That's a classic marketing PEST analysis. And there's also SWAT analysis and a lot of that stuff that's from classic marketing training. A lot of that stuff still applies. I think that that's something that you're absolutely right about that content marketers tend to come from more of a marketing background and the tech comes second. Whereas I think a lot of SEOs will often come from a sort of tech first and connecting with the audience via the tech first and then getting into some of the marketing things. And if you're able to bridge the gap across the two, you'll do really well. And I think that some of the marketing techniques might seem a little old school, but a lot of marketing techniques are 100% transferrable to an SEO space and will do well for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I think that the devil there is in the details. First off, plus one for diversity of thought in the SEO world, but it's all sorts of SEOs adding to the great SEO conversation in the sky, and it all comes together to be one set of awesomeness. But yeah, I think when you talk about your audience targeting, very basic. Content marketers have been thinking about targeting their audiences forever. Recently, I say recently, in the last couple of years in the SEO role, that's come into way more of a focus because there's less opportunity to rank for short-tail keywords. You need to diversify into long-tail keywords. Now you are thinking about how you're targeting your audiences.

I think the uniqueness or the abstractness of that comes into the details. What does it mean to target an audience? How do you target an audience? What does it mean in this space versus that space finding opportunity on the SERP to target the audience, which is where I think an SEO has a tremendous amount of value for content marketers all comes into play. So yeah, when you say targeting an audience, long-tail focused, yeah, that sounds obvious, but when you start getting into the particulars in a particular scenario, then it becomes, wow, there's some real ingenuity there. I was going to say... I know you have something to say hold on one... If you're ever submitting to an SEO award category and you say, "Yeah, we need target audiences, not novel," but if you show the unique ways in which you've targeted that audience, that's where the novelty is, and that's what'll make you win the award.

Crystal Carter:

The thing that I love about SEO and the thing that I find challenging with sometimes with traditional marketing and traditional marketing, not necessarily metrics but maybe KPIs or whatever. And one of the things that I love about SEO is that if you want to say we're targeting audiences, and of course you can do that from a general marketing point of view, one of the things I love about SEO is that you can get some tangibles for that. You can say, okay, this audience is looking for bird feed for robins, or something like that. And so you can look at the search volume for that term for information around that content. You can look at the search volume for pages that are ranking for those terms. And you can see with tangibles, how many people are actually, how big is this market? Well, actually there's only 1000 people looking for this particular thing for instance, in UK, then you can set your expectations for your marketing based on that.

So I think that the research tools that SEOs have available to them work so well to help marketing teams to refine and to focus on certain things. And again, if you're working in tangent, if you're working together, where you have, we have this marketing idea? Well, I have this marketing data. Well we have this marketing data. And you can bring it together with the SEO and the marketing side, then I think that's when you're really flying and that's when it's working really well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And to that point, that's why you see companies like Semrush, where they, you see their advertising, they're going after the wider marketing world with their ads because they realize that the keyword research is just as relevant to an SEO as it is to a content marketer.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

And These tools have a certain universality, that's not a real word, to it. At the same time, I'll say that if SEOs adopt... At times if you look out to the content marketing world and you could adopt some of their mindsets, that can very much help you refine your SEO strategy. For the one I always use, and it's because I love brand marketing is a brand marketing mindset because with SEOs, we talk about topical focus, topical nuance, creating authority around a particular topic and all that kind of stuff. Brand marketers are experts at that. That's literally what they're trying to do. They're trying to position their company as being authoritative, as being reputable, as being whatever, whatever, around a particular set of topics. If you take a brand marketing mindset to your SEO, to your topical focus from an SEO point of view, you'll naturally limit yourself to the topics you should be focusing on as opposed to trying to cast a wide net and catching all sorts of keywords for vanity search volume or vanity traffic metrics.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Precisely. So I guess when you're thinking about that, Mordy, what questions would you ask yourself to make sure that the topic that you're using or the topic that you're pursuing is in keeping with your brand?

Mordy Oberstein:

So it's not even that. That I think is very, again, that's like that's very top level and very easy to do. And I think where it gets more tricky is when you start asking more questions once you've chosen that topic. So obviously as a brand, let's take Wix. Now for us to talk about NASCAR, how to build a race car makes no sense whatsoever. We might get a lot of traffic on that theoretically if we were to write about it. Well, probably not, but let's say we were. That traffic is meaningless and as a brand it dilutes your brand value. Who are you? What are you talking about? What are you doing? I think once you've picked those topics, and again, it can get very nuanced. For example, on the Wix SEO hub, do we cover this or does blog cover this? And where's a topical focus for us as an asset within a wider brand? It gets very, very nuanced.

But then you have the question of how do... Okay, I figured out the topic, how do I handle the topic? What tone do I take? Once you answer those kinds of questions, you'll usually end up creating content that comes off as in a professional authoritative manner that has nuance to it, which is exactly what you want to be doing from an SEO point of view at the same time. So I think I call that brand sniff test. Does it sound right, look right, formatted right, I'm speaking in the right way to the right people? If it passes that brand test, it'll usually pass the EEAT test from the SEO point of view.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And do you think it's important that people identify what their expertise, what their authority is if they were ever to-

Mordy Oberstein:

I would say yes. If you want to create actual a authoritative content, you need to know, not an expert on this, needs somebody else.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Okay. So like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means you need somebody else to do it.

Crystal Carter:

Right? So I'm not an expert on NASCAR, for instance. So like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Neither am I.

Crystal Carter:

... no, that's not it. That's not a thing. Even if I did all the keyboard research in the world, I am not a NASCAR-

Mordy Oberstein:

And that shines through.

Crystal Carter:

I thought I fooled you, I thought I fooled you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, the only people you're fooling are people who are not going to buy your product anyway.

Crystal Carter:

Right, or people who don't really know. And just because you watched Talladega Nights does not make you a NASCAR expert.

Mordy Oberstein:

Didn't finish watching that. So I would've even know that much. That's how little I know about NASCAR.

Crystal Carter:

Shake and bake.

Mordy Oberstein:

But that's really the point is that you can't fudge that expertise. I taking a look at the product review update, the February 2023 product review update recently, and a lot of the top ranking pages, and I'm not getting into why they're ranking, why they're not ranking. But some of the things that they're doing just from a pure content point of view, if you want to compete with them at a content level, they're bringing in expertise, be it the Wirecutter, those kind of websites, are bringing in a level of expertise that you can't fake. And one of the pros and cons I saw around what was animal carriers? The sites that weren't ranking well, were putting things like, oh, it's too small or too big, or whatever it is. I don't know. Very generic things. And the sites that are ranking well and forget the ranking for a second, just from a pure content point of view, were things like, it smells weird when you unbox it.

Crystal Carter:

Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

You could not like... There's the only way that is, you either completely made that up or you actually took it out of the box.

Crystal Carter:

Right. But I think also that's the kind of thing that people will be searching for. But that's also the kind of thing that you like this, I think people have talked a lot about how TikTok is affecting Google and Google search, but I think that actually one of the things that's most prescient about TikTok's emergence is that TikTok is very real. There's a lot of people who are sharing very personal, very unfiltered, very deep things about themselves, about topics, et cetera. There's very few boundaries on TikTok. And so there's people... And in fact, if you're too polished on TikTok, people are like, "Ugh, you're too polished. I don't believe you."

Similarly, this piece of content that you've seen that was like, "Oh, this smells funny." I recently saw a piece of content that was talking about steam rollers or some hair rollers or ceramic rollers or something like that. And they were like, "We tested all these rollers." And they posted the ugliest picture I've ever seen of all of the different rollers that they had, and they had six different sets and it was on a desk and it was an ugly photo, but I believe that they actually took that photo, that that's an actual photo that somebody actually took when they actually reviewed whatever it is they were reviewing. That realness is also something that can help differentiate you from AI generated content, which is something that you need to think about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. So again, take that point, take the AI point. It's a great point by the way, and don't feel weird about taking a picture of whatever it is on a desk, because if you look at the big brands and what they're doing the same thing, they're going the travel carrier for animals, they had actual pictures at the airport of the dog and the carrier on the conveyor belt, whatever it was, at the airport. It wasn't a very pretty picture, but it was real.

And again, going back to say a brand marketing or content marketing mindset, if you're trying to distinguish yourself, forget ranking, but you're just trying to distinguish yourself in front of users that your content is real content written by real people as opposed to AI, you're going to approach the content and the way of writing the content differently. Now, think that Google's able to detect AI content and let's say for just argument's sake, it says if it's AI content and it's a really Y in, Y out kind of query, we're not going to rank it. I know they're not going to say... That they're not, but just argument's sake, hypothetically they are. The content that you just wrote from a brand and a content point of view now automatically completely aligns the search.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So Joe Hall, who we've had on the podcast previously and who's a fantastic SEO was talking about, he recently put out a prompt generator tool, which I tried out and was interesting. And the other thing that he had on his site was how to write content that's better than ChatGPT. And one of the things that he said, and I thought this was really interesting, and one of the things he said was, have an opinion.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Have an opinion. If you ask one of these chatbots, what's your opinion? It's like, "I am a robot. I do not have an opinion. I cannot give you an opinion because I'm a robot." That's what it'll tell you. So have an opinion, actually have an opinion, and that actual opinion of, "Oh, it smells funny." That's like, a robot can't tell whether or not it smells funny, it can't smell.

Mordy Oberstein:

SEOs have been making this mistake for a long time. Forget the AI side, which we'll get more into later. I know we disagree about listicles and I will fully admit there are value to listicles. However, many times SEOs write these sort of listicle kind of content because they wanted to rank and it has no opinion, it has no unique value, it has no targeting, it has none of the good stuff that a content marketer, if you were thinking like a content marketer would've put in there.

Crystal Carter:

Mm-hmm. Interesting. I think that the tricky thing with it, and we're going to talk about featured snippets coming up and the featured snippets love and a listicle, which is one of the reasons why content marketers love a listicle.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not against a listicle.

Crystal Carter:

But I think one of the things that's tricky about it, and I was thinking about this too the other day, so again, I said, I used Joe Hall's Prompt Generator and I plugged it in and it pulled out an article, and the article that it wrote was perfectly solid. It was solid it and stuff. And so those sorts of listicle kinds of things like that are thin, that don't have an opinion, that don't have additional value. Somebody can get that from one of these AI tools and pretty solidly, pretty solidly like enough to get going to maybe do a deeper search or whatever. So it is the deeper, more brand aware, more high value content. And also I think people need to think about the kinds of content you have on your site, once they're on your site, that adds value to your site and making sure that your content aligns with your brand is going to be absolutely crucial in this new space.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of value and insights, Sarah McDowell is going to join us as we ask her, how does marketing media assets like a podcast change based on medium and media? Here's Captivate's Sarah McDowell.

Sarah McDowell:

There are some similarities and differences when marketing a podcast or video, compared to say something like a blog post or written content. Similar to an article or written content, the title needs to be engaging. You need to give people reason to check your content out. We can't be boring folks. You also have to think about keywords, the queries people are searching in places like Google where you should be coming up. For example, with a podcast, you need to think about keywords for your main show title and show description, but you also need to think about keywords for your episode titles. Long-tail keywords work great here. Use something like the tool AlsoAsked which generates data from people also ask on Google.

We also need to think about repurposing. So when you repurpose blog content, let's say into social media posts, et cetera, you should be doing the same for your podcast and videos. Something that I have tried for my podcast is Twitter threads. So taking the key takeaways from a podcast episode and creating a Twitter thread with the last tweet in the thread, asking people to check out your podcast episode.

Now this is great because people are going to engage and we share different parts of the Twitter threads and you're providing value there and then, so you're giving people more reason to check the thing out at the end. I also share video clips of the podcast. When I record, I also record a video, which I then clip into a short two-minute video to share over social media. Obviously, links are also important. Your in external back links, links pointing to you and internal links. There's some examples of how it's the same.

Differences then. First up, it can be tricky with discoverability. There's a debate whether search engines like Google are automatically transcribing audio or not. If they are, it's not going to be perfect. Sorry, John Mueller, search engines are great when it comes to webpages and textbook. Other assets can be tricky, like we know that they can't read texts on an image. You need to think about how people come across your podcast and videos. Sure, they may go to YouTube or they may go to a podcast app, but people will be searching for you in other places. So for example, according to Semrush, there's over 32,000 searches globally for keywords that include best podcast and over 18,000 for keywords that include best video. I reckon that number is even higher. More people are searching. Google shows video in the search, so you must have seen it when you are searching for different things and you get a YouTube carousel or a YouTube video.

But podcasts are a different ballgame. They used to show a podcast episode carousel when you were on a mobile, but they took this away in February this year. I know, boo/ we need to help Google surface our podcasts and episodes. This is why a website is important here, ways like I've mentioned before, but also transcripts okay? Taking the time to use it all, I use Poddin. My mate Danny is Scottish and he says he finds Poddin the most accurate. But you need to use a tool to transcribe, but you also need to tidy up the text. There's always mistakes and you need to remove the filler words. Make it easy for Google. If you have this transcript visible on your podcast episode page, this is going to help as much relevant information as you can to help Google search engines understand your content and what it is about.

There's my thoughts, or my two pence, I think that's the right saying, on the matter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Sarah for that. Don't forget to check out Sarah has a wonderful SEO podcast called the SEO Mindset podcast. We'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah, so a lot of what you're saying goes into what we're talking about before about repurposing, but to target your audience the right way and I love repurposing content. Especially like let's say around a podcast, you throw out an audiogram, you're targeting what the user wants on social, which is interaction. So an interactive asset like an audiogram, and you have the add a bonus of repurposing content at the same time. So two birds with one stone.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think that making sure that you are tapping into where your audience is across the web is really, really important. So the repurposing task does that. So you might have people that are on your podcast that are there. You might have people who might be interested in your podcast on Twitter, then you might have people who are interested in your podcast who are on LinkedIn, and making sure that you're available and visible on those spaces is really, really, really important and should absolutely part of your content marketing journey. I think we had Ross Simmons, who is the king of content distro on a webinar talking about this as well, and there's some great tactics that you can implement to make sure that you're making your content get the best opportunity to be seen.

Mordy Oberstein:

So because we're talking about SEO from the content mindset, one of the things that generally greatly impacts SEOs and content marketers alike because they just drive so much traffic in theory and can serve as part of your branded efforts also are featured snippets. But is there very existence in jeopardy? Join us now as we explore whether or not AI chat experiences on search engines are going to make featured snippets obsolete as we explore the new trends on the SERP with the little segment we call going, going, Google.

Speaker 4:

And it's going, going, google! It's out of here!

Mordy Oberstein:

So there's Bard, which is Google's AI chat experience, you.com, the chat experience bing in the chat experience, and-

Crystal Carter:

Neeva.

Mordy Oberstein:

Neeva, I apologize to all the other search engines who have... Brave... Have a chat experience and I didn't mention them. Apologies.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry. One of the interesting outcomes of that, let's just stick with Google for a minute. They're going, if not by the time this episode airs, release Bard into the wild. What does that mean for feature snippets? Meaning if I'm searching for "How do I change a tire? What are the five steps of changing a tire?" And you currently get either a video or a list or a paragraph of how to change a tire.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

But now I just go to the chat and it basically gives me the exact same information that a featured snippet... So what does that mean for featured snippets? You see the problem?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I do. I do. So they're constantly tinkering with featured snippets. Google is constantly tinkering with featured snippets.

Mordy Oberstein:

Forever.

Crystal Carter:

I've done a few presentations on featured snippets, and it's always exhausting because they're constantly changing what what's going on with them. So you have to update every single time and they'll change it the week before you have to present and the whole thing. Anyway, enough about me.

The thing that people forget about featured snippets is that they are also powered by AI. Everybody's like, "Oh, AI and search!" Y'all. AI has been all over search for years. And Google had that presentation that they did and they talked about, "Oh, we're doing AI with our visual search, and we're using AI for this, and we're using AI for that." And it's true, they've been using AI for featured tidbits for years. They go into your content, they pull it out and they re-structure it on the SERP. Sometimes they'll put bullets in where there aren't, sometimes they'll put numbers in where there aren't. Sometimes they'll add in pictures from other places. So this tooling is already there. What is likely to happen is that some of the things that they've been toying with, with featured snippets are probably going to come to the fore. So with featured snippets, one of the things they were talking about for a while was adding in multiple links to the featured snippets, so you wouldn't have an exclusive featured snippet for each query-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, they've played with that a few times.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they've played with that a few times, but I mean that's fair game now. Although at the moment they're now talking about not having any links in their chat, which I think is a real challenge.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a different... like that's a whole different-

Crystal Carter:

That's another real challenge.

Mordy Oberstein:

... let's just say for a minute there are links in the chat, in a perfect where I don't want to-

Crystal Carter:

Things are happening.

Mordy Oberstein:

... That's a Pandora's box. I'm not opening on this podcast.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot of things changing at the moment. So who knows where we'll be by the time this airs. But I think Bing have certainly done this, and I think Google have done this sometimes, but they'll sometimes have two featured snippets. So if it's a controversial issue then they'll have

Mordy Oberstein:

Bing, or Google has a multifaceted featured snippet.

Crystal Carter:

So they'll have multiple things there. And to be honest, most of the time for most quick queries, the featured snippet is useful. Is useful, is enough, is pretty much the same as what you would get from a quick answer from one of the generator search things. So yeah, I think it will absolutely change, and I think that we might see more people using, you can opt out a featured snippets, we might see more people doing that and depending on how the search results are shown. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's complicated. What do you think?

Mordy Oberstein:

So I'm with you and your point about the featured snippets have changed so much over time is really, I think, on point. First off, I did a study a long time ago. Just cause you're in a featured snippet doesn't mean that you show there consistently over a 30-day period. I don't remember the numbers, but it's not the case. You can go... I'll link to it in the show notes, it's from years ago though. So it's a little out of date, but you don't get that... If you're Wikipedia, maybe you get the 100% of coverage in the featured snippet for 30 days. Other than that, it usually, there's a dominant URL and a secondary URL that Google usually inter-disperses throughout the month. Obviously Google's not thinking about it on a monthly basis, but as a study, I needed a timeframe. Anyway with that so featured snippets has evolved and I think that one of our issues as SEOs is we look at what's on the SERP now and we think that's how it should be forever. If you've been in SEO long enough, you'd remember there were no feature snippets ever.

Crystal Carter:

2017, 2016?

Mordy Oberstein:

Probably 2014 I think was the, I'm terrible with time but I think it was 2014 was when featured snippets came into the play. I could be confusing with direct answers. Anyway, there's a different problem. All part of the same problem sort of, kind of, maybe not, but it doesn't matter. Well, it does matter.

One of the things that I think is really important for us to realize though, is that these things are constantly changing. So I actually did a whole blog post about this on the Wix SEO about why Google is switching to a content diversity focus as opposed to a one true answer authority focus. So back in the day, Google loved being the one true authority. You put in a search query, gave you back a featured snippet, the one URL. And as you mentioned, Bing has been not doing that for a very long time, showing you multiple URLs for featured snippets, or a carousel of featured snippets. Over the last, let's say six months to a year, Google's been testing all sorts of formats where they're throwing in multiple URLs throughout the featured snippet or they're having one under the other, under the other, under the other, a multiple things that we mentioned, like-

Crystal Carter:

Like an accordion type thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

All sorts of variations around that because I think Google realized what we mentioned earlier, that content consumption trends have changed, and just like people want more personal content, they also want a more diverse set of content. And there's a recent change to the top stories carousel, Google's showing multiple perspectives now. This is a change for Google overall, where it's going away from the one true answer, "We know everything. We are Google." to multiple perspectives, multiple URLs, a diverse set of URLs and perspectives, and I think it's important to take the question of AI replacing featured snippets from that point of view. In which case the format of you put in how to change a tire, you get back a AI generated snippet with multiple citations. Let's take the Bing version of it for the moment. That is the future of featured snippets anyway. So yes, it might replace it, but that already is the future of featured snippets

Crystal Carter:

Right and also they replace featured snippets all the time. They've also replaced featured snippets with some of these from sources around the web dropdowns, which are essentially AI generated. That is AI curated content, and then they put it in. So if you type in "seven wonders of the world," or "50 books to read before you die," or something like that, then you may get one of these dropdown things and it'll say, so let's say 50 books to read before you die. And one of them is let's say 1984, and then they'll list these 50 books and then there'll be a dropdown and then there's a bunch of featured snippet type content underneath those things.

But that list is very similar to the AI generated chat because they don't have a source for who came up with the list. They just put the list on there. I've always found that a bit challenging because some of those lists, if I wrote a list for instance, then somebody could say, "Well, you might be biased because you are Western or because of whatever, and so your list will be based on your biases, which I can see from who you are or whatever." Whereas if Google puts that on, then that's a different sort of, "This is the answer" sort of perspective. So I think those lists, those dropdown lists are very similar to that space.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Totally. Exactly.

Crystal Carter:

I think that the featured snippet has always been a challenging beast to wrangle because they show up, they go away, they show up, they go away.

Mordy Oberstein:

Listen, I don't think they're going to die. I think they might be secondary. You might have the chat experience first and then you might have a feature snippet afterwards is what Bing does now currently. So yeah, they'll still be there. Are they still as relevant? Probably not because they're probably not getting the same kind of traffic because Google or in this case, if we're talking about Bing, is showing the chat experience above it. But that is where featured snippets were headed already.

Crystal Carter:

I think also it's important to remember that they're part of an ecosystem. So they're also, and the people also ask, they're also in the voice search, the voice search return, which that may very well change with AI as well. They're also part of the visual search might turn them up. That there's lots of different parts of things that it will show up in and a knowledge panels that'll be like a dropdown on a knowledge panel as well. So I think that, and that goes to more-

Mordy Oberstein:

More panels.

Crystal Carter:

More panels. So I think that goes to the idea of making sure that you've got content that is able to touch on all of those parts of the SERP`. I think that the featured snippet is less of a destination and more part of the journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

So perhaps something has changed with featured snippets that we should cover in the news. Who knows? Perhaps not, probably not the case because this is not what's been in focus, whatever, but it's possible. You'll have to wait and find out.

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to guess it's going to be something about AI. That's my guess.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was one episode, okay, couple of weeks ago, or I don't know if you caught the line where I said, "Okay, there was other news in SEO this week, but it wasn't about AI, so who cares?"

Crystal Carter:

Just AI, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, AI, AI, AI, AIO.

Mordy Oberstein:

AIO. As we AAAIO ourselves over to the snappy news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Geez Louise, what is going on? A lot, and it all has to do with the page experience, update, ranking system or lack thereof. I'll explain. First off, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable Google Search Console to drop page experience report, mobile usability report and mobile friendly tests. Yes, you heard that, right, but it's all a little bit confusing. So one, the page experience report Google added in 2021 is going away. Then in December of 2023, Google will also drop the mobile usability report from Google Search Console along with the mobile friendly test API and tool. Barry speculates this is related to the recent layoffs at Google and resource issues they are subsequently having. Who am I to argue with Barry? On top of all of that, you know the relatively new page where Google talks about their different rankings, algorithms, and different ranking systems? Well, they just removed the page experience update/ranking system from the page. It's gone completely. Barry speculates that the algorithm was pretty much a nothing burger, putting words in Barry's mouth there, which Google basically used to try to convince us that making these changes to our pages was really important. Wow Barry, diving into the whole conspiracy world now, aren't we?

This time I see things slightly ever so different from Barry. Forgive me, Barry, Google here said quote, "It was not," meaning the page experience ranking system, "... was not a separate ranking system and it did not combine all these signals into one single page experience signal." So I guess they removed it, but I think what's going on here is that Google might now have a different way of defining page experience more broadly.

Hear me out. Okay. While all this was happening and as also reported by none other than the King of SERPs, Barry Schwartz, Google added page experience guidance around the helpful content update saying "Provide a great page experience. Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you're providing an overall great page experience across many aspects. For more advice see our page." That updated page that Google said see our page has some really interesting things on it, such as questions to self success page experience. These include obviously things around Core Web Vitals as you would expect, but also questions like how easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages? Or is the page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page?

See, what I think is happening here is Google might be redefining page experience as basically usability, and I wonder if they will assess this by proxy, meaning using various aspects of the algorithm to simulate how a human would best assess good page experience or good page usability. Meaning that the page experience is far more abstract, far more subtle, and is not unified in any way, shape, or form within the algorithm. Hence, they removed it, meaning the page experience ranking system, from their ranking system page. Why? Again, because it might include or it might be headed towards including way more subtle, way more abstract, and way more broadly defined aspects of experience or usability. What do you think, Barry? Do you agree?

Parenthetically Google also added a section about EEAT to the helpful content guidance page saying quote, "While EEAT itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good EEAT is useful." This all feels like an SEO, soap opera.

And with that, that is this week's snappiest of news.

I hope you weren't disappointed with that snappy news. If you were expecting major news around either AI or feature snippets that wasn't covered.

Crystal Carter:

I found it to be incredibly newsworthy.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why we covered it really.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Because it was the news.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was new news for everybody.

Crystal Carter:

Just kidding.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what may be new news to you if you're in the SEO world, although probably not, let's be honest here. Is our follow of the week, who is coming from the content marketing world? Does that make sense? Right? We're covering the overlapping content marketing and SEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So here's a content marketing person for you.

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Ann Handley.

Crystal Carter:

And Handley.

Mordy Oberstein:

A legend, an absolute legend in the content marketing space. She's done an absolute ton for the content marketing space. Of course, I think if I look through my Twitter feed, like my Twitter follow list, whatever, one of the first people I think I've ever followed ever on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

She's incredibly well respected and with great reason. She's very strategic and has a lot of resources available for people to get sucked into and has a reputation that absolutely precedes her.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you could check out what she's doing over at MarketingProfs. It's a great website to learn more about writing and content and content marketing, content writing. There are events that she has. There's a lot there. So check out marketingprofs.com and definitely check out Ann Handley, whose handle is at @marketingprofs. So it's at the word marketing and P-R-O-F-S, profs, we'll include it in the show notes because who's listening and spelling at the same time right now? I don't know why I do that, but I feel like I have to do that. I have to spell it out in case maybe you won't go to the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Some people are auditory learners.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I don't know who those people are. Those people are like that's not-

Crystal Carter:

There are people, they listen to podcasts.

Mordy Oberstein:

There probably are, there are, there are, but even spelling of names. I'm isolating our audio learners right now. I'm sorry.

Crystal Carter:

Have you ever had called someone and they just had said their number? Like you called someone and they're like 555-555, and you're like, what?

Mordy Oberstein:

I have no idea what you just... Yeah, every time I have no-

Crystal Carter:

Sometimes like when people answer the phone, some people tell me, instead of saying hello, they just tell you their phone number.

Mordy Oberstein:

When I ask like, "Okay, what's your number?" I have to ask for three times.

Crystal Carter:

I also don't like it when people, so I say my phone number, my mobile phone number in a certain way, and if somebody says it back to me in a different way, I'm like, I don't even know whose number that is. I don't understand.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that your number? Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. Yes it is. Yes it is.

Crystal Carter:

Probably.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then you're like worried like, oh man, I really hope they... they need to call me back. I didn't give them the wrong number.

Crystal Carter:

These are the things we think about.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what you can't go wrong with is tuning into next week's episode. Thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to shape an SEO campaign. Use cookie cutters and you shape it with those cookie cutter out. That's how you shape an SEO campaign.

Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great webinars and content we have over 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 or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.